Some were mere smudges of wet carbon, like twisted, blackened logs after a forest fire.

Her crotch was filled with shadow; her navel was the merest smudge.

There were the merest smudges on his pockets where for two or three hours he had been dipping his hands to fish out change.

In pain and terror now that she saw her fate, she studied the two wingrats she pursued; they were mere smudges in the moonlight, their wings now dim flickers, pausing to glide more often than not.

These were mere smudges in a series of good snapshots, where expectations were often surpassed.

Twice as we ascended Holmes whipped his lens out of his pocket and carefully examined marks which appeared to me to be mere shapeless smudges of dust upon the cocoa-nut matting which served as a stair-carpet.

The darkness under the mountains was a mere smudge on the face of Light.

Halley's comet was a peacock with a majestic tail in 1910, when it orbited on the same side of the Sun as the Earth, but from farther away it appeared as a mere smudge in 1985-86.

Each day, he patrolled his pristine rows, beheading the merest smudge of green with his vigilant hoe.

And now the surface was a mere smudge of faint light far, far above, and his lungs were already bursting as he kicked his way upward, swimming as fast as he could, yet with so very much farther to go.