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Show LOWER CALIFORNIA DESERTS. Strange Facts Heat Affects Mental Faculties Fac-ulties Parched Winds Split Open Skulls of Men Crazy Man Strange Happenings Cactus Anticipates Wind Storms The Rolling Rootless Cactus How Nature Provides Food and Drink in the Desert Suggestive Thoughts. (Special Correspondence.) I was privileged last evening to be the guest of: Don Estaban Guiteras and his charming family, and when it was time to renew the expression of my appreciation of his hospitality and bid him good night. I deeply regretted that Mexican etiquette eti-quette forbade me to prolong my visit. Don Estaban Es-taban is now in the evening of a life largely spent, in deserts and mountains, and it is allotted to few men to pass through his experiences and retain a fair measure of health or indeed to survive. Whirl tanned and sun scorched, he is a rugged examplo of indomitable courago and of unshaken determination, determi-nation, to whom good luck and success camu when despair was riding on his shadow. I questioned him of the desert, the mountains, moun-tains, the canyons, and never was boy preparing for his first communion more familiar with his catechism than was Don Estaban with the gruesome grue-some wonders of the lonely places of the peninsula. penin-sula. STRANGER THAN FICTION. He told me of a region where many. men have died of thirst and to which flocks of .lucks ami water fowl come year after year in the migratory seasons; of places where rain is almost unknown, yet where clouds come of a night and. breaking on some lofty peak, hurl thousands of tons of water upon the land, altering the forms and shapes of mountains, ploughing deep gorges here, and there ( filling others with great boulders, and changing the face of the country. He spoke of deserts where men go mad with heat, throw their canteen, half-filled half-filled with life-saving water, out into the waste of sand, and tearing and ripping every shred of clothing from their emaciated bodies, shout at ami damn the imaginary fiends mocking them. He asked me why it was that the skulls of men who perish of" heat and thirst on the desert split wide open as soon as life has left their trembling limbs? I answered I had never heard of the weird and singular phenomenon. "Yes," he continued, "I have seen dead men in the Hormiga desert, and tho skull of every one of them was gaping. So dry is the air of these regions, re-gions, so hungry is it for the heart's blood of its victims, that no sooner do men die than the hot air envelopes them and, like a devil-fish, sucks from their tissues, veins and arteries all blood and water. I have followed the trail of dead men by the shreds and rags, the knife, revolver and canteen can-teen flung away and torn from them in their delirium; de-lirium; and when I came upon their bodies, the I hair was ashen gray, the skulls split open and the 1 bodies stark naked. Of the skull, the remorseless heat makes a veritable steam chest, and when tho sutured bone walls can no longer stand the awful strain, the skull splits open and the brain protrudes. pro-trudes. I was traveling one afternoon with a companion over the Muerto desert when the braying bray-ing of one of my burros called us to a halt. A walking walk-ing burra never brays while the sun shines unless it sees or scents danger. Lifting my field glass I saw, far away to our left, a man evidently in distress. dis-tress. We altered our course and as we drew to hailing distance, the man, completely naked, ran to meet us, wildly gesticulating, 'Ritrarse, ritrarse' go back, go back he shouted, the demons are too many for us, let us run, let us run.' We gave the poor fellow a few sips of water, and after a while fed him chocolate and crackers and brought him with us. Striking out diagonally across the sands, we found his canteen, three-quarters full of clear, fresh water. When his mind was giving away he sat down to rest, and, rising, strayed away, he knew not whither, forgettrfig his food and water." "Why do so many men lose their reason in the desert?" I asked Don Estaban. "Well," said he, "many of these men, by dissipation and evil habits hab-its in early manhood have weakened and impaired their brains. Others were born with a weak mentality, men-tality, so that when the merciless heat beats down upon them, when fatigue, and often hunger and thirst, seize upon them, the weakest part of the human system is the first to surrender. Then the intense and sustained silence of the desert, the immeasurable waste of sand around them, and the (Continued on page 5.) LOWER CALIFORNIA DESERTS. (Continued from Page 1.) oppression on the mind of the interminable desolation deso-lation and solitude carry melancholy to the soul and the weakened mind breaks down. STRANGE THINGS HAPPEN. It is what .happens, at times, to men who go out on, the desert; they perish and are heard of no more. The drifting sand covers them and when years after their burial, a hurricane of wind races over the desert, it scatters tile sand which hid them, opens the grave as it were, and carrying the bodies with it, separates the bones and drops them here and there on the bosom of the ocean of sand. "A curious thing," continued Don Estaban, "happens "hap-pens when the strong winds blow on the desert, a something occurs which always reminds me of the continuous presence of God everywhere and of His providence. Does not the Bible somewhere speak of the birds which the Heavenly Father feed-eth feed-eth and the lilies of the field which He cares for. Well, the desert plants are a living proof of God s love for all created things. ''When these sandstorms are due, and before they rush in upon the mighty waste of silence and sand, the cacti and the flower-bearing plants droop down and lie low along the earth. Then when the storms have passed, the plants slowly, cautiously, as if to make sure their enemy is gone, rise again 1o their full height. Only the mosquito and grease-wood grease-wood of toughened and hardened fibre refuse to bow down to the tyrant of the hurricane, and unless un-less torn up by the roots they never yield. But the cacti, save alone the pitahaya of giant strength, tremble at the. approach of the storm, contract, shrivel up and then lie low upon the ground. THE ROLLING CACTUS. "I have often, in my tramps across deserts, stopped and examined a cactus which we call the 'Rodillo.' It has no roots, is perfectly rounded, and its spires or needles, for some mysterious reason, rea-son, point inward, as if its enemy were within itself. it-self. Unless it draws its nourishment from the air I do not know how it survives. It is the plaything play-thing of the winds. When the sand storm riots in the desert the wind plays with the 'Rodillo' and rolls it along forty or fifty miles." "How often do these storms come, Scnor Guiteras?" "Well, it's this way; for your winters in the north you have snow and ice, in the south they have rain; here on our deserts we have winds, and these winds are with us for three months, mild as a sea breeze today, and tomorrow rushing with the speed of a hurricane. But to come back to the 'Rodillo.' YVlien the storm of wind has lifted, this ball cactus is left on the desert, and if during the vernal equinox rain falls, the plant throws out a few rootlets, gets a grip somewhere in the sand till its flowers and seeds, and is off again with the next wind." "Is there any hope for a man if he runs short of water forty or fifty miles out in the desert?" "A man," replied my host, "who is taught, to desert ways never dies of thirst. An Indian will enter a desert stretching away for two hundred miles, carrying with him neither food nor water, and yet it is a thing unheard of for an Indian to go mad on the sandy waste, or die of hunger or thirst. God in His kindness and providence has made provision for man and animal, even in the great, deserts. There is no desolation of sand so utterly bare and barren that here and there upon its forbidden surface there may not be. found patches of the greascwood, the mesquite and the cactus. Now the cholla, and tuna, and the most of the cacti, bear fruit in season, and from these fruits the Indians make a score of dainty dishes. Even when not bearing, their barks and roois, when properly prepared, will support life. Nor need any man die of thirst, for the pitahaya and suaharo cacti are reservoirs of water, cool, fresh and plentiful. But then, one must know how to ! tap the stream. By plunging a knife into the heart the water begins to ooze out slowly and unsatisfactorily, un-satisfactorily, but still enough comes to save a man's life. Of course, you know that the man familiar fa-miliar with the moods of the desert never travels without a can, matches and a hatchet. When he is running short of water he makes for the nearest bunch of columnar cacti, as the pitahaya and suaharo sua-haro are called by us. He selects his tree and cuts it down, having already made two fires eight or ten feet apart. Then he makes a large incision in the middle of the tree, cuts off the butt and the end and places the log between the fires, end to end. The heat of the fires drives the water in the log to its centre, when it begins to flow from the cut already made, into his can. It is by this method meth-od the Indian and the expert desert traveler renews re-news his supply of water." Communing with myself, on the way to my hotel, ho-tel, I said: "So, after all is said and done, education educa-tion is very much a matter of locality. In large centers of population the theologian, the philosopher, philoso-pher, the scientist is a great man, but thrown on his own resources, on the wide deserts, in the immense im-mense forests, he is a nobody and dies. On the other oth-er hand the man bred to desert ways or trained to forest life is the educated man in the wilderness, for he has conquered its secrets. That training, then, apart from the supernatural, which best prepares pre-pares a man to succeed in his sphere, which develops de-velops the faculties demanded by his occupation or calling, which makes him an honest, rugged, manly man, is education in the best acceptation of the often ill-used term." Buena Vista, I. C. - |