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The Tree of Baluchistán is as well known to the manner in the Persian Gulf as Regent Circus or the Marble Arch to the London cabman. With this solitary exception, not a trace of vegetation exists along the sea-board from Persian to Indian frontier. Occasionally, at long intervals, a mud hut is seen, just showing that the country is inhabited, and that is all.
And all the way down I marked the rugged sea-board slumber darkling, afar or near, with never, alas! one friendly light. Well, on the 15th August I had another of those maniac raptures, whose passing away would have left an elephant racked and prostrate.
The thirteen Colonies had, when they first revolted, definite western boundaries, the westernmost of them reaching back from the sea-board to a frontier in the Alleghany Mountains. But at the close of the war Great Britain ceded to the United States the whole of the inland country up to the Mississippi River.
It is quite likely that on this occasion Rhodes put in a word suggesting that it would be an advantage to the Transvaal to become possessed of an outlet on the sea-board, but I hardly think that Kruger wrote the truth in his memoirs in stating that when mentioning Delagoa Bay Rhodes used the words, "We must simply take it," thus associating himself with Kruger.
A few years may see thousands of them, with mosques by the dozen established upon the sea-board. The 'revival of El-Islam' shows itself nowhere so remarkably as in Africa. At Tumento Cameron found himself growing rapidly worse. He suffered from pains in the legs, and owned that even when crossing Africa during his three years of wild life he remembered nothing more severe.
I am beginning to doubt whether my belief on the matter has not been the product of insular ignorance and idolatrous self-worship. It may be that a peach should be a combination of an apple and a turnip. "My great objection to your country, sir," said another, "is that you have got no vegetables." Had he told me that we had got no sea-board, or no coals, he would not have surprised me more.
He visits a piece of sea-board; and from the inclination and soil of the beach, from the weeds and shell-fish, from the configuration of the coast and the depth of soundings outside, he must deduce what magnitude of waves is to be looked for.
The monopoly of the States with a Mediterranean sea-board was coming to an end. Yet it was in his reign that the vast change was initiated. In 1492 Christopher Columbus made his great voyage: in 1497 Vasco da Gama sailed for India, not westwards but southwards and eastwards round the Cape of Good Hope. Ten years later, Albuquerque was founding a Portuguese Empire in the Indian seas.
To him whom business or duty took far from the sea-board into the country of the savage and treacherous Iroquois, there was the ever-present probability that he would some day perhaps many times be compelled to fight for his life, with the certainty that, if disabled by wounds he fell into the enemy's hands, the scalp would be torn from his skull ere death could put an end to his sufferings; whilst capture meant, almost for a certainty, the being eventually put to death after undergoing the most hideous tortures that the cruelty of the Redskins could devise.
But, nevertheless, had the army which mutinied in India been in possession of ports and sea-board; had they held in their hands vast commercial cities and great agricultural districts; had they owned ships and been masters of a wide-spread trade, America could have done nothing better toward us than have remained neutral in such a conflict and have regarded the parties as belligerents.
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