Scrub 



out the long hot days, men, women, and children are 

 hard at work in some miserably small little plot or 

 orchard. The returns must surely be great, but as only 

 plots of a few square feet can be treated in this way, the 

 profit to be made must be pitifully small. The acreage 

 which is made into rich alluvial vegas, vineyards, and 

 olive yards, and so undergoes this intense and careful 

 petite culture^ is exceedingly small as compared with the 

 hills and dry valleys which are left to scrub or maqui. 



These are forbidding, arid, and desolate. One learns 

 more about the story of the scrub by watching for a few 

 minutes the proceedings of goats, and the other hungry 

 beasts, than could be given in many pages of description. 

 Cattle, horses, mules, donkeys, occasionally sheep, goats, 

 and even pigs may be seen driven out to graze by their 

 youthful herds. All are haggard and hungry looking, 

 with projecting bones, and have a satirical and pes- 

 simistic appearance. 



Yet these vegetable demons are very efficient in their 

 horrible task. On a rocky hillside they know better 

 than to touch the asphodel, grape hyacinths, crocus', 

 orchids, scillas, lachenalias, daffodils and the like, for 

 all these beautiful and flourishing bulbs are deadly 

 poisons. These woolly, hairy, and strong-scented 

 lavenders, rosemaries, and the other scented labiates, 

 are also allowed to grow as well at least as the dry 

 and stony soil will permit. 



No animal could possibly take a mouthful of the for- 

 biddingly glutinous and sticky foliage of the gum-cistus, 

 or the viscid and glandular leaves of some Ononis. 



But any small grass seedling which has managed to 

 put out a prostrate stem and a leaf or two not \\ inch 

 long, vanishes with one sweep of the tongue. Should 

 some edible herbaceous weed hide itself amongst the 

 foliage of a lavender or a cistus, some hungry eye per- 



310 



