THE WONDERS OF VEGETATION. 71 



vation of many plants in palm gardens in spite of the 

 burning heat of summer. 



An oasis of palms is a veritable paradise in the 

 burning waste of the desert. Such an oasis is graph- 

 ically described in the narrative of Mr. Martins, who 

 once accidentally discovered a clump of these marvel- 

 lous trees during his passage across the Eastern Saha- 

 ra. " The boundless desert," he says, " was stretching 

 out before me. The sun, high above the round hori- 

 zon, round as we see it on the ocean when out of sight 

 of land seemed the only living thing in the midst of 

 death. All at once I perceived the summits of palms, 

 the trunks of which were not yet visible. I thought 

 it an illusion a mirage. We drew nearer the tufts 

 became more distinct, but the trunks could not yet be 

 seen. The caravan halts near a well. I hasten toward 

 the palms and find they are planted at the bottom of 

 a trough nearly 24 feet in depth. The sand had been 

 raised on all sides ; a feeble palisade of palm leaves 

 helped to keep it up on one side, on the other sides 

 crystals of sulphate of lime of all sizes and shapes, ar- 

 ranged as we see them in collections of minerals, helped 

 to fix the shifting sand. At the bottom of the trough 

 the dates were planted irregularly ; but this was not 

 the slender, elegant palm of the painter. These were 

 trees with short, thick trunks of cylindrical form ; look- 

 ing for all the world like the short, massive columns 

 of an Egyptian temple, or of a moorish mosque. Sur- 

 face roots, joining the lower part of the trunk to the soil, 

 formed a pedestal for these columns, and the lofty tufts 

 on high resembled exactly the vast colonnades of an- 



