Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It throws out long, thorny leaves that curve downward. It is the agave, the far-famed mezcal-plant of Mexico. Here and there, mingling with the cacti, are trees of acacia and mezquite, the denizens of the desert-land. No bright object relieves the eye; no bird pours its melody into the ear.
Its face was almost perpendicular, with the exception of a few stairs or platforms in the basaltic strata, and from these hung out stunted palms, cedars, and dark, shapeless masses of cacti and agave.
Guapo's experience went beyond the theoretical knowledge of the botanist. Guapo knew a vegetable which was good to eat in fact, a most delicious vegetable when cooked with meat. Among naked rocks, in the most barren parts of the desert wilderness, the wild agave may be found growing in luxuriance.
"Oh! these Moqui Indians wouldn't do a white man any harm, unless they happened to take too much juice of the agave plant, in the shape of mescal," Frank hastened to say; "and I don't seem to get the smell of that stuff. So the chances are that he had something of an eye to our horses." "And as he didn't know about Buckskin's ways he gave the little pony a chance to get in some dents.
To begin with, the literary interest of the story is practically gone. This wild, terrible, beautiful woman may be Judith if you choose: she might be Medea or Agave, or Salome, or the Lucrezia Borgia of popular fancy and Donizetti. The fact is she is part of a scheme whose object is the aesthetic aspect of murder murder considered by one of the fine arts.
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.
The town of San Felipe two dozen brown adobes, through which a solitary street threaded its way sprawled in the bottom of a canyon near the Rio Grand. The cow camp had grown, in a few brief months, with all the rapidity of an agave plant, which adds five inches to its size in twenty-four hours. San Felipe was noisy and wide awake. It was December. The sun, however, was warm overhead.
The actor playing the part of Agave, who in her Dionysiac frenzy has torn in pieces her son and returns from Cithaeron carrying his head on the thyrsus, exchanged this for the bloody head of Crassus, and to the infinite delight of his audience of half-Hellenized barbarians began afresh the well-known song: pheromin ex oreos elika neotomon epi melathra makarian theiran .
In strength and effect it resembles lager beer, and is the popular drink with all classes throughout Mexico where it has been in vogue for centuries and is esteemed as "the only drink fit for thirsty angels and men." The agave is capable of being applied to many domestic uses. Under the old dispensation of Indian supremacy it supplied the natives their principal means of support.
It is said that the early dwellers in this region excelled in various mechanical arts, especially in the working of metals and the manufacture of cotton and agave cloth, to which may be added a delicate kind of pottery, rivaling anything of the sort belonging to that period.
Word Of The Day