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Updated: June 15, 2025
Our ascent was rapid, and after about an hour we turned due east, this part being very bare-looking, though there were a good many horrid acacias and also euphorbias with rounded trunks. We soon burst upon a lovely plain all mapped out in fields and abrs. It is six miles to Naab, and we took three hours.
These were dotted everywhere with copses of the yellow-flowered mimosa-bush, through openings in which the glitter of a stream could be seen, while to the left and behind lay the dark masses of a dense jungle filled with arboreous and succulent plants, acacias and evergreens, wild-looking aloes, tall euphorbias, quaint cactuses, and a great variety of flowering shrubs filled also, as was very soon discovered, with antelopes, snakes, jackals, hyenas, leopards, and other wild creatures.
Rare forms of vegetation were around or near at hand: the arborescent aloes, with their tall flower-spikes of coral red, and euphorbias of many shapes; and zamia, with its palm-like fronds; and the soft-leaved Strelitzia reginæ. All these were observed in the neighbourhood of this new-discovered fountain.
The path wound around rough hills, here and there scattered with fig-trees and vines, with lupines, euphorbias, and other wild growths. It is a volcanic blowing-hole of oval shape, about fifty feet in long diameter, and the elliptical mouth discharged to the north the lava-bed before seen. Apparently it is connected with the Bandana Peak, further west.
Also there were a few euphorbias, grey, naked-looking things that end in points like fingers on a hand, and among them some sparse thorn trees, struggling to live in an inhospitable soil. The place has one peculiarity.
Though no hills are nearer than the Himalaya, from the constant alteration of the river-beds, the road undulates remarkably for this part of India, and a jungly vegetation ensues, consisting of the above plants, with the yellow-flowered Cactus replacing the Euphorbias, which were previously much more common.
But almost all must have required considerable time and patience to reach their present growth, for their ages vary from 10 to 150 years. There are other plants not so elaborately trained, but the effect of the whole is rather too formal to be pretty. I managed to bring home some euphorbias, cut into the form of junks, and some banyan trees, one 100 and one 50 years old.
With the exception of the nwana-trees, that stood at long distances apart and regularly, as if they had been planted there was nothing that deserved the name of timber. All the rest was mere "bush," a thorny jungle of mimosas, euphorbias, arborescent aloes, strelitzias, and the horrid zamia plants, beautiful enough to the eye, but of no utility whatever in the building of a house.
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