willow thickets, grassy flats, and bright, flowery
gardens, and in the hottest recesses the delicate abronia, mesquite,
woody compositae, and arborescent cactuses.

The most striking and characteristic part of this widely varied
vegetation are the cactaceae--strange, leafless, old-fashioned plants
with beautiful flowers and fruit, in every way able and admirable. 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 desert, laden in early spring with superb white 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 canyon 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 millefolia.
The nut pine (Pinus edulis) scattered along the upper slopes and roofs
of the canyon buildings, is the principal tree of the strange dwarf
Coconino 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 continuing 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
canyon at first sight seems as uninhabitable as a glacier crevasse,
utterly silent and barren. Nevertheless it is the home of the multitude
of our fellow-mortals, men as we