IN SOUTH AFRICA. 243 
naked and dreary. But there are many pretty wooded ravines 
and shady nooks concealed among these bare hills, which are 
well worth exploring. In these the vegetation is often luxu- 
riant and beautiful; the trees grow to some considerable 
height, and various climbing plants twine round them and 
hang from their branches, or interlace them with rich gar- 
lands of foliage. The massy sandstone rocks, grey with 
lichens, and often assuming the appearance of ruined build- 
ings, half hidden among the evergreen bushes, add to the 
beauty of these little dells. Here grows in great abundance 
that singular tree called the Nojeboom,* with large and jagged 
leaves of a very fine green colour, springing in radiating tufts 
from the very ends of the branches, which are otherwise bare. 
The Acacia or Doornboom, a very tall Aloe, and numerous 
other thorny shrubs,are likewise characteristic of the vegetation 
of these dells (Note A) ; but the most remarkable of all their 
plants is an arborescent Euphorbia, which grows to the height 
of forty or fifty feet, with a thick rough trunk and a broad flat 
head almost like that of a pine tree ; it has no leaves, but its 
younger branches are very succulent, thick, green, angular, 
beset with spines all along the angles, and curved upwards 
like the arms of a candelabrum. I do not know any tree of 
a more singular appearance. It is full of an excessively acrid 
and caustic milk, which gushes out in great quantity where- 
ever an incision is made. 
The places that I found most favourable for botany in this 
neighbourhood, were a ravine above the house at tbat time 
occupied by the Lieutenant-Governor on the west side of the 
town, and the southern face of the long and high ridge of hill 
behind the barracks on the south side of it. This hill rises 
from the town with a long, smooth, grassy slope of very easy 
ascent ; its ridge is narrow, and the descent on the other side 
Véry steep, in some places quite precipitous and rocky, in 
others covered with bush, and affording a vegetation far more 
copious than that of the town side. From the top the view 
extends in one direction to the sea, over an undulated grassy 
* Cussonia spicata. 
T 2 
