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The valleys, with the oozes, have a species of grass, having pink seed-stalks and yellow seeds: this is very pretty. At midday we came to the Lopiri, the rivulet which waters Chitapanga's stockade, and soon after found that his village has a triple stockade, the inner being defended also by a deep broad ditch and hedge of a solanaceous thorny shrub. It is about 200 yards broad and 500 long.
On the slope of the hill, sixty yards from my standpoint, were some deep green, dwarf bushes, each bush looking in that still brilliant sunshine as if it had been hewn out of a block of malachite; and on the pale purple solanaceous flowers covering them some humble-bees were feeding.
There also grew the nightshade, with other solanaceous weeds, bearing little clusters of green and purple berries, wild oats, fox-tail grass, and nettles. The hedge gave them shelter, but no moisture, so that all these weeds and grasses had a somewhat forlorn and starved appearance, climbing up with long stringy stems among the powerful aloes. The hedge was also rich in animal life.
This root is bitter and waxy, though it is cultivated. It was not in flower, so I can not say whether it is a solanaceous plant or not. One never expects to find a grave nor a stone of remembrance set up in Africa; the very rocks are illiterate, they contain so few fossils. Those here are of reddish variegated, hardened sandstone, with madrepore holes in it.
Its stomach, burned by pungent spices, will find the Crucifera insipid and uneatable, though its piquancy is enhanced by essence of sulphur. The Pieris, on its part, takes good care not to touch the tithymals: they would endanger its life. The caterpillar of the Death's-head Hawk-moth requires the solanaceous narcotics, principally the potato, and will have nothing else.
They thrive wonderfully well wherever salt and bushes are to be found. The milk of goats does not coagulate with facility, like that of cows, on account of its richness; but the natives have discovered that the infusion of the fruit of a solanaceous plant, Toluane, quickly produces the effect. The Bechuanas put their milk into sacks made of untanned hide, with the hair taken off.
Its fisheries are of great value to the inhabitants, and the produce is carried to great distances. Among the vegetable products of this region, that which interested me most was a sort of potato. It does not belong to the solanaceous, but to the papilionaceous or pea family, and its flowers have a delightful fragrance. It is easily propagated by small cuttings of the root or stalk.
What correspondence is there between the character of the shivering and snowy liliaceous plants of winter and the purple solanaceous plants of autumn? And then there are still other delightful dispositions which are due far less to the artifice of man than to the consent of certain species to regard others as their friends and not to pine away beside them.
Here, too, we first saw native huts with square walls and round roofs. The fences or walls of the courts which surround the huts are wonderfully straight, and made of upright poles a few inches apart, with strong grass or leafy bushes neatly woven between. In the courts were small plantations of tobacco, and a little solanaceous plant which the Balonda use as a relish; also sugar-cane and bananas.
It was hashish that the Old Man of the Mountain, the chief of the sect of Assassins, had recourse to for intoxicating his adepts, and it was, it is thought, by the use of a virulent solanaceous plant henbane, thornapple, or belladonna that he succeeded in rendering them insensible.
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