This
bush, the greatest curiosity of Croisic, where trees have never grown,
is three miles distant from the harbor, on the point of rocks that
runs farthest into the sea. On this granite promontory, which rises to
a height that neither the waves nor the spray can touch, even in the
wildest weather, and faces southerly, diluvian caprice has constructed
a hollow basin, which projects about four feet. Into this basin, or
cleft, chance, possibly man, has conveyed enough vegetable earth for
the growth of a box-plant, compact, well-nourished, and sown, no
doubt, by birds. The shape of the roots would indicate to a botanist
an existence of at least three hundred years. Above it the rock has
been broken off abruptly. The natural convulsion which did this, the
traces of which are ineffaceably written here, must have carried away
the broken fragments of the granite I know not where.
The sea rushes in, meeting no reefs, to the foot of this cliff, which
rises to a height of some four or five hundred feet; at its base lie
several scattered rocks, just reaching the surface at high water, and
describing a semi-circle.
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