cotta and claret. There is a scented yellow flower the size of flax which is only found in one part of the district and which closes in the evening when the irises unfold. Two of these irises are dwarf, and coloured purple and deep blue; a third is larger and china blue. There are tracts of night-scented stock. Down in the quarries grows a rock plant with a dull red spire and a fleshy leaf that almost adheres to the stone. As for the shrubs, some have transparent joints that look filled with wine; while from the woolly fibre of others jut buttons like a blue scabious. Other blue plants wave their heads in the barley. Mignonette, purple and white anemones, scarlet and yellow ranunculus, scarlet poppies, coltsfoot and dwarf orange marigolds, nettles genuine and false, henbane, mallows, celandine, hen and chickens, lords and ladies, convolvulus. English daisies I do not remember. And many of these flowers are not the varieties we know in England. The lords and ladies, for instance, are smaller and thrust up their pale green spoons in the open ground. While, to compensate, there is a larger kind—an arum of great size with a coal-black sheath and clapper—a positively Satanic plant, such as Des Esseintes would have commanded for his conservatory. In this way, just here and there, the tropic note is struck, and reminds us that these familiar and semi-familiar flowers are after all growing in Africa, and that those swelling hills stretch southwards towards the heart of the dark continent.
But what impresses one most in the scene is the quiet persistence of the earth. There is so little soil about and she does so much with it.
