Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/217

 as I." For him the palm of Southern Europe was a mere exotic flourishing only in such latitudes under exceptionally favourable conditions, and the prisoner sighed for the towering stems and spreading frondage of his African home. Perhaps there was something more than mere nostalgic prejudice in his plaintive cry. "We do it wrong, being so majestical," to set the palm in the midst of European vegetation. Its charm, no doubt, is largely of the spiritual and imaginative order—a charm depending not only upon perfect accord with its surroundings, but upon unchallenged supremacy therein. It is the child of solitude and the brother of sterility. Its natural companions are the sandhill and the limestone rock, or at best those rare low-lying shrubs of the desert that lift up no head to a tenth part of its full stature. Even the green floor of the Nile banks seems almost alien to it, and it needs that same "monotonous" background of mountain and wilderness to keep it "in the picture."