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Updated: May 3, 2025
An erect-growing, tall Cactus, rarely branching unless made to do so by cutting off the top of the stem; furrows and ridges about eight, the ridges prominent, waved, and bearing tufts of blackish wool, in which are set about a dozen black spines, ½ in. long; the stem when young and in good health is bluish in colour.
Around the garden ran a high hedge of cactus, and as I leaned forward in my saddle to look through one of the openings, a girl's face presented itself to me at the other side of it, and we stared each other in the eyes for several seconds before she a Mussulman girl remembered that she must not be seen, when, wrapping her veil around her head, she flew to the house.
One asked oneself whether two mobiles in one day was fair, one wondered where the devil we were going to, and one cursed the dust and the weight of one's pack. Suddenly we found ourselves moving between hedges up what might well have been a dusty country lane at home for the kindly darkness hid the unfamiliar leaves of the cactus which bordered it.
A huge, lofty, fluted column of green was a saguaro, or giant cactus. Another oddshaped cactus, resembling the legs of an inverted devil-fish, bore the name ocatillo. Each branch rose high and symmetrical, furnished with sharp blades that seemed to be at once leaves and thorns.
On every side the sand stretched away to the horizon, its flat expanse broken only by clumps of bristling cactus or very rarely the tall stem of a palm tree. Of the others of the party there was no sign. His companion and he seemed to be alone in the world; and he began to wonder apprehensively if they were destined to undergo the unpleasant experience of being lost in the desert.
"I could name you a silent man or two in Brownsville," he said, "but there ain't only one man that knows the country right." "That so? And who might he be?" "Me." "You?" echoed Daniels in surprise. He turned and considered Gary as if for the first time. "Maybe you know the lay of the land up as far as Hawkin's Arroyo?" "Me? Son, I know every cactus clear to Bald Eagle." "H-m-m!" muttered Daniels.
Of course I was not for an instant deceived by all this: I knew that under it all lay a particularly forbidding and inhospitable expanse of sagebrush and cactus, peopled with nothing more nearly akin to me than prairie dogs, ground owls and jackass rabbits that with these exceptions the desert was as desolate as the environment of Ozymandias' "vast and trunkless legs of stone."
The place was thereafter called Tenochtitlan, or "the place of the cactus-rock," but the name under which it afterward came to be best known was taken from Mexitl, one of the names of the war god Huitzilopochtli. The device of the rock, the cactus, with the eagle and the serpent, formed a tribal totem for the Aztecs, and has been adopted, as the coat-of-arms of the present Republic of Mexico."
Sam thought of roving, marauding Mexicans, of stealthy cougars that sometimes invaded the ranches, of rattlesnakes, centipedes, and a dozen possible dangers. Marthy would be frantic with fear. Randy would cry, and call for dada to come. Still the interminable succession of stretches of brush, cactus, and mesquite.
The cylindric cactus, which bordered the road, gave the landscape an appearance of verdure, without affording either coolness or shade. Before our guide had walked a league, he began to sit down every moment, and at length he wished to repose under the shade of a fine tamarind tree near Casas de la Vela, to await the approach of night.
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