In close order

Usage examples of serried.

Even the peltasts, with their serried ranks and crystal shields, had seemed hardly more formidable than toys on a tabletop.

He seemed carelessly surprised at this, but nevertheless took his hustling very good humoredly, and, keeping his shoulders well squared forced his way with Theos by slow degrees through the serried ranks of people, many of whom, roused to a sort of frenzy threw themselves in front of the advancing horses of the guard, and seizing the reins held on to these like grim death, reckless of all danger.

Shall dawn for thee her saffron footcloths spread, Sunset her purple canopies and red, In serried splendour, and the night unfold Her velvet darkness wrought with starry gold For kingly raiment, soft as cygnet-down.

Each time she saw it, stretching on till it was lost in the serried masses of the palms, her imagination was stirred by a longing to wander through barbaric lands, by a nomad feeling that was almost irresistible.

Elaine and Comus were indulging themselves in two pennyworths of Park chair, drawn aside just a little from the serried rows of sitters who were set out like bedded plants over an acre or so of turf.

They still possessed that anachronistic quality, though this time-with soot-discolored snow on some rooftops, with dirty icicles hanging from eaves, with icterous frost marbelizing many window-they also seemed, somehow, like rank after serried rank of headstones in a graveyard for giants.

Colun set his elbows on the parapet and rested his chin on his hands, staring morosely at the cavern, at the serried ranks of houses that climbed the walls like honeycombs to where the topmost curvature of the vast cave swung over like some rocky sky to meet the rising houses on the farther side, the roadways between climbing up the walls and dangling in the moss-lit air between like spiderweb ladders.

Half a dozen lifeless steamboats, a mile of empty wharves, a negro fatigued with whiskey stretched asleep, in a wide and soundless vacancy, where the serried hosts of commerce used to contend!

But as before the lightning the serried stormclouds, heavy with preponderant excess of moisture, in swollen masses turgidly distended, compass earth and sky in one vast slumber, impending above parched field and drowsy oxen and blighted growth of shrub and verdure till in an instant a flash rives their centres and with the reverberation of the thunder the cloudburst pours its torrent, so and not otherwise was the transformation, violent and instantaneous, upon the utterance of the word.

At loose ends after that, he visited the Golden Dome like any tourist and admired its amazing interior courts with their intricately worked archways and friezes, and the Grand Hall of Mihrabs, where astronomical clockwork substituted for computers to swivel the serried ranks of prayer niches toward Mecca.

Closer to, tree-clad hills hunched defiant shoulders beneath the infinite blue skies, steep bulwarks drawn up close beneath serried spines grudging the barest suggestion of a beach to the all-encompassing seas.

Other beings bided here in Khazathdaur, among the serried wooden towers, the attenuated vaults, the fluted shadows like widows' veils trailing from every soaring bough, the endlessly falling leaves drowning in a watery twilight.

Every flowerbed was packed with serried clashing ranks of French marigolds, yellow calceolaria, royal-blue cineraria, flaming-red geraniums, billiard-ball pink zinnias and mauve asters.

Trashcan Man stared at it in awe-the serried ranks of slot machines like soldiers standing at parade rest, beyond them the roulette and crap tables,, the marble railings enclosing the baccarat tables.

In place of the grim ranks of serried warriors were company after company of Kukuana girls, not over-dressed, so far as clothing went, but each crowned with a wreath of flowers, and holding a palm leaf in one hand and a white arum lily in the other.