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 deserts, laden in early spring
with superb while 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 cañon 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 millefolium_. The nut-pine, _Pinus edulis_, scattered along the
upper slopes and roofs of the cañon buildings, is the principal tree of
the strange Dwarf Cocanini 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 continues 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
cañon at first sight seems as uninhabitable as a glacier crevasse, utterly
silent and barren. Nevertheless it is the home of a multitude of our
fellow-mortals, men as well as animals and plants. Centuries ago it was
inhabited by tribes of Indians, who, long before Columbus saw America,
built thousands of stone houses in its crags, and large ones, some of
them several stories high, with hundreds of rooms, on the mesas of the
adjacent regions. Their cliff-dwellings, almost numberless, are still
to be seen in the cañon, scattered along both sides from top to bottom
and throughout its entire length, built of stone and mortar in seams and