Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/520

 500 There was a "summer dining-room" made of ocotilla sticks, the intervals open; and a "winter dining-room," with tight walls, and a fireplace, in which a wood-fire was burned mornings and evenings. The hot spring, a clear, pleasant water, said to resemble English Harrogate, ran out from below a bath-house, consisting of a patched canvas tent. It became, below, a pretty brook, a pond for the cattle, and source of supply for irrigating the orchard. The mountains behind the place, the Santa Catalinas, are like the Sierra Madres behind Los Angeles. They are of the same sharp fracture, but higher and grander, jutting up here and there into as perfect castles as those of Harlech, the Trostberg, or Rheinstein. Forests of pine of large dimensions crown a part of their summits. South and south-west, across the wide plain, appear the Rincons and silver-bearing Santa Ritas.

There was a fascination in being able to examine at leisure the strange growths of the plain, and not merely to know them in glimpses from the car-windows. I made haste especially to cut down for inspection an example of the enormous saguara, the organ-cactus. Taller than that on the hill-sides of Guerrero along the Acapulco trail, it often rises to a height of sixty feet, bristles over the landscape like masts or columns, or, again, like the seven-branched candlestick of the Mosaic law. Inside it consists of a white, juicy pulp, imbedding a bundle of fibres in the form of long wands, which, when dried, serve a number of useful purposes. It has a palatable fruit, which the Indians collect from its top in August with forked sticks.

The ocotilla is simply a shrub growing as a wattle of sticks, fifteen or twenty together, only waiting to be cut down and turned into palings. The bisnaga is a thorny cactus like an immense watermelon growing on end. One