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 most striking and characteristic part of this widely varied
vegetation are the cactaceae - strange, leafless, old-fashioned plants
with beautiful flowers and fruit, in every way able and admirable.
While grimly defending themselves with innumerable barbed spears, they
offer both food and drink to man and beast. Their juicy globes and
disks and fluted cylindrical columns are almost the only desert wells
that never go dry, and they always seem to rejoice the more and grow
plumper and juicier the hotter the sunshine and sand. Some are
spherical, like rolled-up porcupines, crouching in rock-hollows
beneath a mist of gray lances, unmoved by the wildest winds. Others,
standing as erect as bushes and trees or tall branchless pillars
crowned with magnificent flowers, their prickly armor sparkling, look
boldly abroad over the glaring desert, making the strangest forests
ever seen or dreamed of. Cereus giganteus, the grim chief of the
desert tribe, is often thirty or forty feet high in southern Arizona.
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. The low,
almost stemless Yucca baccata, with beautiful lily flowers and sweet
banana-like fruit, prized by the Indians, is common along the canyon
rim, growing on lean, rocky soil beneath mountain mahogany, nut pines,
and junipers, beside dense flowery mats of Spiraea caespitosa and the
beautiful pinnate-leaved Spiraea millefolia. The nut pine (Pinus
edulis) scattered along the upper slopes and roofs of the canyon
buildings, is the principal tree of the strange dwarf Coconino Forest.
It is a picturesque stub of a pine about twenty-five feet high,
usually with dead, lichened limbs thrust through its rounded head, and
grows on crags and fissured rock tables, braving heat and frost, snow
and drought, and continuing patiently, faithfully fruitful for
centuries. Indians and insects and almost every desert bird and beast
come to it to be fed.
To civilized people from corn and cattle and wheat-field countries the
canyon at first sight seems as uninhabitable as a glacier crevasse,
utterly silent and barren. Nevertheless it is the home of the
multitude of our fellow-mortals, men as well as animals and plants.
Centuries ago it was inhabited by tribes of Indians, who, long before
Columbus saw America, built thousands of stone houses in its crags,
and large ones, some of them several stories high, with hundreds of
rooms, on the mesas of the adjacent regions. Their cliff-dwellings,
almost numberless, are still to be seen in the canyon, scattered along
both sides from top to bottom and throughout its entire length, built
of stone and mortar in seams and fissures like swallows' nests, or on
isolated ridges and peaks.
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