It is near the sunset time, when the cooling of the desert wind begins and we can view the horizon pierced by the distant mountains and perhaps the many trees on the mountain slopes, while out on the mesas and down in the valleys Nature has painted the floor of the desert with lacework of many kinds of brush, filigree of strange fantastic plants, tall and shaftlike or sinuous and creepy, covered with countless spikes and thorns, armed with innumerable spines or darts; all this is the desert, hot and dry and dusty by day, delightfully cool and alluring when the sun has gone and the moonbeams flit about among the strangely weird fantastic clan. It is the beckoning call to spend the twilight in meditation and rest, and then to sleep in comfort. Here then is the amphitheater of the sun, and ere the Goddess of Night bids adieu to the day, she takes up her baton and the music of a soft desert night begins. It comes rushing in over yonder rim of mountain peaks and down through the trees with a great crescendo till it reaches the mesas and valleys. Then lightly, gently, comes the fading diminuendo, dimming the tones of the desert song, faintly and sweetly with the swish of the evening zephyrs, and the land of the cacti is again at peace. We are once more on our way to the desert land of flower mysteries and weird plant phenomena. Along the dusty highway one may notice from time to time many curious-looking mounds which seem almost like monuments standing out in the great alone, in silent eulogy to some departed world perhaps. In the hot dry heat of a desert day they are just some more of Nature’s plants and flowers, but in the dusk of the desert twilight these fantastic growths look like some immense graveyard, and we might fancy that we can even read the epitaphs on their beautiful spiny shafts. For in this fancied graveyard of the desert there are many wonders, and now we shall invade their tomblike resting place and get acquainted with still another group of the weird Fantastic Clan. This is the Visnaga Cactus or Bisnaga, meaning “barrel,” commonly known as the Barrel Cactus, friend of the Indian or the lost traveler on the desert. Science gives him the name _Echinocactus_ (derived from the Greek _echinos_, “hedgehog,” and _kaktos_, a kind of spiny plant) followed by some less pretentious appendage to denote his species. GROWTH AND HABITATS