The Desert is all devil-deviceas you might say 'blasted cleverness'crammed with futile works, always promising something fresh round the next corner, always leading out through heaped decoration and over-insistent design into equal barrenness.

For instance: the desert of Sahara is a dead level of sand.

And, for an instance, here they are at hand; When they have done let our deserts be scand.

The desert was sometimes Gobi, sometimes Sahara, but always an infinite stretch of sand that floated up and up in a stifling layer, like the tide.

Eznarza: My people say that the desert is his country.

The sandy deserts and mud plains are only superficial deposits, as the sandstones are often exposed where the upper formation is intersected by gullies.

He was handsome; at any rate, he was the handsomest man she had seen in the desert, and the desert was just then her sphere of society.

King: Yes, the desert is always the same, even the littlest rocks of it.

To Dan Barry the whole mountain-desert is a home!

The one bright hope that upheld us, the one beautiful dream that dragged weary footsteps southward over that waterless, thorny desert was the occupation of the brewery.

Desert is a loose term to indicate land that supports no man; whether the land can be bitted and broken to that purpose is not proven.

The great Chihuahuan desert is a boot too; a larger boot than Italy.

You will observe in the Benedicite Omnia Opera that the Desert is the sole thing not enjoined to 'bless the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him for ever.'

At Hampton Court the two children, dressed in blue and white check pinafores, their hair closely croppedthe little boy fat and fair (at this time he bore a remarkable resemblance to Laurence's portrait of the youthful King of Rome), the little girl thin and darkran as wild as though the desert had been their playground instead of the gardens of this old palace of kings!

As praise, then, cannot be made a gift, so, neither, when not his due, can any man receive it: he may think he does, but he receives only words; for desert being the essential condition of praise, there can be no reality in the one without the other.

And thou, my trusty bow-string, that so oft For sport has served me faithfully and well, Desert me not in this dread hour of need Only be true this once, my own good cord, That hast so often wing'd the biting shaft:

I shall bear in mind and in heart with me for ever the abbot, the abbey, and this desert, so great is the love they have raised in me in so short a time.

Desert travelling after all is mostly an affair of luck.

The desert of Majes, which now lay ahead of us, is perhaps the widest, hottest, and most barren in this region.

But these words only roused and exasperated the feelings of Kurugsar, who bitterly replied: "Then may calamity be thy reward, Thy stars malignant, and thy life all sorrow; And may'st thou perish, weltering in thy blood, And the bare desert be thy lonely grave For that inhuman thought, that cruel menace.

To this fact is perhaps due the slight knowledge obtained up to the present time of the interior, where arid sandy deserts, dangerous alike to native or European travellers, are the rule, and cover those large open spaces marked upon maps as "unexplored."

Or were I in the wildest waste, Sae black and bare, sae black and bare, The desert were a paradise If thou wert there, if thou wert there; Or were I monarch of the globe, Wi' thee to reign, wi' thee to reign, The brightest jewel in my crown Wad be my queen, wad be my queen.

There is no affectation in the expression of the wish, "O that the desert were my dwelling-place!" though we know that the writer on the shores of the Mediterranean still craved for the gossip of the clubs.

1. Write out and learn: A desert is a rainless tract of country on which little or nothing will grow.

What a desert were this scene without its flowersit would be like the sky of night without its stars!