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Updated: September 3, 2025
It was untenanted of living things except, down below, there were snakes and mosquitoes, and a few wading and swimming fowl; and up above, those big woodpeckers that the country people called logcocks larger than pigeons, with flaming crests and spiky tails swooping in their long, loping flight from snag to snag, always just out of gunshot of the chance invader, and uttering a strident cry which matched those surroundings so fitly that it might well have been the voice of the swamp itself.
He had thus gained a character for uncompromising severity, whereas it was but that a certain sort of cowardice made him creep into spiky armor. He was a good man, who saw some truths clearly, and used them blunderingly. "I don't see why that should follow," said Vavasor, in a softly drawling tone, the very reverse of his host's.
"But all these things do not matter now, these nights of flight and pain... We were in an open place near those great temples at Paestum, at last, on a blank stony place dotted with spiky bushes, empty and desolate and so flat that a grove of eucalyptus far away showed to the feet of its stems. How I can see it!
"There is the weigelia that Dorothy has in front of this house; and forsythia we forced its yellow blossoms last week, you know; and the flowering almond that has whitey-pinky-buttony blossoms." They laughed at Ethel's description, but they listened attentively while she described the spiky white blossoms of deutzia and the winding white bands of the spiraea bridal wreath.
The sky grew darker and darker, and there were queer shapes all around them. Giant cacti with their arms reaching out like the arms of a cross loomed up before them. There were other great cacti in groups of tall straight spines, and every now and then a palm tree would spread its spiky leaves like giant fingers against the sky.
I stood for a moment struck by the grotesque effect of his soaring figure his dirty cricket cap, and spiky hair, his little round body, his arms and his knicker-bockered legs tucked up tightly against the weird spaciousness of the lunar scene. A gust of laughter seized me, and then I stepped off to follow. Plump! I dropped beside him.
Nor must we forget the lesser thistle-tribe, with, first of all, the prickly or "cruel" thistle, which is so well armed that the plant-collector knows not where to grasp it; next, the spear-thistle, with its ample foliage, ending each of its veins with a spear-head; lastly, the black knap-weed, which gathers itself into a spiky knot.
It was partly the terror of the unknown and the unfamiliar; it was partly the interruption to the even tenor of his life and the customary engagements of his day; and in this respect the boy had what may be called a middle-aged temperament, an intense dislike of any interference with his own ways; he had no enterprise, none of the high-hearted enjoyment of novelty, unless he was surrounded by a bulwark of familiar personalities; but partly, too, his love was all given to inanimate things; and as he drove out of the gate on one of these visits, the thought that the larches of the copse should be putting out their rosy buds, the rhododendrons thrusting out their gummy, spiky cases, the stream passing slowly through its deep pools, the bee-hive in the little birch avenue beginning to wake to life, and that he should not be there to go his accustomed rounds, and explore all the minute events of his dear domain it was this that brought out the tears afresh, with a bitter, uncomforted sense of loss and bereavement.
She could not sit on the sand which looked damp, nor equally, of course, on a rock that was spiky and hard. What to do with her? She stood in the middle of the beach, still holding up her skirts, gazing desperately about her, looking first at one spot and then at another. "Oh, dear, the heat!" she exclaimed. "Is there no shade anywhere?
They sat down presently among the spear-like blades of the spiky grass, facing the tides and the evening sky, and Craven, with some difficulty, lit his pipe and persuaded it to draw, while she looked at his long-fingered brown hands. "I couldn't sit here with some people I know," she said. "Desolation like this needs the right companion. Isn't it odd how some people are only for certain places?"
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