

THE VAST. 



fleshy shoots will strike root, and grow to a sur- 

 prising size, in chasms in heaps of stones, where 

 the closest examination can scarcely discover a 

 particle of vegetable soil. Its form is various, and 

 mostly dependent on its age; the first shape it 

 assumes is that of an immense club standing up- 

 right in the ground, and of double the circumfer- 

 ence of the lower part at the top. This form is 

 very striking, while the plant is still only from 

 two to six feet high, but, as it grows taller, the 

 thickness becomes more equal, and when it attains 

 the height of twenty-five feet, it looks like a regu- 

 lar pillar; after this it begins to throw out its 

 branches. These come out at first in a globular 

 shape, but turn upward as they elongate, and 

 then grow parallel to the trunk, and at a certain 

 distance from it, so that a cereus with many 

 branches looks exactly like an immense candela- 

 brum, especially as the branches are mostly sym- 

 metrically arranged round the trunk, of which the 

 diameter is not usually more than a foot and a 

 half, or, in some rare instances, a foot more. 

 They vary much in height; the highest we ever 

 saw, at Williams' Fork, measured from thirty-six 

 to forty feet; but, south of the Gila, they are said 

 to reach sixty; and when you see them rising 

 from the extreme point of a rock, where a surface 

 of a few inches square forms their sole support, 

 you cannot help wondering that the first storm 

 does not tear them from their airy elevation. . . . 

 "If the smaller specimens of the Cevens giganteus 

 that we had seen in the morning excited our 

 astonishment, the feeling was greatly augmented, 

 when, on our further journey, we beheld this 

 stately plant in all its magnificence. The absence 

 of every other vegetation enabled us to distinguish 

 these cactus-cjlumns from a great distance, as 

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