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Through the Palmiste pillars; through the usual black Roseau scrub; then under tangled boughs down a steep stony bank; and we were on a long beach of deep sand and quartz gravel. On our right the Shore- grapes with their green bunches of fruit, the Mahauts with their poplar-like leaves and great yellow flowers, and the ubiquitous Matapalos, fringed the shore.
But I hardly knew where I was to set my foot; for the serpentine paths were most delicately laid with blue sand, which seemed to form upon the earth a darker sky, or a sky seen in the water: and so I walked for a while beside my conductor, with my eyes fixed upon the ground, until at last I perceived, that, in the middle of this round of beds and flowers, there was a great circle of cypresses or poplar-like trees, through which one could not see, because the lowest branches seemed to spring out of the ground.
In the gardens hereabout they have flanked their alleys with the birches, for even when fully grown their habit is more poplar-like than spreading, and many plants, like lilies, requiring partial shade flourish under them; while for fences and screens the trees are planted in small groups, with either stones and ferns, or shrubs set thick between, and the most beautiful winter fence that Evan says he has ever seen in all his wanderings amid costly beauty was when, last winter, in being here to measure for some plans, he came suddenly upon an informal boundary and screen combined, over fifty feet in length, made of white birches, the groups of twos and threes set eight or ten feet apart, the gaps being filled by Japanese barberries laden with their scarlet fruit.
At last, when the sun was high and the worn-out beasts were almost sinking, a group of low buildings came in sight a few miles away beyond a kloof edged with a few poplar-like trees and the kameelthorn. A square, one-storey house of corrugated iron, with a mud-walled hovel or two near it, had a sprawling painted board across its front, signifying that the place was the Free State Hotel.
The country hereabouts has been nearly all burnt by the natives, and the horses endeavour to pick roads where the dreaded triodia has been destroyed. We passed a few clumps of casuarinas and a few stunted trees with broad, poplar-like leaves. Travelling for twelve miles on this bearing, we struck the Finke again, running nearly north and south.
Wonderful it is if only these last have had the same parentage still more if they have had the same parentage, too, with forms so utterly different from them as the prickly- stemmed scarlet-flowered Euphorbia common in our hothouses; as the huge succulent cactus-like Euphorbia of the Canary Islands; as the gale-like Phyllanthus; the many-formed Crotons, which in the West Indies alone comprise, according to Griesbach, at least twelve genera and thirty species; the hemp-like Maniocs, Physic-nuts, Castor-oils; the scarlet Poinsettia which adorns dinner-tables in winter; the pretty little pink and yellow Dalechampia, now common in hothouses; the Manchineel, with its glossy poplar-like leaves; and this very Hura, with leaves still more like a poplar, and a fruit which differs from most of its family in having not three but many divisions, usually a multiple of three up to fifteen; a fruit which it is difficult to obtain, even where the tree is plentiful: for hanging at the end of long branches, it bursts when ripe with a crack like a pistol, scattering its seeds far and wide: from whence its name of Hura crepitans.
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