open the shutters, expecting to see a great conflagration, and
behold, it is the sunrise!

The sun does not greet us in such boisterous fashion in England! Here it
fills the sky with a blood-red radiance and lights up the palm groves
in the garden below, where a mighty congregation of small birds are
shrieking out their joy to greet the god of morning. There is an
intensity in it all, in the flaming sky, and in the thrill of the birds'
clarion that sends exhilaration into our veins and makes us feel it is
good to be alive!

It is not long before we are out and around the garden--and what a
garden! Strange coffee-coloured men in blue garments like smock frocks,
with baggy blue trousers caught tightly round their ankles, appear and
disappear noiselessly, their bare brown feet making no sound on the
sanded paths. There is something unreal about it all, something that
makes one think of the _Arabian Nights_ and an enchanted garden. The
hotel is called "The Winter Palace," and in England we should associate
such a name with a vast artificially warmed glasshouse filled with
broad-leaved plants of dark green; here, right overhead, is a tall bush
covered with masses of sulphur-coloured flowers, shaped like tiny
trumpets, hanging in festoons against a sky of glorious blue. Through
plumed palms we catch glimpses of the spreading fingers of a deep red
poinsettia; there is a pink frilled flower shooting toward the sky, so
decorative that it looks exactly like those made of crinkled paper for
decorations; this is the well-known oleander. The grass is so vividly
green that it seems as if the greenness sprang away from the blades; as
we draw near to it we see that it is not all matted together and
interwoven, as is our grass, but is composed of separate blades, each
one apart and upright, all together standing like a regiment of
soldiers. It has to be sown every year freshly, for no roots can survive
the long drought. Close by is a lawn of bare earth, and a boy of about
your age, with a thin pathetic brown face, runs round and round it,
shouting and waving a flapper to keep off the birds from the newly sown
seed.

We are just going to plunge into a grove of trees--some acacias with
leaves like delicate ferns, and others eucalyptus with long narrow
leaves looking like frosted silver--when we find they are growing in a
swamp, with the earth banked up all round to keep the water in!

Other flowers, familiar to us in England, such as