United States or Mongolia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Another species of the cholla is small, reaching but a foot or two above the ground, but this and other low forms so cover the ground in places that one has to be constantly on guard to keep from running the spines into his feet. These are not all the plants of this wonderful forest. The ocatilla is a cactus-like form having a group of long slender stems bunched together at the root.
Io moved softly forward, peering curiously, and from the arc of a wide curving ocatilla two wild doves sprang, leaving the branch all aquiver. Bolder than his companions of the air, a cactus owl, perched upon the highest column of a great green candelabrum, viewed her with a steady detachment, "sleepless, with cold, commemorative eyes."
Lashing in the wind, a long tentacle of the giant ocatilla drew its cimeter-set thong across Ban's horse which incontinently bolted. The rider lifted up his voice and yelled in sheer, wild, defiant joy of the tumult. A lesser ocatilla thorn gashed his ear so that the blood mingled with the rain that poured down his face.
Below, stretching in endless miles was the desert a sinister, forbidding land of desolate distances, marked only by slender yucca palms, mesquite, dusty greasewood, an occasional clump of green palo verde, the slim fingers of the ocatilla, the high "forks" of the giant sahuara, and clumps of la cholla cactus, looking like apple orchards in full bloom.
Unending, level sands ran into waves, and strange shapes of rocks loomed through the desert blueness like steep-shored islands. It was vast and terrifying like the sea, and yet a very pleasant furred and feathered life appeared to be going on there between the round-headed cactus, with its cruel fishhook thorns, and the warning, blood-red blossoms that dripped from the ocatilla.
Here straggling mesquite bushes grow on the summit of the ridge; cacti and ocatilla sprawl over the sun-baked earth hiding between their thorny stems the headboards and the long narrow heaps of stones which no man could mistake. Some of these headboards still bear traces of black-lettered epitaphs which tell how death came to strong men in the full flush of youth.
A rabbit rustled out of brush at Gale's feet and thumped away over the sand. The wind pattered among dry, broken stalks of dead ocatilla. Every little sound brought Gale to a listening pause. The gloom was thickening fast into darkness. It would be a night without starlight. He moved forward up the pale, zigzag aisles between the mesquite.
Far as the eye could see, the waste was spangled with vivid hues, for the rare rains had come, and all the cacti were in joyous bloom, from the scarlet stain of the ocatilla to the pale, dream-flower of the yucca.
Word Of The Day