We were still in the desert, but serrated peaks with lovely outlines and stormy, snowy tops marched beside us the entire day. The aspect of the country became semi-tropical. The single varieties of cactus and century plants were increased to dozens. The ocotillo, sometimes wrongly called octopus cactus, waved slender green fingers, on which a red bud showed like a rosy fingernail. The landscape warmed from lifeless gray to gold, mauve, blue and deep purple, and always on our left were the benign outlines of the blue Davis Mountains. We mounted higher and higher on a smooth orange road cut through the mountains and came out on a broad open highway with wide vistas. Close by, the mountains looked like huge heaps of black cinder and silt, but distance thinned them, as if cut from paper, into translucent lavender and blue, the edges luminous from the setting sun. Thirty miles out of El Paso we were astonished to find ourselves on a concrete road in perfect museum condition, on which in dismal file many cars crept city-ward at the discreet pace of fifteen miles an hour. It was the first bit of good road Toby had encountered for days but an uncanny something in the self-restraint of the El Pasans on the only good road in Texas recalled Houston to us. We joined the funereal procession and arrived in the city without official escort. Mexico in this southwest corner is merged with Texas, making gay its vast grayness with bright spots of color and slouching figures, and suggesting other-world civilization by its Spanish street signs, and the frankness with which the Latin welcomes the world to the details of his daily life. The outskirts of the town were lined with one story ’dobe huts, and even more fragile shelters made of wattled reeds and mud. Forlorn little Mexican cafés, with temperance signs brazening it out above older and more convivial invitations, failed of their purpose; their purple and blue doors were empty as the be-Sundayed crowds swarmed the streets.