THE VOICE OF THE DESERT 



134 



keepable. It has been demonstrated that only one animal 

 has the ability to get along without water. None of the 

 plants can manage without any external source whatso- 

 ever. But the plants have been most ingenious in the vari- 

 ety of the less radical solutions which they have worked 

 out. 



After all, they can't go looking for anything. They must 

 hve or die in the situation to which it has pleased God to 

 call them. And like all creatures except an occasional man, 

 they will go to great lengths in order to live. Legendary 

 tales notw^ithstanding, even the scorpion does not commit 

 suicide. Even if he wanted to he couldn't do it in the fash- 

 ion legend long attributed to him, because scorpions are 

 immune to their ovvti poison. It is even harder to imagine 

 a plant saying to itself, "Life just isn't worth hving." 

 Many a desert seed falls on stony ground and quite a few 

 af them get along quite well anyway. 



One of the oddest facts is that even within a group as 

 strongly marked as the cacti, certain species have de- 

 veloped characteristic methods quite different from those 

 usually employed by their relatives. Most of them, hke 

 the saguaro, have rather shallow root systems which 

 means that they take up water only at rare intervals and 

 store it in the thick stem. But one of the most beautiful as 

 well as improbable of the desert cacti — the one which 

 Mexicans call reina de la noche, or queen of the night — 

 prefers a radically different method. 



This striking plant stores very little water in the stem. 

 In fact, it couldn't do so very effectively because the stem, 

 though commonly three feet long and sometimes even six, 

 is usually less than an inch in diameter and during most 

 of the year it is quite dry, indeed to all appearances en- 



