THE VOICE OF THE DESERT 



44 



reach maturity, after which an individual may have an- 

 other hundred years to hve. Planting a tree is often taken 

 as a symbol of the farseeing and the unselfish. One puts 

 an acorn in the ground with a certain sense of demon- 

 strating both faith in and concern for a future other than 

 one's own. But if anyone ever planted a saguaro for the 

 sake of future generations, he was carrying such faith and 

 such concern to fantastic limits. 



Yet in favorable areas the saguaros form veritable 

 forests, thousands of specimens covering hundreds of 

 acres grow almost as close together as giant trees do. 

 Obviously the saguaro is extremely well suited to what 

 it is suited to. There is no suggestion that it would prefer 

 any other environment. Indeed, the fact that it is so re- 

 stricted in its distribution, that it does not tolerate in- 

 troduction into other parts of the world, is proof enough 

 how perfectly it has adapted itself. What makes it so fit 

 to live just here? 



The most uninstructed visitor who saw a forest of these 

 giants for the first time would almost certainly assume that 

 their roots go very deep down. If he happened to know 

 something about the habits of certain other desert plants 

 — ^how, for example, a yucca no more than six or eight 

 feet high may send a root forty feet below the surface 

 in search of water — ^he would probably suppose that the 

 saguaro must reach half the way to China. But he couldn't 

 be more wrong. The taproot of a huge specimen is seldom 

 more than thi'ee feet long and seems ridiculously inade- 

 quate. As a matter of fact the saguaro is so insecurely 

 anchored that it often meets its end by being blown over 



