From it issued as strange a sight as Carthoris ever had witnessed, though at the moment he had time to cast but a single
fleeting glance at the tall bowmen emerging through the portal behind their long, oval shields; to note their flowing auburn hair; and to realize that the growling things at their side were fierce Barsoomian lions.
At five o'clock in the evening, before that
fleeting twilight which binds night to day in tropical zones, Conseil and I were astonished by a curious spectacle.
Can it be possible that a few
fleeting years have wrought such a change?"
As they annually tend towards decay, they almost rival in brilliant variety of their gradually changing hues the
fleeting shades of the expiring dolphin.
It was formed of Zeena's obstinate silence, of Mattie's sudden look of warning, of the memory of just such
fleeting imperceptible signs as those which told him, on certain stainless mornings, that before night there would be rain.
When the Victoria passed, there was some slight show of movement; drums were beaten; but the last learned man still lingering in the place had hardly time to notice the new phenomenon, for our travellers, driven onward by the wind of the desert, resumed the winding course of the river, and, ere long, Timbuctoo was nothing more than one of the
fleeting reminiscences of their journey.
In social intercourse he gives you the surface that he wishes the world to accept, and you can only gain a true knowledge of him by inferences from little actions, of which he is unconscious, and from
fleeting expressions, which cross his face unknown to him.
"It is maddening, Virginia," said the man, "to be constantly straining every resource of my memory in futile endeavor to catch and hold one
fleeting clue to my past.