United States or Eswatini ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
His sketchy hotel and outhouses were dilapidated, but they were in the most beautiful surrounding conceivable, a sheltered cove of the lagoon where the swaying palms dipped their boles in the ultramarine, and bulky banana-plants and splendid breadfruit-trees formed a temple of shadow and coolth whence one might look straight up the lowering mountain-side to the ghostly domes, or across the radiant water to the white thread of reef.
Placido was surprised to see the rich jeweler move through such places as if he were familiar with them. They at length reached an open lot where a wretched hut stood off by itself surrounded by banana-plants and areca-palms. Some bamboo frames and sections of the same material led Placido to suspect that they were approaching the house of a pyrotechnist.
Twice in the twenty-four hours the impassive flowing tide subdued the impertinence of each of the brawlers, smothered its gurgling, and forced it back among the ferns and jungle and banana-plants which crowded its banks. The largest stream at high water was four feet deep.
Quick hoofs thudded on the soil, and Christmas swept through the banana-plants like a destroying angel, in a glorious bolt for home. The picnic had palled; and Tom, shouting rebukes, orders, and suggestions from behind a tree, showed by his dun-coloured skin that he had been dragged ignominiously through the freshly tilled soil.
Alone among those shadowing, dripping banana-plants, with no human companionship, he had made his study of the moods of the stream a worship. "Bacchus," I saw repeated on the dates July 13, 14, 15. "Another god on the altar then?" I asked. "Mais, oui," he answered in his rusty voice. "The Fall of the Bastile. Le Vergose sent me a bottle of rum to honor the Republic."
Palms, with cocoanuts of a half dozen stages of growth, and giant banana-plants lined the banks, and bushes with blue flowers like violets, and one with red buttons, intermingled with limes and oranges to form a thicket through which we could hardly force our way. We were yet on the level of the rivulet, but now, the princess said, must take to the cliff.
Banana-plants in full fruit and slim palms in cluster were ofttimes his models; but portraiture was not Wylo's forte. On the bark of trees, on flat rocks as well as on the shifting sand he expressed himself plentifully and graphically. His genius was imperative, almost overbearing. He had been commissioned by an imperious authority to sketch a fever almost amounting to insanity fired his soul.
They are the outside layers of the pendulum of that graceful plant, the purple flower-cone that hangs at the end of the fruit cluster with its volute and royal-hued stem. The banana-plants, which we call trees, lined the road and stood twenty feet high, their long slender leaves blowing in the light wind like banners from a castle wall. The flakes that had dropped upon the ground were lovely.
Beneath a honeycombed cliff, which supported one enormous cotton-tree, was a spot of some thirty yards square sloping down to the stream, planted in rows with magnificent banana-plants, full twelve feet high, and bearing among their huge waxy leaves clusters of ripening fruit; while, under their mellow shade, yams and cassava plants were flourishing luxuriantly, the whole being surrounded by a hedge of orange and scarlet flowers.
From these long leaves rose graduated alabaster columns, the inner stalks of the banana-plants, and on them were fastened flowers and ornaments, fanciful creations of the hands of Tahitian women, fashioned of brilliant leaves and of bamboo-fiber and the glossy white arrowroot-fiber.
Word Of The Day