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Wild goats abound in the Elburz Mountains; the villagers hunt them also for their meat, but the flesh of the wild goat is said to contribute largely to the prevalence of sore eyes among the people. The general aspect of the country immediately south of the Elburz Mountains, beyond the circumscribed area of cultivation about the villages, is that of a desert, desolate, verdureless, and forbidding.
Nothing but savage, awful precipices of naked granite, snowy fields, and verdureless wastes! In every other place in the Alps, we have looked upon the snow in the remote distance, to be dazzled with its sheeny effulgence ourselves, meanwhile, in the region of verdure and warmth.
The gaudy hues, too, which nature had lately worn, were all faded; there was a pale, yellow-leafed vine clambering over the verdureless lilac, and far down in the garden might be seen a shrub covered with bright scarlet berries. But the warm south wind was sweet and fragrant, as if it had strayed through bowers of roses and eglantines.
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.
Within a stone's-throw of where the Wing-sang ties up to discharge freight the dark-green mangrove bushes are bathing in the salt waves. Very seldom does one see green vegetation mingling familiarly with the blue water of the sea there is usually a strip of sand or other verdureless shore but one sees it at lovely Singapore.
High hills, verdureless and enfiladed with dark canadas, cast their gaunt shadows on the tide. During a greater portion of the day the wind, which blew furiously and incessantly, seemed possessed with a spirit of fierce disquiet and unrest.
It is but a narrow strip of land between the ocean and the red, flaring, almost inaccessible, Maui hills, which here rise abruptly to a height of 6,000 feet, pinnacled, chasmed, buttressed, and almost verdureless, except in a few deep clefts, green and cool with ferns and candlenut trees, and moist with falling water.
If they had only possessed two small pieces of wood with which to create the necessary friction, they could easily have made a lamp out of one of the bear's shoulder-blades, and found oil enough in his own fat, while a tag of sealskin, or some other portion of clothing might have supplied a wick; but not a scrap of wood was to be obtained on that verdureless island.
Enoch waved his hand and took his place, and the racing water seized the boats. Hardly had Enoch turned to look once more at the four watching on the beach, when the boats shot round the curving western wall. For the first half hour, the water was smooth and swift, sweeping between walls that were abrupt and verdureless and offered not so much as a finger hold for a landing place.
At Juarez the narrow, shallow Rio Grande, with its bare quicksands, was once more crossed, and the Texas city of El Paso, shadeless and verdureless, was reached. Its population is what would be expected in a frontier town of this region, while an air of crudeness permeates everything.
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