CHAPTER VI 



MINIATURE FORTRESSES ON THE DESERT 



Some of the first inhabitants of the plant kingdom to greet 

 the traveler approaching the desert from almost any direc- 

 tion are most unfriendly, fierce, and strongly armored, as if 

 they would resist intrusion into their own special domain. 

 These fierce cacti are small fortresses of the desert. Out 

 there under burning-hot dry winds, where water is mighty 

 scarce, where the soil is pulverized rock or shale or wastes 

 of alkali sand, life at best is but little more than a fight to 

 survive against yearly drought, seasonal storm, and blazing 

 heat; even the bold woodpeckers, the rodents, and the sly 

 sand foxes play their part in this silent drama Nature stages 

 in the struggle for existence. Among the first greeters of 

 the desert are the Cholla members of the great genus Opiin- 

 tia, the fighters of the strange Fantastic Clan. Their flower 

 colorings are many and variegated, mostly beautiful yellows 

 and orange-yellows, purples, reds and browns, maroons, 

 orange-reds and lavenders; some species possess nearly all 

 colors of the spectrum and are veritable rainbows of tint and 

 hue, with the desert for a dark and picturesque setting. What 

 could be more beautiful than the desert rim with its towering 

 peaks unrolling into low vistas of bajadas, receding into still 

 lower valleys and swales, piled here and there with rocks of 

 volcanic outcroppings, and then the great splashes of Cholla 

 flowers with their brilliant patchwork of colorings stuck at 

 random on their drab, gray, somber, twisted, thornlike, ar- 

 mored trunks? No artist has painted this glorious desert 



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