"Cactus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... Africa; no country west of 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, became the home and hunting-ground of a race of martial ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... out a miserable existence, feeding on sand and gravel and dressing myself in cactus plants. Years passed. Eating sand and mud slowly undermined my robust constitution. I fell ill. I died. ...
— Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... hedged off in squares in which flourished all sorts of vegetables, including sweet corn and potatoes and several other less familiar varieties. In pastures, fenced in with mathematical regularity by hedges of the African cactus thorn, herds of humped cattle were feeding contentedly in the mellow glow of the setting sun, occasionally lowing softly, which latter made Billy, as he expressed it, "long for ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... Cactus is an instance of a calyx composed of a congeries of adherent leaves, which leaves produce from their axilla, tufts of white hair and thorns; or is it not an instance of an axis hollowed out towards the apex, to the sides of which the ovary finally adheres, in this case the outermost series ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... this, destitute of trees and all vegetation save small bushes few and prickly cactus a-many, a desolation of grim and jagged rocks and barren, sandy wastes full of sun-glare and intolerable heat. And now, our water being gone, we began to be plagued with thirst and a great host of flies so bold as to settle on our mouths, nostrils and eyes, so that we must ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... we progressed: ocean, sand, low dunes crowned with impenetrable tangles of wild bay, sparkleberry, and live-oak, with here and there a weather-twisted palmetto sprawling, and here and there the battered blades of cactus and Spanish-bayonet thrust menacingly forward; and over all the vultures, sailing, sailing—some mere circling motes lost in the blue above, some sheering the earth so close that their swiftly sweeping shadows ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... 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 ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... 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 just plumb out ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck
... without noise or damage, was the equivalent of a 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 plateau and ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... 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 ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... His legs were naked up to the knees, showing many an old scar received from the cactus plants and the thorny bushes of acacia, so common in the mountain-valleys of Peru. A tunic-like skirt of woollen cloth,—that home-made sort called "bayeta,"—was fastened around his waist, and reached down to the knees; ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... 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, ...
— Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers • Elizabeth E. Lea
... bands of green (hoist side), white, and red; the coat of arms (an eagle perched on a cactus with a snake in its beak) is centered in ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... forms. Wherever these flowers flourished very luxuriantly there were single trees of stunted growth and thick bark, which seldom rose above fifteen or twenty feet. Besides these there were rich flowering myrtles, and here and there a grotesque cactus ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... rock that might make his fortune, a bit of grey moss, which always made him wonder what there was about it, dry as punk, brittle and tasteless, to make sheep prefer it to far better feed, to his notion—salt sage, black sage, grease wood, or even cactus with the thorns pawed off. No accounting for sheep anyway—"the better you knew 'em the less ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... Urania being, I believe, its botanic name. We found it 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 of ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... with their beer drinking and smoking, and their slow, 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
... 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
... 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... crowned and glorious 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 ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... 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 ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of every description in full bloom. The dragon-tree is a species of dracaena, and looks rather like a gigantic candelabra, composed of a number of yuccas, perched on the top of a gnarled and somewhat deformed stem, half palm half cactus. Another beautiful garden was next visited, belonging to the Marquis de la Candia, who received us and showed us his coffee and plantains in full growth, as well as a magnificent Spanish chestnut-tree, coeval with the ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... closing in upon us, as if to thwart our exit and crush us in their stony arms; but the resistless steed that bore us onward, though quivering and panting with the effort, always contrived to find the narrow opening toward liberty. Occasionally our route lay through enormous fields of cactus and yucca trees, twelve feet in height, and, usually, so hideous from their distorted shapes and prickly spikes, that I could understand the proverb, "Even the Devil cannot eat ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... a hard fruit proposition. Try spineless cactus, the fruits of which are delicious. Blasting would help if there is a moist substratum below the hardpan and might enable you to grow many fruits. If your land is hard and dry all the way down, blasting would not help you ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... smilingly replied the leader of the drummers, a man named Pritchard. "If you'll send the 'bus over to the Cactus House with our trunks we'll be ...
— The Young Engineers in Arizona - Laying Tracks on the Man-killer Quicksand • H. Irving Hancock
... Harry Wakefield! And all because a girl had refused him! He had been trying all along not to think of Dorothy Ray, but by the time he had reached the summit of the hill,—that little round of red sand, where only a single yellow cactus had had the courage to precede him,—he knew that his hour of reckoning had come. He had gambled, yes; but it was for her sake he had gambled; he had lost, yes, but it ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... very good one anyhow," I said encouragingly. "It wasn't typical. Dahlia should have had an orange in her hand, and Myra might have been resting her cheek against a cactus. Try it again, Simpson, and get a little more colour ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... which I would get up, and go out to "do something useful;" and would come home an hour afterward, looking like a bit out of a battle picture, having tumbled through the roof of Farmer Bate's greenhouse and killed a cactus, though totally unable to explain how I came to be on the roof of Farmer Bate's greenhouse. They had much better have left me alone, lost in "The ...
— Dreams - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... is youth! Here the poet's world-wish,— Cool waters at play with the gold-gleaming fish; While cactus a mellower glory receives From light colored softly by blossom and leaves; And nestling alder is whispering low, In lap of ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy
... times their number. The rebel leader, instead of awaiting the attack in the town, made for the open, to give a better chance to his preponderating numbers. Akbar carried the town with a rush, and then dashed in pursuit. But the country was intercepted by lanes, {111} bordered on both sides by cactus hedges, and the horsemen of Akbar were driven back into a position in which but three of them could fight abreast, the enemy being on either side of the cactus hedges. The Emperor was in front of his men, having by his side the gallant Rajput prince, Raja Bhagwan Das of Jaipur, whose sister ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... lips are like this cactus cup; With my hand I crush it up; I tear its flaming leaves apart;— Would that I could tear ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... 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 ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... discoverer's fortune. The skilful propagator of new or rare verbenas has grown rich from annual sales of these beautiful bedding plants. The tulip is an historical monument of floral enthusiasm. When Mexico was opened to Northern enterprise, it yielded of its boundless exuberance the cactus and the dahlia, sources of untold wealth to those florists who ministered to the popular taste for Nature's richest productions. The originator of a new and valuable grape has found in it a fortune. Accident has ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... The 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 hearken ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... I do say so myself!" the old Texan went on, setting out the rest of the lunch. "Well, come on, buckaroo! Break away from them chores an' dive in! Brand my cactus salad, if there's one thing that riles ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... 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 I fancy, in his early acquaintance, before he ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... Though no 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 ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... 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 ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... fast 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 amidst ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... he afterward termed "a splendid animal," beautiful, statuesque, more of Juno than of Venus, and freely endowed with the languorous temperament and the splendid earthy loveliness which grows nowhere but under tropical skies and in the shadow of palm groves and the flame of cactus flowers. She showed him but scant courtesy, however, for she was but a poor hostess, and after dinner carried her cousin away to the billiard-room, and left her husband to entertain the Rev. Ambrose and the detective ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... 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 them ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... beyond the ford she halted the pony on the crest of a low hill and looked about her. The country at this point was broken and rocky; there was much sand; the line of hills, of which the one on which her pony stood was a part, were barren and uninviting. There was much cactus. She made a grimace of abhorrence at a clump that grew near her in an arid stretch, and then looked beyond it at a stretch of green. Far away on a gentle slope she saw some cattle, and looking longer, she observed a man on a horse. One of the Flying W men, of course, she assured ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... reached each new place entirely without hope or fever, and could concentrate immediate attention on the donkeys and tumbling bells, the priests, patios, beggars, children, crowing cocks, sombreros, cactus-hedges, old high white villages, goats, olive-trees, greening plains, singing birds in tiny cages, watersellers, sunsets, melons, mules, great churches, pictures, and swimming grey-brown mountains of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... disappeared over the crest of a low sandhill. Ascending this I was treated to a surprise. Right ahead of me lay a barren waste of sand extending to the right and left as far as I could see. Its width in the direction that I was going I judged to be about twenty miles. On its farther border the cactus plain began again, sloping gradually upward to the horizon, along which was a fringe of cedar trees—the willows of my vision! In that country a cedar will not grow within thirty miles of water if ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... 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 ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... carefully. There was a clip in the magazine. Other clips were in his pocket. The clips were loaded with high velocity shells that exploded on contact. One slug could stop a Venusian krel, a mammoth beast that had been described as a cross between a sea lion and a cactus plant. ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage
... formed ridge, traversed the plain from east to west. A thicket of cactus covered part of its summit. Toward the ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... colored prints and lithographs, illustrating religion or royalty, and as many greenhouse plants as the owner can afford to decorate the windows. I have seen, even beyond Umea, some fine specimens of cactus, pelargonium, calla, and other exotics. It is singular that, with the universal passion of the Swedes for flowers and for music, they have produced no distinguished painters or composers—but, indeed, ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... his cart. When 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
... preferred not to force the dilation, and so adroitly followed the sinuosities of a 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
... tongue is a composite, mainly a Shoshonean dialect, probably accumulated as the various clans of the present tribe gathered in northeastern Arizona, from the cactus country to the south, the San Juan country to the northward and the Rio Grande valley to the eastward. But the Welsh legend was ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... 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 and in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... domicile of the worthy padre, Don Lucas de Alacuesta. It was a large house, situated near the outskirts of the town, with an extensive garden, enclosed by a high wall, rendered still higher by a stockade of the organ cactus that grew along ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... 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 of feet into the ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... written about this, time, in allusion to the marriage of her eldest, sister, and the funeral of John Wadge, an old and valued friend of the family. It was hoped that the cactus which had belonged to J.W. would have blossomed in time for the wedding; but the first flower only opened a fortnight afterwards, on the morning of his own funeral: and when, in a few years, the marriage ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... his eyes searched the road beyond her, the hedges on either side. If she remained for an instant longer he feared she might be the witness to a shocking tragedy, that she herself might even become a victim. But the road lay empty, in the hedges of spiked cactus not a frond stirred; and the aged man who had led him to the rendezvous sat motionless, ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... 400 species, as characteristic of the coal formations. Of these we will only enumerate arborescent Calamites and Lycopodiaceae, scaly Lepidodendra, Sigillariae, which attain a height of sixty feet, and are sometimes found standing upright, being distinguished by a double system of vascular bundles, cactus-like Stigmariae, a great number of ferns, in some cases the stems, and in others the fronds alone being found, indicating by their abundance the insular form of the dry land,* Cycadeae** especially palms, although ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... him." Then he went up to the girl, cut her loose from the stake, and she raised up in a sitting posture, "Would ye's moind lettin' me help ye to yer fate, Miss?" said Mike. "O, I'm so tired and weak I can't stand," said the girl. "They have almost killed me dragging me over the cactus." ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan
... slope of sand, isn't it?" she whispered. "Sand and cactus,—no roses blooming here ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... neighborhood. It wasn't. For hundreds of miles in every direction the plains stretched away to the dim horizon. There was room everywhere, nothing much, in fact, but room, with a little coarse grass and plenty of clear air. But the population went in for crowding by preference, and didn't care a cactus whether it was ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the Avenue, twelve hundred strong, to entrain for Texas. The bullets of the foe were not the only dangers. It was midsummer and these men were bound for the tropics and the cursed fields of sand where the tarantula, the rattlesnake, and the scorpion lurked under the cactus. ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... 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 houses. Many vegetables, such as cucumber and vegetable-marrow, are ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly
... where she wun't ever hear a bit o' music, 'r see a picter, 'r see a friend. She'll swelter in the burnin' sun an' parch in the hot winds in the summer, an' in the winter she'll be shet in by blizzards an' cold weather. She'll see nothin' but kioats, prairie-dogs, sage-brush, an' cactus. An' what fer! Jest for nothin' but me! To git me away from things she's afraid've got more of a pull with me than what she's got. An' I say, by the livin' Lord, I'll go under before I'll give up, an' say I've got as fur ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... 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 lumberjacks—they ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... horticulturist insane, who took a delicate fern and planted it in arid soil, on a hilltop, far from shade, and expected it to thrive and bear blossoms like the cactus. ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... those at Naples, and the churches are second only to those of Rome in their magnificence. One might almost fancy one's self in the far East, there are so many surroundings of a Moorish and Saracenic character, and many of the names are quite oriental. The cactus, palm, and citron trees, tropical flowers and sunny skies, carry out the impression. There is no matter for wonder in this, however, as the Saracens made Palermo the capital of their Sicilian territories for more than two centuries, when the Normans in their ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... bundle of seven spines of the Viznaga cactus (Echinocactus wislizeni) was found (139547; pl. 14, a). These spines had all been straightened from their natural curved condition. They could have served a variety ...
— A Burial Cave in Baja California - The Palmer Collection, 1887 • William C. Massey
... creek and got some fresh 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 down so careful, and turning back every once in awhile to ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... the grass changed yet again. They had rolled under wheel by now more than one hundred different varieties of wild grasses. The vegetation began to show the growing altitude. The cactus was seen now and then. On the far horizon the wavering mysteries of the mirage appeared, marvelous in deceptiveness, mystical, alluring, the very spirits of the Far West, appearing to move before their eyes in giant pantomime. They were passing ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... every earth hummock and sagebush had to be used as cover. The hunter wriggled through the grass flat on his face, pushing himself along for perhaps a quarter of a mile by his toes and fingers, heedless of the spiny cactus. When near enough to the huge, unconscious quarry the hunter began firing, still keeping himself carefully concealed. If the smoke was blown away by the wind, and if the buffaloes caught no glimpse of the assailant, they would often stand motionless and stupid until many of their number had ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... of the elephants, caught us upon every side. In a few minutes our clothes were in rags, and we were bleeding from countless scratches, but we continued the chase as fast as we could run upon the track. The prickly cactus which abounds in these jungles, and grows to the height of twenty feet, in some places checked us for a few moments, being crushed into a heap by the horny-footed beasts before us. These obstacles overcome, we again pushed ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... there in that cactus-bordered country of black, lava hills where I was born an' where I belong!" said Rathburn grimly, sliding into a chair on the opposite side ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts
... 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 ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... preceding the execution, and when the squad of soldiers marched from town it was still shining brightly through the mists. It lighted a plain two miles in extent, broken by ridges and gullies and covered with thick, high grass, and with bunches of cactus and palmetto. In the hollow of the ridges the mist lay like broad lakes of water, and on one side of the plain stood the walls of the old town. On the other rose hills covered with royal palms that showed white in the moonlight, like hundreds of marble columns. A line ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis
... wooden boxes, pierced with little holes, and kept dry; all the old leaves should be taken off, as, in their decay, they cause dampness, and the roots wrapped in dry moss or cloth. The same means may be used for the pulpy plants, such as the cactus: any dry flexible substance, not subject to dampnes, as hairwool etc. may be used to pack them. These pulpy plants, if large, should be separated from the others, so that they may not be ...
— Movement of the International Literary Exchanges, between France and North America from January 1845 to May, 1846 • Various
... Can Mallorqui was sad and silent. Pepet led the way, the bimbau between his lips buzzing like a gad-fly. From time to time he stopped to throw a stone at a bird or at a puffed-up black lizard darting among the opuntia cactus. Little impression did death make upon him! Margalida walked at her mother's side, silent, abstracted, her eyes opened very wide, beautiful bovine eyes, which looked in every direction reflecting not a single thought. She seemed to forget that behind her was ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... they were too busy with other things to have much 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 ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... then, now through narrow gullies in brown and barren mountains, now striking some village path amidst peach trees and marguerites, Jose Medina drove Martin Hillyard down to the edge of the sea. Here amongst cactus bushes in flower, with turf for a carpet, a camp had been prepared near to one of the two tiny villages. Jose Medina was king in this region. The party arrived in the afternoon of the twenty-sixth day of the month, all of the colour of saffron from the ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... western horizon rose a range of mountains whose bare peaks cut a jagged line along the sky. The country between us and these far-away mountains was made up of many parallel ranges of rocky hills; which ranges were separated by broad, shallow valleys, where cactus and sage-brush covered the dry ground thickly; and the only trees that broke this dreary monotony were pita-palms, the most dismal thing in all created nature to which the name of a tree ever has been given by man. There was no trail, and travelling through this tangle of ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... old stones. I listened to the sound of the water as it plashed in the shade of the majestic plum tree, I studied the grasses and the wood mosses that grew at the edge of my little lake; and upon the warm side of the garden where the sun shone all through the day, the cactus put out ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... 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 ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... 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 ...
— The Grand Canon of the Colorado • John Muir
... structure! What plans for the future greatness and prosperity of the Nation have been made. But, alas! here, too, come seasons of drought when seeds of humility, virtue and love fail to sprout and those of discord, strife and malice, like thorny cactus, ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... grew hot, and the way was long. As the ground rose again, it was stony and overgrown with cactus. A great desolation took possession of the girl. She felt as if she were in an endless flight from an unseen pursuer, who would never give up until ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... down stairs and out into the garden, feeling as the gate swung to behind her that she was stepping into an old, old English garden belonging to some ducal estate. Coming as she did straight from the edge of the desert, with its burning stretches of sand, its cactus and greasewood, its bare red buttes and lank rows of cotton-wood trees, this Eden of green and bloom had a double charm ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... shadows of the palm trees as black and definite as the trees themselves. The air was calm, full of the eternal hum of insects, a tropical chorus of many octaves, from the deep drone of the bee to the high, keen pipe of the mosquito. Beyond the veranda was a small cleared garden, bounded with cactus hedges and adorned with clumps of flowering shrubs, round which the great blue butterflies and the tiny humming-birds fluttered and darted in crescents of sparkling light. Within we were seated round the cane table, on which lay a sealed envelope. Inscribed upon it, in ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... little by little smothered the weird gleam that rose from the gray-white plain. Away toward the east a range of mountains gloomed faintly, rimming the distance. Another towered against the western horizon. Cactus clumps and bunches of mesquite and greasewood blotted the whitely gleaming earth. In and out among these dark spots a man was slowly riding. Now and then he leaned forward and looked keenly through the growing darkness as though ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... 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
... sharp-toothed kind that prey on them. Go as far as you dare in the heart of a lonely land, you cannot go so far that life and death are not before you. Painted lizards slip in and out of rock crevices, and pant on the white hot sands. Birds, hummingbirds even, nest in the cactus scrub; woodpeckers befriend the demoniac yuccas; out of the stark, treeless waste rings the music of the night-singing mockingbird. If it be summer and the sun well down, there will be a burrowing owl to call. Strange, furry, tricksy things dart across the open ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... among these awful vegetables that unnerves one, starts the cold chills chasing each other up and down my spinal column, and causes staring big beads of perspiration to ooze out of my forehead. No more appalling physical calamity on a small scale could befall a person than to take a header on to a cactus-covered greensward; millions of miniature needles would fill his tender hide with prickly sensations, and his vision with floating stars. It would perchance cast clouds of gloom over his whole life. Henceforth he would be a solemn-visaged, bilious-eyed needle-cushion ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... between this tangle of thickets, over the clematis and blackberry bush,—and here we are under the pines, the lofty and majestic pines. How different are these natural hedges, growing in wild disorder, from the ugly cactus fences with which my neighbours choose to shut in their homes, and even their souls. But my business now is not with them. There are my friends the children again gathering the pine-needles of last summer for lighting the fire of the silk-worm ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... 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 ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... intensity by the whiteness of the cliffs and the soil, by a veritable African sirocco which raised the dust in a spiral column as the carriage passed. They reached the hottest, the most sheltered portions of the Corniche,—a genuinely tropical temperature, where dates, cactus, the aloe, with its tall, candelabra-like branches, grow in the fields. When he saw those slender trunks, that fantastic vegetation shooting up in the white, hot air, when he felt the blinding dust crunching under the wheels like snow, de Gery, his eyes partly closed, half-dreaming ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... flower of a prickly-pear cactus, full of sunlight from behind, which a fairy took the fancy to swell into ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... summer while we were living in Denver, near the Rocky Mountains. One day mamma put some lunch in a pail, and said brother Lolie and I could go up on the bluffs along the Platte River to gather wild flowers and cactus plants, and have a good day's sport. When the whistles at the workshops in the city blew for noon, we sat down on the bluffs to eat our dinner. We could see over to the big high mountains, which reached almost up to the clouds. They looked as though they were only a mile ...
— Harper's Young People, August 17, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... one side of the moon, or if the sky-pieces hung down over the scenes when they ought to have hung behind them, or when a palm tree was introduced into a scene representing the Berlin Zoological Gardens, or a cactus in a view of the Tyrol, or a beech tree in the far north of Norway. As if that was of any consequence. Is it not quite immaterial? Who would fidget about such a trifle? It's only make-believe, after all, and every one is expected to be amused. Then sometimes the public applauded ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... 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 Providence and Norman Wilkinson have dropped mutual ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... activity. Ever and anon a struggling part broke from its parent plant and darted away in independent existence; leaping upon and consuming or being consumed by a fellow creature equally monstrous. This flora was of a uniform color—a lurid, sickly yellow. In form some of it was fern-like, some cactus-like, some vaguely tree-like; but it was all outrageous, inherently repulsive to all Solarian senses. And no less hideous were the animal-like forms of life, which slithered and slunk rapaciously through that fantastic pseudo-vegetation. Snake-like, reptile-like, bat-like, the creatures ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... in March and April, Gaza had been put into a powerful state of defence. The houses of the town are mostly on a ridge, and enclosing the place is a mass of gardens fully a mile deep, each surrounded by high cactus hedges affording complete cover and quite impossible for infantry to penetrate. To reduce Gaza would require a prolonged artillery bombardment with far more batteries than General Allenby could ever expect to have at his command, and it is certain that not ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... week of happy days of excursions and explorations, where sometimes we had to walk through great distances of undergrowth and the everywhere-abundant prickly cactus, cutting our way with large cavalry swords, always with our eyes skinned to catch sight of some strange bird, beast, or flower. Sometimes we waded for miles through swamps, which, in some places, abound with enormous water snakes up to 6 ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... 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 ...
— Three Years on the Plains - Observations of Indians, 1867-1870 • Edmund B. Tuttle
... noontime rest on the plains, was suddenly missing! Of the desperate hunt, the half-mad mother's frantic searching, her agonies when the long-delayed start must be made, her screams when she was driven away with her tinier child in her arms, knowing that behind one of those thousands of mesquite or cactus bushes, the little yellow head must be pillowed on the sand, the little ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... it, and that she also knew she had confessed in her eyes her love for him. What was he going to do about it? That was the question he had to face and to settle; and he went out alone and tramped over the brown hills and across arroyos and through clumps of sage brush and juniper and cactus, and ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... 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 price low. They had ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... retorted spiritedly. "It looks so much different in the summer time, but still seems queer to me with its heaps of rocks and no trees except the stiff old Joshuas. I wonder why they are called that. Even they don't seem like trees to me. They look like giant cactus plants, and ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... the 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 masses of red rock as large ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... on the acacia, from this nearer point looking like a great scarlet blossom of some cactus, so intense was the colour; but Winifred was distracted from her interest in the bird by seeing the old house more plainly than she had ever seen it before. It stood, a large substantial dwelling, built ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... o'clock the next morning, they set out in the barges, and after landing on the island, had no easy time to find the pirate camp, as they had to cut their way through thickets of trailing vines, thorny bushes and cactus plants and in such intense heat that some of the men fainted from exhaustion. They found the camp, but their prey had fled! Evidently the approaching vessels had been seen, and the pirates were gone. The sailors at once searched their camp, which was protected by several cannon, and there they found ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... Monocotyledons, and Dicotyledons. Here is a casual list of plants that then grew in the latitude of London and Paris: the palm, magnolia, myrtle, Banksia, vine, fig, aralea, sequoia, eucalyptus, cinnamon tree, cactus, agave, tulip tree, apple, plum, bamboo, almond, plane, maple, willow, oak, evergreen oak, laurel, beech, cedar, etc. The landscape must have been extraordinarily varied and beautiful and rich. To one botanist it suggests Malaysia, to ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... kingdom will certainly not be rank and luxurious, because there is not enough sunlight or heat for that; nor will it be gnarled and tough, but more likely spongy and cactus-like. The weak gravity will oppose but a mild resistance to the activity and climbing propensities of vegetable sap, however, which is likely to result in very tall, slender trees. The forces that lie hidden in an acorn should be able to build a most grandly towering oak on Mars. Among the ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... 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 to the drug-store ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... again, for he sees no reason to alter his words - in speaking of the wonderful variety of forms in the Euphorbiaceae, from the weedy English Euphorbias, the Dog's Mercuries, and the Box, to the prickly-stemmed Scarlet Euphorbia of Madagascar, the succulent Cactus-like Euphorbias of the Canaries and elsewhere; the Gale-like Phyllanthus; the many-formed Crotons; the Hemp-like Maniocs, Physic-nuts, Castor-oils, the scarlet Poinsettia, the little pink and yellow Dalechampia, the poisonous Manchineel, and the gigantic Hura, or sandbox ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... 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 some ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... endurance, and love of wild-weathery adventure. No superannuated mastiff or bulldog grown old in office surpassed this fluffy midget in stoic dignity. He sometimes reminded me of a small, squat, unshakable desert cactus. For he never displayed a single trace of the merry, tricksy, elfish fun of the terriers and collies that we all know, nor of their touching affection and devotion. Like children, most small dogs beg to be loved and allowed to love; but Stickeen seemed a very Diogenes, asking only to be let ...
— Stickeen • John Muir
... and got lost almost 4 hours. They had the whole troop out looking for me, and the trumpeters blowing for over an hour. There was no moon and I had decided to spend the night where I was by a cactus, when I saw a light in the dim distance and finally Captain McCoy found me. It gave me a vivid sense of how misleading the flatness of the desert can be. When Captain McCoy found me he could not see me ten feet away and I think it was chiefly the white dog he had with him ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... calling-hours. Every one can drop in upon every one else at pleasure. Mrs. Boulte put on a big terai hat, and walked across to the Vansuythens's house to borrow last week's Queen. The two compounds touched, and instead of going up the drive, she crossed through the gap in the cactus-hedge, entering the house from the back. As she passed through the dining-room, she heard, behind the purdah that cloaked the drawing-room door, her husband's voice, saying—"But on my Honor! On my Soul and Honor, I tell you she doesn't care ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... which men base their gloomy conclusions! The pessimist always argues from a single instance to a general law. If he strikes a poor peach on top he throws the whole basket away—or sells them as soon as he can. He insists on sitting square on the cactus bunch when there is only one on the whole bench-land. He then becomes an authority on cactus. If he can discover a few foes on the horizon he is blind to a regiment of ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... ready to burst into full blossom for anyone who should address him; while the rubbish he would then talk to ladies had a certain grace about it—such as absolutely astonished Hester once she happened to overhear some of it, and set her wondering how the phenomenon was to be accounted for of the home-cactus blossoming into such a sweet company-flower—wondering also which was the real Cornelius, he of the seamy side turned always to his own people, or he of the silken flowers and arabesques presented to strangers. ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... a sharp incline, Gloriana called 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 shadows ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... swung along, kicking up the acrid alkali dust from the cattle-trail that snaked its way through the cactus and sagebrush, the roar behind us died; and before us, far away, dull muffled thunders grew up in the hush of the burning noon. Thunders in a desert, and no cloud! For an hour we swung along the trail, and ever the thunders increased—like the undertone of the ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... of old, are now prime favorites—preferred by many to any other kind. The old very double "show" and "fancy" varieties are largely grown, but they share public favor with the "decoratives," the pompones, and the cactus, and, as I have said, the single forms. Which of these forms is most popular it would be hard to say. All of them have enthusiastic champions, and the best thing to do is ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... 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
... wrote in our 1943 report: "If any man deserves a bright NNGA medal, it is A. L. Young, of Brooks, Alberta." By planting his trees near enough to irrigation ditches in his "desert, cactus country," and protecting them from livestock, Mr. Young is able to get nuts on the hardier trees, but he reported that the nuts, "while of fair size, do not have fleshy kernels ... Butternuts are very sweet with fair size kernels ... Giant hickory from Ontario seems hardy but particular about ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... Longfellow, without knocking, entered the sitting-room, his hair white as if he had walked through the snow with his hat off; and William H. Prescott, with his eyesight restored, happened in from Mexico, a cactus in his buttonhole; and Audubon set a cage of birds on the table—Baltimore oriole, chaffinch, starling and bobolink doing their prettiest; and Christopher North thumped his gun down on the hall ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... broad back where not covered by his long hair glisten in the hot rays of the sun. His gun was lying within reach of his right hand, but I could not see what he was doing. On the impulse of the moment I dropped behind a flowering cactus for concealment. Then I took counsel with myself and decided that it would be too risky to return to camp as I had intended to do. In that direction for a long distance the ground was gently rising and ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... climate. You may walk the deserts of the Great Basin in the bloom time of the year, all the way across from the snowy Sierra to the snowy Wahsatch, and your eyes will be filled with many a gay malva, and poppy, and abronia, and cactus, but you may not see a single true lily, and only a very few liliaceous plants of any kind. Not even in the cool, fresh glens of the mountains will you find these favorite flowers, though some of these desert ranges ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... very good riding, but is exceedingly dangerous to both horse and rider because of the many prairie-dog holes, which are terrible death traps. And besides, the dogs invariably get their feet full of cactus needles, which cause much suffering ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... a soft crashing of waves upon the Black Sea shores, where the huge Caucasus beckoned in the sky beyond; a rustling in the umbrella pines and cactus at Marseilles, whence magic steamers start about the world like flying dreams. He heard the plash of fountains upon Mount Ida's slopes, and the whisper of the tamarisk on Marathon. It was dawn once more upon the Ionian Sea, and he smelt the perfume of the Cyclades. ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... to shreds. The white road winds between gray walls crumbling in an amiable disintegration, but held together against ruin by a network of maidenhair ferns and creepers of unknown name, and overhung by trees where the cactus climbs and hangs in spiky links, or if another sort, pierces them with speary stems as tall and straight as the stalks of the neighboring bamboo. The loquat-trees cluster—like quinces in the garden closes, and show ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... but at last I gathered that he had been watching my mistress, who used to meet a sort of vagabond whom my steward had hired the month before, behind the neighboring cactus woods, or in the ravine where the oleanders flourished. The night before, Mohammed had seen her go out without seeing her return, and he repeated, in an exasperated manner:—'Gone, mo'ssieuia; she ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... little on these sunny, silent shores; four walls of loose stones, a roof of furze and brambles, a fare of fish and fruit and millet-bread, a fire of driftwood easily gathered—and all is told. For a feast pluck the violet cactus; for a holiday push the old red boat to sea, and set the brown sail square against the sun—nothing can be cheaper, perhaps few ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... dry soil is congenial. Mezquite, 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 and keeping them together. ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... estate to the government, and, perhaps, grant it to some one of his officers, or pawn it to foreign sympathizers for military stores. The neighborhood of Rivas was dotted with ranch-houses, distenanted by these means,—rank grass growing in the court-yards, the cactus-hedges gapped, and the crops swept away by the foragers. Perhaps, had these men been let alone, jealousy toward foreigners would not, of itself, have made them enemies; but General Walker was obliged to provide arms and provisions for his soldiers, and, having no other resource, he must ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... 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 bearing of ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... & 23. 1847. Within a circle formed by two serpents, one of which is a rattlesnake, the American army, commanded by General Taylor, is repulsing the attack of the Mexicans. Beneath are branches of cactus and oak. F. A. SMITH DEL. (delineavit.) ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... scoria, with adornments of obsidian, amygdaloids, rosettes of quartz crystal and opalescent chalcedony. A thousand stony needles lifted their ragged points as if to defy the lightning. The only vegetation was a spiny cactus, clinging closely to the rocks, wearing their grayish and yellowish colors, lending no verdure to the scene, and harmonizing with ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... forth from every part of the planter's house, and lighted up the surrounding landscape,—the tall plantains and cotton and fig-trees, the tangled mass of creepers and their delicate tracery as they hung from their lofty boughs, the fields of sugar-cane, the cactus-bushes, and numberless other shrubs, and the grey sombre mountain-tops beyond. From the way the blacks were running here and there in dense masses, and the excited shouts I heard, I discovered that they ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... here now, but they may take it into their heads to come back and search. We had better make for the trees; by keeping close to that cactus hedge we shall be ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... heed to him. Lying there he looked down the slope, clad with stunted cork-trees and evergreen oaks; here and there was the golden gleam of broom; yonder over a spur of whitish rock sprawled the green and living scarlet of a cactus. Below him about the caves of Hercules was a space of sea whose clear depths shifted with its slow movement from the deep green of emerald to all the colours of the opal. A little farther off behind a projecting screen of rock that formed a little ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... irrigate the farms down at Rosita. It will leave them dry; the alfalfa will die; no more grain or peas or beans will be raised on them; they won't have even good pasturage; they will go back to sagebrush and cactus—all those farms, all those beautiful ranches! Altogether four or five thousand acres! They are worth two hundred thousand dollars now—to-morrow worth nothing! Half my winter hay comes from them; half my peas for fattening lambs. I shall have to sell part of my sheep. I'm a millionaire ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... 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. ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... account of a hunting trip for them—"To the Gulf of Cortez," published in a preceding volume of the Club's book—will be remembered, and the curious fact stated by his Indian guide that the sheep break holes in the hard, prickly rinds of the venaga cactus with their horns, and then eat ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... road crept up the sides of profound gorges, and skirted many a precipice; bridges innumerable spanned the dry ravines which at another season are filled with furious torrents. From the zone of orange and olive and cactus we passed that of beech and oak, noble trees now shedding their rich-hued foliage on bracken crisped and brown; here I noticed the feathery bowers of wild clematis ("old man's beard"), and many a spike of the ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... 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 ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis |
