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Updated: June 28, 2025
She enjoyed overwhelming the ladies of the island who did not know French with the superiority of the foreigner; she listened to the novelist's lyric eulogies of the originality of this African landscape, with its little white houses, spiny cacti, slender palms, and aged olive trees, in such striking contrast to the harmonious order of the broad fields of France.
They darted hither and thither; the spiny creatures which the schoolboy loves built their queer nests among the waterweeds; and sometimes a silly adventurer alarmed by the majestic approach of a large fish would rush on to the loamy bank at the shallow end of the lake and wriggle piteously in hopeless failure. The afternoons were divinely restful by the varied shores of the limpid lake.
There was here a very broad beach of untrodden white sand, which extended quite into the forest, where it formed rounded hills and hollows like sand dunes, covered with a peculiar vegetation: harsh, reedy grasses, and low trees matted together with lianas, and varied with dwarf spiny palms of the genus Bactris.
The curved, gray seeds, which are rough, wrinkled and somewhat spiny, retain their germinating power for about three years. Cultivation. For the garden the seed is usually started in a hotbed during March or April and the plants pricked out in flats 2 inches apart and hardened off in the usual way.
These words, however, as commonly used, are comparative; I have always applied them to the plains of Patagonia, which can boast of spiny bushes and some tufts of grass; and this is absolute fertility, as compared with northern Chile.
There are the little shrimps and the big hump-backed fellows, or prawns; there are the 'crangons' or squillae; and the big lobsters and the crawfish or 'langoustes', their spiny cousins.
Our traps contained shrews of two species, meadow voles, Asiatic white-footed mice, spiny mice, rats, squirrels, and tree shrews. The small mammals were exceedingly abundant and easy to catch, but after the first day we began to have difficulty with the natives who stole our traps. We usually marked them with a bit of cotton, and the boys would follow an entire line down a hedge, taking every one.
It was marked "Live animals with care," and consisted of a box, containing several divisions, each having fine wire-work to admit air. In one I found a spiny creature called a Gecko, in another a beautiful lizard which had not survived the journey, and in the third a very rare species of mouse known as Perognathus Pencillatus.
Place them under a strong glass, and who can fail to wonder at the miracles of form and color that are revealed? From these tiny flowerets the scale runs upward until it touches the hybrid rose. During this period, also, many of the forest trees emulate the wild flowers at their feet until their inflorescence culminates in the white cord-like fringe that foretells the spiny chestnut burrs.
A tall-growing plant, rather straggling in habit, branching freely, the stems usually four-winged, but sometimes with three, five, or more, constricted at intervals, as in Phyllocactus, the wings spiny along the edges; spines 1 in. long.
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