Capitolo 49
fruits that ruffle that they seem to grow out paradoxically some edge of
fleshy and thick leaves, are really a native of Italy, Spain and north
Africa, where it now abounds on every sun-tormented slant. As Mr.
Henry James and the Mr. Marion Crawford, the fig tree of Barbary as French
call him/it, it is, in point of fact, an American citizen, established the residence and a half
naturalized on this side of the Atlantic, but fragrant still to heart
of his/her Colombian origin. Nothing is more commune, indeed, that to see
classical portraits of the school of Alma-Tadema--not, clearly, from the
his/her master's brush same that is impeccable in such details but
jobs of fair of decent imitators--in that Caia or the thin one of March
gracefully in his/her white stole on a melancholy elbow against a marble
lintel, nearby in a decorated courtyard with a basin of Pompeian and
covered with prickly pear or "aloe American." I don't have proper need says
what, as a matter of simple historical fact, cactus neither agaves,
it was known in Europe it cultivates from very after Christopher Cristoforo Christopher Columbus had governed
his/her barking of vagabondage in the sandy beaches of the island of Cat scan in the Bahamas.
(I have seen the island of Cat scan with these many eyes, and you/he/she can honestly assure
You that his/her beaches sandy _are_.) But this is only one among the many ones
small pardonable inaccuracies of painters that thrust scarlet color
geraniums from the Head of Good Hope in the fingers of Aspasia, or
provides more anymore King Solomon in all of his/her glory with Japanese lilies of the
recent introduction.
A present day, the cactus of prickly-pear and the it is true
American Agave (what the world to great he/she insists to the I confuse with
the aloe, a member of a family totally list) you/he/she has spread
in a wild condition evidently on all the rocky coasts both of
Southern Europe and of Northern Africa. The alien weeds of desert have
sheltered firmly their roots in the fissures of sunbaked of Ligurian Apennines;
the tall candelabrum of the western agave has reared its great point of