These Freshets Are The Edens Of Adel. The Banks Are Charmingly Wooded With Acacias Of Many Varieties, Some Thorned Like The Fabled Zakkum, Others Parachute-Shaped, And Planted In Impenetrable Thickets:

Huge white creepers, snake-shaped, enclasp giant trees, or connect with their cordage the higher boughs, or depend like cables from the lower branches to the ground.

Luxuriant parasites abound: here they form domes of flashing green, there they surround with verdure decayed trunks, and not unfrequently cluster into sylvan bowers, under which--grateful sight!--appears succulent grass. From the thinner thorns the bell-shaped nests of the Loxia depend, waving in the breeze, and the wood resounds with the cries of bright-winged choristers. The torrent-beds are of the clearest and finest white sand, glittering with gold-coloured mica, and varied with nodules of clear and milky quartz, red porphyry, and granites of many hues. Sometimes the centre is occupied by an islet of torn trees and stones rolled in heaps, supporting a clump of thick jujube or tall acacia, whilst the lower parts of the beds are overgrown with long lines of lively green colocynth. [29] Here are usually the wells, surrounded by heaps of thorns, from which the leaves have been browsed off, and dwarf sticks that support the water-hide. When the flocks and herds are absent, troops of gazelles may be seen daintily pacing the yielding surface; snake trails streak the sand, and at night the fiercer kind of animals, lions, leopards, and elephants, take their turn.

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