It is possible:
element (white-space: nowrap; overflow: scroll;)
Text parsed as HTML or XML is tokenized, which means all runs of whitespace are collapsed to a single space character. This means you will have a single line of text unless you specify something in addition to the overflow declaration that could cause your text to wrap.
EDIT: I failed to include the necessary write-space: nowrap property, otherwise the default is that a container will scroll vertically opposed to horizontally.