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Updated: May 7, 2025
You will have to dare the spines of the cacti behind you; make a great leap to the window and take your chances of escaping the fusillade of pistol shots, by flying in the darkness, into the garden. I will show you the grounds so that you will not be lost in them, if you get that far. If caught, you will have to pretend to be a burglar who entered at the window for purposes of plunder.
Before me I could see old ruins whitened by the sea-wind ruins about which no grass ever grows. The dismal melancholy of deserts prevails over this arid land, whose cracked surface can barely nourish a few shriveled mimosas, cacti, and dwarf palms. Twenty yards away, along the course of a ravine, stones were gleaming whitely like a long line of scattered bones.
Citoyenne, n'y touchez pas. Vegetable, animal, or mineral? Four-and-twenty questions might be spent upon it, and you would be none the wiser. Now to be plain, the box contains "the old man's head;" now you know. Cacti sent to me by Sir William Hooker; your mother has not room for more than two, which she kept. Thunderstorm and hail-shower, half-past eleven.
So it is that in those parts where man inhabits one sees young plants of Yucca arborensis infrequently. Other yuccas, cacti, low herbs, a thousand sorts, one finds journeying east from the coastwise hills. There is neither poverty of soil nor species to account for the sparseness of desert growth, but simply that each plant requires more room.
Once they left the town they turned toward the mountains and conversation ceased shortly, for not only were they obliged to ride single file through the sagebrush and cacti but the trot of the livery horse soon left Wallie with no breath nor desire to continue it.
The mail rider, crossing the hot desert of Arizona, through the cacti and over holes where scorpions hide, makes for Devil's Well, under El Diablo a dark pool surrounded with gaunt rocks. Here, coming when the night is on, he lies down, and the wind swishing in the sage brush puts him to sleep. At dawn he wakens with the frightened whinny of his horse in his ears and, all awake, looks about him.
Patches of cultivated land were filled with sugar cane, banana plants, and orange trees. Palms and cacti appeared in many varieties. Flowers bloomed on every side. Geraniums, fuschias, and heliotropes were of enormous size. Camelias, lilies, and nasturtiums grew in profusion.
It was a long drive to the river, up hill and down, over rocky roads, through sandy soil, among the ugly Spanish bayonets and cacti resplendent with scarlet blossoms, and over the desert, now a mass of gorgeous colors, for the summer suns had not yet burned out the little life which the winter rains had coaxed into blooming.
The narrow shallow wash leading down from the pass deepened, widened, almost imperceptibly at first, and then gradually until its proportions were striking. It was a gully where the gravel washed down during rains, and where a scant vegetation, greasewood, and few low cacti and scrubby sage struggled for existence. Not a bird or lizard or living creature in sight! The trail was getting lonely.
Both were oppressed by the fear that at any minute they would come upon a solid wall of cacti and be obliged to retrace their steps, and both knew that might mean a stunning blow to courage. At times the constant zig-zagging, the unalterable, smooth, grey-green surface of the cacti, made them halt dizzily, for both brain and body were sick for want of food.
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