Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/123

Rh and sour tamarisks into the likeness of trooping devils. The smell of the sun had not left the earth, and little aimless winds, blowing across the rose-gardens to the southward, brought the scent of dried roses and water.' He is almost as keen a connoisseur of scents and smells as M. Guy de Maupassant himself. He realises their powers. Several such samples have been given already. Here are the Himalayas from the nasal point of view: 'The monkeys sang sorrowfully to each other as they hunted for dry roots in the fern-wreathed trees, and the last puff of the day-wind brought from the unseen villages the scent of damp wood-smoke, hot cakes, dripping undergrowth, and rotting pine-cones. That is the true smell of the Himalayas, and if once it creeps into the blood of a man, that man will, at the last, forgetting all else, return to the hills to die.' Admirable, indeed, are these little descriptive cameos which he strews broadcast. Sometimes they are enclosed in two or three lines. 'The witchery of the dawn turned the grey river-reaches to purple, gold, and opal: and it was as though the lumbering barge crept across the splendour of a new Heaven.' Again he achieves the same result in one single epithet.  'The drinking earth'—three words to describe the drought-laden Indian land under the heavy, unceasing downpour of the longed-for, welcome rains.