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In England this work may be left to a servant, but with us the servants are so rare to whom such work can be intrusted that the only safe course is to see to it yourself; and if you have a true sportsman's love for a gun, you will not find the duty a disagreeable one. In so many arid forms which States incrust themselves with, once in a century, if so often, a poetic act and record occur.
He had not been alone in declaring that the gold was there; Elias had said so too. Why should he alone be made responsible? The Emîr deigned not so much as to look on his despair. Returning thus across the plain, they met the mules. The driver's mouth fell open at the Frank's command to turn back, just when they were near the limit of that arid waste and all the beasts were tired.
The gardens are all cultivated, with irrigation, and look surprisingly green and delicious in contrast with the barren, arid rocks which surround them; the wells are dug deep in the centre of the valley, in the bed of what elsewhere would be a river, and are worked by a running slope and bullocks who draw up and down skin buckets, which, like those in Bahrein, empty themselves automatically into tanks connected with the channels which convey the water to the gardens.
Our maize, or Indian corn, affords an excellent example of a plant which, having developed in a land of droughts, is well contrived, through its capacities for gathering dew, to protect itself against arid conditions. In an ordinary dew-making night the leaves of a single stem may gather as much as half a pint of water, which flows down their surfaces to the roots.
Doubtless there is not a spot on the whole earth, a wild rock, an arid plain, over which we pass with indifference, that has not been consecrated in the life of some man, and is not painted in his remembrance; for, like battered vessels, before meeting inevitable wreck, we leave some fragment of ourselves on every rock. Whither go the dark-blue clouds of that storm of the Pyrenees?
Lidgerwood had crossed this arid, lifeless plain twice within the week on his preliminary tour of inspection, but both times he had been in the Pullman, with fellow-passengers to fill the nearer field of vision and to temper the awful loneliness of the waste. Now, however, the desert with its heat, its stillness, its vacancy, its pitiless barrenness, claimed him as its own.
This extraordinary and inexplicable custom must have a great tendency to prevent the rapid increase of the population; and its adoption may perhaps be a wise ordination of Providence, for that purpose, in a country of so desert and arid a character as that which these people occupy. November 10.
Had the tornado burst upon us, instead of passing off as it did, it is very doubtful whether the hand that writes this would not have been mingled with its native dust, in the arid sands of Florida; for, as we rode on, we saw gigantic pine, cedar, and hiccory trees, torn up by the roots, and scattered over the surrounding country, by by-gone hurricanes, many of them hundreds of yards from the spot that nurtured their roots while the gnarled branches lying across our track, scorched black-with the lightning, or from long exposure to a burning sun, impeded our advance, and made the journey anything but pleasant.
To our utter disgust, after standing for hours in a siding of the station, chatting to all sorts and conditions of the species soldier, the order came to detrain. We drivers took the horses first to water, and then picketed them on an arid patch of ground near the station, where the gunners had meantime brought the guns and waggons.
There was one incongruity which surprised him a wicker waste-paper basket, so nonsensically out of place in this arid cell, where not the wildest hare-brain could picture any one coming to read or write, that he bestowed upon it a particular, frowning attention, and so discovered the second attractive possession of the room.
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