“Our valises were on the front seat beside the driver, and we ourselves climbed into the closed part of the galareta at the back....”
(page [152])
“The prevailing tree of Minorca is the wild olive, which turns its back to the north ... and assumes the appearance of a crumb-brush.”
(page [153])
“When the North wind goes down the West wind is already knocking at the door,” says a Minorcan proverb, and the few trees that grow in these exposed regions are driven to the most ridiculous subterfuges in their endeavours to protect their foliage from the blasts that sweep for ever across the island. The prevailing tree is the oleaster, or wild olive, which turns its back to the north, and with bent stem and long hair all blown in one direction assumes as nearly as possible the appearance of an attenuated crumb-brush. Some of the trees are absolutely ludicrous in their contortions, and we could not help laughing at the sight of a whole row of them growing beside a low stone wall, over which they had flung themselves in their attempts to escape; falling on their hands and knees, so to speak, in the next field, they had picked themselves up again and gone on running, leaving their roots and trunks on the farther side of the wall—quite content so long as the very tips of their branches remained alive and out of reach of the dreaded north wind.
At the seventh kilometre stone out of Mahon our driver pulled up, and tying the mule to a gate, he led us across a field to show us what he called a bonito casito—a good little house—built by megalithic man.
At the base of a ruined talayót constructed of enormous stones and overgrown with ivy, we saw a small opening, about a yard in height, leading into a low passage some eight feet long, at the further end of which is a still smaller doorway, measuring only two feet six inches by two feet. Once through this, however, one enters a palatial abode not less than twenty feet long, seven wide, and nine high—which, although it will hardly bear comparison in point of grandeur with the stone dwellings built by the Minorcans nowadays for their pigs, was yet so immeasurably superior to the modest priestly dwelling of Taláto-de-Dalt that we concluded that we were looking upon the residence of none other than the arch-druid or high-priest himself—and that it was through this very doorway that the venerable personage used to emerge on all fours, robed in full canonicals.