Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 2.djvu/24

 8 NORTH-WEST AFRICA. and timber for the coast towns. But in former times the thuyas of Cyrenaica were used to make those costly " tiger " and " panther" grained tables, which were so highly prized by the Romans, and the exquisitely perfumed wood of which was supposed to have been employed by Circe in her incantations. The slopes facing seawards are clothed with forests of the wild olive, whose branches are shaken for the berry, greedily eaten by sheep and goat. The carob, when allowed to grow in the open, throws off such a mass of young sprouts that whole families of Bedouins take up their residence during the summer months beneath this vast canopy of verdure, sheltering them from all eyes. Like the streams of Greece, the wadies of Barka are fringed with oleander plants ; dwarf palms grow in clusters along the sea-coast; fruit-trees of the Italian zone, dominated here and there by the tall stems and branches of the date-palm, flourish in the well-watered gardens now usually surrounded with hedges of the " Barbary fig," an immigrant from the New World, which has already become so common in the Mediterranean flora. Some of the fertile valleys opening seawards are stocked with as many species of plants as the ancient "Garden of the Hosperides " itself, described in the Perip/ous of Scylax. This marvellous land was situated according to Pliny near Berenice ; but Scylax states expressly that it was not far from the Ras-Sem, the Phycus of the ancients, that is, the northernmost headland of Cyrenaica. A ccording to the description of the Greek writer, it occupied a natural gorge or an ancient quarry, like the latomice of Syracuse. The brothers Beechey believed they had discovered its site amid the now flooded precipices to the east of Benghazi, but none of these present the dimensions of the garden as described by Scylax. Some idea of its exquisite beauty may be had by visiting the chasms now filled with verdure which open abruptly in the stony plateau near Syracuse. Orange, citron, medlar, peach trees, all struggling upwards towards the blue vault of heaven, rise to heights of from 50 to 60 or 70 feet. The stems of the trees are enclosed by leafy shrubs, their branches entwined by wreaths of creepers, the paths strewn with flowers and fruits, the -foliage alive with song of birds. Above this elysium of fragrant and flowering plants rise the grey rocks, here and there clothed with ivy, their every crest crowned with verdure. The si/phium, or lascrpitium, at one time one of the main resources of Cyrenaica, and whose very name had passed into a proverb implying the most precious of treasures, is now found only in the wild state on the cliff, if indeed it is the same plant. The old writers tell us that it had already disappeared in their time, and amongst the modern observers, Schroff, Oersted, Ascherson and others, have expressed the opinion that the plant so highly valued by the Greeks and Romans for its curative virtues, was a species of asafoetida. Nevertheless most naturalists accept the hypothesis of Delia Cella, the first explorer of the country, who supposes that the silphium was the drias or adriaJi of the natives — that is, the thapsia garganica of botanists. The Cyrenian coins represent this umbellifer with suflScient accuracy, although its form is somewhat enlarged and its fruit of some- what too cardiform a shape. Like the hardened sap of the silphium, wthich