Finis cannot be written to any story which deals with the desert; for the desert call is a charm, it will etch away the heart of you until it brings you back; back to the long trek across burning arid wastes where you wondered first how any living thing could exist and where you found life and beauty and music, back to the giant amphitheater of the desert where the moonbeams flit about at night among the weird Fantastic Clan and the sun boils everything up by day, defying you then to tarry long. But you take the dare and come again if you can, and yet again, wending your way farther each time across the foothills and mountains, ever in search of that evanescent something called the desert-spell or the thing that calls you back.

In our domestic lives we work hard for the few little things we have; many homes are devoid of the animation and color and the thrill of flower creations; for to have the beauty of plants and blossoms is to work for them and then to keep them, by dint of much effort and labor of love. But how different it is on the desert! There the flowers just grow and blossom and keep on blooming without care or cultivation from the hand of man. It seems never to rain in that great natural amphitheater of the sun, but the plants Nature has placed there, so carelessly, we fancy, just bloom and thrive and bloom again. Yet there is no confusion in their placement and pattern; they are filigree and patchwork, scroll and lacework; they represent all that is beautiful and symmetrical in Nature’s handiwork in this realm of desert bloom.

Man comes and goes through life, dancing in and out of the Great Scheme, but he has missed much of the picture and the skein of life if he has not gone out to see the desert. For it is there on the broad high mesas of these vast arid stretches that life begins and ends; it is this desert land of plants and flowers, the great dry region of the earth, that haunts us, fascinates us, beckons us, allures us, just as it did the ancient pueblo and cave dweller, in ages long gone by.

We have finished our long trip into the mysterious realm of the Fantastic Clan, and we hope that you have gone with us in fancy along all the devious and rocky paths into the habitats of the cactus plants, and sensed something of their strange and matchless growth, and much of their beauty and charm. For you have not seen Life in all its many and varied forms till you have viewed at least once the wondrous parade of the brilliant cactus flowers, and surveyed the gorgeous painted canvas flung far out over the burning mesas on the Great American Desert. And remember, too, the words of the poet:

“If you have not, then I could not tell,

For you could not understand.”

(Madge Morris: “Lure of the Desert”)