IMPERIAL VALLEY TO YUMA 313 



of myriads of these demons. The hot dank air rings 

 with their infernal pipings, and every moment is a 

 misery. If equatorial Africa is worse than this, Liv- 

 ingstone and Stanley were heroes indeed. 



A few miles to the north I found the outposts 

 of the saguaros. Scarred and barren hills broke 

 abruptly from levels strewn with fragments of rock 

 of unusual hues, and the walls of every gully showed 

 broken veins and ledges that made me again ponder 

 turning prospector. There was no trouble in dis- 

 tinguishing the saguaros: they stood like tall posts 

 among the stunted shrubs that sprinkled the mesa, 

 varied only by small ironwoods, palo verdes, and 

 mesquits where the shallow depression of a water- 

 course collected the scanty rainfall. It was my first 

 meeting with the saguaro and I was struck with its 

 odd characteristics. 



Its typical shape is a slender, straight column of 

 equal diameter from top to bottom. From this a 

 few stumpy arms may break out, and as these al- 

 most always turn upward, parallel to the main stem, 

 a common effect is that of a gigantic candelabrum. 

 Most of them, however, take original forms, each 

 one a study in the weird. In close examination the 

 plant is beautiful enough, the stem and branches 

 glossy dark green and regularly fluted, and bearing 

 in early summer white waxen blossoms which ma- 

 ture into edible crimson fruit. The tallest specimen 

 I found was a solitary, old, ragged fellow, forty feet 

 high, with a grotesque array of excrescences. An 

 Alaskan Indian would have hailed it as a wondrous 

 totem-pole. 



