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ON THE PACIFIC COAST 339
grow also on the desert coast of Ecuador, along with a few others
not found in Northern Peru.
In the ravines which run from the tablazo down to the valley,
besides a few stunted Algarrobos, there is another small prickly
tree, a species of Cantua, with black stems and branches, which
becomes clad with fugacious, roundish, Loranthus-like leaves and
pretty white flowers only in the rainy years. There also grows a
Cactus called Rabo de zorra (fox's brush), from its usually simple
stems being densely beset on the numerous angles or strice with
reddish bristle-like prickles.
On the margin of the river, except where the banks are
unusually high, there is a narrow strip of land, called the vega,
which is overflowed every year about February or March by the
flush of water from the Andes, although no rain may have fallen
in the plain. The vega is in many parts of the valley the only
ground kept under cultivation, and the indigenous vegetation
there is of a quite distinct character. Instead of the Algarrobo,
we have the Willow and a small Composite tree, Tessaria kgitinia,
with leaves very like those of Salix cinerea, and soft brittle wood,
which is the common fuel at Lima and elsewhere on the coast,
where it is called Pajaro bobo. Less abundant than those two
trees are Buddleia ainericana, a pretty Cassia, two species of
Baccharis, two rampant Mimosae (one of them M. asperata},
Muntingia Calalniru, and Cestntm hediondinum (called Yerba
Santa), of which only the two last grow to be trees of moderate
size, the rest being weak bushes or shrubs. Over trees and
bushes climb a half-shrubby Asclepiadea (Sarcostemma sp.), with
very milky stems and umbels of pretty white flowers, a Cissus,
a Passiflora, allied to P. fceiida, a pretty delicate gourd plant, and
a Mikania.
It is usually only on the vega that we find any herbaceous
vegetation, except in the rainy years. There the Caria brava,
a (iynerium, with a stem 15 feet high and leafy all the way up,
and with smaller and less silky panicles than the other species,
grows in large patches. The huts of the Indians and Mestizos
in the suburbs of Piura have often nothing more than a single
row of Cana brava stems stuck into the ground for walK and
others laid hori/ontally over them for roof, affording, of course,
little protection from sun and wind, and none at all from the
1
rain, which happily falls so
very rarely.
1
Along with it grow a
It does not enter into the scope of this memoir to e the towns of
North Peru and the customs ol ih-'ir inhabitants, but it miidit leave
.1 false
impression wen- I not to add that all the better class oi houses an a >>lidly
constructed as almost anywhere in South America. At Piura they have thick
walls of adobes, and are built round patios or courts, over which a\uiiiiL^ are
stretched in the heat of the day.
are almost universal
( dass windows, verandas, and l>al