The plants died, the lakes dried up.
The spore-cases remain after the plant is dried up and withered.
These openings are usually the sandy beds of dried-up or intermittent affluents, such as the Bak, Ham, Houm, Aub (or Great Fish) rivers of Great Namaqualand.
The leaf ultimately becomes dried up and brittle.
This is the less improbable because it lies in the neighbourhood of a line of earthquake movement, and both from Thucydides and from Strabo we hear of the northern part of the island being shaken at different periods, and the latter writer speaks of a fountain at Chalcis being dried up by a similar cause, and a mud volcano formed in the neighbouring plain.
