Page:Mexico, picturesque, political, progressive.djvu/110

108 entering from the north, is brought for the first time into close contact with those immense plantations of the maguey, which form one of the largest industries of the country at present. Here for hundreds of miles the plains and hillsides are covered with long, close lines of agave in every stage, from the strong, large, generous beauty of the full-grown plant, to the small, tender green of the newly transplanted shoots. If one can conceive the symmetry of these regular forms, with the spiked, fleshy leaves, eight or ten feet long, falling in a whorl around the central blossom-stalk with the regularity of sculpture, and conceive also the effect of seeing them spread over such vast tracts of country, he will have before him one of the most novel pictures in this land of novelty. The plant is to the native what the cocoa-palm is to the South-Sea Islander; it combines within itself a dozen different materials for comfort and use. Growing on an absolutely dry soil, with no help from irrigation, it has a property of condensing moisture and coolness about its roots, which makes it yield at full growth an incredible amount of liquid. The difficulty of finding certain information regarding any thing here, where the usual