While grimly defending
themselves with innumerable barbed spears, they offer both food and drink
to man and beast. Their juicy globes and disks and fluted cylindrical
columns are almost the only desert wells that never go dry, and they
always seem to rejoice the more and grow plumper and juicier the hotter
the sunshine and sand. 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 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 canon 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_.
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