There was a waterless part of the gardens at Terragena that was called the Caatinga. Nobody knew why it had that name; there was no such word in Italian and whatever justifications¹ old Rylands had for its use were long since forgotten. Possibly it was Spanish-American or a fragment from some Red Indian tongue. The Caatinga was a region of high brown rocky walls and ribs² and buttresses³ and recesses⁴ and hard extensive flats of sunburnt stone, through which narrow winding⁵ paths and steps had been hewn from one display to another; one came into its reverberating⁶ midday heat through two cavernous arches of rock with a slope of streaming mesembryanthemum, fleshy or shrivelled, between them, and a multitude of agaves in thorny⁷ groups, of gigantic prickly pears in intricate contortions⁸, of cactuses and echinocactus, thick jungles of spiky⁹ and leathery exotics, gave a strongly African quality to its shelves and plateau and ridges¹⁰ and theatre-like bays. Only the wide variety of the plants and an occasional label betrayed the artificiality of this crouching¹¹, malignantly¹² defensive¹³ vegetation. “African,” said some visitors, but others, less travelled or more imaginative, said: “This might be in some other planet, in Mars or in the moon.” Or they said it looked like life among the rocks under the sea.

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