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Updated: June 27, 2025
The earth was a gray shadow more unreal than the sky. We could hear her breathing lightly in the pauses between the howling of the jackals, the movement of the wind in the tamarisks, and the fitful mutter of musketry-fire leagues away to the left. A native woman from some unseen hut began to sing, the mail-train thundered past on its way to Delhi, and a roosting crow cawed drowsily.
Pomegranates, tamarisks, poplars, and acacias are even now almost the only trees besides the two above mentioned, to be found between Samarah and the Persian Gulf. The tamarisk grows chiefly as a shrub along the rivers, but sometimes attains the dimensions of a tree, as in the case of the "solitary tree" still growing upon the ruins of Babylon.
We quite understood that danger was a bogey to prevent us keeping them from a town, and we pointed out that the Yafei were not likely to come down a light-coloured mountainside with only a few tamarisks into a valley half a mile wide; so my husband firmly said we would stay on the clean sand. Here we saw many baboons. The first ruin is probably Persian or later Arabian.
Conscious that his rich array made him a conspicuous object, he retreated along the bank of the river, and endeavored to conceal himself in a thicket of willows and tamarisks. Thence, looking back, he beheld his loyal band at length give way, supposing, no doubt, he had effected his escape. They crossed the ford, followed pell-mell by the enemy, and several of them were struck down in the stream.
Ours is an old farm, and had an orchard of old apple-trees sloping down to the river as also did the home field, only divided by a low stone wall from the little strip of flower-garden before the house, which in those days had nothing in it but two tamarisks, a tea-tree, and a rose with lovely buds and flowers that always had green hearts.
It was fine to sit there under the tamarisks around an immense camp-fire and listen to a really good band playing the old favourites again and giving us a few new ones, to be whistled or sung about the camp for weeks.
Palm groves lift their feathery plumes towards the sky, and mulberry-trees and dark-toned tamarisks shade the water-wheels, which, with incessant groanings, are continually turned by blindfolded bullocks. Villages and little farmsteads are frequent, and everywhere are the people, men, women, and children, working on the land which so richly rewards their labour.
Seen from a balloon, Moonstone would have looked like a Noah's ark town set out in the sand and lightly shaded by gray-green tamarisks and cottonwoods.
With that the old man went into the house, leaving the Emîr alone, resting forlornly on the garden-seat beneath a flowering tree and staring at the ground. Iskender parted the growth of tamarisks and stood out before him. The Emîr gave a start and a faint cry, with eyes dilated. Iskender pounced on his hand and, murmuring words of love, essayed to kiss it. It was snatched from him.
As she looked out again at the palm-trees beyond the tamarisks, above whose plumy heads the evening star now rode in the azure blue of the night sky, the singing was taken up again after a pause; she heard once more the angelic greeting which had before struck her soul as so comforting and full of promise when she read it in the Gospel: "Glory to God on high, on earth peace, good-will toward men."
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