The Alamogordo Desert 163 



is a fearful region. The Mexicans call it mal pws, ' l bad 

 country"; giant floods whose waves are stone, fields and 

 fissures, caverns, holes, pits, and wells, alternating with 

 tilted slopes, knife-edge culms and ridges, make a topog- 

 raphy weird, impassable, fascinating because so unap- 

 proachable. Yet the mal pa/is is covered with vegeta- 

 tion. Of course, the vegetation changes, but by no 

 means as one might easily suppose. Here is no new 

 species, no variety of a species, when the desert is studied 

 as a whole. The change is correspondent to a change in 

 level. The lava beds are high, and they are crowned 

 with the flora of their own altitude. We shall meet it on 

 the foothills of all the mountains we presently ascend. 

 Here is no alteration of soil, for the only soil is that de- 

 posited by the wind, the lava itself perfectly intractable. 

 Here are the familiar mountain cedar, Jumperus ocd- 

 dentalis-, cholla, sometimes twelve or fifteen feet high, 

 where, springing in some ragged well-hole, it seems to 

 peer out above the sooty walls that hem it in ; here is the 

 mountain barberry. Even the nut pine, Pinus edulis, 

 has mistaken these pitchy steeps for the clayey flanks of 

 its usual mountain fastness, and now and then rivals the 

 cedar in its hold upon the jagged upturned edges of these 

 flinty sheets. Even the lava-beds have not apparently 

 affected the general character of the desert flora. 



At the south ends of these black fields, however, emerge 

 great springs. Here all the plain is saturated with salt 

 and alkali, and here is a peculiar flora conditioned by 

 this fact. The waters emerge almost from the edge of 

 the lava sheets, and tufts of Suceda and Allenrolfia are 



