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The desert begins at the town-gates, but for the first few miles we have a sight of some very fruitful country on the left, until at length we leave town and trees behind us, and with them all the verdure, and find ourselves surrounded on all sides by a sea of sand. For the first four or five hours I was not ill-pleased with this mode of travelling.
He might, for instance, have become a florist, and employed Mamie as his chief assistant. Instead of this he took her to what he considered the most beautiful place on earth. He established his home in the meadows of the Yosemite Valley, where the clear waters of the Merced preserve the verdure of the fields the whole summer through.
In this fine extent of wood and verdure the Pope's villa or casino, now the only summer palace which the existing Pontiff chooses to permit himself, stands as in a domain, small yet perfect. Almost everything within these walls has been built or completely transformed since the days of Nicholas.
The turf that overspreads the soil: the old moss and fern that cover the roots of the trees; the torrents that gush down the sloping banks of the calcareous rocks; in fine, the harmonious accordance of tints reflected by the waters, the verdure, and the sky; everything recalls to the traveller, sensations which he has already felt.
The valleys were clothed with bright and luxuriant verdure, and flowering parasitical plants wound along the trunks of spreading trees. This beautiful spot, however, abounded in scorpions and panthers. Next day they approached the Fellatah town of Dirkulla.
The salle de verdure looked just as it did when the little daughters of Louis XV came here to have their afternoon cakes and tea, so we did not try to change this bit of our garden. My idea of making over the place was to leave the part of the garden against the stone walls in the rear in its tangled, woodsy state, and to build against it a trellis that would be in line with the terrace.
Neither friend nor foe could penetrate many yards through the wall of verdure that shut them in to right and left. To have tried to flank them without literally breaking a way through the canes and interlacing plants was impossible.
But life is there; for at once, as if by magic, the whole expanse is green with verdure, growing with marvellous rapidity, decked with flowers. "Garden without path or fence, Rolling up its billowy blooms." Then you rise some soft morning, and the air is vocal with the cooing of myriad birds.
Oh, sweet and true knowledge, which dost carry with thee the knife of hate, and dost stretch out the hand of holy desire, to draw forth and kill with this hate the worm of self-love a worm that spoils and gnaws the root of our tree so that it cannot bear any fruit of life, but dries up, and its verdure lasts not!
But it did make him sigh to think that a lazy and ignorant boy should be destined to live among those mountains, and that tropical verdure of which he had read, to see the cave-temples, the tanks, the prodigious rivers, and the natives and their ways, of which his imagination was full, while he must stay at home, and see nothing beyond London, as long as he lived.
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