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Updated: June 2, 2025
The flowers were not attractive to the eye or of pleasant odor; but the long corollas held a pungent, honeyed sweetness that attracted the birds and many insects. Its technical name was Agave Americana.
This word seems to be derived from quiotl, which is the Aztec name for Agave, from which plant a drink not unlike beer is produced, and suggests the possibility that there might have been a time when the succulent flower stem of the Yucca furnished drink as well as food for the Indians.
There, you know, was the rock, still beautiful, for all its scars, with its countless windows and arches and ways, tier upon tier, for a thousand feet, a vast carving of grey, broken by vine-clad terraces, and lemon and orange groves, and masses of agave and prickly pear, and puffs of almond blossom.
The ruins stand on a bare and arid mountain, crowned with agave, columnar cactus, and thorny mimosas: they bear less resemblance to the works of man, than to those masses of rock which were ruptured at the early revolutions of the globe.
Others keep stands of dulces and agua-miel or limonada; while others sell small loaves piloncilios of corn-stalk sugar, or baked roots of the agave. Some squat before fires, and prepare tortillas and chile Colorado; or melt the sugared chocolate cake in their urn-like earthen ollas.
A sort of candied preserve and molasses, expressed from the fruit of the cereus giganteus and agave Americana was found by our party in 1851, as we passed through the Pinal Llano camps and among the Gila tribes, to be most acceptable. The candied preserve was a most excellent substitute for sugar.
Here was the magnolia grandiflora in full bloom, its immense cup-like flowers filling the whole place with delightful fragrance, and the American agave, also loaded with a profusion of elegant flowers; roses of the most rare and superb varieties, jasmines, honeysuckles, clematis, spice woods, and a great variety of other choice plants, were also in lavish abundance.
It is the Agave Americana, the same aloe that is so common in southern Europe, where indeed it flowers, and that grows in our gardens and used to have the reputation of flowering once in a hundred years. I do not exaggerate when I say that we saw hundreds of thousands of them that day, planted in long regular lines.
Into these pits dry wood, roots, pine cones, etc., are thrown and set on fire, until the whole oven is thoroughly heated. On the hot rocks are then laid the pulpy stalks of the agave; over these is placed a layer of wet grass; then more agave or mescal leaves, more grass, and so on, until the pit is full.
Next to maize the chief culture among the Otomis is maguéy. This forms division lines between the corn-fields and the village yards, and is sometimes, though not commonly here, planted in fields. The maguéy is an agave very close to the century-plant. Manifold are its uses, but to the Otomi its value is chiefly in two directions. It furnishes ixtli fibre for ayates, and it yields pulque.
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