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The land for miles round it was covered with a dense growth of cardoon thistles. Now the cardoon is the European artichoke run wild and its character somewhat altered in a different soil and climate. The large deep-cut leaves are of a palish grey-green colour, the stalks covered with a whitish-grey down, and the leaves and stems thickly set with long yellow spines.
Now, too, in the light of early dawn, it might easily have been imagined a host of bodiless spirits driven forth from the realms of the dead; for a whitish-grey column of dust extending to the blue vault of heaven moved before it, and the vast whole, with its many parts and voices, veiled by the clouds of sand, had the appearance of a single form.
It was at this time looking very black and wild to windward; the sky all along the south-western horizon being of a deep slaty, indigo hue, swept by swift- flying streamers of dirty, whitish-grey cloud; while the leaden-grey sea, scourged into a waste of steep, foam-capped ridges and deep, seething, wind-furrowed valleys, had already risen to such a height as to completely becalm our low canvas every time that the schooner settled down into the trough.
From a plain of whitish-grey soil, covered with concentric shells as large as a nut, rises a circular embankment with gently-sloping sides, intersected only by a small cleft which serves as an entrance, and which shows, on its edges denuded of vegetation, the loose rapilli of which the embankment is formed. The sides of this natural amphitheatre tower more than a hundred feet above its flat base.
At length, sight of joy! a moving object is seen, and it gives rise to the usual inquiries, Who is it? and what can be his errand? The old whitish-grey coat, the hobbling gait, the hat half-slouched, half-cocked, announced the forlorn maker of periwigs, and left for investigation only the second query. This was soon solved by a servant entering the parlour, "A letter from Monkbarns, Sir Arthur."
Fully forty feet long from the snout to the tip of the tail, with a head shaped midway between that of a pike and a crocodile, with enormous protruding eyes, with a smooth somewhat fish-shaped body almost black above and shading off to a dirty whitish-grey beneath, with a long tail broad and flat at its extremity, and with four seal-like flippers instead of legs and feet, the monsters looked more like nightmare creatures, evolved by reading a book on antediluvian animals after a . Of course, that was it, Escombe decided, as his thoughts took some such turn as above.
It was the three engines entering the great freight yard abreast, the smoke of the engines towering straight up like tall whitish-grey plumes, in the damp, cold air, the sky lowering with blackish-grey clouds, the red and yellow and blue cars standing out in the sodden darkness because of the water. You could feel the cold, wet drizzle, the soppy tracks, the weariness of "throwing switches."
At length, sight of joy! a moving object is seen, and it gives rise to the usual inquiries, Who is it? and what can be his errand? The old whitish-grey coat, the hobbling gait, the hat half-slouched, half-cocked, announced the forlorn maker of periwigs, and left for investigation only the second query. This was soon solved by a servant entering the parlour, "A letter from Monkbarns, Sir Arthur."
Gunpat Rao was one of the finest young elephants in captivity; one of the swiftest in the caravan; but the mahouts knew he could not think a trick! The sense of his danger swept them. The Gul Moti knew that "white elephants" are always feared being almost always bad. This one was not white; nor grey, nor yellow. He was whitish-grey dull-tawny overcast unclean looking.
Just beyond the promontory the coast-line took an abrupt bend to the right, at the end of which was a sequestered little bay, with a beach of yellow sand, and a cluster of grassy mounds behind, of the brightest emerald green. The bay and the green mounds and the strip of yellow sand were all exceedingly small, and were surrounded by a mass of rugged rocks of a cold, whitish-grey colour.
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