Joshua, with an equally startling blossom.

"To go out on the desert ... and meet these cacti is like whispering
into the ear of the Sphinx, and listening at her locked lips, ... and
to go out in April and see them suddenly abloom is as though the lips
of the Sphinx should part and utter solemn words. A bunch of white
flowers at the tip of the obelisk, flowers springing white and
wonderful out of this dead, gaunt, prickly thing--is not that
Nature's consummate miracle, a symbol of resurrection more profound
than the lily of the fields."*

* Harriet Monroe, Atlantic Monthly, June, 1902.


Then there is the glorious ocotillo, waving its long, slender wands
from the ground-centre, each green with its myriad little
lance-shaped leaves, and bursting at the end into a scarlet flame of
blossoms dazzling in the burning sunlight. Near by springs up the
Barrel cactus, a forbidding column no one dares touch. A little
farther is the "yant" of the Pai Ute, with leaves fringed with teeth
like its kind, the Agaves. This is a source of food for the native,
who roasts the asparagus-like tip starting up in the spring, and he
also takes the whole head, and, trimming off the outer leaves, bakes
it in pits, whereby it is full of sweetness like thick molasses. The
inner pulp is dried in sheets and laid away. Near by, the Pinyon tree
in the autumn sheds its delicious nuts by the bushel, and meanwhile
there are many full, nutritious grass seeds, the kind called "ak" by
the Pai Utes almost equalling wheat in the size of its kernel. In the
lowlands grows the stolid mesquite tree, more underground than above,
whose roots furnish excellent firewood,--albeit they must be broken