ON THE PACIFIC COAST 339 
grow also on the desert coast of Ecuador, along with a few others 
not found in Northern Peru. 
In the ravines which run from the tablazo down to the valley, 
besides a few stunted Algarrobos, there is another small prickly 
tree, a species of Cantua, with black stems and branches, which 
becomes clad with fugacious, roundish, Loranthus-like leaves and 
pretty white flowers only in the rainy years. There also grows a 
Cactus called Rabo de zorra (fox's brush), from its usually simple 
stems being densely beset on the numerous angles or strige with 
reddish bristle-like prickles. 
On the margin of the river, except where the banks are 
unusually high, there is a narrow strip of land, called the vega, 
which is overflowed every year about February or March by the 
flush of water from the Andes, although no rain may have fallen 
in the plain. The vega is in many parts of the valley the only 
ground kept under cultivation, and the indigenous vegetation 
there is of a quite distinct character. Instead of the Algarrobo, 
we have the Willow and a small Composite tree, Tessaria legitima^ 
with leaves very like those of Salix cinerea^ and soft brittle wood, 
which is the common fuel at Lima and elsewhere on the coast, 
where it is called Pajaro bobo. Less abundant than those two 
trees are Buddleia americafia, a pretty Cassia, two species of 
Baccharis, two rampant Mimosse (one of them M. asperafa\ 
Mu7ttingia Calaburu^ and Cestrum hediondmimi (called Verba 
Santa), of which only the two last grow to be trees of moderate 
size, the rest being weak bushes or shrubs. Over trees and 
. bushes climb a half-shrubby Asclepiadea (Sarcostemma sp.), with 
very milky stems and umbels of pretty white flowers, a Cissus, 
a Passiflora, allied to P. foetida^ a pretty delicate gourd plant, and 
a Mikania. 
It is usually only on the vega that we find any herbaceous 
vegetation, except in the rainy years. There the Cana brava, 
a Gynerium, with a stem 1 5 feet high and leafy all the way up, 
and with smaller and less silky panicles than the other species, 
grows in large patches. The huts of the Indians and Mestizos 
in the suburbs of Piura have often nothing more than a single 
row of Cafia brava stems stuck into the ground for walls, and 
others laid horizontally over them for roof, affording, of course, 
little protection from sun and wind, and none at all from the 
rain, which happily fails so very rarely.^ Along with it grow a 
^ It does not enter into the scope of this memoir to describe the towns of 
North Peru and the customs of their inhabitants, but it might leave a false 
impression were I not to add that all the better class of houses are as solidly 
constructed as almost anywhere in South America. At Piura they have thick 
walls of adobes, and are built round patios or courts, over which awnings are 
stretched in the heat of the day. Glass windows, verandas, and balconies 
are almost universal. 
