west find the features of the land on which they live blank or
full of pictures according to the amount of interest and intelligence
with which they view the features. Intelligence cannot be acquired, but
interest can; and data for interest and intelligence to act upon are
entirely acquirable.

"Studies perfect nature," Bacon said. "Nature follows art" to the extent
that most of us see principally what our attention has been called to.
I might never have noticed rose-purple snow between shadows if I had
not seen a picture of that kind of snow. I had thought white the only
natural color of snow. I cannot think of yew trees, which I have never
seen, without thinking of Wordsworth's poem on three yew trees.

Nobody has written a memorable poem on the mesquite. Yet the mesquite
has entered into the social, economic, and aesthetic life of the land;
it has made history and has been painted by artists. In the homely
chronicles of the Southwest its thorns stick, its roots burn into bright
coals, its trunks make fence posts, its lovely leaves wave. To live
beside this beautiful, often pernicious, always interesting and highly
characteristic tree--or bush--and to know nothing of its significance is
to be cheated out of a part of life. It is but one of a thousand factors
peculiar to the Southwest and to the land's cultural inheritance.

For a long time, as he tells in his _Narrative_, Cabeza de Vaca was
a kind of prisoner to coastal Indians of Texas. Annually, during the
season when prickly pear apples (_tunas_, or Indian figs, as they are
called in books) were ripe, these Indians would go upland to feed on
the fruit. During his sojourn with them Cabeza de Vaca went along. He
describes how the Indians would dig a hole in the ground, squeeze the
fruit out of _tunas_ into the hole, and then swill up big drinks of it.
Long ago the Indians vanished, but prickly pears still flourish over
millions of acres of land. The prickly pear is one of the characteristic
growths of the Southwest. Strangers look at it and regard it as odd.
Painters look at it in bloom or in fruit and strive to capture the
colors. During the droughts ranchmen singe the thorns off its leaves,
using a flame-throwing machine, easily portable by a man on foot, fed
from a small gasoline tank. From Central Texas on down into Central
America prickly pear acts as host for the infinitesimal insect called
cochineal, which supplied the famous dyes of Aztec civilization.

A