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Updated: May 14, 2025
This tree is not one with a thick trunk; in fact, the largest ones are not three feet in diameter, but it rises to a height of 120 feet. Its trunk is branchless for more than half that height, and the branches then spread out and droop, like the fronds of the palm. They are naked near their bases, but loaded towards the top with tufts of silvery green leaves, each two feet in length.
"At the end of this corridor I shall come to a spiral runway, which I must follow down instead of up; after that the way is along but a single branchless corridor. Am I right?" "Quite right, Dator," answered Solan; "and now begone. Already have you tempted fate too long within this forbidden place." "Tonight, or tomorrow, then, you may expect the signal," said Thurid, rising to go.
Amidst all the glamour of war, these huts, surrounded by tall poplars, which stood grim, gaunt and leafless in many places branchless, owing to the enemies' shells, which tore their way through them presented the most picturesque scene I had come across for many a long day. Upon the boards fixed over the doorposts were written the names of familiar London places.
We pulled on for about half a mile further, when I noticed, high up on a sunny cliff, that shot boldly out into the clear blue heavens, a small red flag suddenly run up to the top of a tall, scathed, branchless palm tree, where it flared for a moment in the breeze like the flame of a torch, and then as suddenly disappeared. "Come, they are on the look out for us I see."
Without the assistance of our Indian guides, we could not possibly have found our way among the gigantic trees which shot up like tall masts from the level soil, often branchless till near the summit, where their boughs intertwined, and formed a canopy which the rays of the sun could scarcely penetrate.
Catherine, I began to climb, hauling myself up by the rope, whereon I had made knots to this end; nor was the climbing more difficult than to scale a branchless beech trunk for a bird's nest, which, like other boys, I had often done. So behold me, at last, with my legs hanging in free air, seated on the sill of the casement.
Contrasted with the wanton blaze of green, the contorted trunks and labyrinthine shadow-meanderings of our woodlands, these palm groves, despite their frenzied exuberance, figure forth the idea of reserve and chastity; an impression which is heightened by the ethereal striving of those branchless columns, by their joyous and effective rupture of the horizontal, so different from the careworn tread of our oaks and beeches.
About a hundred feet or more of the trunk is usually branchless, but its massive simplicity is relieved by the bark furrows, which instead of making an irregular network run evenly parallel, like the fluting of an architectural column, and to some extent by tufts of slender sprays that wave lightly in the winds and cast flecks of shade, seeming to have been pinned on here and there for the sake of beauty only.
Each tree, if taken by itself, was more like an umbrella than anything else to English eyes, for in these primitive forests, where no kind pruning hand has ever touched them, they shoot up, straight and branchless, into the free air above, where they spread a leafy crown out to the sunbeams.
Right and left of me, in the dim light, I saw the half-completed foundations of new houses in their first stage of existence. Boards and bricks were scattered about us. At places gaunt scaffolding poles rose like the branchless trees of the brick desert. Behind us, on the other side of the high-road, stretched another plot of waste ground, as yet not built on.
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