United States or Kenya ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
There was a sort of rough table-land scrubby and stony and thick it was, but still the grass wasn't bad in summer, when the country below was all dried up. There were wild horses in troops there, and a few wild cattle, so Jim and I knew the place well; but it was too far and too much of a journey for our own horses to go often.
"Good-bye, den, an' may you find Aunt Hominy an' de little chillen, Jimmy, an' bring dem all home to Prencess Anne from dat ar Joe Johnson!" cried Samson, and trotted his mule through the swamp and away. Jimmy Phoebus saw him overtake the old woman in the cart and begin to speak with her as the scrubby woods swallowed them in.
On the one hand, there had been the land, soaked and sodden, wild, shagged with scrubby growths of timber and brooded over by sullen clouds, and visibly inhabited only by shepherds, leaning upon their staves at an angle of forty-five degrees, and looking, in their immovable dejection, with their legs wrapped in long-haired goat-skins, like satyrs that had been converted, and were trying to do right; turning dim faces to us, they warned us with every mute appeal against the land, as a waste of mud from one end of Italy to the other.
Without a pause they crossed to the other side and broke their way through the scrubby snow-laden bush on the opposite bank. "Hello!" The two men came to an abrupt halt. They were confronting a small child of perhaps five or six years. He was clad in furs from head to foot. A pretty, robust, white-skinned child, wide-eyed, and smiling his frankly cordial greeting.
The surrounding vegetation was entirely tropical, consisting of scrubby sal trees, acacia, Grislea, Emblica, Hibiscus, etc.; the elevation being but 1300 feet, though the spot was twenty-five miles in a straight line from the plains.
For two miles after leaving the hills we passed through a soft, sandy, scrubby country and spinifex. It then became harder, with grass and spinifex alternately. At four miles from the hills we camped without water.
"The Isle of Axholme lieth eighteen miles long and five in breadth," said Richard Wood. "Where didst thou see them?" and he held up three coins. "Toward the south end on a little solid place which hath on it three scrubby trees. There did they lie." And the groom left off speaking to eye the money in ecstasy, for not often did such wealth come his way. Richard Wood tossed him the coins.
Then, coatless, hatless as he was, he swung himself out of the window, dropped upon the grass, and, without an instant of hesitation, strode off down the road in the direction that Levi West had taken. As he climbed the fence where the two men had climbed it he could see them in the pallid light, far away across the level, scrubby meadow land, walking toward a narrow strip of pine woods.
Our camp had been on the low ground, near the water, in the midst of many scrubby hills, all of which commanded our position. There were now a great many well armed natives around us, and though they were very kind and friendly, I did not like the idea of their occupying the acclivities immediately above us at all events, not during my contemplated absence from the party.
And this was exactly what I did; and a terrible run I had for it, fearing at every step to hear the echo of shots in the valley, and dropping down the scrubby rocks with tearing and violent scratching. Then I crossed Bagworthy stream, not far below Doone-valley, and breasted the hill towards Slocombslade, with my heart very heavily panting.
Word Of The Day