MESAS AND FOOT-HILLS 



207 



few hours of the day, you will find a growth of 

 bushes, small trees, vines, and grasses that, tak- 

 en together, form something of a thicket that 

 is for a desert. And here, too, on the northern 

 exposure you will find the abrupt walls of the 

 peak stained with great fields of orange and 

 gray lichens that lend a color quality to the 

 whole top. 



But through the bushes and grasses and 

 lichens the wine-red of the porphyry comes 

 cropping out to tell you that the mountain is a 

 mass of rock, that it holds little or no soil on 

 its sides, that it has not a suspicion of water ; 

 and that whatever grows upon it, does so, not 

 by favor of circumstance, but through sheer 

 desert stubbornness. The vegetation is a thin 

 disguise that is penetrated in a few moments. 

 The arid character of the mountain says plainly 

 enough that we are not yet out of the region 

 of sands and burning winds and fiery sun-shafts. 

 The whole of the Arizona country as far east 

 as the Continental Divide, in spite of its occa- 

 sional green valleys and few high mountain- 

 ranges with timbered tops, is a slope leading 

 up and out from the desert by gradual if broken 

 steps which we have called mesas or benches. 

 It is a bare, dry land. Its name would imply 



Gray 



lichens. 



Still in the 



desert 



region. 



