To attempt any description of the varied forms of cactus in Mexico would be out of the question. In the northern provinces alone, botanists have described above eight hundred species. The most striking we met with were the prickly pear (cactus opuntia), the órgano, the night-blowing cereus, the various mamillarias—dome-shaped mounds covered with thorns, varying in diameter from an inch to six or eight feet—and the greybeard, el viejo, “the old man,” as our guide called them, upright pillars like street-posts, and covered with grey wool-like filaments.
Getting to the top of the ravine again, we found an old Indian milking an aloe, which flourishes here, though a little further down the climate is too hot for it to produce pulque. This old gentleman had a long gourd, of the shape and size of a great club, but hollow inside, and very light. The small end of this gourd was pushed in among the aloe-leaves into the hollow made by scooping out the inside of the plant, and in which the sweet juice, the aguamiel, collects. By having a little hole at each end of the gourd, and sucking at the large end, the hollow of the plant emptied itself into the Acocote, (in proper Mexican, Acocotl, Water-throat), as this queer implement is called. Then the Indian stopped the hole at the end he had been sucking at, with his finger, and dexterously emptied the contents of the gourd into a pig-skin which he carried at his back. We went up with the old man to his rancho, and tested his pulque, which was very good, though we could not say the same of his domestic arrangements. It puzzled us not a little to see people living up at this height in houses built of sticks, such as are used in the hot lands, and hardly affording any protection from the weather, severe as it is here. The pulque is taken to market in pig-skins, which, though the pig himself is taken out of them, still retain his shape very accurately; and when nearly full of liquor, they roll about on their backs, and kick up the little dumpy legs that are left them, in the most comical and life-like way. When we went away we bought the old man’s acocote, and carried it home in triumph, and is it not in the Museum at Kew Gardens to this day? (See the illustration at page 36.)