THROUGH THE COWBOYS' COUNTRY.

The Santa Cruz Valley—The Cactus—An ancient and honourable Pueblo—A terrible Beverage—Are Cicadas deaf?—A floral Catastrophe—The Secretary and the Peccaries.

YUMA marks the frontier between California and Arizona. But it might just as well mark the frontier between India and Beluchistan, for it reproduces with exact fidelity a portion of the town of Rohri, in Sind. A broad, full-streamed river (the Colorado) seems to divide the town into two; on the top of its steep bank stands a military post, a group of bungalows, single-storied, white-walled, green-shuttered, verandahed. On the opposite side cluster low, flat-roofed houses, walled in with mud, while here and there a white-washed bungalow, with broad projecting eaves, stands in its own compound. Brown-skinned men with only a waistcloth round the loins loaf around, and in the sandy spaces that separate the buildings lean pariah dogs lie about, languid with the heat. The dreadful temperature assists to complete the delusion, and finally the mosquitoes of the Colorado river have all the ferocity of those that hatch on the banks of the Indus.

Against our will, too, these pernicious insects board our train and refuse to be blown out again by all the draughts which we tax our ingenuity to create. So we sit up sulkily in a cloud of tobacco smoke far into the night and Arizona—watching the wonderful cactus-plants passing our windows in gaunt procession, and here and there seeing a fire flash past us, lit probably by Papajo Indians for the preparation of their abominable "poolke" liquor. But the mosquitoes are satisfied at last, and go to sleep, and so we go too.

We awake in the Santa Cruz Valley, with the preposterous cactus poles and posts standing up as stiff and straight as sentries "at attention," and looking as if they were doing it for a joke. There is no unvegetable form that they will not take, for they mimic the shape of gate posts, semaphores, bee-hives, and even mops—anything, in fact, apparently that falls in with their humour, and makes them look as unlike plants as possible. I am not sure that they ought not to be punished, some of them. Such botanical lawlessness is deplorable. But, after all, is not this America, where every cactus "may do as he darned pleases"? These cacti, by the way—the gigantic columnar species, which throws up one solid shaft of flesh, fluted on each side, and studded closely with rosettes of spines—are the same that crowd in multitudinous impis on the side of the hills which slope from the massacre-field of Isandula in Zululand, down to the Buffalo River. How well I remember them!

If it were not for the cactus it would be a miserably uninteresting country, for the vegetation is only the lowest and poorest looking scrub, and water as yet there is none. But now we are approaching what the inhabitants call "the ancient and honourable pueblo of Tucson," pronouncing it Too son, and ancient and honourable we found it—For does it not dispute with Santa Fe the title of the most ancient town in the United States? and was not the breakfast which it gave us worthy of all honour?

It takes, reader, as you will have guessed, a very long journey indeed to knock into a traveller's head a complete conception of the size of North America. Mere space could never do it, for human nature is such that when trying to grasp in the mind any great lapse of time or territory, the two ends are brought together as it were, and all the great middle is forgotten. Nor does mere variety of scene emphasize distance on the memory, for the more striking details here and there crowd out the large monotonous intervals. Thus a mile of an Echo canyon obliterates half a state's length of Platte Valley pastures, and a single patch of Arkansas turtle-swamp whole prairies of Texan meadow. But in America, even though many successive days of unbroken travel may have run into one, or its many variations—from populous states to desert ones, from timber states to pasture ones, from corn states to mineral ones, from mountain to valley, river to lake, canyoned hills to herd-supporting prairies, from pine forest to oak forest, from sodden marsh to arid cactus-land—may have got blurred together, there grows at the end of it all upon the mind a befitting sense of vastness which neither linear measurement in miles nor variety in the panorama fully explain. It is due, I think, to the size of the instalments in which America puts forward her alternations of scene. She does not keep shifting her suits, so as to spoil the effect of her really strong hand, but goes on leading each till she has established it, and made each equally impressive. You have a whole day at a time of one thing, and then you go to sleep, and when you wake it is just the same, and you cannot help saying to yourself: "Twenty-four successive hours of meadowland is a considerable pasturage," and you do not forget it ever afterwards. The next item is twenty-four hours of mountains, "all of them rich in metals;" and by the time this has got indelibly fixed on the memory, Nature changes the slide, and then there is rolling corn-land on the screen for a day and night. And so, in a series of majestic alternations, the continent passes in review, and eventually all blends into one vast comprehensible whole.

Apart from physical, there are curious ethnological divisions which mark off the continent into gigantic subnationalities. For though the whole is of course "American," there is always an underlying race, a subsidiary one so to speak, which allots the vast area into separate compartments. Thus on the eastern coast we have the mulatto, who gives place beyond Nebraska to the Indian, and he, beyond Nevada, to the Chinaman. After California comes the Mexican, and after him the negro, and so back to the East and the mulatto again.

Here in Arizona, at Tucson, the "Mexican" is in the ascendant, for such is the name which this wonderful mixture of nationalities prefers to be called by. He is really a kind of hash, made up of all sorts of brown-skinnned odds and ends, an olla podrida. But he calls himself "Mexican," and Tucson is his ancient and honourable pueblo. It is a wretched-looking place from the train, with its slouching hybrid men, and multitudinous pariah dogs. Indians go about with the possessive air of those who know themselves to be at home; and it is not easy to decide whether they, with their naked bodies and ropes of hair dangling to the waist, or the half-breed Mexican with their villainous slouch and ragged shabbiness, are the lower race of the two. And the dogs! they are legion; having no homes, they are at home everywhere. I am told there is a public garden, and some "elegant" buildings, but as usual they are on "the other side of the town." All that we can see on this side, are collections of squalid Arabic-looking huts and houses, made of mud, low-roofed and stockaded with ragged-looking fences. The heat is of course prodigious for eight months of the year, and the dust and the flies and the mosquitoes are each and all as Asiatic as the heat—or any other feature of this ancient and honourable It has its interest, however, as an American pueblo. It has its interests, however, as an American "antiquity;" while the river, the Santa Cruz, which flows past the town, is one of those Arethusa streams, which comes to the surface a few miles above the town and disappears again a few miles below it.

For the student of hybrid life, Tucson must have exceptional attractions; but for the ordinary traveller, it has positively none. Kawai Indians have not many points very different from Papajo Indians, and mud hovels are after all only mud hovels. But it is an ancient and honourable pueblo.

The only people who look cool are the Mexican soldiers in blue and white, and that other Mexican, a civilian, in a broad-brimmed, flimsy hat, spangled with a tinsel braid and fringe. Have these men ever got anything to do? and when they have, do they ever do it? It seems impossible they could undertake any work more arduous than lolling against a post, and smoking a yellow-papered cigarette. Yet only a few days ago these Mexicans, perhaps those very soldiers there, destroyed a tribe of Apaches, and then arrested a force of Arizona Rangers who had pursued the Indians on to Mexican ground! These Apaches had kept the State in a perpetual terror for a long time, but finding the Federal soldiers closing in upon them, they crossed the frontier line close to Tucson, and there fell in with the Mexicans, who must at any rate be given the credit for promptitude and efficiency in all their Indian conflicts. The Apaches were destroyed, and the force of Rangers who had followed them were caught by the Mexican general, and under an old agreement between the two Republics, they were made prisoners of war, disarmed, and told to find their way back two hundred and fifty miles into the States as best and as quickly as they could. Some thirty years ago a Mexican general, who captured some American filibusters in a similar way at the village of Cavorca, paraded his captives and shot them all down. So the Arizona men were glad enough to get away.

The cactus country continues, and the plants play the mountebank more audaciously than ever. There is no absurdity they will not commit, even to pretending that they are broken fishing rods, or bundles of riding whips. But the majority stand about in blunt, kerb-stone fashion, as if they thought they were marking out streets and squares for the cotton-tail rabbits that live amongst them. Under the hill on the left is the old mission church of "San'avere" (San Xavier); and over those mountains, the "Whetstones," lies the mining settlement of Tombstone, where the cowboys rejoice to run their race, and the value of life seldom rises to par in the market. Then we enter upon a plain of the mezcal all in full bloom, and a "lodge" of brown men, partly Indian, partly Mexican, waiting it may be for the plant to mature and the time to come round for distilling its fiery liquor. I tasted mezcal at El Paso for the first time in my life, and I think I may venture to say the last, so whether it was good of its kind or not, I cannot tell. I am no judge of mezcal. But I know that it was thick, of a dull sherry colour, with a nasty vegetable smell, and infinitely more fiery than anything I ever tasted before, not excepting the whisky which the natives in parts of Central India brew from rye, the brandy which the Boers of the Transvaal distil from rotten potatoes, or the "tarantula juice" which you are often offered by the hearty miners of Colorado. It is almost literally "fire-water;" but the red pepper, I suppose, has as much to do with the effect upon the tongue and palate as the juice of the mezcal.

On a sudden, in the midst of this desolate land, we come upon a ranche with cattle wading about among the rich blue grass; but in a minute it is gone, and lo! a Chinese village, smothered in a tangle of shrubs all overgrown with creeping gourds, with the coolies lying in the shade smoking long pipes of reed.

Have you ever smoked Chinese "tobacco"? If not, be careful how you do. A single pipe of it (and Chinese pipes hold very little) will upset even an old smoker. For myself, can hardly believe it is tobacco, for in the hand it feels of a silky texture, utterly unlike any tobacco I ever saw, while the smell of it, and the taste on the tongue, are as different to the buena yerba as possible. It is imported by the Chinese in America for their own consumption, and in spite of duties is exceedingly cheap. A single sniff of it, by the way, completely explains that heavy, stupefying odour which hangs about Chinese quarters and Chinese persons.

But this glimpse of China has disappeared as rapidly as the ranche had done, and in a few minutes later a collection of low mud-walled huts, overshadowed by rank vegetation, an ox or two trying to chew the cud in an uptilted cart, some brown-skinned children playing with magnolia blossoms, and lo! a glimpse of Bengal.

And then as suddenly we are out again on to the cactus plains with cotton-tail rabbits everywhere, and cicadas innumerable shrilling from the muskeet trees. Above all the noise of the train we could hear the incessant chorus filling the hot out-of-doors, and, stepping on to the rear platform, I found that several had flown or been blown on to the car. Poor helpless creatures, with their foolish big-eyed heads and little brown bodies wrapped up in a pair of large transparent wings. But fancy living in such a hideous din as these cicadas live in! Do naturalists know whether they are deaf? One would suppose of course that the voice was given them originally for calling to each other in the desolate wastes in which they are sometimes found scattered about. But in the lapse of countless generations that have spent their lives crowded together in one bush, sitting often actually elbow to elbow and screaming to each other at the tops of their voices, it is hardly less rational to suppose that kindly Nature has encouraged them to develop a comfortable deafness. At any rate it is impossible to suppose that even a cicada can enjoy the ear-splitting clamour in which its neighbours indulge, and which now keeps up with us all the way as we traverse the San Pedro Valley, and mounting from plateau to plateau—some of them fine grass land, others arid cactus beds—reach another "Great Divide," and then descend across an immense, desolate prairie, brightened here and there with beautiful patches of flowers, into the San Simon Valley. And all the time we eat our dinner (at the Bowie station) the cicadas go on shrilling, on the hot and dusty ground, till the air is fairly thrilling, with the waves of barren sound. That sounds like rhyme,—and I do not wonder at it,—for even the cicadas themselves manage to drift into a kind of metre in their arid aimless clamour, and the high noon, as we sit on our cars again, looking out on the pink-flowered cactus and the mezcal with its shafts of white blossoms, seems to throb with a regular pulsation of strident sound.

What a desolate land it seems, this New Mexico into which we have crossed! But not for long. We soon find ourselves out upon a vast plain of grassland, upon which the sullen, egotistical cactus will not grow. "You common vegetables may grow there if you like," it says. "Any fool of a plant can grow where there is good soil; but it shows genius to grow on no soil at all." So it will not stir a step on to the grass-land, but stands there out on the barren sun-smitten sand, throwing up its columns of juicy green flesh and bursting out all over into flowers of vivid splendour, just to show perhaps that "Todgers's can do it when it likes." There is about the cactus' conduct something of the superciliousness of the camel, which wades through hay with its nose up in the air as if it scorned the gross provender of vulgar herds, and then nibbles its huge stomach full of the tiny tufts of leaves which is found growing among—the topmost thorns of the scanty mimosa.

Here, on this plain, is plenty of the "camel thorn," the muskeet, and a whole wilderness of Spanish bayonet waiting till some one thinks it worth while to turn it into paper, and there is not probably a finer fibre in the world. Nor, because the cactus contemns the easy levels, do other flowers refuse to grow. They are here in exquisite profusion, a foretaste of the Texan "flower-prairies," and when the train stopped for water I got out and from a yard of ground gathered a dozen varieties. Nearly all of them were old familiar friends of English gardens, and some were beautifully scented, notably one with a delicate thyme perfume, and another that had all the fragrance of lemon verbena.

Both to north and south are mountains very rich in mineral wealth, and at Lordsburg, where we halted, I could not resist the temptation of buying some "specimens." I had often resisted the same temptation before, but here somehow the beauty of the fragments was irresistible. Outside the station, by the way, under a heap of rubbish, were lying a score or so of bars of copper bullion, worth, perhaps, twenty pounds apiece. Such bulky plunder probably suits nobody in a climate of everlasting heat, but it is all pure copper nevertheless—pennies en bloc.

The plain continues in a monotony of low muskeet scrub, broken here and there by flowering mezcal. It is utterly waterless, and, except for one fortnight's rain which it receives, gets no water all the year round. Yet beautiful flowers are in blossom even now, and what it must be just after the rain has fallen it is difficult to imagine. To this great flower-grown chapparal succeeds a natural curiosity of a very striking kind—a vast cemetery of dead yuccas. It looks as if some terrific epidemic had swept in a wave of scorching death over the immense savannah of stately plants. Not one has escaped. And there they stand, thousand by thousand, mile after mile, each yucca in its place, but brown and dead. And so through the graveyards of the dead things into Deming—Deming of evil repute, and ill-favoured enough to justify such a reputation. Even the cowboy fresh from Tombstone used to call Deming "a hard place," and there is a dreadful legend that once upon a time, that is to say, about ten years ago, every man in the den had been a murderer! No one would go there except those who were conscious that their lives were already forfeited to the law, and who preferred the excitement of death in a saloon fight to the dull formalities of hanging. However, tempora mutantur, and all that I remember Deming for myself is its appearance of dejection and a very tolerable supper.

And then away again, across the same flower-grown meadow, with its sprinkling of muskeet bushes, and its platoons of yucca, but now all radiant in their bridal bravery of waxen white. The death-line of the beautiful plant seems to have been mysteriously drawn at Deming. I got out at a stoppage and cut two more of the yuccas. The temptation to possess such splendour of blossom was too great to resist. But alas! as before, the dainty thing in its virginal white was hideous with clinging parasites, and so I fastened them into the brake-wheel on the platform, and sitting in my car smoking, could look out at the great mass of silver bells that thus completely filled the doorway, and in the falling twilight they grew quite ghostly, the spectres of dead flowers, and touching them we find the flowers all clammy and cold. "How it chills one!" said a girl, holding a thick, white, damp petal between her fingers. "It feels like a dead thing."

And sitting out in the moonlight—an exquisite change after the hateful heat of the day thfit was past—we saw the muskeet growth gradually dwindle away, and then great lengths of wind-swept sand-dunes supervened. And every now and then a monstrous owl—the "great grey owl of California," I think it must have been—tumbled up off the ground and into the sky above us. Otherwise the desolation was utter. But I sat on smoking into the night, and was abundantly repaid after awhile, for the country, as if weary of its monotony, suddenly swells up into billows and sinks into huge troughs, a land-Atlantic that beats upon the rocks of the Colorado range to right and left; and as we cut our way through the crests of its waves, the land broke away from before us into bay—like recesses; crowned with galleries of pinnacled rock and curved round into great amphitheatres of cliff. But away on the left it seemed heaving with a more prodigious swell, and every now and then down in the hollows I thought I could catch glimpses of moon-lit water glittering. And the train sped on, winding in and out of the upper ridges of the valley brim, and then, descending, plunged into a dense growth of willows, and lo! the Rio Grande, and "the shining levels of the mere." It was it then, this splendid stream, that had been disturbing the land so, thrusting the valley this way and that, shaping the hills to its pleasure, and that now rolled its flood along the stately water-way which it had made, with groves of trees for reed beds and a mountain range for banks!

We cross it soon, seeing the Santa Fe line pass underneath us with the river flowing underneath it again—and then with the Rio Grande gradually curving away from us, we reach El Paso. And it is well perhaps for El Paso, that we see it under the gracious witchery of moonlight, for it is a place to flee from. Without one of the merits of Asia, it has all Asia's plagues of heat and insects and dust. And no one plants trees or sows crops; and so, sun-smitten, and waterless, it lies there blistering, with all its population of half-breeds and pariah dogs, a place, as I said, to flee from. And yet on the other side of the river, a rifle-shot off, is the Mexican town of El Paso—for the river here separates the States from their neighbour Republic—and there, there are shade trees and pleasant houses, well-ordered streets, and all the adjuncts of a superior civilization.

A brawl alongside the station platform, with a horrible admixture of polyglot oaths and the flash of knives, is the only incident of El Paso life we travellers had experience of. But it may be characteristic.

One of the party who had been incidentally concerned in the disagreement travelled with us. He knew both New and Old Mexico well, and among other things which he told me I remember that he said that he had seen peccaries in New Mexico, on the borders of Arizona. I had thought till then that this very disagreeable member of the pig family confined itself to more southern regions.

Treed by pigs is not exactly the position in which we should expect to find a Colonial Secretary—at least, not often. But when one of the Secretaries in Honduras was recently exploring the interior of the country, he was overtaken by a drove of peccaries, and had only time to take a snap shot at the first of them and scramble up a tree, dropping his rifle in the performance, before the whole pack were round his perch, gnashing their teeth at him, grunting, and sharpening their tusks against his tree. Now the peccary is not only ferocious but patient, and rather than let a meal escape it, it will wait about for days, so that the Secretary had only two courses—either to remain where he was till he dropped down among the swine from sheer exhaustion and hunger, or else to commit suicide at once by coming down to be killed there and then. While he was in this dilemma, however, what should come along—and looking out for supper too—but a jaguar. Never was beast of prey so opportune! For the jaguar has a particular fondness for wild pork, and the peccaries know it, for no sooner did they see the great ruddy head thrust out through the bushes than they bolted helter-skelter, forgetting, in their anxiety to save their own bacon, the meal they were themselves leaving up the tree. The jaguar was off after the swine with admirable promptitude, and the Secretary, finding the coast clear, came down—reflecting, as he walked towards the camp, upon the admirable arrangements of Nature, who, having made peccaries to eat Colonial Secretaries, provided also jaguars to eat the peccaries.

And so to sleep, and sleeping, over the boundary into Texas.