Treacherous situation (which sucks people and things down)

Usage examples of quicksand.

Across the way, crawling along the barely visible wall of a shop front, hunching itself across the stone blocks as if mired in quicksand, was the guilt he felt at heeding no one but himself as he sought to vindicate both promise and belief a guilt that threatened to rise up and choke him.

Sometimes he was drawing her in an agony from the swallowing gullet of a quicksand, which held her fast, and swallowed at her all the time that he fought to rescue her from its jawless throat.

And the odor of death in the night air, too: rot and fungus, putrifying gas from the muddy bottom, something long dead caught in a quicksand pool.

John Rullion commanded the devout: The Surlord of Spire Vanis ruled a city that rested on quicksand.

Between the animals sinking in quicksand up to their bellies and the men being drenched through with mud, they were in a pretty mean mood by the time they reached the Mexican border.

It is a land drowning in its own juices, with muskeg, quicksand and matted spruce forests making any kind of orderly traverse impossible.

The peristaltic pulse of the thick stuff always made Cari think of quicksand, of sand-colored octopi creeping along an ocean floor, of week-old oatmeal.

We carried Aziz out upon the trembling land, wrapped in my aba for a shroud, and we found a place where we could break through the glittering crust, and we laid Aziz on the quaggy quicksand under it.

There followed a loud squelching sound and his feet sank as if in quicksand.

Van der Valk did his best not to let Stam sink into the quicksand of bureaucracy.

They moved on, carefully picking their way through the quagmires and quicksand, stopping often as more geyserssome of mud, some of frothy, boiling watershot high into the air.

In crossing one river one of the horses was so irretrievably stuck in a quicksand that humanity required it to be shot, and at the next, the Umkamas, the stream was so swollen that the Captain had to devise a canoe by sewing two cowskins together with sinews and stretching it upon branches, in which, as no one save himself had any notion of boating, he shoved off alone.

He would go weeks without dreaming of Antonelli, of his gross nose and wattled neck, of the leer with which he would push George into a boiling quicksand and hold him under, till he woke screaming with Omani bending over him in concern.

Arlen Sears to him like a buzzard on dead meat, sucking him in like so much quicksand, and distracting the crowd sufficiently to allow Rare to come on undetected and undeterred .

So overboard he goes again, to hunt for another Ararat and find another quicksand.