Tucson/Bisbee  - Sunny worked for over 30 years in the copper mines of Bisbee, a town nestled in the Mule Mountains of southern Arizona about 10 kilometres from Mexico. He still heads underground almost every day with his hard hat, miner's lantern and slicker. But he no longer needs a hammer and chisel, and he leaves his metal lunch box at home, too.

Nowadays, Sunny is a tour guide at Bisbee's Copper Queen Mine, now inactive, where tons of gold, silver, copper and zinc were hacked out of the rock from 1881 to 1975. It is just one of the many attractions awaiting tourists in the desert of southern Arizona.

Passageways in the mine are horizontal and stretch a total of 200 kilometres. Most were cut and blasted in painstaking detail work. Though arduous, the job was sought-after because it provided the miners with a good living.

The Copper Queen Mine was among 34 working mines in Bisbee during the town's heyday. Boasting about 25,000 inhabitants around 1900, it was the biggest city between the Mississippi River and Pacific Ocean. Today Bisbee is just a shadow of its former self, with a population of some 6,000. Still, the shadow is quite attractive.

The town's centrepiece is the Copper Queen Hotel. To clear a level space for the giant building, a large portion of a mountainside had to be blasted away. Mosaic tiles for the lobby came from Italy, and the cathedral ceiling in the Palm Room is said to have been fitted with Tiffany glass.

The hotel's walls are nearly two feet thick. "That's how they managed to keep the rooms pleasantly cool even in the summer heat," noted Adam Lamb, the operating manager.

Once considered a luxurious place, the Copper Queen Hotel charms its contemporary guests mainly with a romantic Old West atmosphere which has inexplicable phenomena, according to some.

"The hotel has three resident ghosts," explained Lamb, "one for every taste." The spirits, so the legend goes, are those of an older gentleman, a lady in her early 30s and a boy who drowned in the nearby San Pedro River.

Gripping stories are told in the town of Tombstone, north of Bisbee, about people who disappeared in the desert or succumbed to the harsh climate.

Today the facades of many buildings are in the style of the Old West, and there are regular re-enactments - using guns firing blanks - of the famous O. K. Corral gunfight in
1881.

Tombstone was then a silver boomtown full of hard men and easy women. One of the most interesting sights for tourists is Boothill Graveyard. Simple wooden crosses mark piles of stones amid cacti and thorny shrubs. Scrawled inscriptions on the crosses indicated those buried there and the cause of death, often violent.

Near the border with the US state of New Mexico in south-east Arizona, the Chiricahua Mountains once sheltered an Apache tribe that fiercely protected its ancestral lands from encroachments by white settlers. Treaties were concluded and broken, and finally the Apaches were defeated and dispersed to the faraway states of Florida, Alabama and Oklahoma.

Some of their descendants still inhabit the surrounding area, site of Chiricahua National Monument, a national park whose dramatic rock spires are the result of erosion from layers of ash deposited by the eruption of the Turkey Creek Volcano more than 27 million years ago.

"Only the Apaches managed to cope in this region," remarked Suzanne Moody, a park ranger. She said survival was extremely difficult in the barren mountains.

Southern Arizona is not completely barren and arid, however. The city of Tucson is regularly soaked by heavy rains in summer. Broad river beds, empty and dry most of the year, rapidly fill up with water. City fire department crews are often called to rescue cars stranded in washes and under bridges.

"Here in Tucson we have a 'stupid motorist law,'" said resident Jessica Fish. The law requires motorists stranded in flash floods to pay all rescue costs themselves.

On the outskirts of Tucson, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum educates visitors on how animal and plant life developed in this hot and dry climate - and on just how diverse the desert can be.

The elevation of the land increases further south from Tucson, and cacti along the roadside and in the plain become sparser. The desert gradually turns into grassland, and the landscape yellows on the plateau.

Internet: www. arizonaguide. com. (dpa)