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In dry gulches and on taluses and sun-beaten crags are sparsely scattered yuccas, cactuses, agave, etc. Where springs gush from the rocks there are willow thickets, grassy flats, and bright, flowery gardens, and in the hottest recesses the delicate abronia, mesquite, woody compositae, and arborescent cactuses.
Birds, hummingbirds even, nest in the cactus scrub; woodpeckers befriend the demoniac yuccas; out of the stark, treeless waste rings the music of the night-singing mockingbird. If it be summer and the sun well down, there will be a burrowing owl to call. Strange, furry, tricksy things dart across the open places, or sit motionless in the conning towers of the creosote.
One thinks that the designers might have done more in the way of variety; there are no conifers excepting a few cryptomerias and yews which will all be dead in a couple of years, and as for those yuccas, beloved of Italian municipalities, they will have grown more dyspeptic-looking than ever.
Not long would one be obliged to live and move and have his being alone on this desert before strange messages would begin to formulate in the wind's eerie whispering in the yuccas. The burros ranged about, browsing off the desert growth. There had been barley for Babe, and Hiram had watered her at the last camp. A rinse-out of her mouth and she would do very well till morning.
As the last words of this dismal chant rang out, an echo seemed to be flung back at the singer from behind a neighboring ridge, upon which the lone yuccas stood upright, like, so many figures of formed bits of humanity. "Ye-e-e-e-e-e-e!" It came in a long drawn out wail that fairly seemed to make the desert ring with its gruesome echoes. All at once it was taken up from another point.
The trip lasted three hours and involved three changes of mules at stations, where we found all the excitement and bustle of a true railroad station. The country was, at first, rolling, with a sparse growth of yuccas, many of which were exceptionally large and fine. On the hills were occasional haciendas.
Out on the prairie in one of the western states where buffaloes and wild horses once had roamed at their pleasure and where cacti and yuccas still thrived and bloomed could be seen a small two-story frame building.
"We owe it all to the great azequia," observed the abbé. "See, it feeds these rills and fills those fountains, waters our fields, and makes the desert bloom like the rose and the dry places rejoice. And we have not only fruit and flowers, but corn, coffee, cocoa, yuccas, potatoes, and almost every sort of vegetable." "Quipai is a land of plenty and a garden of delight."
Probably there had been blows, and the old man was having the worst of it when his companions came along and turned the tide of battle. The road, after passing the hacienda, ascended almost constantly for many miles. We passed clumps of yuccas. As we mounted we faced a strong and cutting wind, and were glad when any turn in the road gave us a moment's relief.
Several species of tree yuccas in the same desert, laden in early spring with superb white lilies, form forests hardly less wonderful, though here they grow singly or in small lonely groves.
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