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On the more level ground were the usual weeds; Ipomoeas with white and purple flowers, Bignonias, Echites, and Allamandas, with yellow ones, scrambled and tumbled everywhere; and, if not just there, then often enough elsewhere, might be seen a single Aristolochia scrambling up a low tree, from which hung, amid round leaves, huge flowers shaped like a great helmet with a ladle at the lower lip, a foot or more across, of purplish colour, spotted like a toad, and about as fragrant as a dead dog.
All these and the Echites, or viper-stone, were credited with extraordinary magical virtues, and many of the assertions of later writers about the toad-stone are clearly due to their having calmly transferred the marvellous stories about other imaginary stones to the imaginary toad-stone. The only stone in the above list which has a real existence is that in the fish's head.
On our left, as we went on, the bush was low, all of yellow Cassia and white Hibiscus, and tangled with lovely convolvulus-like creepers, Ipomoea and Echites, with white, purple, or yellow flowers.
Karnikara is Pterospermum accrifolium, Linn. Cyama is sometimes used for the Pilu, i.e., Salvadora Persica, Linn. Varanapushpa or Nagapushpa or Punnaga is Colophyllum inophyllum, Linn. Astapadika or padika is otherwise called Bhardravalli. It is the Vallaris dichotoma, Wall., Syn., Echites dichotoma, Roxb. Bhringaraja is the Lanius Malabaricus. Kokila is the well-known Indian Koel or cuckoo.
On our left, as we went on, the bush was low, all of yellow cassia and white Hibiscus, and tangled with lovely convolvulus-like creepers, Ipomoea and Echites, with white, purple or yellow flowers.
It pours down the stems, semi-gray on one side, then yellow, and then, on the opposite side, covered with a powdery lichen varying in colour from orange up to clear vermilion, and spreads itself over a floor of yellow sand and brown fallen nuts, and the only vegetation of which, in general, is a long crawling Echites, with pairs of large cream-white flowers.
Only here and there an Echites had crawled out of the wood and lay along the ground, its long shoots gay with large cream-coloured flowers and pairs of glossy leaves; and on it, and on some dead brushwood, grew a lovely little parasitic Orchis, an Oncidium, with tiny fans of leaves, and flowers like swarms of yellow butterflies.
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