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"I was right," he said to me one day, leaving her seated in the garden beside her quiet, patient mother, and joining me where I lay listless yet fretful under the shadeless gum-trees, gazing not on the flocks and fields that I could call my own, but on the far mountain range, from which the arch of the horizon seemed to spring, "I was right," said the great physician; "this is reason suspended, not reason lost.
Nor was there any diminishing fringe on its outskirts; the sentinels that guarded the few gateways of the dim trails were as monstrous as the serried ranks drawn up in the heart of the forest. Consequently, the red highway that skirted the eastern angle was bare and shadeless, until it slipped a league off into a watered valley and refreshed itself under lesser sycamores and willows.
The person who loves trees is a better person than the one who does not. As the poet expresses it: "Ah, bare must be the shadeless ways, and bleak the path must be, Of him, who, having open eyes, has never learned do see, And so has never learned to love the beauty of a tree.
The master and servant parted the one to ride wearily to his unpeaceful home, the other to journey along more hopefully to the shadeless cabins in the fields. Compared to the field-hands, who were little more than heathen and barbarian, our favorite China was a princess. One day and night among them proved to the unhappy girl that her master was in the right she could not live with them.
Perhaps you will laugh at it. It isn't merely that I loathe this squalid, shadeless, vile town of Omdurman, or the horrors of its prison. It isn't merely that I hate the emptiness of those desert wastes. It isn't merely that I am sick of the palm trees of Khartum, or these chains or the whips of the gaolers. But there's something more.
Like Kant, who was unable to collect his thoughts after the fir-tree at which he was accustomed to gaze while meditating was cut down, so the poor abbe could never attain the ardor of his former prayers while walking up and down the shadeless paths. Du Bousquier had planted an English garden.
In the shadeless street, he paused irresolute. The heat of the slumbrous afternoon was oppressive; all animation seemed suspended. The trees in streets and gardens drooped, brownishyellow, and heavy with dust. The sun met the eyes blindingly, and was reflected from every house-wall. Maurice went for a walk in the woods.
What further reliance he placed on Ignacio's story is not known; but, in commemoration of a worthy Californian custom, the place was called La Canada de la Tentacion del Pio Muletero, or "The Glen of the Temptation of the Pious Muleteer," a name which it retains to this day. The next morning the party, issuing from a narrow gorge, came upon a long valley, sear and burnt with the shadeless heat.
There was a considerable pleasure, in spite of rain and fever, in this new scenery. The deep gloom contrasted strongly with the shadeless glare of the Kalahari, which had left an indelible impression on my memory. Though drenched day by day at this time, and for months afterward, it was long before I could believe that we were getting too much of a good thing.
A profusion of water gives to South America its amazing forests; a want inflicts on Australia its shadeless trees, with their shrunken and pointed leaves. With the diminished moisture the green gardens of France are replaced in Gobi by ligneous plants covered with a gray down. Physical circumstances control the vegetable as well as the animal world.
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