50 CALIFORNIA DESERT TRAILS 



stuck full of daggers is as near as I can come to a 

 human analogy. The wood is a harsh, rasping fibre; 

 knife-blades, long, hard, and keen, fill the place of 

 leaves; the flower is greenish white and ill-smelling; 

 and the fruit a cluster of nubbly pods, bitter and 

 useless. A landscape filled with Joshua trees has a 

 nightmare effect even in broad daylight: at the 

 witching hour it can be almost infernal. 



The ocotillo, Fouquieria splendens (commonly but 

 wrongly taken for a cactus), is to me the most strik- 

 ing and characteristic of the desert plants. In it are 

 expressed the desert's intrinsic qualities, its haggard- 

 ness and gray sterility, its cruelty of thorn and claw, 

 'its fierce, hot beauty. In a landscape crowded with 

 these lean, sinuous shapes, as one finds them filling 

 great tracts of the barrenest desert of the Colorado, 

 one feels an added wildness and fascination. Of the 

 cacti, a few are really beautiful, many interesting or 

 quaint, others ugly but grotesque. The beauty of 

 the ocotillo is the beauty of Cleopatra or Carmen, 

 fierce and fatal. The scarlet streamer that comes in 

 spring at the tip of every stem is like a darting drag- 

 on's tongue. A company of ocotillos writhing in a 

 hurricane makes as eerie a sight as anything I know 

 in the vegetable realm. 



In shape the ocotillo is a sheaf of thin, whip-like 

 canes from six or eight to twenty feet long, spread- 

 ing more or less widely from a main stump near the 

 ground. The canes are closely armed with curving 

 thorns, which give the plant a cactus-like appear- 

 ance. For nine or ten months of the year it stands 

 gaunt, leafless, seemingly lifeless, and one strange 



