Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !

Updated: June 23, 2025


This was Tartarin, accustoming himself to be calm when the king of beasts was raging. The feeling began to grow, however, that the hero was shirking. He showed no haste to be off. At length, one night Major Bravida went to Baobab Villa and said very solemnly, "Tartarin, you must go!"

No matter.... For Tarascon it was quite splendid, and those citizens who were admitted, on Sundays, to have the privilege of inspecting Tartarin's baobab went home full of admiration. You may imagine my emotions as I walked through this remarkable garden... they were nothing, however, to what I felt on being admitted to the sanctum of the great man himself.

Suddenly a foam-flecked black mare swung round a bend between two banks, and the sun shone on a polished saber-hilt. A turbaned Rajput rose in his stirrups, gazed left and right and then in front of him from the burned-out guardhouse to the baobab drew rein to a walk and waved his hand. "By all that's good and great and wonderful," said Brown aloud, "if here's not Juggut Khan again!"

He pointed to a long, low-lying expanse of land, covered with trees. Away to the northward the ground rose, forming a plateau of coral nearly fifty feet above the sea, and on which many huge baobab trees were growing. The shores surrounding the harbour were low and covered with mangroves, but in and out could be discerned several lofty hills.

I knew that the tree had other names as well as baobab; that the negroes of Senegal call it the "monkey's bread-tree," the "sour gourd," and "lalo plant," and my book had been minute enough to give the botanical name, which is Adansonia so called from a distinguished French botanist, of the name of Adanson, who, long ago, travelled through western Africa, and was the first to describe this wonderful tree.

Not a native tree was there not one flower of France; nothing hut exotic plants, gum-trees, gourds, cotton-woods, cocoa and cacao, mangoes, bananas, palms, a baobab, nopals, cacti, Barbary figs well, you would believe yourself in the very midst of Central Africa, ten thousand leagues away.

As we were now among the hills and mountains, the country was extremely beautiful; at the farthest point of that day's excursion we were close to the high range from which, in the rainy season, innumerable torrents pour into the Settite; some of these gorges were ornamented with the dark foliage of large tamarind trees, while upon rocks that did not appear to offer any sustenance, the unsightly yet mighty baobab* grasped with its gnarled roots the blocks of granite, and formed a peculiar object in the wild and rugged scenery.

Although the bark of many of the trees near their villages is completely torn off in a way that would destroy any other tree, the baobab does not suffer, but throws out a new bark as often as the old one is cut off. Trees are either exogenous that is to say, grow by means of successive layers on the outside; or they endogenous which means that they are increased by layers in the inside.

These had probably been left for two reasons: first, want of proper axes for felling trees of such enormous growth; secondly, because during a famine the fruit of the baobab furnishes a flour which, in the absence of anything better, is said to be eatable and nourishing.

For instance, to habituate himself to long marches he would go round his morning constitutional seven or eight times, sometimes at a brisk walk, sometimes at the trot with two pebbles in his mouth. Then to accustom himself to nocturnal chills and the mists of dawn, he went into the garden and stayed there until ten or eleven at night, alone with his rifle, on watch behind the baobab.

Word Of The Day

vine-capital

Others Looking