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Besides this plant there is scarcely a sign of vegetation on the island, if we except some coarse rank grass near the harbor, some lichen, and a shrub which bears resemblance to a cabbage shooting into seed, and which has a bitter and acrid taste. The face of the country is hilly, although none of the hills can be called lofty. Their tops are perpetually covered with snow.
At the foot of the stairs was a vaulted stone passageway, slippery with lichen, the dampness hanging in beads on the wall. Turning two corners, we brought up at a narrow, nail-studded door. "Here I bid you farewell," quoth the little old lady. "You have only to walk on till you get to the end. At the steps, pull the rope once and wait.
This deserted quarter is traversed by a narrow torrent running in a deep channel, across which are thrown little curved bridges with granite balustrades eaten away by lichen. All the objects there wear the strange grimace, the quaint arrangement familiar to us in the most antique Japanese drawings.
"This is the Indian tradition of the origin of the patches of lichen attached to the bare rocks. The Indians still call them 'no-scabs, and when boiled they make a kind of jelly food which is a little better than starvation. "Then Nanahboozhoo, although his back was bleeding from his sliding down the rough rocks, continued walking, sometimes along the shore and sometimes in the thick bush.
The front of the house exhibited an ordinary manorial presentation of Elizabethan windows, mullioned and hooded, worked in rich snuff-colored freestone from local quarries. The ashlar of the walls, where not overgrown with ivy and other creepers, was coated with lichen of every shade, intensifying its luxuriance with its nearness to the ground, till, below the plinth, it merged in moss.
In the evening we descended from the elevated ground, crossed three swampy meadows, and encamped at their northern extremity within a cluster of large pine-trees, the branches of which were elegantly decorated with abundance of a greenish yellow lichen. Our march was ten miles. The weather was very mild, almost too warm for the exercise we were taking.
It is not enough that animal industry should be able, to a certain extent, to adapt itself to casual exigencies when choosing the site of a nest; if the race is to thrive, something else is required, something which hide-bound instinct is unable to provide. The Chaffinch, for instance, introduces a great quantity of lichen into the outer layer of his nest.
"'But it hesitated. It might have been, that, had but some hand been there to move but one stone from its path, it would have forced its way past rocks and ridges, and found its way to the great sea it might have been! But no hand was there. "'The rocks closed over it. Nine hundred fathoms deep, in a still, dark pool it lay. The green lichen hung from the rocks.
The clear, limpid, flowing waters, the mountains clothed with the vigorous vegetation of those regions, the sombre rocks, the graceful buildings, the fortifications raised by nature, and the granite towers built by man; combined with all the artifices of light and shade, with the contrasts of the varieties of foliage, with the groups of houses where an active population swarms, with the lonely barren places where the granite will not suffer even the lichen to fasten on its surface, in short, with all the ideas we ask a landscape to possess: grace and awfulness, poesy with its renascent magic, sublime pictures, delightful ruralities, all these are here; it is Brittany in bloom.
The destruction of covert renders Tosari immune from this past peril, and the tragic tiger stories related round the hearthstone of the communal house are becoming oral traditions of a forgotten day, gathering round themselves the moss and lichen of fable and myth.
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