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.
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