STEEP TRAILS 



agave, etc. Where springs gush from the rocks 

 there are willow thickets, grassy flats, and 

 bright, flowery gardens, and in the hottest 

 recesses the delicate abronia, mesquite, woody 

 compositae, and arborescent cactuses. 



The most striking and characteristic part 

 of this widely varied vegetation are the cac- 

 tacese — strange, leafless, old-fashioned plants 

 with beautiful flowers and fruit, in every way 

 able and admirable. While grimly defending 

 themselves with innumerable barbed spears, 

 they offer both food and drink to man and 

 beast. Their juicy globes and disks and fluted 

 cylindrical columns are almost the only desert 

 wells that never go dry, and they always seem 

 to rejoice the more and grow plumper and 

 juicier the hotter the sunshine and sand. Some 

 are spherical, like roUed-up porcupines, crouch- 

 ing in rock-hollows beneath a mist of gray 

 lances, unmoved by the wildest winds. Others, 

 standing as erect as bushes and trees or tall 

 branchless pillars crowned with magnificent 

 flowers, their prickly armor sparkling, look 

 boldly abroad over the glaring desert, making 

 the strangest forests ever seen or dreamed of. 

 Cereus giganteus, the grim chief of the desert 

 tribe, is often thirty or forty feet high in south- 

 ern Arizona. Several species of tree yuccas 

 in the same deserts, laden in early spring with 

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