128 Recreations of a Sportsman 



histo tree or a palo verde with a bamboo fence 

 ten feet across, for the convenience of the pig, 

 thus producing shade and artistic effect at once, 

 and hiding the pig, who, perchance, was taking 

 a siesta on the veranda of Senor Osario? From 

 here we entered into the artistic joys of Guada- 

 lupe, dashed into the forest again near Mount 

 Cohuincahui, and other lofty knife-like peaks to 

 the north, across wide llanos into palo verde, 

 hecho, and pitahaya, and near Ontagota perhaps 

 passing the greatest wonder of this region, the 

 effect of irrigation on a cactus forest. On one 

 side of the road stood the brilliantly-colored 

 cactus with its tens of thousand spires and 

 columns, on the other, the hacienda of an 

 American farmer, Don Pedro Chism, who had 

 cleared the land of cactus with a big traction 

 engine, turned on the waters of the Kio Yaqui 

 by vast canals, and produced the touch of Midas 

 in a wheat-field, that rippled away in the sun- 

 light, as far as the eye could reach. At the 

 little town where his warehouse was piled with 

 wheat, garbanzas, and alfalfa, he told us that 

 the delta was the richest land in the world, and 

 that he grew everything that could be grown 

 anywhere. In this marvellous exhibition one 

 saw the doom of the giant cactus forest. It 

 was giant, due to the richness of the soil de- 

 posited by the Eio Yaqui and Eio Mayo in cen- 

 turies, and it did not require the gift of a prophet 



