  We believe that many readers are interested in the mysterious plants and flowers of the desert, especially of the great Southwest. Here in our own back yard, as it were, in sunny California and also over in that great sand pile of southwestern Arizona, sometimes called the “Studio of the Gods,” time has carved and chiseled out wonderful valleys and caÑons, and graced their floors with tiny streams of water like threads of molten silver on burnished sands. This desert fairyland is brimful of Nature’s most curious plants and flowers. Here in Nature’s workshop you will find plants and flowers weird and marvelous, of fantastic shapes and grotesque design, of glowing hue and exotic fragrance. Out where rock and sand and gravel, and sagebrush and mesquite and chaparral struggle hard to hold on to life, the giant cactus, Sahuaro, the Old Man cactus known as Cereus senilis, the Prickly Pear Opuntia, and the wonderful Night Blooming Cereus live on peacefully and quietly and seem to smile down on man and beast and reptile, in the magnificent splendor of their brilliant flowers and fruit in the spring. Drought or rain in plenty seems to make but little difference to most of these, for the reason that Nature, the Great Engineer, has given these plants a unique structure which enables them to store up enough moisture in their reservoir systems to last, in some cases, as long as three years, if the rains should not come. It would tax man’s ingenuity to the utmost to beat that! Do you know how the Cursed Cholla gets its name? or why the cactus spines are such a puzzle to the botanist? or the romance Time has woven round the Night Blooming Cereus? or why the Barrel cactus is the Indian’s friend in time of drought, the traveler’s friend when lost? or why the Fishhook cactus is called by that name? Would you know a Pipe Organ cactus if you saw one? Do you know that the Strawberry cactus or Hedgehog is delicious for food? “The Fantastic Clan” tells you about all these things. In this book we take you on a pleasant journey through a wonderland of plant life, stopping at lonely isolated spots to view the Night Blooming Cereus cactus, whose ethereal beauty vies with the famous orchids of the South American forests. And to see this lovely queen in all her pristine beauty will make you forget the orchid and the rose! We also get a glimpse of the Hawaiian Night Blooming Cereus, so exquisitely beautiful that, for ages, in faraway Hawaii magnificent fiestas have marked the opening of the buds and the blooming of the Night Blooming Cereus. Then we take you into the presence of the giant cactus, Sahuaro, which in a previous volume we have called the Sage of the desert; steadfast, towering pillarlike fifty feet into the air, he gives a sense of power to all who behold him, some certain realization of the grandeur and the mystery of God’s creations here on Earth. The Serpent cacti, with their grotesque angular arms projecting like so many sinuous tentacles, claim our attention next; and the Prickly Pears, advance guard for the entire cactus clan, pass before our gaze. Many, many others, of fantastic shapes and distorted growth, freaks of nature, also numbers of God’s glorious creations, flowers of ethereal beauty, trees, majestic and noble, crowd into this picture stretched before our eyes in one vast scene of limitless sand, the Great American Desert. |
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