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Updated: June 15, 2025
I now wheel along a smooth, level road leading through several orchard-environed villages; general cultivation and an atmosphere of peace and plenty seems to pervade the valley, which, with its scattering villages amid the foliage of their orchards, looks most charming upon emerging from the gloomy environments of the rock-ribbed and verdureless ravine; a fitting background is presented on the south by a mountain-chain of considerable elevation, upon the highest peaks of which still linger tardy patches of snow.
Surely never was there a more forlorn little town, trying to scramble up a hillside covered with the tall trunks of dead trees and blackened stumps, shut out from one world by the waste of waters before it, shut in from another by dreary, verdureless hills. Surely nobody lived there; those could not be homes, those desolate frame houses where people were "staying" awhile.
One horse had a heavy fall on the slippery rocks, and the others had narrow escapes. However, this was as good a road as we had found in Palestine, and possibly even the best, and so there was not much grumbling. Sometimes, in the glens, we came upon luxuriant orchards of figs, apricots, pomegranates, and such things, but oftener the scenery was rugged, mountainous, verdureless and forbidding.
Across a dark verdureless field will blow a wind through the heart of the winter which will wake in the patient mind not a memory merely, but a prophecy of the spring, with a glimmer of crocus, or snow-drop, or primrose; and across the waste of tired endeavour will a gentle hope, coming he knows not whence, breathe springlike upon the heart of the man around whom life looks desolate and dreary.
Graffiacane saw over hills and valleys and many another town each with its church standing highest, the guardian of the flock of houses beneath it; saw over many a water-course, mostly dry, with lovely oleanders growing in the middle of it; saw over multitudinous oliveyards and vineyards; saw over mills with great wheels, and little ribbons of water to drive them running sometimes along the tops of walls to get at their work; saw over rugged pines, and ugly, verdureless, raw hillsides away to the sea, lying in the heat like a heavenly vat in which all the tails of all the peacocks God was making, lay steeped in their proper dye.
In almost all great desert regions, particularly in the typical Sahara, we find a variety of storm belonging to the whirlwind group, which, owing to the nature of the country, take on special characteristics. These desert storms take up from the verdureless earth great quantities of sand and other fine débris, which often so clouds the air as to bring the darkness of night at midday.
The plain I am now traversing is a broad, gray-looking area surrounded by mountains, and stretching away eastward from Lake Ooroomiah for seventy-five miles. It presents the same peculiar aspect of Persian scenery nearly everywhere-a general verdureless and unproductive country, with the barren surface here and there relieved by small oases of cultivated fields and orchards.
The greater part of the work which it does, as we shall see hereafter, is done through the waters which it impels and bears about. Yet where winds blow over verdureless surfaces the effect of the sand which they sweep before them is often considerable.
The first child's name expresses his father's discontent, and suggests the bitter contrast between Sinai and Egypt; the court and the sheepfold; the gloomy, verdureless, gaunt peaks of Sinai, blazing in the fierce sunshine, and the cool, luscious vegetation of Goshen, the land for cattle.
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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