grass-cutters going along with great bundles of hay. We cross the valley
and enter a smaller valley, which forks at a slight angle with the large
one. As we fairly entered it, we saw near its extremity the camp of
Goun-Gonna. A prettier situation could hardly have been selected. The
hills to the right-hand are almost perpendicular, and upon a ledge about
half-way up a village is nestled. The stream which flows down it has been
used for the purpose of irrigation, and the bright green of the young
crops was a delightful relief to our eyes. On the left-hand the hills are
less precipitous, but are still very steep. The valley is less than a
quarter of a mile in width, and ends abruptly with a semicircular sweep a
short distance above the spot where the camp is pitched. What adds greatly
to the beauty of the valley is, that it contains several of those immense
trees with distorted trunks and bright-green foliage, whose real name is a
moot point, but which are alike claimed to belong to the banyan,
india-rubber, or tulip-tree species. At any rate, whatever be their
species, they are one of the most picturesque species of tree I ever saw.
They cover an immense extent of ground, and their trunks sometimes lie
along the ground, sometimes rise in strange contorted forms. Their bark is
extremely rough, and whitish-gray, and if seen without the foliage, would
be certainly rather taken for strange blocks and pillars of stone than for
the trunks of trees. In the camp we found a company of the 33d and the
head-quarters of that regiment, who are upon their way to join the wing at
Attegrat, and who had just come in, as had the mountain battery of steel
guns under Colonel Milward, both having left Senafe two or three hours
before ourselves. There was also a convoy of the Transport Train on their
way to the front, and also a troop of the Scinde Horse. This station must
be fifteen hundred feet below Senafe, and the difference of temperature is
surprising. Last night I did not at all feel cold, whereas at Senafe it
was next to impossible to keep warm, however numerous the wrappings in
which one enveloped oneself. This morning I have been up a very pretty
little broad valley, about a quarter of a mile in length. This branches
off from the larger valley exactly opposite the camp, and it is down this
that the little stream of water comes. The valley is clothed in shrubs and
small trees, and the water falls into it over a perpendicular rock fifty
feet high at its upper extremity. It put me very much in mind of a
Westmoreland glen, with a little “force” at the extremity. Here, too, to
increase the resemblance, I found some old friends whom I have not seen
since I left England, namely dog-roses, common brambles, and honeysuckle.
Down by the water’s edge, upon the rocks, kept moist by the water-spray,
grew maiden-hair and other ferns. The air was sweet with arbutus-flowers,
and the plash of the water was most grateful to the ear after the dry
plains of Zulla and Senafe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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