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The addition of "Mont Vert," however, is a misnomer; for though seated at the foot of a steep mountain, it is not green, but sterile, rocky, and verdureless. The village is best reached from Florac, from which it is about twenty miles distant.
I was the youngest in a family remarkable for their literary attainments; and, while yet a child, I had seen riches melt away from our once prosperous home, as the Canadian snows dissolve before the first warm days of spring, leaving the verdureless earth naked and bare. There was, however, a spirit in my family that rose superior to the crushing influences of adversity.
Verdureless and waterless stretches, in crossing which our poor animals were two nights without food, brought us to the glacier-blue waters of the Serchu, tumbling along in a deep broad gash, and farther on to a lateral torrent which is the boundary between Rupchu, tributary to Kashmir, and Lahul or British Tibet, under the rule of the Empress of India.
San Leon ranch was a large one. The dwelling house and many outbuildings were upon a rich plateau topping a spur from the great mountain beyond. On one side, the land sloped to the valley of the Mismit, utilized for the sheep farming; and across the river, or run, rose grassy fields, climbing one above another till they ended in rocky, verdureless soil.
Yesterday morning at 6.30 I was aroused by the news that "The Islands" were in sight. Oahu in the distance, a group of grey, barren peaks rising verdureless out of the lonely sea, was not an exception to the rule that the first sight of land is a disappointment. Owing to the clear atmosphere, we seemed only five miles off, but in reality we were twenty, and the land improved as we neared it.
There were not then, as now, upon some of them, great dead trees reaching out their long bare arms in verdureless desolation above a stinted undergrowth, and piled up trunks charred and blackened by the fire that had revelled among them, but all were green, and thrifty, and glorious in their robes of beauty.
Wastes as dreary and desolate as the steppes of Central Russia or the deserts of Turkestan sometimes stretched away to the horizon on either side of the track. At other points were gray, verdureless slopes and rocky buttes, or saline mud-flats that looked like the old bed of some ancient sea.
But for some reason or other, the last of the echoes was the loudest, and the name came back to him as clearly as he had spoken it, from a hill of verdureless rocks some two thousand yards distant: "Batavsky!" "Goodness, how distinct!" he mused. "But why more distinct from that inaccessible hill than from the others? Was it the work of ah, pshaw!
Five and one-twentieth miles over a rough, red, and verdureless country brought us to the Rio Puerco of the West. There was not a drop of water in it. The commanding officer ordered me to take ten cavalrymen, with shovels, and go on to Carizo Creek, and, if I found no running water, to sink holes in a line across its bed. The boy corporals were allowed to go with me.
After all, it is a satisfaction to turn to the towering rock of St. Angelo; not a tree, not a shrub, not a spire of grass, on its perpendicular side. We try to analyze the satisfaction there is in such a bald, treeless, verdureless mass.
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