Below the surface of the earth, of course, there is not nearly the same dryness or danger of losing water, so that there are often a great number of bulbs, tubers, and the like hidden in the soil. There they wait patiently, sometimes for a whole year or even for a longer period. So soon as a shower of rain falls they start to life, push out their leaves, and live at very high pressure for a few days. After a shower of rain, the Karoo in South Africa, for instance, is an extraordinarily beautiful country. There are bulbous Pelargoniums, a very curious leafless cucurbitaceous plant (_Acanthosicyos_), hundreds and thousands of Lilies, Irids, and Amaryllids. A single scarlet flower of a Brunsvigia can be seen more than a mile away! These tender and delicate, exquisitely beautiful bulbs flourish amongst the succulent Euphorbias and Mesembryanthemums, between the hedgehog-like thorny plants and the woody little densely-branched mats of the permanent flora. The rain stimulates even these last to put out green leaves and flowers, but their time comes later on, when by the return of the usual drought every leaf and flower and the fruit of every bulb has been shrivelled up, turned into powder, and scattered in dust by the wind.[65] [65] Scott Elliot, _Trans. Bot. Soc. Edin._, vol. 18, p. 243. Then the Karoo becomes unlovely, desolate, and barren-looking, with only its inconspicuous permanent plants visible. The above description applies to bulbs and perennial plants with underground stores of food. Yet these are by no means the only plants which manage to exist in the Egyptian and Arabian desert. After a shower of rain a whole crowd of tiny annuals suddenly develop from seed; they come into full flower and have set their seed before they are killed off by a return of the desert conditions, when the effects of the rain have died away. These plants are not really desert plants at all, for they only grow during the short time that it is not a desert. They are like the Ephemerid insects which live for a summer day only. Nor is it only in Egypt that we find such ephemerals. Mr. Coville found them in the Colorado desert in North America. The plants are quite different, but similar conditions have brought about an entirely similar mode of life on the other side of the globe! In Colorado they seem to be much influenced by the quantity of rain. Mr. Orcutt, after the great rain of February, 1891, found plants of Amaranthus (allied to our Love-Lies-Bleeding), which were ten feet in height, but in 1892 he found specimens of the same in the same place only nine inches high, though they were perfect plants and in full flower; in this last year there was only the usual very scanty rainfall.