"Cactus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... juniper, and "black-jack" oaks grow in groves or spinneys; while standing apart may be observed the arborescent jucca—the "dragon-tree" of the Western world, towering above an underwood unlike any other, composed of cactaceae in all the varieties of cereus, cactus, and echinocactus. Altogether unlike is the bottom-land bordering upon the river. There the vegetation is lush and luxuriant, showing a growth of large forest timber—the trees set thickly, and matted with many parasites, that look like cables coiling around ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... lips; and the lakes of light ahead lay a wavering looming veil. A mile farther on, the ripped punk of a dead pinon betrayed the passing of the fugitives. When Wayland dismounted to examine the marks, he stepped on a small cactus. They picked up a trail that led over rocky mesas and dipped suddenly into the deep dug-way of a dry gravel bed. The sand walls of the dead stream afforded shelter from the sun, and the two riders spurred their bronchos to a canter led by the pack mule. The sand banks spread, widened, opened; ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... stone and rose red brick perched on a ledge of rock midway between earth and heaven, the cliff falling almost sheer to the valley two hundred feet and more, the mountain rising behind straight toward the sky; all the rocks covered with cactus and dwarf fig-trees, the convent draped in smothering roses, and in front a terrace with a fountain in the midst; and then—nothing—between you and the sapphire sea, six miles away. Below stretches the Eden valley, the Concha d'Oro, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... the hot plains towards the mountains which rose invitingly before us, ready to receive us into their green depths. On leaving the town, we passed first through sandy lanes bordered by cactus hedges, rising in columnar rows, and then came out upon the excellent macadamized road over which thirteen of the sixteen miles of our journey lay. As we went along we met a continual succession of groups of the country people, mostly women ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... cypress-trees, all of which seemed extremely ancient, while some appeared quite dead and withered. There was, in addition to these trees, a thick undergrowth of long rank grass and stunted shrubs, among which an outrageously prickly variety of the cactus made itself conspicuously apparent to the touch; while, more than half hidden by the undergrowth, there were dotted here and there a few sepulchral stones and monuments in the very last stage of irretrievable dilapidation. ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... horizon was one vast span of blue, whitening as it dipped earthward. Miles upon miles to the east and southeast the desert unrolled itself, white, naked, inhospitable, palpitating and shimmering under the sun, unbroken by so much as a rock or cactus stump. In the distance it assumed all manner of faint colors, pink, purple, and pale orange. To the west rose the Panamint Range, sparsely sprinkled with gray sagebrush; here the earths and sands were yellow, ochre, and rich, deep red, the hollows and canyons picked out with intense blue ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... the conservatory. She was gazing straight before her, not at the great, tall, flowering cactus nor the orchids, nor the mass of geraniums and pelargoniums of every shade and hue—she was seeing a picture of a wild, wild lonely place, of a bare old house, of a seashore that was like no other ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... the most desirable mid-day pastime, and over land and sea a solemn sense of peace is brooding. From where the tents are set no other human habitation is in sight. A great spur of rock, with the green and scarlet of cactus sprawling over it at will, shuts off lighthouse and telegraph station, while the towering hills above hide the village of Mediunah, whence our supplies are brought each day at dawn ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... Main Street of the City of Angels was all but empty. Upon it the lassitude of early afternoon lay heavily. The spider-legged music-racks of the Mexican string orchestra, the empty platform chairs, the deserted side-tables along the pictured wall, the huge cactus scrawled over with pin-etched initials,—all the impedimenta of ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... crooned so long in the umbrella tree built a nest there and cooed on to his mate. The clear, rainless winter gave place to spring and the giant cactus burst into flower. It rained, short and hard, and the desert floor took on suddenly a fine mat of green; and still he did not come. He was like the rain, this wild man of the desert; swift and fierce, then gone and forgotten. Once she saw his Mexican, the old, bearded ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... like a miracle out of the Arabian Nights. Your backyard becomes voluptuous with pomegranate and almond trees, lemon groves, and hedges of flowering cactus, dazzling banks of azaleas, marble- basined fountains, in which chestnut-and-white pond-herons step daintily amid exotic water-lilies, while golden pheasants strut about on alabaster terraces. The whole effect rather suggests the idea that ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... look, but we knew that the cactus plants, which grew rank on the slope of the mountain, concealed powerful batteries, and that on the summit of the rock were mounted cannons of the largest calibre, which, if required, could hurl projectiles to the far side of the strait, a distance ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... probably succeed. Persons that are fond of flowers, and have collected a number, are generally willing to give their young friends a few plants; and where we succeed in raising a fine plant from a slip, or cutting, we value it more than one that has been purchased at a green-house. Geraniums, cactus', wax plants, cape and catalonian jessamines, and some others, are easily cultivated in a parlor. Roses, camelias, and azaleas bloom best in a moderate temperature, as the heat of a parlor (unless very large) dries the buds, and prevents their ...
— Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers • Elizabeth E. Lea
... this range profits by their moisture, whereas the regions east of it receive it to the full. Hence the almost tropical fertility of Natal and eastern Cape Colony, with their high rainfall, their luxuriance of vegetation, indigo, figs, and coffee, and the jungles of cactus and mimosa which choke their torrid kloofs. Hence, equally, the more austere veld of the central tableland, the great grass wildernesses, which are as characteristic of South Africa as the prairies and the pampas of America, and, like them, ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... contrast was the sandy plain over which we rode. On this grew the short, stubby buffalo-grass, the dust-colored sage-brush, and cactus in rank profusion. Over to the right, perhaps a mile away, a long range of foothills ran down to the horizon, with here and there the great canons, through which entrance was effected to the upland country, each canon bearing a historical or ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... had a pleasant ride over a valley-plain, between hedges of cactus in flower and bushes of red roses, past graceful clumps of bamboo waving like ostrich feathers. By-and-by drizzling rain came on and compelled us to seek shelter in the only inn in a poor out-of-the-way hamlet. But I could not stop here, ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... to say they were not friendly. I now turned back and examined the Indian woman's camp. She had only fire enough to make a smoke. Her conical shaped basket left behind, contained a few poor arrows and some cactus leaves, from which the spines had been burned, and there lay the little pallet where the baby was sleeping. It was a bare ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... aquarium building, standing isolated near its centre, is worthy of its surroundings. As seen from the bay, it gleams white amid the half-tropical foliage, with the circling rampart of hills, flanked by Vesuvius itself, for background. And near at hand the picturesque cactus growth scrambling over the walls gives precisely the necessary finish to the otherwise rather severe type of the architecture. The ensemble prepares one to be pleased with whatever the structure may have to ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... on a small sandy beach, and then started off into the country, and by noon we had caught three large tortoises which we found feeding on cactus plants. Then, as we were resting and eating, we suddenly heard the report of a heavy gun, and then another and another. We clambered up the side of a rugged hill, from the summit of which we could see the harbour, a mile distant, and there was the Britannia lying at anchor, ...
— "Old Mary" - 1901 • Louis Becke
... sunrise, floating high in a thin, expanded atmosphere. Did clouds everywhere in the universe always look much the same? Wolfish, glinting darts, vanishing away. Then a mountainside covered with spiny growths that, from a distance, seemed half cactus and half pine. A road, a field, a dull-hued cylinder pointing upward. Shapes of soft, bluish grey, topped like rounded roofs, unfolding out of a chink, and swaying off in a kind of run—with little clinkings of equipment, for there were sounds, too. Two eyelike organs projecting upward, the pupils ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... a couteau des prairies on a small scale, traversed the plain from east to west. A thicket of cactus covered part of its summit. Towards this thicket I ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... African game, as a general rule, avoids a country where the grass grows very high. We enjoyed, however, some bold and wonderful mountain scenery, and obtained glimpses through the flying murk of the vast plains and the base of Suswa. On a precipitous canon cliff we found a hanging garden of cactus and of looped cactus-like vines that was a marvel to behold. We ran across the hartebeeste on our way home. Our men were already out of meat; the hartebeeste of yesterday had disappeared. These porters are a good deal like the old-fashioned Michigan ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... momentous lunar screed Proves the persistence of this wondrous breed. Yet this in PICKERING'S favour let us state: He has no scare or scandal to relate— Nothing in any way that may impugn The credit or the morals of the moon; And on the other hand it does attract us To learn that she is growing sage and cactus. Hardly romantic vegetables, these, And not so edible as good green cheese Which nursery rhymers (banned by MONTESSORI) Associated with the lunar story. Still PICKERING'S vegetable views are tame Contrasted with Professor GODDARD'S aim; For he, as from the daily Press we learn, An obvious ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... at our high altitude, and several times a most extraordinary stench, as of decaying carcasses, would assail our nostrils and cause us to grow faint and sickly. Soon we began to notice that these poisonous vapours were most pungent in the vicinity of certain enormous cactus-like growths which we encountered here and there; but these huge plants looked so picturesque and beautiful that we found it hard to believe that they could taint the ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... attempts to leave the herd was to send a bullet through his horn, which gave him something to think about and shake his head over. No doubt it hurt him terribly, but it generally was an effective check to his waywardness. And when some old hoary-headed bull wanted to "gang his ain gait" a piece of cactus tossed on to his back, whence it was difficult to shake off, would give him ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... note: strategic location 160 km south of the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; mostly exposed rock, but enough grassland to support goat herds; dense stands of fig-like trees, scattered cactus ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... plants. Probably five hundred kinds have been, or are, in cultivation in the gardens of the few specialists who take an interest in Cactuses; but these are practically unknown in English horticulture. It is not, however, very many years ago that there was something like a Cactus mania, when rich amateurs vied with each other in procuring and growing large collections of the rarest and ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... breath of Nature that was delightful. The scent of violets was worth all the incense in the world; all the splendid marbles and priestly vestments seemed hard and cold when compared with the glorious colors of the cactus and the wild forms of the golden and gigantic aloes. The Favonian breeze played on the brow of this beautiful hill, and the exquisite palm-trees, while they bowed their rustling heads, answered in responsive chorus ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... once more come into the desert. At length we reached the rim of the mile-deep Caraveli Canyon and our eyes were gladdened at sight of the rich green oasis, a striking contrast to the barren walls of the canyon. As we descended the long, winding road we passed many fine specimens of tree cactus. At the foot of the steep descent we found ourselves separated from the nearest settlement by a very wide river, which it was necessary to ford. Neither of the Tejadas had ever been here before and its depths and dangers were unknown. Fortunately Pablo found a forlorn ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... Nablus lies in the hollow between Mount Gerizim on the south and Mount Ebal on the north. The side of Gerizim is precipitous and jagged; Ebal rises more smoothly, but very steeply, and is covered with plantations of thornless cactus, (Opuntia cochinillifera), cultivated for the sake of the cochineal insects which live upon the plant and from which a red ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... rosemary, crushing it between her white fingers. "See," she said, "some of us are like that it takes a blow to find the sweetness in our souls. Some of us need dry, hard places, like the poppies "—pointing to a mass of brilliant bloom—"and some of us are always thorny, like the cactus, with only once in ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... are still cultivated by Indians, descendants of cliff dwellers, who raise corn, squashes, melons, potatoes, etc., to reinforce the produce of the many wild food-furnishing plants, nuts, beans, berries, yucca and cactus fruits, grass and sunflower seeds, etc., and the flesh of animals, deer, rabbits, lizards, etc. The canon Indians I have met here seem to be living much as did their ancestors, though not now driven into ...
— The Grand Canon of the Colorado • John Muir
... Thea dragged him over the hill and made a camp under the shade of a bush or a bank, he would waddle about and play with his blocks, or bury his monkey in the sand and dig him up again. Sometimes he got into the cactus and set up a howl, but usually he let his sister read peacefully, while he coated his hands and face, first with an all-day sucker and then ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... hard day's work to a strong man. At the end of it he lay gasping and sick, aching in every limb, almost blind with glare and over-exertion, weary to death—and entirely happy. Thank God he would be able to stand up in a moment and rest behind a big cactus. Then he would have a spell of foot-work for a change, and, though crouching double, would not be doing any crawling until he had crossed the ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... blazing sky. Heat rose up from the ground and hung heavily over man and beast. Many insects sat out in the sun rattling with joy; the little tearing river grew clear from the swollen mud, and shrank to a succession of standing pools; and the fat, squatting cactus bloomed everywhere into butter-colored flowers big as tulips in the sand. There were artesian wells in Mesa, and the water did not taste very good; but if you drank from the standing pools where the river had been, you repaired ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... pockets emptied. Even the boots and socks of the man had been removed, so thorough had been the search. Whatever the murderers had been looking for it was not money, since his purse, still fairly well lined with greenbacks, was found behind a cactus ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... almost any forms of plant-structure which, for special reasons of utility, differ widely from these (to us) more habitual forms, the result is not suggestive of beauty. Many of the tropical and un-tree-like plants—such as the cactus tribe—strike us as odd and quaint, not as beautiful. Be this however as it may, I trust I have said enough to prove that in the vegetable world, at all events, the attainment of beauty cannot be held to have been an object aimed at, so to speak, for its own sake. Even if, for the purposes of ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... curious formations that are always inherent in volcanic regions. The region surrounding Naples is abrupt, picturesque, with the same irregular outline of hills that characterizes the elevations in the Tonto basin in Arizona. The vegetation is of the tropical type. The cactus is common, although it grows to no such monstrous heights as in Arizona. Orange and lemon groves prevail as far as the eye can see. On every height towns and villages crown the crests and sweep in winding terraces around the hillsides. Olive orchards abound. ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... a good start. Appointed Professor POPOFF to be our Naturalist. He is a little out of practice, but passed the preliminary examination very satisfactorily. Only made one trifling mistake. Said that tea-roses belonged to the cactus family. Fancy they don't, but am not sure. The suggestion that cucumbers were dug out of the ground like potatoes, was only an error of judgment. Anyone might have made it. But although rusty in his science, he is well up in machine-gun drill. He will suit the expedition to a nicety. Artillery, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 13, 1892 • Various
... as Ted Strong sat on Sultan and gazed across the wide valley, over which the sun's warm rays shimmered above the sand and cactus, greasewood and sage toward a low-lying ranch house in the far distance, it did not seem at ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... I will do the same. Take all you can carry and follow in my wake." Jones, as he spoke, seized a torch, extinguished it, and handed it to Dick. Equipped as he had directed, they set out, half crawling, half swimming, to avoid the volumes of smoke hovering in the thick, cactus-like leaves of the wild laurel. Presently they emerged, after toil and misery, that excitement alone enabled the boy to support, into what seemed a cleared space. But as soon as their eyes could distinguish clearly, they found themselves on the edge of a wide pond. ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... to differ from most other trees in having all its branches in one plane, like the sticks of a fan or the feathers of a peacock's tail." I may further mention, that the specimen which showed me the abrupt cactus-like terminations of Ulodendron repeated the evidence of Messrs. Lindley and Hutton's specimen regarding the arrangement of the cone scars on opposite sides, and showed also that these scars ascended to within little more than an inch of the top ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... cactus, of which they make needles, grows abundantly on the mountains round Ollantay-tampu. It is called ahuarancu. They set fire to the cacti as a war signal. Zegarra calls it a thistle. The word in the ...
— Apu Ollantay - A Drama of the Time of the Incas • Sir Clements R. Markham
... to do out there in the wilderness meant thousands of dollars to the stockholders somewhere up in God's country, who would some day hold them to account for them. They dragged their chains through miles and miles of jungle, and over flat alkali beds and cactus, and they reared bridges across roaring canons. We know nothing about them and we care less. When their work is done we ride over the road in an observation-car and look down thousands and thousands ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... point, one day last autumn, Horace and Sylvia found a plantation of our one New England cactus, the prickly pear (Opuntia opuntia). We have it here and there in our rocky pasture; but in greater heat and with better underfeeding it seemed a bit of a tropical plain dropped on the eastern coast. Do you know the thing? The leaves are shaped like the fans of a lobster's tail ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... cactus and the aloe bloom Beneath the window of your room; Your window where, at evenfall, Beneath the twilight's first pale star, You linger, tall and spiritual, And ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... tree by digging the nest out of the dead wood where a knot hole offers a convenient opening. The only place I have ever known them regularly to nest in living trees is in the deserts of Arizona, where the saguaro or "tree cactus" is about the only tree large enough to be employed for such a purpose. In the {35} Northern States Flickers sometimes chisel holes through the weatherboarding of ice-houses and make cavities for their eggs in the tightly packed sawdust within. They have been ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... right after Lewis and Clark came back and told their beaver stories, the country was known, you might say. It was at the Three Forks that Colter and Potts, two of the Lewis and Clark men, were attacked by the Blackfeet, and Potts killed and Colter forced to run naked, six miles over the stones and cactus—till at last he killed his nearest pursuer with his own spear, and hid under a raft of driftwood in ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... our attention to a view panoramic and matchless beneath the glamour of sunset. Below us lay the mission town, its crude buildings aglow with rosy light; to the left was the canon, a frowning wilderness of manzanita, cactus and chaparral; to the right towered the triune peak of the Bishop, purple against an amber sky; in the distance were the shimmering waters of the Pacific. Upon the face of the landscape brooded infinite peace, and the soft ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... what had been the debatable ground, as much the enemy's as ours, and had not gone far before we were suddenly aware of a group of Spanish horsemen over the hedge of cactus to the left of the road, brightly dressed young fellows wearing the blue linen and red facings of the guarda civile, who at the sight of us turned and dashed back through the fields as though to give news of our approach. Then there was a freshly macheted opening ...
— The Surrender of Santiago - An Account of the Historic Surrender of Santiago to General - Shafter, July 17, 1898 • Frank Norris
... multiple embrace. The desmodium and genesta celebrate their hospitality with a joke, as it were, letting their threshold fall beneath the feet of the caller, and startling him with an explosion and a cloud of yellow powder, suggesting the day pyrotechnics of the Chinese. The prickly-pear cactus encloses its buzzing visitor in a golden bower, from which he must emerge at the roof as dusty as a miller. The barberry, in similar vein, lays mischievous hold of the tongue of its sipping bee, and ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... and south for a distance of five miles, through a bare, level prairie tenanted only by roving cattle and horses—if one excepts rabbits, prairie dogs, rattlesnakes, owls, lizards, and scorpions. There was no vegetation except grease-wood, cactus, and sagebrush. In heavy rains or during sudden meltings of the snow back on the mountains, each of several small gullies bore its share of water to the junction at the beginning; of the arroyo, from whence it sped, tumbling and churning ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... garden, a bit of colour and greenery squeezed in, as it were, between cliff and fortress, from which one looks down over precipices of red rock with the prickly pear clinging to their clefts and ledges, or across a rift of sea to the huge bare front of the Testa del Cane with gigantic euphorbias, cactus, and orange-gardens fringing its base. A bribe administered to Talleyrand is said to have saved the political existence of Monaco at the Congress of Vienna: but it is far more wonderful that, after all the annexations ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... rode on, alone, I stood up and took in the scenery like a tourist ... there danced away, and gathered in, the shimmering, sun-flooded desert ... an endless flat expanse of silver sage and sentinel cactus. I saw bleached bones and a side-cast skull with whitened horns, poking up into the sky ... I saw a sick steer straggling alone, exactly like some melodramatic painting of Western life ... the kind we see hanging for ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... here was comparatively level, rising gradually to the foot of the rock, which then rose steeply up. A few houses were scattered about, surrounded by gardens. Hedges of cactus lined the road. Parties of soldiers and sailors, natives with carts, and women in picturesque costumes passed along. The vegetation on the low ground was abundant, and Bob looked with delight at the ...
— Held Fast For England - A Tale of the Siege of Gibraltar (1779-83) • G. A. Henty
... across just such land as southern Texas, endless flat sand scattered with chaparral, mesquite, and cactus; nowhere a sign of life, but for fences of one or two barb-wires on crooked sticks—not even bird life. The wind, strong and incessant as at sea, sounded as mournful through the thorny mesquite bushes as in our Northern winters, even ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... walnut and butternut seedlings. I have no acreage of nut trees. I grow seedlings and plant them wherever I find a place protected from the stock and within reach of moisture from the irrigation ditch, as this is a desert, cactus country. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Thirty-Fourth Annual Report 1943 • Various
... For a mile or so the route lay through fertile gardens and fields. Then suddenly the cultivation ended abruptly on the edge of a sandy desert that, seamed with nullahs, or deep, steep-sided ravines, and dotted with tall clumps of thorny cactus, stretched away to the horizon. The road became a barely discernible track; but the two sowars cantered on, confidently heading for the spot where the fresh ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... dream of Egypt, which beckoned and drew me towards it with a glamour I could not resist. Over the wall of the garden the orange-trees lifted their mounds of impenetrable foliage; and the blossoms of the pomegranates, sprinkled against such a background, were like coals of fire. The fig-bearing cactus grew about the house in clumps twenty feet high, covered with pale-yellow flowers. The building was large and roomy, with a court-yard, around which ran a shaded gallery. The farmer who was issuing therefrom as I approached ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... extends a range of round-topped hills, 15 or 16 hundred feet high, covered with a grey-brownish coating, relieved only here and there by patches of dead green, and furrowed by clefts, within which the bright red of tile-roofed houses is discernible. Half-withered cactus trees, the only plants which take root in the ungenial soil, impart no life to the dreary landscape. The hills continue rising in undulating outlines, and extend into the interior of the country, where they unite with the great chain ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... mental, emotional, or behavioral impairment in an individual. Hallucinogens are drugs that affect sensation, thinking, self- awareness, and emotion. Hallucinogens include LSD (acid, microdot), mescaline and peyote (mexc, buttons, cactus), amphetamine variants (PMA, STP, DOB), phencyclidine (PCP, angel dust, hog), phencyclidine analogues (PCE, PCPy, TCP), and others (psilocybin, psilocyn). Hashish is the resinous exudate of the cannabis or hemp plant (Cannabis sativa). Heroin is a semisynthetic derivative ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... the speaker might possibly have the power to enforce his sentence diverted my attention from the slate, and I looked round. In front of the Jack-in-a-box stood a tiny red flower-pot and saucer, in which was a miniature cactus. My thoughts flew back to a bazaar in London where, years ago, a stand of these fairy plants had excited my warmest longings, and where a benevolent old gentleman whom I had not seen before, and never saw again, bought this one and gave it to me. Vague memories ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... shadows. The house, of red brick, one story, ran low and long beneath the trees. Through its middle, dividing its six rooms in half, extended a broad, arched passageway, picturesque with flowering cactus and hanging red earthern jars. A "gallery," low and broad, encircled the building. Vines climbed about it, and the adjacent ground was, for a space, covered with transplanted grass and shrubs. A little lake, long and ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... the city had given place to garden, cultivated field, trees dotted here and there, and then hedges which looked weird, ghastly, and strange in the moonlight, being composed of those fleshy, nightmare-looking plants of cactus growth, the prickly pears, with their horrible thorns, while more and more the way in front began to spread out wild, desolate and strange in the soft, misty, silvery grey of the moonlight, through which the long-legged animals stalked, casting weird shadows upon the soft, sandy road, and save ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... A simple, dignified woman dressed in home-spun. At her knees a boy and a girl - the future builders of the Western country. She has crossed the cactus-covered plains, has endured the greatest hardships, that she may rear her sturdy little ones to lay the foundations of a mighty Western empire. The bulls' heads are symbolic of sacrifice; oak leaves symbolize strength. She is ...
— Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts • Juliet James
... My questioning thought and shows me yuccas, cactus Whose thick leaves in the rainless places thrive. And shows me leaves that must have rain, and roots That must have water where the river flows. And how the spirit of life, though turned or driven This way or that beyond a course begun, Cannot be stayed or quenched, but moves, conforms To soil and ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... the dwelling, with its group of outhouses. By chance he found a path leading to the rear of these which he had not traversed before, and followed it until he came to a hedge of thickly set trees of some variety of cactus, which seemed to have been planted to form an enclosure. Cautiously pushing aside the branches bordering a small gap in this hedge, Uncle John discovered a charming garden lying beyond, so he quickly squeezed himself through ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... mouth would have been pretty but for a trace of moustache. Upon the whole, aided by the resources of the toilet, her appearance at distance was such, that some might have thought her, if anything, rather beautiful, though of a style of beauty rather peculiar and cactus-like. ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... 18th, at 8 A.M., we drive over the bridge which crosses Cherry Creek, and then cross six miles of uninhabited prairie, seamed with gulches, and brown with withered herbage and cactus—no verdure except along the canals, where several species of Artemisia and a prickly poppy with a large white flower grow profusely. We then begin to mount the bare foot-hills, among which are curious ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... is a joyous trysting-place, my love, With no inconstant climate to distract us; Pure azure is the sky that laughs above These admirable bowers of prickly cactus, Where we may nestle, conjugating ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 21, 1920 • Various
... been everywhere and seen everything," he said once. Towards the end of the afternoon Olivia had been much touched by a little incident; she had asked him a question about a curious cactus. "If you will come with me, my dear," he had answered, "I could show you a better specimen"—and then a dull red had risen to his forehead. "Excuse me, Mrs. Luttrell. I forgot whom I was addressing—and—and—you——" but here he ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Strictly business. Known among the trade as the human cactus. Canceled a ten-thousand-dollar order once because the grateful salesman called her 'girlie.' Stick ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... whom he cursed were in Elysium compared to the place where he tortured himself. There are desert birds that silently surround a rattlesnake, as he sleeps, with little bundles of cactus-heads and their million needles, so that, when the reptile wakes, it cannot escape through the palisade of bristling weapons by which it is surrounded; and in ghoulish anger it strikes its fangs into its own body until it dies. Just such a helpless rage held ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... huge blocked-out town, and set where no town could ever live. Benton was prey for sun, wind, dust, drought, and the wind was terribly and insupportably cold. No sage, no cedars, no grass, not even a cactus-bush, nothing green or living to relieve the eye, which swept across the gray and the white, through the dust, to the distant bare and desolate hills ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... it, youngster. We might go within ten feet of him, and never see him. Why, I've knowed 'em to hide behind a brown-bush, clump er cactus, or a rock, so mighty cunnin' thet ther ain't one scout in fifty would see 'em, ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... enough to suit the Blackfeet. An old fellow commenced to shout at him, and motion for him to go faster. But he didn't wish to go faster; the ground was thickly grown to prickly-pear cactus, and he had to pick his path ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... of the four days we turned in at a deep bay and came to anchor. The country was the usual proposition—very light-brown, brittle-looking mountains, about two thousand feet high; lots of sage and cactus, a pebbly beach, and not a sign of anything fresh ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... the scent of flowers, is the sort of dwelling that would suit the climate and the habit of life here. But the present occupiers have taken no hints from the natives. In village and country they have done all they can, in spite of the maguey and the cactus and the palm and the umbrella-tree and the live-oak and the riotous flowers and the thousand novel forms of vegetation, to give everything a prosaic look. But why should the tourist find fault with this? The American likes it, and he would not like the picturesqueness of the Spanish ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... though you looked very good to me that day I was starving and tried to catch you to eat." And they all laughed, for once Button had nearly caught Black Wings, but he proved too quick for the half starved cat and flew up in a cactus plant and cawed and scolded Button. Afterwards they became good friends, and Black Wings carried a message to Nannie telling her that Billy, Stubby and Button would be back at the old farm on Billy's birthday. They had met the crow on the desert near Salt Lake City, and he had flown ...
— Billy Whiskers' Adventures • Frances Trego Montgomery
... evidently understood English pretty well. Naab laughed, and while Hare ate breakfast he talked of the sheep. The flock he had numbered three thousand. They were a goodly part of them Navajo stock: small, hardy sheep that could live on anything but cactus, and needed little water. This flock had grown from a small number to its present size in a few years. Being remarkably free from the diseases and pests which retard increase in low countries, the sheep ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... forgot to say that Wm. MacLaggan was the largest and ugliest goat ever known to the memory of man, and had been taught every vice and wickedness any goat could be taught, and it is as natural for a goat to imbibe sin as it is for him to eat a cactus, or ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... verb made out of the name of Luther Burbank, the man who has raised such marvelous flowers in California and has turned the cactus into a food for cattle instead of a ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... with verdure, and making them the winter home of the buffalo,—the favorite hunting-grounds of the Indians,—while the streams which flow from the southern slope of the mountains are alkaline, and, instead of luxuriant vegetation, there are vast regions covered with wild sage and cactus. They run into the Great Salt Lake, and have no outlet to the ocean. A late writer, describing the geological features ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... girls do the piano. On Tuesday Cust and Miss B. and another girl and I went over into Spain to see the meet and we had a short run after a fox who went to earth, much to my relief, in about three minutes and before I had been thrown off. There are no fences but the ground is one mass of rocks and cactus and ravines down which these English go with an ease that makes me tremble with admiration. We had not come out to follow, so we, being quite soaked through and very hungry, went to an inn and it was such an inn as Don Quixote used to stop at, with the dining-room over the stable ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... hills are nearer than the Himalaya, from the constant alteration of the river-beds, the road undulates remarkably for this part of India, and a jungly vegetation ensues, consisting of the above plants, with the yellow-flowered Cactus replacing the Euphorbias, which were previously much more common. Though still 100 miles distant from the hills, mosses appeared on the banks, and more ferns were just ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... crowned with towering sahuaros, and in the dip of the pass ahead a mighty forest of their misshapen stalks was thrust up like giant fingers against the horizon. The trail wound in among them, where they rose like fluted columns above the lesser cactus—great skin-covered tanks, gorged fat with water too bitter to quench the fieriest thirst, yet guarded jealously by poison-barbed spines. Gilded woodpeckers, with hearts red as blood painted upon their breasts, dipped in uneven flight from sahuaro to sahuaro, dodged ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... say that I am myself nettled, when they reply that they prefer the advanced atrophy. A good counter-irritant in cases of blood-poisoning is a stout holly leaf, eaten raw. In serious cases of collapse, if a patient can be got to consume a cactus or a prickly pear, the stimulative effect is really surprising. In the absence of these products of the vegetable kingdom, a hedge-stake, taken directly after a meal, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 9, 1892 • Various
... pretty sharply-inclined plane, and swept very close to the villages of Thembo and Tura-Wels. The latter forms part of the Unyamwezy, a magnificent country, where the trees attain enormous dimensions; among them the cactus, ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... its branches, it is rather a graceful plant. Its leaves are small, covered with a resinous substance; and, particularly when bruised and crushed, exhale a singular but very agreeable and refreshing odor. This shrub and the yucca, with many varieties of cactus, make the characteristic features in the vegetation for a long distance to the eastward. Along the foot of the mountain, 20 miles to the southward, red stripes of flowers were visible during the morning, which we supposed to be variegated sandstones. We rode rapidly during ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... visit to Laramie, ninety-five miles north-east of our post. Leaving at noon in procession, with three ambulances and as many army wagons, scaling the bluffs, bare of everything like trees or shrubs, and only covered with grass and wild flowers, and now and then sage-bush and prickly-pear cactus, which are very troublesome to the horses' feet. The roads were, as usual, very hard and fine, so that up hill and down dale we made six miles to the hour all the way. Our first station was Horse Creek, twenty-five miles, ...
— Three Years on the Plains - Observations of Indians, 1867-1870 • Edmund B. Tuttle
... Courtnay sprang up and dashed for him. Tinker bolted round a group of shrubs, Courtnay after him. Finding him unpleasantly quick on his feet Tinker bolted into the shrubs. Courtnay plunged after him right into a well-grown specimen of the flowering cactus. It brought him up short. He began to swear, and though he could have sworn with equal fluency and infelicity in French, German, or Italian, in the depth of his genuine emotion he returned to the tongue of his boyhood, and swore in English. When he came out of the shrubs, ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... and it was all desert. Two years ago when they first came this cotton field was uneven heaps of blown sand, desert cactus, and mesquite—barren and forbidding as a nightmare of thirst and want. It had taken a year's work and nearly all their meagre capital to level it and dig the water ditches. And the next year—that was last year—the crop was light and ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... led down to the garden and was decorated by lemon and pomegranate trees in tubs, and with cactus and aloe and flowering plants, stood a young girl of about twenty, scattering millet from two plates held by a barefooted child of twelve. At her feet were assembled hens, turkeys, ducks, pigeons, sparrows ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... everything is ready for another start. On, on we go, through a barren cactus country, till we reach the Mohave river. The day is far spent, we are all very weary, men as well as animals. So, boys, off with the packs of provisions, and let your mules go with their long hair ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... Fork, and to the right a march of lessening hills, and all before us one awful vast gray, sad and silent plain, and in dimmest distance again the gray summits about Pryor's Gap. The space before us was a vast park, thick with cactus and sage-brush, lit up here and there—but especially at the point where the canyon sets free the river on to the plain—by brilliant masses of tinted rocks or clays in level strata overlapping one ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... and noble draped figures walking beside them or majestically perching on their rumps. And for miles and miles there will be no more towns—only, at intervals on the naked slopes, circles of rush-roofed huts in a blue stockade of cactus, or a hundred or two nomad tents of black camel's hair resting on walls of wattled thorn and grouped about ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... the next mornin' the white pony is limpin' an' draggin' his off hind hoof, an' when he's standin' still he p'ints the toe down like something's fetched loose. Black Cloud is sore; but he can't find no cactus thorn nor nothin' to bring about the lameness an' he don't know what to make of the racket. Black Cloud's up ag'inst it, an' the audience begins to figger that the Lance's' medicine is too strong for ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... orange groves and high cactus hedges. From the hills here there is a beautiful view of the valley and gulf of Calvi. Junction here with road to Corte, 55-1/2 miles, south-east, passing through a charming and picturesque ...
— Itinerary through Corsica - by its Rail, Carriage & Forest Roads • Charles Bertram Black
... the glaring sunshine of that May morning, after they had unsaddled at Moreno's, after the sergeant, wearied with the vigils of two successive nights, had gone to sleep in the coolest shade he could find, there came riding across the sun-baked, cactus-dotted plain at the west a young man who had the features of the American and the grave, courteous ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... and mosquitoes. Clearings had all ended, and the red land formed broken waves of poor soil, almost nude of vegetation at this mid-winter of the tropics, except thickets of "milk plant" and forests of quadrangular cactus; the latter are quaint as the dragon-tree, some twenty feet tall and mostly sun-scorched to touchwood. The baobab (adansonia) is apparently of two kinds, the "Imbundeiro," hung with long- stringed calabashes, which forms swarming-places for bees; and the "Aliconda" ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... moment threw itself into a decorative pattern fit to be remembered. It is the same effect which you get more constantly in Spain, so that the commonest things are transfigured into beauty. For in the cactus and the aloe and the broad fields of grain, in the mules with their wide panniers and the peasants, in the shepherds' huts and the straggling farm-houses, the romantic is there, needing no subtlety to be discovered; and the least imaginative may feel a certain thrill ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... through a hotbed of sensuality and a hailstorm of seduction, on a single twilight eve in London had four or five encounters the particulars of which remained in my memory as barbed arrows remain imbedded in the flesh, smarting and itching and burning like the thorny fibres of cactus or sweetbriar seed with which one has ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... doctor get matters arranged it will really make no difference whether a farmer is located in the black-waxy district, or on the arid cactus-cursed lands of the trans-Pecos country, as he will have to surrender to the public all he produces in excess of what the poorest land in use will yield. He will have no incentive to study the capabilities of his ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... banked up together. You should have seen my lily bed! I made the men collect all the odd bulbs and plant them together, and they were a perfect show. The scent met you half-way down the path; it was almost overpowering. And then I had a lot of the new cactus dahlias, and left only about two branches on each, so that they came up like one huge bush with all the lovely contrasting colours. Many people say they don't like dahlias, but that is only because they haven't seen ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... water. He was agreeable and we hunched up to each other. It ain't to my credit to say it, but I was worse hurt than that Injun, so I worked him. He got the short straw, and had to crawl a mile through cactus, while I sat comfortable on the cause of the disagreement and yelled to him that he looked like a badger, and other things that an Injun wouldn't feel was a compliment." Red leaned back and roared. "I can see him now putting his hands ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... tell to all who would listen of his past experiences, in every one of which he unblushingly figured as the hero. But he really handled the big touring car in an admirable manner, and when one afternoon a tire was punctured by a cactus spine by the roadside—their first accident—they could not fail to admire the dexterous manner in which he changed the tube ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... them in blank amazement, thinking they must all have lost their wits together, I was unconsciously being dragged and pulled along till we came to a kind of ruined marble staircase, down which they hurried me into something still resembling a spacious chamber; for though the wild fig-tree and cactus pushed their fantastic branches through gaps in the walls, these stood partly upright as yet, discovering in places the dull red glow ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... of growing out of each other, (note the singular imposition in many of them, the prickly pear for instance, of the fruit upon the body of the plant, so that it looks like a swelling or disease,) and often farther opposed by harsh truncation of line as in the cactus truncatophylla. All these circumstances so concur to deprive the plant of vital evidences, that we receive from it more sense of pain than of beauty; and yet even here, the sharpness of the angles, the symmetrical order and strength of the spines, the fresh and even color of the body, are ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... desert plain & up dry wash. Daddy suffered from heat & ran into cactus while looking for shade. Got it in his mouth, tongue, feet & all over body. Fixed him up poor creature groaned all evening & would not eat his supper. Poor feed & wood here. Water found by digging 2 ft. in sand in sandstone basins in bed of dry wash. Monte lay ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... slumbering, but I lifted my eyes; high in the heavens floated a flock of birds flying back to us.... 'Spring! welcome spring!' I shouted aloud: 'welcome, life and love and happiness!' And at that instance, with sweetly troubling shock, suddenly like a cactus flower thy image blossomed aflame within me, blossomed and grew, bewilderingly fair and radiant, and I knew that I love thee, thee only—that I am all filled full ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... Many varieties of cactus, prickly pears, plums and plants with the most gorgeous flowers lined their path, and gave constant delight to young Smith and some of the others, but Jack and Percival were more intent on seeing where they would come out than in looking at plants ...
— The Hilltop Boys on Lost Island • Cyril Burleigh
... a creation, and a beneficent one. It has opened up vast territories to the farmer, gardener and stock-raiser, where before cactus and sagebrush were supreme; and the prairie-dog and his chum, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... soon after their coming to the ranch, a cactus fence round the house enclosure; and seeing the dry ugliness of the long, straight sticks placed close together, Annesley disliked and wondered at it. At last she questioned Knight, and complained that the bristly ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... name of California, which conveys to-day such opulent suggestions, then meant nothing but barrenness, and Nevada was a name as yet unknown; some future Congressman, innocent of taste and of Spanish, was to hit upon the absurdity of calling that land of silver and cactus, of the orange and the sage-hen, the land of snow. But imperfect as was the appreciation, at that day, of the possibilities which lay hidden in those sunset regions, there was still enough of instinctive greed in the minds of politicians to make ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... Judy had forgone three meals! He shut his lips tightly, and a light of almost heroic resolve came into his eyes. Round at the side of the house was the window to the pantry; he had often gazed longingly up at it, but had never ventured to attempt the ascent, for there was a horrible cactus creeper up ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... place for me," commented Billie as he kept himself well hidden behind a giant cactus. "It reminds me of Ali Baba and the forty thieves. I hope I have better ...
— The Broncho Rider Boys with Funston at Vera Cruz - Or, Upholding the Honor of the Stars and Stripes • Frank Fowler
... beautiful Santa Marguerite valley with its carpet of green, enlivened with splashes of yellow from the wild mustard blossoms. Across the swift flowing ford of the Salinis river, through deep ravines and mountain gorges, and over miles and miles of sun-baked sand and dreary waste of stunted cactus ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... saw him wet and cold from a hard day of loading ship through the surf and insisted on "mothering" him to the extent of seeing that he had dry clothing and other comforts. And, although the difference between the green tropic isle beyond the sunset which lay enshrined in her memory and this barren cactus-grown pile of volcanic rocks was immeasurable, yet the one, in its peace, its soft sweet air, and the near presence of the murmuring sea, called ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... a species which has the habit of feeding upon the cactus, is used for a dye stuff, for which service the brightly colored body is appropriated. Although the creature is deliberately planted where it is to feed, and thus is in a way submitted to culture, it cannot fairly be said to have been entered in the domesticated circle ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... or three mouldering peach-trees, and all over the roof and floor a riot of green tomatoes, a fruit which even when it becomes ruddy-faced I do not particularly like. In a single large pot stood a dissipated cactus, resembling a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various
... a growing hedge of cactus plants around the goat-pasture. This kind of cactus grows straight up in tall, round spikes about as large around as a boy's leg, and higher than a man's head. The spikes are covered with long, stiff spines that stick straight ...
— The Mexican Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... well, Little Brother," calls Arul, as she hurries back on the narrow path that winds between boulders and thickets of prickly pear cactus. Green parrots are screaming in the tamarind trees and overhead a white-throated Brahmany kite wheels motionless in the vivid blue. The sun is blazing now, but Arul runs unheeding. It is time for school—she knows it by the sun-clock in ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... her garden that I had not? She would be so pleased to exchange plants with me, and had I any of the new cactus Dahlias, and so on, until we reached the walk's end, and turned about under a veteran cherry tree that showered us ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... horse, and it started forward eagerly, while the girl in horror struggled on behind. Over rough, uneven ground, between greasewood, sage-brush, and cactus, back into the trail. The man, oblivious of her presence, rode contentedly on, a silent shadow on a dark horse wending a silent way between the purple-green clumps of other shadows, until, bewildered, the girl almost lost sight ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... after the hogs was nearly hopeless: all sound of them was swallowed up in the tangle of scrub. Yet I held on, crawling through thickets of lentisk, tangling my legs in creepers, pushing my head into clumps of cactus, here tearing my hands and boots on sharp granite, there ripping my clothes on prickly thorns. Once I found what appeared to be a goat-track. It led to another cleft of rock, where, beating down the briers, I looked down a chasm which ended, thirty feet below, in a whole brake of cacti. ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... of grades takes us past the base of Elk Mountain to a broad and sandy cactus-plain, whence we descend among curious trap and sandstone formations, simulating human architecture, to the crossing of the North Platte. A little farther on, so close to the snow-line that we shiver under the white ridges with a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... stateliness opposed by the flexile vivacity of the feathery willow acacia? The same white lilies, or their deliciously sweet July representatives, are contrasted well with scarlet geranium, vivid and glowing, or with the flames of the cactus, and toned down by the bluish lavender of the wistaria. This makes a bouquet eminently suited for church—its colors forming Ruskin's sacred chord, and typifying the union ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... to the saddle and turned down the river. Unfortunately the country here was an open one. Along the sandy shore of the stream the mesquite was thin. There was no soapweed and very little cactus. The terrain of the hill country farther back was rougher, more full of pockets, and covered with heavier brush. But it was necessary for the fugitives to ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... to feel the ground," said Florence, smiling at Madeline. "Miss Hammond, I suppose that prize horse of yours—White Stockings—would spoil his coat if he were heah to roll in this greasewood and cactus." ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... awful heat, the silence never broken by the cry of a bird, a hut rarely breaking the barren monotony, only an infrequent spring to save from death. It was almost impossible to get food or fresh horses. Many a night De la Vega and his stoical guide slept beneath a cactus, or in the mocking bed of a creek. The mustangs he managed to lasso were almost unridable, and would have bucked to death any but a Californian. Sometimes he lived on cactus fruit and the dried meat he had brought with ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... all the world beside, from the mystery of one beautiful and strange green thing to another, she went wandering and admiring, and now and then timidly advancing her nose to see if something glorious was something sweet too. She could hardly leave a superb cactus, in the petals of which there was such a singular blending of scarlet and crimson as almost to dazzle her sight; and if the pleasure of smell could intoxicate she would have reeled away from a luxuriant daphne odorata in full flower, over which she feasted for a ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... heavy screen of leaves and flowers which lies upon the surface of the water, which, however, is often strongly disturbed as some ungainly monster rolls or turns below them. On the outskirts of the towns are the gardens, enclosed by hedges of castor-oil or cactus, where many kinds of fruits and spices are grown: bananas, pineapple, guava, bael, citrons, etc., are some of the ordinary kinds, while the coco-nut, tamarind, jack, and papaya grow everywhere about the streets and ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly
... scenery of a piece, and when you arrive the curtain goes slowly up, and it is your first night. The beauty which you see is strangely artificial, and all partakes of the grotesque. Here flourishes that monstrous cactus-like growth called prickly-pear, with flat flap-like leaves resembling fingerless green hands; warped and brutal-looking stems looking like palsied arms. The cactus is abloom in red-hot poker ends. Orange trees and lemon trees and olive ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... the equator, where monstrous orchids blow, where beetles big as mice sit on the tent-ropes, and fireflies glide about by night like little moving stars, the travelers went three days through forests of cactus till they came to the open plains ...
— Tales of Three Hemispheres • Lord Dunsany
... citizens of the air. I had just then a great Cecropia, an able-bodied green gentleman armed with twelve thorn-like, sizable horns, and wearing, along with other agreeable adornments, three yellow and four red arrangements like growths of dwarf cactus plants on the segments behind his hard ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... 'Mid the cactus and the thistles of Mexico's fair lands, Where the cattle roam in thousands, a-many a herd and brand, There is a grave with neither headstone, neither date nor name,— There lies my partner sleeping in the ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... waited for nothing. It seemed to take new strength from the indignities inflicted upon it and it increased, if anything, its tempo of growth. It plunged into the ocean in a dozen spots at once. It swarmed over sand which had never known anything but cactus and the Sierra Madres became great humps of green against the skyline. This last conquest shocked those who had thought the mountains immune in their inhospitable heights. Cynodon dactylon, uninoculated, had always shunned coldness, though it survived ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... closing in, and the ruddy, horizontal rays of the sun were casting long grotesque shadows of the tall-branched plants of the cactus family that stood up, some like great fleshy leaves, rudely stuck one upon the other, and some like strangely rugged and prickly fluted columns, a body of Indians, about a hundred strong, rode over the plain ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... due time. But some impulse told him to turn to the right, and he began to wander westward along the edge of the cliffs—always on his left hand, space and the sea, and on his right, lawns or gardens or parapets crowned by cactus plants in urns, and behind these a great variety of houses—French chateaux and marble palaces and nice little white cottages, and, finally, a frowning Gothic castle. All alike seemed asleep, with empty piazzas and closed shutters, and the only ...
— The Beauty and the Bolshevist • Alice Duer Miller
... by Quails came to a hole, and one of the keenest-witted picked up a piece of prickly cholla cactus and pushed it into the hole; then they all ran in after it. But Coyote dug out the hole and reached them. When he came to the ...
— Myths and Legends of California and the Old Southwest • Katharine Berry Judson
... Once, when Dave sighted moving persons in the distance, Bowers drove the craft up to three thousand feet above the earth. But soon, under the glass, these suspects turned out to be a party of wretched refugees, hurrying, ragged, barefooted, starving, gaunt and cactus-torn, to safety within the American ...
— Dave Darrin at Vera Cruz • H. Irving Hancock
... time for relaxation. There was a deep veranda in front of the window and a lot of flowers planted in pots and tins. Beyond the veranda he had glimpses of a gorgeous garden, with sweetpeas, marguerites, queer-looking cactus plants, blazing-red geraniums, and a coral tree in ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... in shape like a water-melon, hangs from its delicate tendrils. When cut open, it is found filled with a juice-like nectar, having the flavour of the strawberry and peach. A species, of cactus—the nopal—produces the ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... beasts, and were tired besides and in no condition for running. Roosevelt and his mentor picketed them in a hollow, half a mile from the game, and started off on their hands and knees. Roosevelt blundered into a bed of cactus and filled his hands with the spines; but he came within a hundred and fifty feet or less of the buffalo. He drew up and fired. The bullet made the dust fly from the hide as it hit the body with a loud crack, but apparently did no particular harm. The three buffalo made off over a low rise ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... called for an instant remedy and I brought him the blotting paper, instead of smiling at the merry quality of my jest, he pursued me for two hours around my father's farm, and finally cornering me in the Discosaurus shed, larruped me for twenty full minutes with a paddle pulled from a prickly cactus plant in my mother's drawing-room, thorn side down. Indeed most of my early recollections of the old gentleman are inseparably associated with a series of chastisements which, even as he had prophesied when administering them, I have not been able to forget, although I cannot see that any ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... esteemed .45, the intrepidity of the one-card draw, and the nocturnal stimulation of towns from undue lethargy; but, hitherto, it had not been famed as a stronghold of aesthetics. Lonny Briscoe's brush had removed that disability. Here, among the limestone rocks, the succulent cactus, and the drought-parched grass of that arid valley, had been born the Boy Artist. Why he came to woo art is beyond postulation. Beyond doubt, some spore of the afflatus must have sprung up within him in spite of the desert soil ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... to be noted that we had not seen cactus nor sandy wastes, nor were the trees thorny, while many of the wild trees yielded good fruit. It is also to be noted that we did not see snow on the mountains, nor were there any mosquitos or ants in the land, which are very harmful, both ...
— The First Discovery of Australia and New Guinea • George Collingridge
... expression. The heat of the sun is great; but a gentle wind cools the air. Birds never sang more loud and clear. The flowers, too, on the window-sill, and on the table, rose, geranium, and the delicate crimson cactus, are all so beautiful, that we think the German poet right, when he calls the flowers "stars in the firmament of the earth." Out of doors all is quiet. Opposite the window stands the village schoolhouse. ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... in, hat in hand, and a few minutes later Selby stood in the middle of his room, his coat off, his shirt-sleeves rolled up. The chamber originally contained, besides the furniture, about two square feet of walking room, and now this was occupied by a cactus. The bed groaned under crates of pansies, lilies and heliotrope, the lounge was covered with hyacinths and tulips, and the washstand supported a species of young tree warranted to bear flowers at ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... enable the museum to exhibit the leaves, fibres, and other vegetable productions from which the cloth, baskets, and so forth were constructed by the people who placed their dead in the caves. Dr. Palmer also sent a full set of the rude apparatus by which the present Indians of Mexico make their cactus-cakes and syrup, from the thorn-tipped pole with which the prickly fruit is gathered to the great earthen colanders through which it is strained; also all the implements and utensils, the native still, etc., used in making pulque ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... lighter, and looked out upon the bright garden, the alms-houses, and the church tower. The upper part of the window was occupied by Katherine's large cage of canary birds, and below was a stand of flower-pots, a cactus which never dreamt of blossoming, an ice-plant, and a columnia belonging to Katherine, a nourishing daphne of Helen's, and a verbena, and a few geranium cuttings which she had brought from Dykelands, looking very miserable under cracked tumblers and stemless wine-glasses. On a small round ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... threw lassoes over the hind feet of the elephants, and tried to hold them, and the elephants bellowed, and dragged the cowboys and their ponies right amongst the other animals, and in about a minute, as the boss canvasman said when he came to, and they were picking the cactus thorns out of him: "Hell was ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck
... hedges of great height and density, and as even as a brick wall at the top and sides. There are also alleys forming long vistas between the trunks and beneath the boughs of oaks, ilexes, and olives; and there are shrubberies and tangled wildernesses of palm, cactus, rhododendron, and I know not what; and a profusion of roses that bloom and wither with nobody to pluck and few to look at them. They climb about the sculpture of fountains, rear themselves against pillars and porticos, run brimming over the walls, and strew ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... wall of neat masonry, instead of the usual crooked posts. Here were Chug Springs, the head of a branch stream, and from thence we went over what we were told was the toughest divide in the whole country. The heat was scorching over the dreary, dusty wastes of sand and alkali, where hardly the cactus could find sustenance. This was our first glimpse of the Mauvaises Terres, the alkali-lands, which turn up their white linings here and there, but do not quite prevail on this side the Platte. The Black Hills of Wyoming, with their dark jagged outlines, gave life to the backward view, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... leather. How devoutly did I long for the well-stuffed pig-skin of Hyde Park! We had an hour or two more hard work riding about the fields, when we reached the farm, watching the process of extracting pulque from the maguey or cactus,—and a very nasty process it is,—inspecting the granaries belonging to the hacienda, and dodging between the rows of Indian corn, which grows here to so prodigious a height as to rival the famous ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... before him, steeped in moonlight. No sound disturbed the stillness save the far-off cry of the screaming gulls and the monotonous murmur of the distant sea. Walking slowly down the road, grown high on both sides with sage and cactus, he caught a glimpse of a bulky ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... faint trail rose the dreary, angling grotesques of the cactus, and the dried and dead stalks of the soapweed. Beyond, to the south, lay a sea of shimmering space, clear to the light blue that edged the sky-line. The afternoon sun showed copper-red through a faint haze which bespoke a change of weather. The miles ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... crackled beneath a cactus that filled up the niche in the wall, and in black wood frames against the oak-stained paper hung Steuben's "Esmeralda" and Schopin's "Potiphar." The ready-laid table, the two silver chafing-dishes, the crystal ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... wonderful greenness denotes a cooler climate and more copious rains, also their slopes and valleys are densely wooded, and Kauai obviously has its characteristic features, one of which must certainly be a superabundance of that most unsightly cactus, the prickly pear, to which the motto nemo me impune lacessit ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... cases the stem itself is green, and to some extent replaces the leaves. In our common Broom we see an approach to this, and the same feature is more marked in Cactus. Or the leaves become fleshy, thus offering, in proportion to their volume, a smaller surface for evaporation. Of this the Stonecrops, Mesembryanthemum, etc., are familiar instances. Other modes of checking transpiration and thus ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... Hindu, so that an elegant union of the keen and naked Jain asceticism with the mellower and richer fancy of the luxurious Mohammedan has resulted in a perfect work of that art which makes death lovely by recalling its spiritual significance. Besides, a holy silence broods about the cactus and the euphorbian foliage, so that a word will send the paroquets, accustomed to such unbroken stillness, into hasty flights. The tomb proper is in the chamber at the centre, enclosed by delicately-trellised walls of stone. I can easily fancy that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... tell me how it is a man can get fond of so Godforsaken a country? Cactus and greasewood and mesquite, and for a change mesquite and greasewood and cactus! Nothing but sand washes and sand hills, except the naked mountains 'way off with their bones sticking through. But in the mo'ning like this, when the world's kind o' smiley with the sunshine, or ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... stolid ways, you would think them perfectly earthly; but an ethereal fire is all the while working in them, and bursting out in most unexpected little jets of poetry and sentiment, like blossoms on a cactus. ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... pathetically trodden-down-to-bits porphyry discs in the doorway. And the little cippus of a Roman girl who lived sixteen years and twenty-eight days. Against the apse, outside, the great python of a cactus. ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... speculations. If he resents the honest drawing of his well-known features, why, so much the better. His indignation may be fraught with wholesome reactions. Perhaps he will have his defenders—interested ones, of course. We may pluck the cactus-flower with hands cased in buckskin, and swear that it harbors no sting below its roseate and silken cockade of bloom. Prejudice is too often the saucepan on which we cook our criticisms; and when these are done to a turn we cast the vessel into a dust-bin, trying with mighty ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... these cleared away the air was as cool and pure and sweet as in a New England orchard in May. On a bush by the trail a tiny wren appeared and burst into song like a vivacious firecracker. Rock squirrels darted here and there, and tiny cactus flowers opened their sleepy eyes and poured out fragrance. And then, by and by, it was evening and we were truly ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... along the upper edge of a rock to the eastward a similar fringe in a scarcely less forward condition swayed and bent, dark against the blinding glare of the sun. And beyond this fringe was the silhouette of a plant mass, branching clumsily like a cactus, and swelling visibly, swelling like a bladder that fills ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... area of barren, rocky hills, with not a tree in sight anywhere, except the ugly, uncompromising yuccas, and they could scarcely be dignified by the name of trees. Nothing but sagebrush, greasewood, mesquite and cactus; not ...
— Tabitha at Ivy Hall • Ruth Alberta Brown
... hundred-mile voyage. At any rate, they did, and they found the Scotch heather here. Here, too, one finds another strange plant, plentiful over on the sandy peninsula of Coatue, the Opuntia or prickly pear, a variety of cactus common enough in Mexico and portions of our Southwest, but ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard |
