What is "tortuous"

Usage examples of "tortuous".

A dark purple fluid appeared to pulse in the tortuous anastomoses of channels which lay under the surface.

Over the walls of the Mellah, from the direction of the Spanish inn at the entrance to the little tortuous quarter of the shoemakers, there came at intervals a hubbub of voices, and occasionally wild shouts and cries.

We left Malacca at seven this morning in the small, unseaworthy, untrustworthy, unrigged steam-launch Moosmee, and after crawling for some hours at a speed of about five miles an hour along brown and yellow shores with a broad, dark belt of palms above them, we left the waveless, burning sea behind, and after a few miles of tortuous steaming through the mangrove swamps of the Linggi river, landed here to wait for sufficient water for the rest of our journey.

When the hunters tired of fishing, and when they wearied of crossing the sand-dunes and the glaring, shimmering beachglaring and shimmering on every fine day of summer-to poke off the mussels and spear the butterfish and groper, they pushed through the Ceratopetalums and the burrawangs, and, following the tortuous bed of the principal creek amid the ferns and the moss and the vines and the myrtles, gradually ascending, they entered the sub-tropical patch where the ferns were huge and lank and staghorns clustered on rocks and trees, and the beautiful Dendrobium clung, and the supplejacks and leatherwoods and bangalow palms ran up in slender height, and that pretty massive parasite-the wild fig-made its umbrageous shade, as has been written.

Instead the mild little inventor, with his spools and his pulleys, his bits of wire and his measureless reaches of string, pursued his peaceful though tortuous way, and if his abode became transformed into a magnified cobweb only himself and Celestina were inconvenienced thereby.

It was slow, tortuous going, like reading a foreign language, jammed with multisyllabic words I had to break down into parts before they yielded information.

The Circum-Gaea rejoined Ophion at that point after having made its way through North Rhea and down through the tortuous passes of the western Nemesis Mountains.

Tigris, the Euphrates, and the Ganges pass beneath the Ocean to cross the regions towards which we are traveling, and then they empty into the Persian Gulf, whereas the Nile follows a more tortuous path through the antediluvian lands, enters the Ocean, resumes its course in the lower southern regions, and more precisely in the land of Egypt, emptying into the Romaic Gulf, which would be what the Latins first call Mediterranean and then Hellespont.

Merritt came up behind him and stood beside him as they waited for one of the lumbering, perilously loaded oxcarts to make its way past and enter the tortuous downward road to the plateau by the dam.

From Pamplona, by tortuous paths, the army might struggle back to France through the high Pyrenees.

Were all the hospital physicians of Europe and America to devote themselves, for the requisite period, to this sole pursuit, and were their results to be unanimous as to the total worthlessness of the whole system in practice, this slippery delusion would slide through their fingers without the slightest discomposure, when, as they supposed, they had crushed every joint in its tortuous and trailing body.

Who could have told him, that gradually, and by the very force of circumstances, he would be led to overcome his repugnance, and to rival the ruses and the tortuous combinations of the wretches he was trying to reach?

I know not what manner of man thou art in the flesh, sir, but figure thee bearded and blackavised, and of a lean tortuous habit of body, that moves ever with a swish.

With him, they canoed through tortuous canyons on flumes of water, shooting dire-toothed rapids.

With him, they canoed through tortuous canyons on flumes of water, shooting dire-toothed rapids.