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Updated: May 15, 2025
She was crouching under a prickly-pear shrub, that threw a distorted blue shadow on the sun-baked, sun-bleached ground, trying to eat the fruit in the native way with two sticks. But she had no knife, and her mouth was bleeding. Bough gave the tired pony both spurs when the prey he hunted came in sight.
These they threw among the prickly-pear hedge, which, dried by the hot sun, was as combustible as tinder. In an instant the whole was in a blaze. Stanley had collected his party, each one being loaded with as much property as could be carried. Then, sallying forth, they fired a volley, which drove the blacks to a distance.
No living thing was moving throughout the vast landscape, except the lizards that darted over the sand and through the rank grass and prickly-pear just at our feet. And yet stern and wild associations gave a singular interest to the view; for here each man lives by the strength of his arm and the valor of his heart.
As we advanced, the vegetation became thicker, and we were confronted at times by high hedges of prickly-pear and cactus, growing so close together that it was impossible to make our way through. This occasioned several détours, the sepoys lining the hedges and firing at us through loopholes and openings, cursing the gore log and daring us to come on.
Come to our shore, where the fauna and flora of the whole country meet in one. All the wild birds pass in their migrations; and the flowers!" Then she would expatiate on the trailing arbutus in April, and the vast sheets of pale blue lupines in early June, and the yellow, sunlike blossoms of the prickly-pear in July, and the red glories of painter's-brush and bittersweet and sumach in September.
When this companion was with her, she could get the most wonderful things out of Spanish Johnny, or Wunsch, or Dr. Archie. On her thirteenth birthday she wandered for a long while about the sand ridges, picking up crystals and looking into the yellow prickly-pear blossoms with their thousand stamens. She looked at the sand hills until she wished she WERE a sand hill.
There are in our new country many women who consider themselves fashionable leaders members of an exclusive set and who fear if they should know some other women out of that set that they would imperil their social standing. These people have no titles by which they can be known, so they preserve their exclusiveness by disagreeable manners, as one would hedge a garden by a border of prickly-pear.
"Bevins, you gave us a good chase," I said, as we rode up. "Yes," he returned calmly, "and if I'd had fifteen minutes' more start and got across the Platte you'd never have caught me." Bevins's flight was the most remarkable feat of its kind I have ever heard of. A man who could run barefooted in the snow through a prickly-pear patch was surely a "tough one."
His mixture of satire and kindliness always reminds me of those lanes near Beyrout in which you ride with the prickly-pear bristling alongside of you, and yet can pluck the grapes which force themselves among it from the fields.
We were anxious to get on shore to see about coals, water, and provisions, but no health-boat came near us. We landed, went to the market, bought some lovely carnations stuck in a prickly-pear leaf to keep them fresh, and then went to the Hôtel Royal kept by the landlord of the old Club House Hotel, where we had so often stayed to order breakfast.
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