Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 10, 2025
How many times, per amica silentia lunæ, have I lain upon the ground, in the shelter of a clump of rosemary, to listen to the delicious concert! The nocturnal Cricket sings continually in the gardens. Each tuft of the red-flowered cistus has its band of musicians, and each bush of fragrant lavender. The shrubs and the terebinth-trees contain their orchestras.
She never saw that most elegant plant, and is so delicate an artist that the introduction will be a mutual benefit; Ellen will gain a subject worthy of her pencil, and the pretty weed will live; no small favour to a flower almost as transitory as the gum cistus: duration is the only charm which it wants, and that Ellen will give it. We will take nobody but May.
They reached an open moor, where there were rocks covered with cistus and wild vine. Here the air was very sweet and pure, the sun pleasant. The Marquess's ass grew frisky, pricked up his ears and brayed. Giafar ibn Mulk edged up close, and put his arm round the Marquess's neck. 'The signal is a good one, he said. 'Strike, Cogia. Cogia drove his knife in up to the heft. The Marquess coughed.
Heidi had meanwhile reached her field of flowers, and as she caught sight of it she uttered a cry of joy. The whole ground in front of her was a mass of shimmering gold, where the cistus flowers spread their yellow blossoms. Above them waved whole bushes of the deep blue bell-flowers; while the fragrance that arose from the whole sunlit expanse was as if the rarest balsam had been flung over it.
As we brushed through them, the gummy leaves of a cistus stuck to the clothes: and with its small white flower and yellow heart stood for our English dog-rose. In place of heather, we had myrtle and lentisque with leaves somewhat similar. That large bulb with long flat leaves? Do not touch it if your hands are cut; the Arabs use it as blisters for their horses. Is that the same sort?
From those treeless slopes there streamed forth deliciously warm emanations stored up during the scorching hours of noon; the short scrub that clothed them was redolent of that peculiar Calabrian odour which haunts one like a melody an odour of dried cistus and other aromatic plants, balsamic by day, almost overpowering at this hour.
These plains of the Alemtejo are supposed to be the least beautiful part of the country, but no one can cross them in April without being almost overcome with the beauty of the flowers, cistus, white, yellow, or red, tall white heaths, red heaths, blue lithospermum, yellow whin, and most brilliant of all the large pimpernel, whose blue flowers almost surpass the gentian.
Silvestro laughed nervously. "Why should we fight, Castracane? Besides, we have no knives. How can we fight?" "Like this," said the other between his teeth. His left arm whipped out, like a lizard's tongue, and Silvestro lay flat on his back among the cistus flowers, seeing ink and scarlet clouds. "Stick a Jew indeed!" cried Castracane. "Stick a grandmother! Why, you're as soft as cheese!"
Picture corn-fields full of love-in-a-mist; orchards of fig-trees, with the grass ablaze with golden pyrethrums; red mallow standing up in the barley; the ground carpeted with blue-and-white convolvulus; masses of carmine-coloured convolvulus densely festooned over the thorn-hedges; on the barest, stoniest of soil stretches of cistus, pale pink to faded mauve; asphodels everywhere; sometimes the wild spring form of the cultivated artichoke, the small variety of the ice-plant, the larkspur, the lupin, and several varieties of lavender.
Heidi went running hither and thither and shouting with delight, for here were whole patches of delicate red primroses, and there the blue gleam of the lovely gentian, while above them all laughed and nodded the tender-leaved golden cistus. Enchanted with all this waving field of brightly-colored flowers, Heidi forgot even Peter and the goats.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking