Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The flat about the encampment was covered with Spanish-bayonet, soapweed, and cacti, with here and there a variety of palmetto, which attains a height of about twenty-five feet, the trunks shaggy with a fringe of dead spines left by each year's growth.
To the flower-lover it is the yucca; to the cultivator, or whosoever meddles with its leaves, it is the Spanish-bayonet; to the utilitarian, who values a thing only as it is of use to him, it is the soap-weed ignoble name, referring to certain qualities pertaining to its roots.
Here and there a belated Indian-shot flaunts its brilliant lance and over yonder a cactus masks its treachery with a blush; an occasional larkspur or gentian raises blue eyes from the gentle hill slopes, and down on the plains the martial Spanish-bayonet parades its oriflamme. The whole landscape has an underlying wash of burnt sienna, glowing warmly through the superimposed color.
Wherever he looked, he could see with his mind's eye stark faces in the long grass of the valley and the Spanish-bayonet clumps in the woods. All day he had seen them there dying of thirst, bleeding to death alone. As he went down the hill, lights were moving along the creek bed. A row of muffled dead lay along the bed of the creek.
On he went, along endless hedges of azalea and oleander, past thickets of Spanish-bayonet, under leaning cocoanut-palms; and at last the huge banyan-tree rose sprawling across the sky-line, and he saw the white facades and red-tiled roofs beyond.
The spot selected for the ambush was at a point where the road passed though a large body of prickly-pear, the terrible thorns of which, in connection with the sharp-pointed leaves of the Spanish-bayonet, formed a natural chevaux-de-frise that no living creature could penetrate.
The front of the camp looked towards the creek, which flowed over bowlders and pebbles with a great rush and roar. The Indians were expected in their flight to make a dash for the stream, and attempt to pass through the shoal rapids to the wooded bluffs beyond. My instructions were for the men to screen themselves on the flanks, behind the yuccas, Spanish-bayonet, emole, and cacti.
So I concloods I'll round up my silver outside an' then return. "'Excuse me," I says to Frosty. "You stay right yere with the bottle, an' I'll be among you ag'in in a minute all spraddled out." "'I goes wanderin' out back of the Tub of Blood, where it's lonesome, an' camps down by a Spanish-bayonet, an' tugs away to get my boot off an' my dinero into circ'lation.
It had not changed as we progressed: ocean, sand, low dunes crowned with impenetrable tangles of wild bay, sparkleberry, and live-oak, with here and there a weather-twisted palmetto sprawling, and here and there the battered blades of cactus and Spanish-bayonet thrust menacingly forward; and over all the vultures, sailing, sailing some mere circling motes lost in the blue above, some sheering the earth so close that their swiftly sweeping shadows slanted continually across our road.
Word Of The Day