Some of the bushes had been roughly pruned, to foster, if possible, a more bushy growth and a heavier crop of leaves near to the parent stem.
It was a strange landscape; and any passing traveller, knowing nothing of the Simiacine, must perforce have seen at once that these insignificant little trees were something quite apart in the vegetable kingdom.

Each standing with its magic circle, no bird built its nest within the branches--no insect constructed its filmy home--no spider weaved its busy web from twig to twig.
Solitary, mournful, lifeless the Plateau which had nearly cost Victor Durnovo his life lay beneath the face of heaven, far above the surrounding country--the summit of an unnamed mountain--a land lying in the heart of a tropic country which was neither tropic, temperate, nor arctic.

Fauna had it none, for it produced nothing that could sustain life.

Flora it knew not, for the little trees, with their perennial fortune of brilliant brown-tinted leaves, monopolised vegetable life, and slew all comers.

It seemed like some stray tract of another planet, where the condition of living things was different.