Did the sand shift, blown away from around the upper stem of this Euphorbia caput-medusae plant, leaving it half naked? Nearly buried or starkly exposed, the stoical, tough-skinned succulent carries on regardless, its fortunes hardly affected by the vicissitudes of semi-desert life on the Namaqualand coast.

The finger-like stems from the central “trunk” are quite short here, Medusa sporting outsized warts rather than snakes for hair. Don’t stare too blatantly though, she might still succeed in turning observers into stone, as long ago in ancient Greece when reality blurred with mythology (Grenier, 2019; Smith, et al, 2017).