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I recognised some euphorbias, with the caustic sugar coming from them; heliotropes, quite incapable of justifying their name, sadly drooped their clusters of flowers, both their colour and perfume half gone. Here and there some chrysanthemums grew timidly at the foot of an aloe with long, sickly-looking leaves.
They have a particular anxiety to secure the point where cross-roads meet. On and around the graves are planted tree euphorbias and other species of that family. On the grave itself they also place water-bottles, broken pipes, cooking vessels, and sometimes a little bow and arrow.
Imagination could do anything with that sound except figure the reality of it or paint the tremendous forest bending to the wind in billows of foliage a hundred leagues long; the roar of the cotton-woods, the cry of the palm, the sigh of the withered euphorbias, the thunderous drumming of the great plantain leaves, all joining in one tremendous symphony led by the trumpets of the wind, broken by rainbursts from the rushing clouds overhead, and all in viewless darkness, black as the darkness of the pit.
Euphorbias, acacias, baobabs, all were in blossom, and the fresh morning air was laden with delicious and almost overpoweringly fragrant perfume.
Microscopic mossy growths had begun to mottle the slab that closed her in; over its face some singular creeper was crawling, planting tiny reptile-feet into the chiselled letters of the inscription; and from the moist soil below speckled euphorbias were growing up to her, and morning glories, and beautiful green tangled things of which he did not know the name.
Little euphorbias, peperomias, and other succulent plants, have taken the place of the cryptogamous tribes; and evergreen shrubs, rhexias, and purple-flowered melastomas, form verdant isles amid desert and rocky plains.
Here millet fields, with hedges of blue aloe or euphorbias like seven-branched candlesticks, announced a place of habitation; soon the village itself appeared, a long irregular line of white-walled houses roofed with thatch or tile, and here and there greater dwellings with carved balconies and barred verandahs, behind which impassive white-robed figures sat and seemed to ponder upon life.
Professor Haeckel, botanising near that same spot, spent an hour in an endeavour to force his way into one of these jungles, but only succeeded in advancing a few steps into the thicket, when, stung by mosquitoes, bitten by ants, his clothing torn from his bleeding arms and legs, wounded by the thousands of sharp thorns of the calamus, hibiscus, euphorbias, lantanas, and myriad other jungle plants, he was obliged, utterly discomfited, to desist.
In the dry soil of India, many spurges grow thick and succulent, learn to suppress their leaves, and assume the bizarre forms and quaint jointed appearance of the true cactuses. In flower and fruit, however, they are euphorbias to the end; it is only in the thick and fleshy stem that they resemble their nobler and more beautiful Western rivals.
Up the gorge rode Hendrik; and no sooner had he arrived at its top, than he discovered the herd of elands seven old bulls about a mile off upon the upper plain. There was not cover enough to have sheltered a fox. The only growth near the spot where the elands were, consisted of straggling aloe-plants, euphorbias, with some stunted bushes, and tufts of dry grass, characteristic of the desert.
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