el-drivers' efforts to get their trains of laden beasts along the
narrow sandy lanes of Tangier, between hedges of prickly pears, where
the camels with their long necks could reach the tempting lobes on both
sides of the way.

In this thirsty season, while the cattle in the Mexican plains derive
moisture from the cactus, the aloe provides for man a substitute for
water. It frequently happened to us to go from rancho to rancho asking
for water in vain, though pulque was to be had in abundance.

To attempt any description of the varied forms of cactus in Mexico
would be out of the question. In the northern provinces alone,
botanists have described above eight hundred species. The most striking
we met with were the prickly pear (cactus opuntia), the organo, the
night-blowing cereus, the various mamillarias--dome-shaped mounds
covered with thorns, varying in diameter from an inch to six or eight
feet--and the greybeard, _el viejo,_ "the old man," as our guide called
them, upright pillars like street-posts, and covered with grey
wool-like filaments.

Getting to the top of the ravine again, we found an old Indian milking
an aloe, which flourishes here, though a little further down the
climate is too hot for it to produce pulque. This old gentleman had a
long gourd, of the shape and size of a great club, but hollow inside,
and very light. The small end of this gourd was pushed in among the
aloe-leaves into the hollow made by scooping out the inside of the
plant, and in which the sweet juice, the aguamiel, collects. By having
a little hole at each end of the gourd, and sucking at the large end,
the hollow of the plant emptied itself into the Acocote, (in proper
Mexican, _Acocotl_, Water-throat), as this queer implement is called.
Then the Indian stopped the hole at the end he had been sucking at,
with his finger, and dexterously emptied the contents of the gourd into
a pig-skin which he carried at his back. We went up with the old man to
his rancho, and tested his pulque, which was very good, though we could
not say the same of his domestic arrangements. It puzzled us not a
little to see people living up at this height in houses built of
sticks, such as are used in the hot lands, and hardly affording any
protection from the weather, severe as it is here. The pulque is taken
to market in pig-skins, which, though the pig himself is taken out of
them, still retain his shape very accurately; and when nearly full of
liquor, they