Word: portentous
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...seems that the whole world lies waiting for one final and consuming igneous blast. . . . Then, on the waltzing surface of distant alkali, a lake of sweet cool waters appears. But the wise desert rat astride his fuzzy burro passes his tongue between cracked lips, smiles ironically and sets the portent down as Death Valley's crowning treachery, the mirage. And yet, last week, there was a lake in California's subsea level inferno. One Perry Brite, Kerr County supervisor, stood on Dante's Lookout and saw that 50 miles of the sink had become covered with water...
...ALMOND TREE-Grace Zaring Stone-Bobbs-Merrttl ($2.50).* When middle-aged but still lovely Leda, newly widowed & impoverished, brought her only daughter Marise back to the U. S. to try to live economically, she thought she had nothing to look forward to. Her formidable spinster sister, a little-seen portent in Washington society, took them in with unenthusiastic, sisterly hospitality. Marise was 16, knew nothing about her native country, was pleasingly thrilled when she got a job in an interior decorator's office. Leda made no move to look up old friends; sat in the house...
...week: three more blast furnaces (two at Birmingham and one at Chicago) were blown out; the summer decline in automotive steel buying had set in strongly.† Last week's rise, slight as it was, in the face of all these unfavorable factors may well have been a portent that steel production has reached the irreducible minimum, the rock bottom below which no depression can sink...
Cleveland music-lovers and city-boosters looked into the sky one afternoon last week for a portent. Suddenly from the Union Terminal Tower a great white banner with a diagonal red stripe was flung to the breeze. The weather that evening would be fine. The Opera...
...your suspicion confirmed. Defenders of the old-line detective story might object that The Glass Key is less a detective than a crime story. But whether you are a squeamish voyager among books or so hardened that the roaring forties seem like the doldrums, this book will be a portent and a welcome...