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Show BY PATH AND TEAIL. 195 and no place wider than an ordinary street. Wherever a cat could stand a cactus grew, whose thorny plates matted the face of the escarpment. Sheltered from the sun by walls of solid granite, porphyry or basalt, the great pass was cool and the silence intense. Here and there were piles of loose stones and boulders deposited when the rains of the summer solstice swept madly down the flanks of the Catalinas and swelled this gorge to a rushing torrent. When we emerged from the gloomy canyon we saw before us another desert, stretching away many miles to the Santa Eita range, supposed by the early Spanish explorers to contain fabulous hordes of gold and silver. To our right rose the Baboquivari, the sacred mount of the Papagoes. Across this desert four hundred years ago marched the Spanish missionary and explorer, Father Marcos of Nizza, on his way to the Zuni towns in northern Arizona to bear a message of salvation to these strange people, " who sat in darkness and in the shadow of death. ' ' |
