Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/306

 286 chestnut, was the finest shade-tree. There was a notable absence throughout the journey of what we are accustomed to deem the essentially tropical features. Very often one might have been riding in the woods of Connecticut. There was not even a rank luxuriance of growth, just as there were no serpents nor the swarms of pestiferous insects (other than a few gnats) to have been expected. We saw once a couple of coyote wolves trotting demurely along, and, again, a large iguana, a harmless reptile, one of which I also noted later, gliding around an old bronze gun at the fort of Acapulco.

Birds I hardly recollect at all, except a white heron or two, charmingly reflected in an upland pool one early morning, and the tecuses, a kind of black-bird. Vincente pelted at these latter with small stones, by way of trying his aim. The organ-cactus, however, should be exempted from the complaint of a want of tropicality. It abounds thickly about the gorges and on the mountain slopes. Rising twenty-five feet and more in height, the plants are like seven-branched candlesticks of the Mosaic law, or spears of the gods hurled down and yet quivering in the earth. The fan-palm, too, must be excepted. It crops out on the bleak hill-sides as common as mullein-stalks with us. I can never respect it, in the conservatories, again. To see it thus was a kind of shock : it was like seeing some exotic belle of society masquerading as a kitchen wench. For one day before reaching the coast we had the cocoa-nut palms. Nobody in the hamlets would get the fruit down for us except on a wholesale order, for munificent prices, which brought the cost above what it is in New York. There was often a shortage of the other fruits and commodities, as sugar, in the same way, in or near the very places where they grew.

Toward the concluding stages of the march we fell in