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Updated: June 27, 2025
We camped at a noble reach, garnished with a mimic forest of old tamarisks, whose small voices, united in chorus, passably imitated the mighty murmur of the sea. Our day's march had covered a score of miles; hard work, considering the condition of the mules. After a splendid night, we set out London-wards at five a.m., April 8th, delayed, as has been said, by the politike of the Shaykhs.
Next day he was hawking, and the day after he was again under the tamarisks learning Arabic, and so the days went by between sport and study without his perceiving them until one morning Owen found the spring in possession of a considerable caravan, some five and twenty or thirty camel-drivers and horsemen; and anxious to practise the last phrases he had acquired, he went forward to meet the Saharians, for they were easily recognisable as such by the blacker skin and a pungent blackness in the eyes.
I was only in fun, but I see now that it was taking a liberty. It's a dreadful come-down from the Montmorenci, to be sure: still, one must marry somebody within seven days. But then, again, I've written such flaming accounts of the other one to all my friends. I've asked Sponge and Rasper and Robinson to come down, and see us after the honeymoon at "the Tamarisks," my little place near Dover.
I cannot see the water, but I hear it spurting and splashing round the legs of the camels in front of me. Now my camel slides down a nasty mud bank. He slithers and wriggles about to keep himself up, and then he, too, tramps through the water and scrambles up the other side. "Tamarisks," I hear some one shout. Welcome sound! It means that we are safe, for nothing grows in the salt desert.
Brefar Church stands on a green knoll close by the water's edge and only a few yards above a shingly beach where the Islanders bring their boats to shore. Its bell had ceased ringing long before its windows came into view with the warm lamp light shining within; and the beach lay dark under the shadow of the tamarisks topping the graveyard wall.
Here again is a river, and there the road runs up a hill. Here the country is barren, but soon after crops wave again round villages. Maize fields in a valley are agitated like the swell of the sea, and gentle breezes rustle through rain-bedewed sugar-cane. Bananas hang down like golden cucumbers, and in barren places tamarisks and mimosas perfume the air.
As the north wind, blowing on an orchard that has been sodden with autumn rain, soon dries it, and the heart of the owner is glad even so the whole plain was dried and the dead bodies were consumed. Then he turned tongues of fire on to the river. He burned the elms the willows and the tamarisks, the lotus also, with the rushes and marshy herbage that grew abundantly by the banks of the river.
Behind the high tamarisk hedge, her garden was a jungle of verdure in summer. Above the cherry trees and peach trees and golden plums stood the windmill, with its tank on stilts, which kept all this verdure alive. Outside, the sage-brush grew up to the very edge of the garden, and the sand was always drifting up to the tamarisks.
In many places are clumps of birches and junipers, which are the principal trees of the Pamir, and on the undulating plains grow tamarisks and sedges and mugwort, and a sort of reed very abundant by the sides of the saline pools, and a dwarf labiate called "terskenne" by the Kirghizes. The major mentioned certain animals which constitute a somewhat varied fauna on the heights of the Pamir.
A large, low moon turned the tops of the plume-grass to silver, and the stunted camel-thorn bushes and sour tamarisks into the likenesses of trooping devils. The smell of the sun had not left the earth, and little aimless winds blowing across the rose-gardens to the southward brought the scent of dried roses and water.
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