god Umlimo incident of the Matabele war, in riding through the giant cactus forest of the delta of the Yaqui River, in Sonora, the northwestern province of Mexico, came upon a stone, near Esperanza, covered with strange inscriptions cut deep into the weather-beaten surface, and displaying every evidence of antiquity. It was his description of it, and the possibility of finding it again, that induced me to make the trip to Mexico the following year, where I had the pleasure of seeing him relocate the stone, the ethnological value of which is yet in course of determination.

Major Burnham told me that he had found it in a cactus forest, and that the delta of the Yaqui River was covered with large cactus-trees. I imagined that he referred to the common, scattering Cereus of Arizona, -the cactus of the Rio Grande region and that of the Llano Escantada, or desert plains,-which I knew well; hence it was with profound astonishment that I beheld the giant cactus forest into which we ran, and which we traversed from end to end of its three or

four thousand square miles. I am free to confess that the inscription, the real objective, became a secondary consideration, to me at least while the forest completely filled my imagination by its size and beauty.

Cactus of many kinds is found all over the Southwest, but it is not until one approaches the center of Sonora that it attains its most imposing development, and becomes a giant forest in every sense of the term. Few have even heard of this delta, and for years the wars between the Yaqui Indians and Mexico have kept the great State of Sonora, which borders Arizona, as unknown to the average American as some parts of Africa. Railway extension was stopped, the Mexican government prohibited aliens from working the mines, and the American who wandered from the main highways took desperate chances. Within a few months, by the capture of the Yaqui Indians and their partial deportation to Yucatan, all this has been changed and, as a result, this fascinating region is thrown open to the world. Railroad construction is rapidly progressing in the direction of Guadalajara and the City of Mexico, passing ancient towns

and villages unknown even to Cortez, and opening up a country that in a few years will probably become one of the winter resorts of the American continent. Mr. Luther Burbank, who has been making studies of the cacti within its borders, in a recent address said: "Mexico is the land of destiny, the land of the hidden past, the land of a most brilliant future. It has a climate in parts surpassing California. It is destined in the summer, the autumn, the winter, and the spring to be the resort of all the world."

The gateway to Sonora from the north is at Nogales, three quarters of a mile above sea-level, on the international line, one half of the town being in Mexico and the rest in Arizona. From Nogales down the Santa Margarita Valley the country is picturesque, laid out with ranches, with glimpses of haciendas, or farms, through the trees, and alluring Mexican towns here and there. There are fair roads for motors all over the province.

But we availed ourselves of the railway, until we reached Esperanza, where the motor-car portion of the trip began.

Esperanza is the site of the ancient town of Comorita and on the historic Camino Real, or King's Highway from Mexico. It stands nearly at the head, or east end, of the delta, sixty or seventy miles from the gulf and between the Mayo and Yaqui rivers, on land as level as a floor and crossed by roads which I have found marked on maps of the seventeenth century, made in Spain.

We reached Esperanza at midnight, and Major Burnham took me over to the big adobe of the Rio Yaqui Club, from which we heard the melody of Mexican songs. floating through the air, and the familiar laughing yelp of distant coyotes. It was moonlight, and the sharp volcanic peaks of Mount Sombrerete stood out sharply against the sky. I caught the notes of strange birds and the harsh call of parrots, and all about us seemed to rise the masts of phantom ships. The adobe was in a small clearing, but a moment's walk from its broad veranda or Spanish patio took me to the heart of the giant cactus forest, the big-spined trunks seeming magnified in the moonlight, and casting strange shadows. After a short stroll I perceived that it was a good place in which

to get lost. I returned to the music of Yaqui voices in the quaint cactus, bamboo, and mesquite houses; but every night the fascination was strong to go a little way into the forest and get the weird effect and listen to the strange sounds of animal life.

Major Burnham in a general way remembered the location of the stone. It was four or five miles from the river, presumably between the ancient Yaqui towns of Bacaporo and Bachoco, with a mountain named Osocahui lying about ten miles away. But as the cactus forest had completely captivated me, it was decided that before we made the search for the stone we should go down the Yaqui River to the Gulf of California by way of some of the old Indian towns. No personally conducted parties had yet carved their names on the biggest trees, or contaminated the native weavers with aniline dyes and other horrors, so the outlook was alluring. A canoe was sent down by a mule team that we might cast a line in the Gulf of California, seventy miles to the west. One Oromado, a famous Yaqui runner, was taken on the car as a guide, a modest youth in a deep-purple zarape, or blanket, who would have thought a Marathon race a pastime, judging from the running of some of the Yaquis.

The equipment of our car consisted of a tarpaulin and blankets, canteens (strapped on the outside to get the cool air), a water olla, or jar, in the car, and a scant food supply, as we expected to live on the country, where deer and various game-birds are plentiful. We took rods, guns, and rifles, and the chauffeur was armed with a six-shooter. It is necessary to carry water when away from the river, and as the delta from the Mayo to the Yaqui was seventy or eighty miles wide in places as we traveled, the runner was depended upon to show where the wells were in case of a breakdown.

We were off early in the April morning, plunging directly into the cactus. forest, the touring-car gliding along the perfect roads like a bird. The delta was apparently level. Away to the north, beyond the Yaqui River, were the Bacatete Mountains, the stronghold for ages of the wild or bronco Yaquis. To the west strange jagged and isolated peaks, Mounts Cuchus, Chimbampo, Tesamo, Guamochil, and others, stood out against the sky, while to

the south were other peaks, and all day, as we sped on to the west, mountain ranges and peaks rose over the cactus-trees and the edge of the world and came into life, like ships at sea. The delta itself was like the floor of a room, and the only hill we saw was in coming up out of the Cocoraqui arroyo, which proved to be no hill, but the wall of a balsa, or irrigation dam. I should think the drop from Esperanza to the gulf for seventy miles was a foot a mile, and in April we found the ancient roads almost perfect, comparable in the main to those of a park. They were evidently made by merely cutting down the cactus, leaving a hard, smooth surface, over which a motor can move at any speed.

From the slope of the various peaks which environ the delta, the vast plain appears covered with brush; but once on the level, and in it, the verdure resolves itself into a cactus forest of extraordinary attraction and solidity. I can compare it only to some artificial scene in a riotous extravaganza, where the artist in striving for scenic effect has drawn liberally upon his imagination to produce weird shapes, brilliant tints, and strange contrasts of color, unreal and fantastic. The pervading impression, as we wound in and out, was of intense, enduring, insistent green of every possible tint and shade-trees not only with green leaves, but with trunk, limbs, and branches painted in greens so delicate and quaint that the limit of artificiality was reached. The forest itself was made up in the main of three or four distinct species of giant cactus, which appeared to range from twenty to forty feet in height, while specimens of the tallest have been estimated at over sixty.

The largest and most persistent was the saguaro, a gigantic cactus, a splendid, fluted column, rising erect, sometimes in a single pillar forty or fifty feet, and again with symmetrical, branching arms forming a colossal candelabrum; and as I glanced ahead, as we dashed along, with new vistas appearing at every turn, they seemed like pillars of some ruined Greek temple that had strayed down into the Yaqui country.

The trunks of the largest saguaros were often over three feet in diameter, richly fluted, and savagely spined in long, regular lines. Nature had painted them in greens of an entrancing variety, tone, and

tint. Some seemed to merge into red, purple, or yellow, and the eye was constantly diverted to more beautiful forms on the sky-line, or by some spectacular giant that seemed fairly to stop the way, or, again, by the distant maze of columns that rose like the spars of ships along the docks of some great seaport. The blossoms of the saguaro were a rich yellow, and clinging to them here and there were large woodpeckers, which appeared to find some food of their choice in the small petals. Nearly all these green pillars were perforated by these birds, which formed their nests in the fibrous interior, a home guarded by a savage array of spines and darts.

As large as was the saguaro, it was exceeded in colossal proportions by another species, called the pitahaya, which seemed to be made up of fifty or sixty saguaros all growing from a single trunk, bending upward with perfect lines of beauty, and forming a compact mass of assembled columns of green, with a sprinkling of golden-red blossoms.

Side by side with these impressive giants grew a third large cactus, called hecho by the natives, and saguesa by others. It bore some resemblance to the pitahaya, though the columns did not exceed ten in number. Nevertheless, the uprising forms made a most impressive figure in the land

scape.

A fourth somewhat similar tree is known as the sina, and if the reader can imagine these giants packed together as closely as the pines in a mountain forest, rising from a base of smaller and different. cacti, and stretching away until they merged into a violet haze that clung about the base of distant mountains, some idea can be formed of the strange forest through which our car was running.

This minor cactus forest which I have called the base did not suffer by comparison, for what it lacked in size it made up in variety and weird beauty. Some were formed like snakes, drooping gracefully; others were pear-shaped, in all colors from an impossible purple to a vivid red, and one of the largest had the tips of its graceful arms covered with pompons of silvery spines, which waved gently in the breeze.

There was no monotony in our wanderings across the delta, so varied were the cacti in variety and grouping. While all