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Cacti leered impudently at us; palms and pomegranates made the breeze on our faces whisper of the south and the east. Not a place we passed that I would not have loved to spend a month in, studying in the carved stones of churches and ruined castles the history of Venetian rule, or the wild romance of Turkish raids.
Drawings from nature of the plant in the old botanical works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries look very like ornamental patterns. Now after the general form had been introduced, pomegranates or other fruits for instance, pine-apples were introduced within the nest of leaves. We now come to the third group of forms the so-called Cashmere pattern, or Indian palmetta.
Last week I picked him up a copy of "Bells and Pomegranates" for one and nine, and he sold it next day for two pound sixteen. There's business for you, Daddy. That put off our breach at least a fortnight, but unless I discover a first folio of Shakespeare for sixpence between now and then, I don't see what's to postpone the agony after that and if I did I should probably speculate in it myself.
We went out for a short stroll round the Plaza before breakfast, which meal was scarcely over when Mr. Mackay arrived in a carriage, and took us off to see what there was to see in the town. The Plaza was full of bright-looking flower-beds, in which were superb roses, and many English flowers, shaded by oranges, pomegranates, and deutzias.
Nimes in August is about as hot as Cairo in May, which certainly is saying a good deal. In front of the pleasant Hotel de Luxembourg are fountains and gardens, bright with oleanders and pomegranates; and the town is open and airy, but the heat is very oppressive. The unremitting precautions taken to keep out the sun show what is expected in summer- time.
In speaking of renegades, it may be well to mention that the town seemed to swarm with flaxen-headed children, some toddling about in their bare buff, some basking in the sun, and others devouring plantains and pomegranates. Indeed, there were various proofs of an infusion of renegade blood, rarely met with in so remote a country.
The gardens furnish besides a few vegetables and fruits, such as pomegranates, apricots, peaches, almonds, olives, melons, pumpkins, tomatas, onions, and peppers, a few grape-trees and fig-trees in the choicest gardens, but all in small quantities. There is scarcely a flower or fancy tree but the tout. No person of my acquaintance, except my turjeman, showed much fancy for botany.
As in the Gospel parables, the birds of the field and farmyard, the fruits of the earth, figured the Christian truths and virtues. Their purified forms accompanied man in his ascension towards God. Around the mystic chrisms, circled garlands of oranges and pears and pomegranates.
Through clustering pomegranates, figs, plums, peach-trees, wild but bearing fruit, we journeyed on and on; and, as new beauties arose around us, we could not help indulging in castles in the air, and forming visions of earthly paradises, where, with the addition only of such importations as are inseparable from all ideas of paradise, either in Cashmere or elsewhere, one might live in uninterrupted enjoyment of existence, and, at least, bury in oblivion all remembrance of such regions as the "Plains of India."
The seifi, sown in summer and reaped in autumn, consists of rice, cotton, Indian corn, and garden produce; the tchatvi, sown in October and November, and reaped from May till July, is exclusively wheat and barley. A quantity of fruit is also grown grapes, oranges, and pomegranates. Shiráz is famed for the latter.
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