Steep Trails - California - Utah - Nevada - Washington - Oregon - The Grand Canyon By John Muir












































































































































 -   Some are
spherical, like rolled-up porcupines, crouching in rock-hollows
beneath a mist of gray lances, unmoved by the - Page 295
Steep Trails - California - Utah - Nevada - Washington - Oregon - The Grand Canyon By John Muir - Page 295 of 304 - First - Home

Enter page number    Previous Next

Number of Words to Display Per Page: 250 500 1000

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.

Enter page number   Previous Next
Page 295 of 304
Words from 79850 to 80123 of 82482


Previous 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 Next

More links: First 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
 110 120 130 140 150 160 170 180 190 200
 210 220 230 240 250 260 270 280 290 300
 Last

Display Words Per Page: 250 500 1000

 
Africa (29)
Asia (27)
Europe (59)
North America (58)
Oceania (24)
South America (8)
 

List of Travel Books RSS Feeds

Africa Travel Books RSS Feed

Asia Travel Books RSS Feed

Europe Travel Books RSS Feed

North America Travel Books RSS Feed

Oceania Travel Books RSS Feed

South America Travel Books RSS Feed

Copyright © 2005 - 2022 Travel Books Online