The crumbling wall that surrounded the sunken garden alongside the house was a rich
hunting ground for me. There was a whole landscape on this wall if you peered closely
enough to see it; the roofs of a hundred tiny toadstools, red, yellow, and brown, showed in
patches like villages on the damper portions; mountains of bottle-green moss grew in tuffets
so symmetrical that they might have been planted and trimmed; forests of small ferns
sprouted from cracks in the shady places, drooping languidly like green fountains. The top
of the wall was a desert land, too dry for anything except sun bathing by the dragon-flies. At
the base of the wall grew a mass of plants, cyclamens, crocus, asphodel, thrusting their
leaves among the piles of broken and chipped roof-tiles that lay there. The whole strip was
guarded by a labyrinth of blackberry hung, in seasons, with fruit that was plump and juicy
and black as ebony.
The inhabitants of the wall were a mixed lot, and they were divided into day and night
workers, the hunters and the hunted. At night the hunters were the toads that lived among
the brambles, and the geckos pale, translucent with bulging eyes, that lived in the cracks
higher up the wall. Their prey was the population of stupid, absent-minded crane-flies that
zoomed and barged their way among the leaves; moths of all sizes and shapes, striped,
tessellated, checked, spotted and blotched, that fluttered in soft clouds along the withered
plaster; the beetles, rotund and neatly clad as business men, hurrying with portly efficiency
about their night's work.










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