Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/36

 although, like many other animals, it may lie torpid and inoffensive for weeks, and even months, at a time. It is a noteworthy fact that the Gila monster is the only reptile on earth to-day that exactly fills the description of the basilisk or cockatrice of mediæval fable, which, being familiar to the first-comers among the Castilians, could hardly have added much to its popularity among them.

It may not be amiss to say of the vegetation that the mescal was to the aborigines of that region much what the palm is to the nomads of Syria. Baked in ovens of hot stone covered with earth, it supplied a sweet, delicious, and nutritive food; its juice could be fermented into an alcoholic drink very acceptable to the palate, even if it threw into the shade the best record ever made by "Jersey lightning" as a stimulant. Tear out one of the thorns and the adhering filament, and you had a very fair article of needle and thread; if a lance staff was needed, the sapling mescal stood ready at hand to be so utilized; the stalk, cut into sections of proper length, and provided with strings of sinew, became the Apache fiddle—I do not care to be interrupted by questions as to the quality of the music emitted by these fiddles, as I am now trying to give my readers some notion of the economic value of the several plants of the Territory, and am not ready to enter into a disquisition upon melody and such matters, in which, perhaps, the poor little Apache fiddle would cut but a slim figure—and in various other ways this strange, thorny-leafed plant seemed anxious to show its friendship for man. And I for one am not at all surprised that the Aztecs reverenced it as one of their gods, under the name of Quetzalcoatl.

The "mesquite" is a member of the acacia family, and from its bark annually, each October, exudes a gum equal to the best Arabic that ever descended the Nile from Khartoum. There are three varieties of the plant, two of them edible and one not. One of the edible kinds—the "tornillo," or screw—grows luxuriantly in the hot, sandy valley of the Colorado, and forms the main vegetable food of the Mojave Indians; the other, with pods shaped much like those of the string-bean of our own markets, is equally good, and has a sweet and pleasantly acidulated taste. The squaws take these beans, put them in mortars, and pound them into meal, of which bread is made, in shape and size and