XXX 
SENTINELS OF THE DESERT 
I SN’T IT ODD that nature has set up innumerable 
fluted Grecian vegetable pillars in the dry lands of the 
Southwest as though to mark the ruins of a world where 
plant life hardly exists! 
The sahuaro, king of the cacti, sentinel of the desert, 
here holds sway. It lifts its solemn column to heights of 
forty or fifty feet. Its natural growth is in a single shaft, 
but it sometimes happens that, high up, the monarch 
branches out into three or four or half a dozen columns, 
standing like huge cluster candlesticks awaiting the com¬ 
ing of the lamplighter. When the giant branches thus, 
it is usually because the normal trunk has been wounded 
or broken. 
Nobody knows how long it has taken these vegetable 
columns to erect themselves there in the desert. When 
occasional rains come, they fill their inner barrels with 
water and seal it in. They draw on this sparingly for 
growth and, when the supply runs low, cease growing 
altogether. From man’s observation in the generation 
or two that he has been watching them, he has become 
convinced that some of these sentinels have been stand¬ 
ing guard here for three or four centuries. 
These great leafless trees of a strange tribe must be 
able to cling tightly to life, or they would not survive here 
in the desert. There is evidence to show how heroic is the 
struggle one of them may make when a storm uproots it. 
60 
