know how to use with pulverized rock for cementing arrow points to
shafts. Trust Indians not to miss any virtues of the plant world!

Nothing the desert produces expresses it better than the unhappy growth
of the tree yuccas. Tormented, thin forests of it stalk drearily in the
high mesas, particularly in that triangular slip that fans out eastward
from the meeting of the Sierras and coastwise hills where the first
swings across the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. The yucca
bristles with bayonet-pointed leaves, dull green, growing shaggy with
age, tipped with panicles of fetid, greenish bloom. After death, which
is slow, the ghostly hollow network of its woody skeleton, with hardly
power to rot, makes the moonlight fearful. Before the yucca has come to
flower, while yet its bloom is a creamy cone-shaped bud of the size of a
small cabbage, full of sugary sap, the Indians twist it deftly out of
its fence of daggers and roast it for their own delectation. So it is
that in those parts where man inhabits one sees young plants of _Yucca
arborensis_ infrequently. Other yuccas, cacti, low herbs, a thousand
sorts, one finds journeying east from the coastwise hills. There is
neither poverty of soil nor species to account for the sparseness of
desert growth, but simply that each plant requires more room. So much
earth must be preëmpted to extract so much moisture. The real struggle
for existence, the real brain of the plant, is underground; above there
is room for a rounded perfect growth. In Death Valley, reputed the very
core of desolation, are nearly two hundred identified species.

Above the lower tree-line, which is also the snow-line, mapped out
abruptly by the sun, one finds spreading growth of piñon, juniper,
branched nearly to the ground, lilac and sage, and scattering white
pines.