Word: baobab
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With the names of trees you can make a fine pagan bouquet of words: hornbeam, ginkgo, quickbeam, oak, white willow, tamarind, Lombardy poplar, false cypress, elder, laburnum, larch, baobab, black gum, rowan, hazel, whitebeam, tree of heaven...
Earliest man lived in these landscapes, among such animals, among these splendid trees that have personalities as distinct as those of the animals: the aristocratic flat-topped acacia, the gnarled and magisterial baobab. Possibly scenes from that infancy are lodged in some layer of human memory, in the brilliant but preconscious morning...
...skeleton of an elephant lies out in the grasses near a baobab tree and a scattering of black volcanic stones. The thick-trunked, gnarled baobab gesticulates with its branches, as if trying to summon help. There are no tusks lying among the bones, of course; ivory vanishes quickly in East Africa. The elephant is three weeks dead. Poachers. Not far away, a baby elephant walks alone. That is unusual. Elephants are careful mothers and do not leave their young unattended. The skeleton is the mother, and the baby is an orphan...
...insight into the author's reasons for pursuing such an unrewarding project. One of Kosinski's few gestures toward literary excellence amounts to a stylistic tic: his repeated use of Grim Bits from Mother Nature to give symbolic weight to Whalen's flounders. The grotesque baobab tree, we learn, seems to have its branches in the earth and its roots in the air; a certain species of African bird can soar gracefully, but nearly always crashes when it lands, with the result that the earth beneath its air space is littered with broken, still living hulks. Heavy...
...alone on a distant asteroid, of the journey that he takes from his asteroid to the Sahara Desert, and of the adventures he has there and elsewhere on the earth. His book is laced with quaint illustrations (by Saint Exupery himself) of a coa constrictor swallowing an elephant, baobab trees devouring a planet, and ant hill sized volcanoes...