lumns. Some
throw out branches, crooked, shaggy branches, with hirsute oval leaves.
Yet there is a homogeneousness about all these vegetable forms, in their
colour, in their fruit and flowers, that proclaims them of one family.
They are cacti. It is a forest of the Mexican nopal. Another singular
plant is here. It throws out long, thorny leaves that curve downward.
It is the agave, the far-famed mezcal-plant of Mexico. Here and there,
mingling with the cacti, are trees of acacia and mezquite, the denizens
of the desert-land. No bright object relieves the eye; no bird pours
its melody into the ear. The lonely owl flaps away into the impassable
thicket, the rattlesnake glides under its scanty shade, and the coyote
skulks through its silent glades.

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I have climbed mountain after mountain, and still I behold peaks soaring
far above, crowned with the snow that never melts. I stand upon
beetling cliffs, and look into chasms that yawn beneath, sleeping in the
silence of desolation. Great fragments have fallen into them, and lie
piled one upon another. Others hang threatening over, as if waiting for
some concussion of the atmosphere to hurl them from their balance. Dark
precipices frown me into fear, and my head reels with a dizzy faintness.
I hold by the pine-tree shaft, or the angle of the firmer rock.

Above, and below, and around me, are mountains piled on mountains in
chaotic confusion. Some are bald and bleak; others exhibit traces of
vegetation in the dark needles of the pine and cedar, whose stunted
forms half-grow, half-hang from the cliffs. Here, a cone-shaped peak
soars up till it is lost in snow and clouds. There, a ridge elevates
its sharp outline against the sky; while along its side, lie huge
boulders of granite, as though they had been hurled from the hands of
Titan giants!

A fearful monster, the grizzly bear, drags his body along the high
ridges; the carcajou squats upon the projecting rock, waiting the elk
that must pass to the water below; and the bighorn bounds from crag to
crag in search of his shy mate. Along the pine branch the bald buzzard
whets his filthy beak; and the war-eagle, soaring over all, cuts sharply
against the blue field of the heavens.

These are the Rocky Mountains, the American Andes, the colossal
vertebras of the continent!

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