"You have forgotten to tell him," added l'Encuerado, "that the tender shoots of the tunero, baked under the ashes, will furnish us this evening with a most delicious dish."
A little farther on, the prickly pears were succeeded by another species called the Cierge (the Cactus cereus of savants). Several of these plants were growing with a single stem, and measured from ten to twelve feet in height, looking like telegraph poles; others had two or three shoots springing from them, which made them look still more singular. A third species, creeping over the ground, added much to the difficulty of our walking, and obliged us very often to take long strides to avoid them. In spite of all the care we could take, we scratched our limbs several times against their sharp spines.
I again took the lead—for there was not room between the cierges to walk abreast—and, climbing up a small hillock, surveyed a wide prospect. Such a complete change could not possibly have taken place in so short a time in any other country. More trees, more shrubs, more bushes! Everywhere the cactus might be seen assuming twenty different shapes—round, straight, conical, or flattened, and really seeming as if it delighted in assuming appearances so fantastic as almost to defy description. Here and there the cierges, standing side by side, seemed to vie with each other in height, sometimes attaining to as much as twenty to thirty feet, while the young shoots resembled a palisade, or one of those impenetrable hedges with which the Indians who live on the plateau surround their dwellings. Farther on, there were vast vegetable masses of a spherical shape, covered with rose-colored, horny, and transparent thorns, which displayed across our path all their huge rotundity, really exhibiting nothing vegetable to the eye but their color. Here and there, too, some creeping species, with their branches full of thorns, formed a perfect thicket; one might almost have fancied that they were a hundred-headed hydra.
"We might almost imagine we were in a hot-house full of rich-growing plants and golden-colored flowers," said Sumichrast to me.
"Yes," I replied; "but we must also imagine that we are looking at them through the lens of a microscope. What would a Parisian say if he saw this viznaga?"
The plant I was pointing to was at least six feet in height and three times that in circumference.
"When I was a shepherd," said l'Encuerado, "I led my goats into one of the plains where the viznagas grow. With my machete I made a cut into one side of the plant, and my goats immediately began to eat the pith with which it was filled. Gradually they hollowed out a hole large enough for two or three of them to enter at once, and this make-shift hut afforded me a first-rate shelter against the rays of the sun and the night breezes."
"Oh!" cried Lucien, with enthusiasm, "if we have to camp in these fields, we must have such a house."
I again examined the landscape round us. There was nothing whatever which betrayed the vicinity of man. Everywhere the cacti spread out their variously-shaped flowers, which were nearly all yellowish or pink. Above us was a fiery sky, in which nothing seemed to move but a few vultures; on the ground there were hundreds of lizards in constant motion.