initial commit of ebook 44764HEAD main

author: Roger Frank <rfrank@pglaf.org> 2025-10-14 18:56:53 -0700
committer: Roger Frank <rfrank@pglaf.org> 2025-10-14 18:56:53 -0700
commit: b4fcae0391802e06892ab0d45249ce6ec61b74b9 (patch)
tree: aeca1a0d6ea8ee7a63ec41238a655d9f186399bf
83 files changed, 29611 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6833f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
diff --git a/44764-0.txt b/44764-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d0f1ca3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,3780 @@
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 44764 ***
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+  Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have
+  been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
+
+  Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
+
+  On page 18, "arroya" should possibly be "arroyo."
+
+  On page 53, "gaumet" should possibly be "gamut."
+
+  On page 134, the text is "Noriegas'."  The Index shows "Noriega's."
+
+  "Tamalpias" should possibly be "Tamalpais."
+
+
+
+
+  [Illustration: THE THREE BROTHERS, YOSEMITE VALLEY]
+
+
+
+
+CALIFORNIA
+
+
+
+
+     _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
+
+     THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN
+     A WOMAN OF GENIUS
+     THE LOVELY LADY
+     ETC.
+
+
+     AGENTS
+
+     America           The Macmillan Company
+                         64 & 66 Fifth Avenue, New York
+
+     Australasia       The Oxford University Press
+                         205 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
+
+     Canada            The Macmillan Company of Canada, Ltd.
+                         St. Martin's House, 70 Bond Street,
+     Toronto
+
+     India             Macmillan & Company, Ltd.
+                         Macmillan Building, Bombay
+                         309 Bow Bazaar Street, Calcutta
+
+
+
+
+     CALIFORNIA
+
+     THE LAND OF THE SUN
+
+     PAINTED BY
+     SUTTON PALMER
+
+     DESCRIBED BY
+     MARY AUSTIN
+
+
+     ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
+     4, 5, & 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.
+
+
+
+
+     _Published Autumn 1914_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                            PAGE
+  I. The Sparrow Hawk's Own                                    1
+  II. Mothering Mountains                                     25
+  III. The Coasts of Adventure                                45
+  IV. The Port of Monterey                                    61
+  V. Old Spanish Gardens                                      85
+  VI. The Land of the Little Duck                            105
+  VII. The Twin Valleys                                      125
+  VIII. The High Sierras and the Sage-brush Country          147
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+  1. The Three Brothers, Yosemite Valley             _Frontispiece_
+                                                        FACING PAGE
+  2. San Diego, looking across the Bay toward Point Loma          9
+  3. Redlands, looking toward San Bernardino Range               16
+  4. A Eucalyptus Grove                                          33
+  5. Glendale, Valley of the San Gabriel                         40
+  6. A Cañon in the Sierra Madre                                 49
+  7. The Cemetery, Santa Barbara Mission                         56
+  8. Sycamores, a Coast Range Cañon                              59
+  9. Tall Chaparral, Santa Cruz                                  62
+  10. Looking down on Monterey and the Bay                       65
+  11. Pescadero, a Chinese Fishing Village, Monterey Bay         72
+  12. Cypress Point, near Carmel                                 75
+  13. Santa Cruz Mountains, the Coast Range                      78
+  14. The Patio, Old Spanish Residence                           88
+  15. The Golden Gate and Black Point, from Hyde Street,
+      San Francisco. (Site of the Panama Exposition,
+      1915)                                                     107
+  16. Tamalpias                                                 110
+  17. Mill Valley, and Backwater of San Francisco Bay           113
+  18. Waiting for Duck--Los Baños                               120
+  19. Mirror Lake, Yosemite                                     129
+  20. Among the Redwoods of the Great Twin Valleys              131
+  21. Clear Lake, Lake County                                   134
+  22. Castle Crag, Rattlesnake Cañon                            136
+  23. McCloud River, Upper Sacramento Valley                    139
+  24. Donner Lake, on the old Emigrant Trail                    142
+  25. Laurel Lake, Upper Sacramento                             145
+  26. Yosemite Falls                                            152
+  27. Blue Lake, Lake County                                    155
+  28. Lake Tahoe, the High Sierras                              158
+  29. Mount Shasta--Sierra Glow                                 161
+  30. Valley of the Yosemite                                    163
+  31. The Half Dome, Yosemite                                   166
+  32. Shasta--Snow Clouds                                       168
+     _Sketch Map at end of Volume._
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE SPARROW-HAWK'S OWN
+
+
+For a graphic and memorable report of the contours of any country, see
+always the aboriginal account of its making. That will give you the lie
+of the land as no geographer could sketch it forth for you. California
+was made by Padahoon the Sparrow-Hawk and the Little Duck, who brooded
+on the face of the waters in the Beginning of Things.
+
+There is no knowing where the tale comes from, for Winnenap the
+Medicine-Man who told it to me, was eclectic in his faiths as in his
+practice. Winnenap was a Shoshone, one of the group who had been forced
+southward into Death Valley when the great Pah Ute nation had split
+their tribes like a wedge. In the last of their wars he had been taken
+as a hostage by the Paiutes and brought up by them. He might have
+remembered the story, or his wife might have told him. She was a tall
+brown woman out of Tejon, and _her_ mother was of that band of captives
+taken from San Gabriel by the Mojaves, Mission-bred. Wherever it came
+from, the tale has its roots deep in the land it explains.
+
+Padahoon, being wearied of going to and fro under the heavens, said
+to the Little Duck that it was time there should be mountains; so the
+Little Duck dived and brought up the primordial mud of which even the
+geographers are agreed mountains are made.
+
+As he brought it the Sparrow-Hawk built a round beautiful ring of
+mountains enclosing a quiet space of sea. Said the Little Duck, "I
+choose this side," coming up with his bill full of mud toward the west.
+Whereupon the Sparrow-Hawk built the other side higher. When it was all
+done and the Little Duck surveyed it, he observed, as people will to
+this day, the discrepancy between the low western hills and the high
+Sierras, and he thought the builder had not played him fair. "Very
+well, then," said the Sparrow-Hawk, "since you are resolved to be so
+greedy," and he bit out pieces of the Sierras with his bill, and threw
+them over his shoulder.
+
+You can see the bites still deep and sharp about Mt. Whitney.
+
+But the Little Duck would not be satisfied; he took hold by the great
+bulk of Shasta and began to pull, and Padahoon pulled on his side until
+the beautiful ring was pulled out in a long oval and began to break on
+the west where the bay of San Francisco comes in. So they were forced
+to divide the mountain range north and south and make what they could
+of it. But the Sparrow-Hawk, remembering the pieces he had thrown over
+his shoulder, chose the south, where you can still see him sailing any
+clear day about four in the afternoon, over all his stolen territory.
+
+There you have the bones of the land as neatly laid out for you as they
+could do it in Kensington Museum: the long oval, breaking seaward, the
+high, bitten, westward peaks, and the Sparrow-Hawk's Own, tailing south
+like the quirk of an attenuated Q.
+
+They serve, these fragmentary ranges, for the outposts of habitableness
+between the sea wind and the forces of pure desertness. Always there
+is skirmish and assault going on about them. Showers rush up the slope
+of San Jacinto, all their shining spears a-tilt. Great gusts of wind
+roar through the Pass of San Gorgiono, the old Puerto de San Carlos.
+Seasonally they are beleaguered by stealthy rushes of the fogs that
+from the Gulf hear the peaks about Whitney calling, or by the yellow
+murk of sand-storms on which the whole face of the desert is lifted up
+as it travels toward its destiny in orchard row and vineyard. Always
+the edge of the wind is against the stone. They shine, the frontlets of
+the sentinel saints, in that keen polish, as the faces of saints must
+with benignity.
+
+Just beyond the pilæ of the broken mountains--the Pillars of Hercules
+of the West--the desert winds about the eastern bases of the range in
+deep indented bays, white-rimmed with the wave marks of its ancient
+sea. Out a very little way, where the shuddering heat-waves trick the
+imagination, it seems about to be retaken by the ghost of tumbling
+billows. Nothing else moves in it; nothing sounds. Plantations of
+growing things near the Pass lean all a little toward it, edging,
+peering--the wild, spiny, thorny things of the desert to enter the
+rain-fed paradise, the full-leafed offspring of the sea wind plotting
+to take the unfriended sandy spaces. They creep a little forward or
+back as the years run wet or dry. The green things stand up, they
+march along the cliffs, they balance on the edge of precipices, but
+desperation is in every contorted stem of _mesquite_ and _palo verde_.
+And with all this struggle, so still! East on the desert rim the
+Colorado ramps like a stallion between its walls, westward the Pacific
+rings the low foreshore with thunder; but the land never cries out,
+quartz mountains disintegrate but they do not murmur.
+
+It is odd here in a land rife with the naked struggle of great pagan
+forces, to find the promontories so lend themselves to the gentle
+names of saints. Perhaps the Padres were not so far from nature as one
+thinks; in the southerly range which, with San Bernardino on the north,
+sentinels the Pass by which the iron-rimmed Emigrant trail enters the
+coast valleys, they rendered for once the pagan touch. San Jacinto--St.
+Hyacinth--was he ever anything but a Christianised memory of a Grecian
+myth, or does it matter at all so long as there are men to see, in
+the deep purple light that dies along the heights, the colour of blood
+that is shed for love? Perhaps the best thing beauty can say to Greek
+or Christian is that there are still things worth dying for. No doubt
+the veins of Padre Jayme Bravo were as rich in martyr passion as the
+stained air of the mountain is in purples, paling to rose at morning,
+thinning at noon to pure aerial blues.
+
+Seen from the coast the range has a finny contour as of some huge
+creature risen from the sea, with low hills about it like dolphins
+playing; but the prevailing note of the landscape is always blue,
+repeating the tints of the wild brodiæa that may be found on the lomas
+early in April, sending up its clustered heads between two slender
+curving spears.
+
+Near at hand the masking growth is seen to be green, the dark
+olivaceous green of the chamisal. Nowhere does one get the force of
+the Spanish termination _al_--the place where--as in that word. The
+chamisal is the place of the chamise: miles and miles of it, with
+scarcely another shrub allowed, spread over the mesa and well up
+into laps and bays of the hills. It grows breast high, man high in
+the favoured regions; but even where under the influence of drouth
+and altitude it creeps to the knees, it abates nothing of its social
+character. Its ever-green foliage has a dull shining from the resinous
+coating which protects it from evaporation, and a slight sticky feel,
+characteristics that no doubt won it the name of "greasewood" from the
+emigrants who valued it chiefly because it could be burned green. The
+spring winds blowing up from the bay whip all its fretted surface to
+a froth of panicled white bloom, that, stirring a little as the wind
+shifts, full of bee-murmur, touches the imagination with the continual
+reminder of the sea. Higher up the thick lacy chaparral flecks and
+ripples, showing the light underside of leaves, and tosses up great
+fountain sprays of ceanothus, sea-blue and lilac-scented.
+
+  [Illustration: SAN DIEGO, LOOKING ACROSS THE BAY TOWARD POINT LOMA]
+
+All the human interest of this region centres about the city on the bay
+of San Diego, a low locked harbour with a long spit of sand breaking
+the mild Pacific swell, as it bides its time for the shipping of the
+south-western world. It has already waited longer than most people
+suppose. Just fifty years after the landing of Columbus on the Bahamas,
+Cabrillo discovered it; Sir Francis Drake, romping up that coast with
+his buccaneers, must have seen it though he left no note of any visit,
+and in 1602 Sebastian Viscaino anchored there and gave it its present
+name. Just about the time the mixed Dutch and English on the Atlantic
+coast were beginning to think of themselves as Americans and to act
+accordingly, the Franciscan _Frailes_ settled on San Diego bay. Nobody
+will know why it was reserved for the brown-skirted brothers of St.
+Francis to undertake the subjugation of Alta California, until it is
+known why the King of Spain quarrelled with the Jesuits. They were
+accused of plotting against His Majesty, but in those days it was
+possible to accuse the Jesuits of almost anything without going very
+far wrong in the popular estimate. I have my own opinion about it,
+which is that a great land, like a great lady, has her way with men.
+And no land has called its own as has California:--poet or painter
+or pioneer, the world's rim under. No better patron could be found
+for this blossoming West than Francis of Assisi, who preached to his
+little brothers of the air and would have made a convert of the coyote.
+Perhaps the first settlers of a country leave their stripe on all the
+land's later offspring: if it was a way the West took to breed fervour
+and faith and the spirit of prophecy in the young generation, who shall
+say she has not succeeded?
+
+In January of 1769 two expeditions by land and sea set forth in the
+name of God and the King of Spain, under the patronage of Señor San
+Jose, indubitable patron of all journeys since the flight into Egypt.
+In April the ship _San Antonio_ anchored in the placid bay, there to
+await the live stock driven up from Velicatá. So the old world came to
+the new with a whole collocation of sainted personages flocking like
+doves to her banners.
+
+But it was not saints that the land wanted so much as the stuff that
+goes to make them. The expedition starved, sickened; their eyes were
+holden. Governor Portola, with the greater part of the expedition, made
+a long _pasear_ on foot to find the lost port of Monterey, and came
+back, with armour rust on his doublet sleeves and nothing much gained
+beside, to declare the expedition a failure. But Padre Serra--Junipero
+Serra, father president of Missions, juniper of God's own planting,
+sapling of that stock of which the founder of the order had wished
+for a whole forest full--Padre Serra claimed a churchman's privilege.
+He demanded time for a _novena_, a nine days' cycle of prayer to the
+patron who was so unaccountably hiding the relief ship in the fogs
+and indecisions of the uncharted coast. It is my belief that the Padre
+chose the _novena_ simply because it was the longest possible time he
+could hope to delay the return of the expedition. Nine days they drew
+in their belts and told their beads, and on the last hour of the last
+day, far on the sea rim, behold the white wings of succour!
+
+The Patron, who could never be at a loss for an expedient, contrived
+that the ship should lose an anchor which compelled it to put in at San
+Diego, where they had no expectation of finding any of the party. It
+was so that the land tried them out and approved, for from that day the
+founding went forward steadily.
+
+There is a fine growing city now on the site of the early landing,
+regularly stratified through all the architectural periods of
+California, from the low thick-walled adobe of the Spanish occupation
+to the newest shingle-stained bungalow of the latest one-lunged
+millionaire; but the land has not lost, in a century and a half, one
+mark by which the brown-skirted _Frailes_ found their way about in
+it. It has its distinctive mark, the Sparrow-Hawk's land, the seal of
+a private and peculiar affection. Here about the mouth of one of its
+swift seasonal rivers, and touching as with a finger-tip the opposing
+shore of the island of Santa Rosa, is the habitat of the Torrey pine.
+Japanesque, unrelated, drinking the sea air, never spreading inland,
+it hugs the sea-worn edges of La Jolla, as though, as some botanists
+believe, the species came to life there out of the jewel-tinted water
+and the spirit of the desert dust.
+
+It is also possible to think of it as a relict of the land of which
+the broken Channel Islands were made, but in any case it is a pity that
+science could not have retained for this lonely, restricted species the
+name the _Frailes_ gave to its fostering waters, Soledad--the solitary.
+Behind the town the mesa rises abruptly, knife-cut by the gullies of
+intermittent streams; and far back where the mountains break down into
+foothills, and these into the lomas--little low mounds of detritus--the
+sea air collects all the blue rays of the diffused light and holds
+them there all day in the hollows, in memory of the sea from which they
+rose.
+
+In April of the year of the Occupation the white panicles of the
+chamise would be tossing here and there, and the yellow violets run
+thin lines as of fire among the grasses. You would not believe there
+were so many yellow violets in the world as a day's riding will still
+show you. At this season, _islay_, the wild cherry, will be shaking out
+its fine white spray of bloom, the button willow begins, the sycamore,
+the buckthorn, _cascara sagrada_; the great berried manzanita, which
+shed its waxen bells as early as December, will be reddening its
+apples. Here also the chia, the true sage, the honey-maker, bread of
+the wild tribes, makes itself known by the penetrating pungent odour
+of its unfolding foliage. Binding all the leafy thickets, runs the
+succulent starry bloom of the megarrhiza that, from its hidden root,
+as large as a man's body, sends up smothering tendrils so sensitive
+to their opportunity that you have only to sit down beside them on
+one of these long growing afternoons, to find all their tips curling
+in your direction and the stems moving sensibly across the grass in
+the direction of support. As early as February the foot-long vines
+can be seen locating the nearest shrub or the cañon wall, farther
+away than you could detect it by any tactile sense. And how quickly,
+once the objective is sensed, the questing Force is withdrawn from
+the unsuccessful members! Perhaps this one to the right may keep on
+in the direction in which it has caught the invisible communicating
+thread from the nearest buckthorn, but the other three or four green
+tentacles, finding no invitation from any quarter, not only stop
+growing but seem to shrink and dwindle in the interests of the climbing
+brother. Sometimes in a particularly lusty growth, all the young vines
+will be drawn toward some conspicuous support, so that by the third
+day those that lay out starlike, with inquiring tips raised a little,
+delicately feeling, will swing through all their points to the one
+hopeful direction. These warm sensuous days toward the end of April,
+just after rain, when the very earth is full of a subtle intoxication,
+one has but to thrust a finger among the bourgeoning tips and tendrils
+of the megarrhiza to see them stir with live response. One must
+suppose, since the megarrhiza is of no discoverable use to anybody,
+that the Force uses it to its own ends, an ascending, uprearing Force,
+rehearsing itself for a more serviceable instrument.--This, however,
+is a digression; probably the Padres found no time for philosophising
+about anything, much less so useless a specimen as the wild cucumber.
+
+What the Franciscans saw first in Alta California was what all pioneers
+look for in new lands--the witness of their faith. They saw the
+waxberry bush from which they were to gather the thin coating of the
+berries into candles for their improvised altars, saw the crepitant,
+aromatic _yerba buena_, and the shrubby, glutinous-leaved herb of the
+Saints, given to them for healing.
+
+More than all else they must have seen in the month of the Virgin
+Mother, high on the altar slopes of San Jacinto and San Bernardino, the
+white thyrses of the yucca, called The Candles of Our Lord. Back where
+the green exclusiveness of the chamise gives place to the chaparral,
+the tall shafts arise. They grow in blossoming, the bells climbing
+with the aspiring stalk until as many as six thousand of them may hang
+pure and stiff along the lance-like stem between the bayonet-bristling
+leaves. Long after the white flame has burnt out, the stalks remain,
+rank on rank, as though battalions of Spanish spearmen had fallen
+there, holding each his spear aloft in his dead hand.
+
+It is only back there where the yuccas begin, that the small, swift
+life of the mesa goes on, very much as it did in the days of the
+Spanish _Frailes_. The doves begin it, voicing the mesa dawn in notes
+of a cool blueness; then the sleek and stately quail, moving down in
+twittering droves to the infrequent water-holes. The rhythm of a flock
+in motion is like the ripple of muscles in the sides of a great snake.
+After them the road runner, _corredor del camino_, the cock of the
+chaparral, crest down, rudder aslant, swifter than a horse, incarnate
+spirit of the hopeful dust through which he flirts and flits. Then
+the blueness is folded up, it lies packed in the cañons, the mountains
+flatten; high in his airy haunts the Sparrow-Hawk sails, and the furry,
+frisk-tailed folk begin the day's affairs.
+
+  [Illustration: REDLANDS, LOOKING TOWARD SAN BERNARDINO RANGE]
+
+The secret of learning the mesa life is to sit still, to sit still and
+to keep on sitting still. The only other secret is to be learned in the
+wattled huts stuck like the heaps of the house-building rats in the
+dry washes, inwoven with the boughs of buckthorn and _islay_, except
+for size scarcely distinguishable from them. For the Indian has gone
+through all that green woof with the thread of kinship and found it an
+ordered world. He is choke-full as is the chamisal of wild life, of
+the tag ends of instincts and understandings left over from the days
+when he was brother to the beast--those sleek-bellied rats, stealing to
+lay another foot-long, dried stick to the characterless heap of their
+dwelling,--bad Indians to him, trying to remember their ways when they
+were men; that brown feathered bunch, in and out of the chia bush,--she
+was present at the making of man. Your aboriginal has the true sense of
+proportion: not size but vitality. You can cover the sage wren with the
+hollow of your hand, but you cannot hop so far for your size nor be so
+brave about it.
+
+Very different from the spring flutter and fullness, must have been the
+look of the land in the year of the martyrdom of Padre Jayme Bravo,
+which was the year of Bunker Hill and the Republic. The green of the
+chamisal was overlaid then by the brown tones of its seeding. _Islay_
+had shed its crimson drupes; the cactus fires had died down to the dull
+purples of the fruiting prickly pear; the sycamores by the dwindling
+waters of the arroya had scarcely a palsied leaf to wag. The Mission
+had been moved, for what reasons must be guessed by whoever has had
+occasion to observe the effect of a standing army on the subjugated
+peoples, back from the sea marsh to a little valley of what is known
+now as Mission River. Sixty converts had come down out of the hills
+to receive the Medicine of the Soft-Hearted God. That is the way they
+must have looked at it--rood and cup and sprinkling water, and the
+bells louder than the medicine drums. Back in the dry gullies the
+drums would have been going night and day where the _tingaivashes_, the
+Medicine-Men, lashed themselves into a fury over this apostasy. Certain
+of the renegades heard them between their orisons; they fled back to
+the muttering roll and the pound of the dancing feet. In the night
+after that, eight hundred of the Dieguenos, clothed in frantic fervour
+and very little else, came down to make an end of the "long gowns." How
+the soul of Padre Jayme must have leaped up as he heard them yelling
+outside his unguarded hut: the appetite for martyrdom is deeper than
+all our dreaming. He ran toward them with arms extended. "Love God, my
+children!" he cried, and received their arrows. When it was reported
+to the Padre President at Monterey, "Thank God," he said; "now the
+soil is watered." It did indeed repay them such a crop of souls as any
+watering produces in that soil; but at San Juan Capistrano, where a new
+foundation was in progress, they buried the bells and returned to the
+presidio.
+
+Few people understand why Californians so love their Missions, the
+meagre ruins of them, scant as a last year's nest. But two priests, a
+corporal, and three men in the unmapped land with eight hundred angry
+savages--it is the mark of the Western breed to love odds such as that!
+It is not to the campanile at Pala nor the ruined arches of San Luis
+Rey that men made pilgrimages but to the spirit of enterprise that
+built the West.
+
+All about the upper mesa there are traces, scarcely more evident to the
+eye than the Missions, that the inhabitants of it have been dreamers,
+dreaming greatly. I do not now refer to the court of San Luis Rey,
+from the roofs of which a joyous populace once cheered a governor
+of California in the part of toreador, in a neighbourhood where
+Raphael-eyed muchachitos who have never heard of the Five Little Pigs
+that Went to Market can still repeat you the rhyme that begins
+
+     Up in Heaven there is a bull fight,
+     The bull has horns of silver and a tail of gold.
+
+Heaven enough under those conditions to the children of the Occupation!
+Nor am I thinking of a road on which, when there is a light wind
+moving from the sea, you can still hear at midnight the pounding feet
+of the Indian riders galloping down to the bay, only to see their
+beloved Padre blessing them from the ship's side in departing. I do
+not think even--because I make a practice of thinking as little as
+possible of a matter so discreditable to us as our Indian policy--of
+the procession of the evicted _Palatingwas_, even though the whole
+region of Warner's ranch is still full of the shame of it and the
+rending cry. The struggle of men with men is at best a sick and squalid
+affair for one of the parties; but men contriving against the gods
+for possession of the earth is your true epic. The brave little towns
+which start up there with their too early florescence of avenue and
+public square, the courageous acres which the vineyardist clears in the
+chamisal and the chamise takes again! All along the upper mesa, Pan
+and the homesteader keep up the ancient fight. And with what unequal
+weapons! The wild gourd, the bindweed, the megarrhiza, at the mere
+rumour of a cleared space, come beckoning and joining hands. Though
+he goes gunning all day without finding one young rabbit for his pot,
+the bark of the homesteader's orchard trees will be gnawed by them at
+the precise sappy moment. At dawn the quail may be heard with soft
+contented noises between the rows of bearing vines, plunging their
+beaks in the ripest berries. Then the mule-deer will spend the night
+in the carefully fenced enclosure, ruining the largest bunches with
+selective bites; after which the homesteader, if he is wise, will know
+that he is beaten. The mule-deer can go over any fence, though usually
+he prefers to go between the wires, which he can do without altering
+his stride. Detected, even at its most leafless, the antlered chaparral
+makes cover for him until, after hours of following, he is glimpsed
+at last, scaling at his stiff bounding gait some inaccessible rocky
+stair from which nothing comes back but the bullet's deflected whine.
+Now and then some pot-hunter who remembers when the mule-deer could be
+heard barking to the does in any deep gully, when the moon rose hot on
+the flushed trail of the October day, will tell you that there are no
+more of his kind on San Jacinto. But so long as there are homesteaders
+to be fended from the hill borders, the mule-deer will come back. And
+when the mule-deer is gone there will still be drouth. Let the coast
+currents swing out a few degrees, or the Gulf winds blow contrarily for
+consecutive seasons, and the stoutest homesteader fails. After a few
+years you can guess where he has been by finding the chamise growing
+taller in the ploughed places.
+
+Incurable wild hills and wild sufficing sea, and the little strip
+between which they give to one another--Indian giving!--conceded by the
+years of rain and demanded back by drouth; shoals that the tide piles
+and the sea eats again! It lies like a many-coloured dancer's scarf,
+and hearts are still caught in its folds as in the days of the Spanish
+Occupation.
+
+There's a stripe of aquamarine turning to chrysoprase, that's for
+the sea; amber then for the hollow cliffs of La Jolla and San Juan,
+smugglers' cliffs eaten well under the shore; a stripe of scarlet,
+spangled with viscid diamond dew, that's for the mesembryanthemums
+crowding the foreshore; pale green of the lupins with a white thread
+through it of the highway, green again for the chamisal, and blue of
+the mountains' unassailable sea thought.
+
+Nature is a great symbolist; what she makes out of her own materials is
+but the shadow of what man in any country will make finally of his. San
+Diego by the sea dreams of a great sea empery. What by all the signs
+she is bound to produce, is a poet. There in the scarf-coloured, low
+shore is the vocal forecast of him in the night-singing mocking-bird.
+Especially in the fringing island of Coronado out of the waxberry bush
+he can be heard gurgling like a full fountain with jets and rushes
+of pure crystal sound. From moonrise on until dawn he scatters from a
+tireless throat, music like light and laughter. It is as impossible to
+close the eyes under it as in the glare of the sun. And if the moon,
+the measurer, be gone on a journey to the other side of the world,
+still he sings, all his notes muffled by the dark; he sways and sings,
+dozes and sings, dreaming and wakes to sing. So it should be with poets
+whether anybody wishes them to or not. "The lands of the sun expand the
+soul," says the proverb.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+MOTHERING MOUNTAINS
+
+
+It is all part of that subtle relation between the observer and the
+landscape of the west, which goes by the name of "atmosphere," that
+one returns again and again to the reality of Christian feeling in the
+Franciscan Pioneers, as witnessed by the names they left us--one of the
+most charming proofs, if proof were wanted, of the power of religion
+to illuminate the mind to a degree often denied to generations of art
+and culture. How many book-fed tourists rounding the blue ranks of San
+Jacinto to face the noble front of the Coast Range as it swings back
+from the San Gabriel valley, would have found for it a name at once so
+absolute, so understanding as Sierra Madre, Mother Mountain?
+
+There you have it all in one comprehensive sweep: the brooding,
+snow-touched, virginal peaks, visited and encompassed by the sacred
+spirit of the sea, and below it the fertile valley, the little
+huddling, skirting hills fed from her breast. The very lights that
+die along the heights, the airs that play there, the swelling fecund
+slopes, have in them something so richly maternal; the virtue of
+the land is the virtue that we love most in the mothers of men. And
+if you want facts under the poetry, see how the Sierra receives the
+rain and sends it down laden with the rich substance of her granite
+bosses, making herself lean to fatten the valleys. The great gorges
+and swift angles of the hills which fade and show in the evening
+glow, are wrought there by the ceaseless contribution of the mountain
+to the tillable land. And what a land it has become! There have been
+notable kingdoms of the past of fewer and less productive acres. Yet
+even in the great avenues of palms that flick the light a thousand
+ways from their wind-stirred, serrate edges, is a reminder of the
+host of bristling, spiny growth the land once entertained. It is as if
+the sinister forces of the desert lurked somewhere not far under the
+surface, ready at any moment to retake all this wonder of fertility,
+should the beneficence of the Mother Mountain fail. The Padre pioneers
+must have felt these two contending forces many a time when they lay
+down at night under the majestic Sierra, for they named the first
+spot where they made an abiding place, in honour of the protecting
+influence, _Nuestro Señora, Reina de Los Angeles_, Our Lady the Queen
+of the Angels. There she hovered, snow-whitened amid tall candles of
+the stars, while south and west the coyote barked the menace of the
+unwatered lands. Now this is remarkable, and one of the things that go
+to show we are vastly more susceptible to influences of nature than
+some hard-headed members of society suppose, that in this group of
+low hills and shallow valleys between the Sierra Madre and the sea,
+the most conspicuous human achievement has been a new form of domestic
+architecture.
+
+This is the thing that most strikes the attention of the traveller:
+not the orchards and the gardens, which are not appreciably different
+in kind from those of the Riviera and some favoured parts of Italy,
+but the homes, the number of them, their extraordinary adaptability to
+the purposes of gracious living. The Angelenos call them bungalows,
+in respect to the type from which the later form developed, but they
+deserve a name as distinctive as they have in character become. These
+little thin-walled dwellings, all of desert-tinted native woods and
+stones, are as indigenous to the soil as if they had grown up out of
+it, as charming in line and the perfection of utility as some of those
+wild growths which show a delicate airy florescence above ground, but
+under it have deep, man-shaped, resistant roots. With their low and
+flat-pitched roofs they present a certain likeness to the aboriginal
+dwellings which the Franciscans found scattered like wasps' nests among
+the chaparral along the river,--which is only another way of saying
+that the spirit of the land shapes the art that is produced there.
+
+One must pause a little by the dry wash of this river, so long ago
+turned into an irrigating ditch that it is only in seasons of unusual
+flood it remembers its ancient banks, and finds them, in spite of
+all that real estate agencies have done to obliterate such natural
+boundaries. This river of Los Angeles betrays the streak of original
+desertness in the country by flowing bottom-side up, for which it
+receives the name of _arroya_, and even _arroya seca_ as against the
+_rio_ of the full-flowing Sacramento and San Juan. A _rio_ is chiefly
+water, but an _arroya_, and especially that one which travels farthest
+from the Mothering Mountains toward the sea, is at most seasons of
+the year a small trickle of water among stones in a wide, deep wash,
+overgrown with button willow and sycamores that click their gossiping
+leaves in every breath of wind or in no wind at all. Tiny gold and
+silver backed ferns climb down the banks to drink, and as soon as the
+spring freshet has gone by, brodiæas and blazing stars come up between
+the boulders worn as smooth as if by hand.
+
+Farther up, where the stream narrows, it is overgrown by willows,
+alders, and rock maples, and leaps white-footed into brown pools for
+trout. Deer drink at the shallows, and it is not so long ago that
+cinnamon bear and grizzlies tracked the wet clay of its borders. This
+is the guarantee that this woman-country is in no danger of too much
+mothering. No climate which is acceptable to trout and grizzlies is in
+the least likely to prove enervating; men and beasts, they run pretty
+much to the same vital, sporting qualities.
+
+All that country which extends from the foot of the Sierra Madre to the
+sea, is so cunningly patterned off with ranks of low hills and lomas
+that its vastness is disguised, or rather revealed by subtle change and
+swift surprises as a discreet woman reveals her charms. This renders it
+one of the most delightful of motoring countries. The car swings over a
+perfect road into snug little orchard nooks as safe and secret seeming
+as a nest, climbs a round-breasted hill to greet the wide horizon of
+the sea, or a mesa stretching away into blue and amber desertness,
+which when adventured upon, discloses in unsuspected hollows white,
+peaceful towns girt by great acres of orange groves, or the orderly
+array of vines trimmed low and balancing like small, wide-skirted
+figures in a minuet. And then the ground opens suddenly to deep, dry
+gullies where little handfuls of the grey soil gather themselves up and
+scuttle mysteriously under the cactus bushes, and dried seeds of the
+megarrhiza rattle with a muffled sound as the pods blow about. Here one
+meets occasionally the last survivors of the old way of life before men
+found it: _neotoma_, the house-building rat, with his conical heap of
+rubbish; or a road runner, tilting his tail and practising his short,
+sharp runs in the powdery sand under the rabbit brush; here, too, the
+lurking desert shows its spiny tips like a creature half-buried in the
+sand, not dead, but drowsing.
+
+  [Illustration: A EUCALYPTUS GROVE]
+
+As artists know colour, and poets know it, this is the most colourful
+corner of the world. The blue and silver tones of the Sparrow-Hawk's
+land give place to airy violets, fawns, and rich ambers. It is curious,
+that obstinate preference which a locality has for colour schemes
+of its own adoption; man can break up and re-form them, but he can
+never quite overcome the original key. Here the bright, instant note
+of the geraniums that shore up the bungalows, even the insult of the
+magenta-coloured Bougainvillea is subdued by the aerial softness
+that lies along the hills like the bloom on fruit. The sheets of
+Eschscholtzia gold that once spread over miles of the San Gabriel
+valley, and still linger in torn fragments about Altadena, have been
+sheared by the plough, to vanish and reappear again in the solid globes
+of orange, distilled from the saps and juices of the soil.
+
+One of the most interesting of the instruments by which the cultivated
+landscape has gathered up and fixed the evanescent greens that spread
+thinly yet over the uncropped hills in spring, is the eucalyptus.
+All the tints are there, from the olive greens of the chaparral to
+the sombre darkness of the evergreen oak; young shoots of it have the
+silvery finish of the artemisia which once gave the note of the mesas
+about Riverside and San Bernardino. No other imported tree has quite
+to such a degree the air of the _habitué_; one wonders indeed if it
+could have been half so much at home in Australia, from whence it has
+returned like some wandering heir to the ancestral acre.
+
+It proves its blood royal by its facile adaptiveness to the prevailing
+lines of the landscape, taking the rounded, leaning outline of the live
+oaks on the wind-driven hills, or in sheltered ravines springing upward
+straight as the silver firs. Perhaps its most charming possibilities
+are revealed in the middle distance where, lifted high on columnar
+stems, its leaf crowns take on the blunt, flowing contours of the
+hills. At all times it has a beautiful resilience to the wind, bowing
+with a certain courtliness without compulsion, and recovering as if
+by conscious harmonious movement. The pepper tree, however, most
+magnificent specimens of which may be found lining the avenues of
+Pasadena, or in some unexpected corner of the hills marking the site of
+some old Spanish hacienda, is always an alien. It is like the Spaniards
+who brought it, perhaps, in its drooping grace, in the careless
+prodigality with which it sheds its fragile crimson fruits. Something
+of old-worldliness persists in its spicy odours, and in the stir of its
+lacy shadows; when the moon comes over the mountain wall and the wind
+is moving, there is the touch of mystery one associates with lovely
+señoritas leaning out of balconies. One fancies that the pepper tree
+will last so long as the dying race of Dons and Doñas, and with them
+will cease to be a feature of local interest.
+
+There is hardly more than a trace in the modern city of Los Angeles of
+_Nuestra Señora, Reina de los Angeles_. The last time I passed through
+the old plaza, the streets of offence encroached upon it from the east,
+and a corner of the sacred precinct had been sacrificed to the trolley.
+The Church of Our Lady, over whose door may still be traced the fading
+inscription from which the city takes its name, was never a mission,
+but one of the six chapels or _asistencias_ centred about the Mission
+San Gabriel. It was here the first expedition passed northward looking
+for the port of Monterey, on the day of the feast of Our Lady in the
+year when the Atlantic Colonies were making up their minds to fight the
+English. It was close to this spot and along Downey Street were enacted
+the most pitiful of all the tragic incidents which marked the recession
+of the aboriginal races. Bereft of their lands and the protection of
+their Church, they became a prey to the greed of the dominant peoples,
+and used regularly to be incited to drunkenness upon their wages on
+Sunday, arrested while in that condition, and sold each Monday morning
+for the amount of their fines to the neighbouring ranchers. Things
+like this lurking under the surface of commercial enterprise, as the
+desert lies in wait in sandy stretches, advise us that much of our
+insistence on democracy grows out of our inability to trust ourselves
+to deal equitably with our fellows under any other conditions. We can
+keep to the rules of the game we have set up more easily than to the
+unfenced humanities. Here in the old plaza full of sleepy light, which
+still retains the indefinable stamp of the people to whom to-morrow was
+always a better day for doing things, one sighs for the short-sighted
+self-interest which so wasted the native children of the soil.
+
+But after all the land couldn't have loved them as it does the race
+for which it brings forth its miraculous harvests. Not that there
+weren't miracles in those days; in fact they began here, or rather at
+San Gabriel, six miles or so beyond the river which in those days was
+called Porcincula, a name that linked the old world with the new by
+way of the little chapel in Italy in which the beloved Francis received
+such heavenly favours. The miracle of San Gabriel relates to a display
+of a canvas presentiment of Our Lady, at the mere sight of which the
+wild tribes experienced exceeding grace. Looking up suddenly at the
+Mother Mountain brooding above the plain, it is easy to understand
+how the symbol of aloof but solicitous care came home to the primitive
+mind, always peculiarly open to suggestions of humaneness in nature.
+
+The heads of the Sierra Madre are rounded, the contours of great
+dignity. The appeal it makes to the eye is of mass and line. Its
+charms, and it has many, of forested slope, leaping waters, and lilied
+meadows, do not offer themselves to the casual glance, but must be
+sought after with great pains. The bulk of the range is of warm,
+grey granite, clothed with atmospheric colour as with a garment. It
+borrows more from the sky than the sea, taking on at times an aerial
+transparency, the soul of the mountain about to pass trembling into
+light. Pinkish tones are discoverable in even the bluest shadows,
+and at times the peaks are touched with the rich, roseate orange of
+the Alpine-glow. But the variations of temperature and atmospheric
+conditions are not sufficiently pronounced to present themselves to
+the sense as the source of its aspects of tenderness, of majesty,
+of virginal aloofness. Rather such changes seem to be occasioned by
+palpitations of the Mountain Spirit, remote in sacred meditation,
+glowing, dimming, defining itself from within.
+
+It may be that the immense vitality of the land, its abundance, the
+bursting orchards, the rich variety of native growth, somehow dwarfs
+the earliest impression of the Sierra Madre, since few, if any, gather
+at first an adequate idea of the actual mass and height it represents.
+It is only after appreciation of the really amazing activities of the
+Angelenos is a little dulled by familiarity, at early morning when
+the groves are sleeping and the bright plantations of the gardens lack
+the sun to flash their brilliance on the sight, or at evening when a
+sea mist covers the teeming land, one is prepared to hear that many of
+these peaks are higher than the Simplon, and that it would be possible
+to wander for months in the intricacies of its cañons without having
+time to grow familiar with a single one of them.
+
+Sometimes the mere mechanics of the land, the pull of the wind up the
+narrow gorges as you pass, advises the open mind of power and immensity
+residing in the thinly forested bulks. Passing what appears a mere
+shadowy gulf in the mountain wall, you are aware of a murmurous sound
+as of the sea in a shell, and feel suddenly the push of the draught
+on your windshield like a great steady hand. In places above San
+Bernardino, the steady pouring of invisible wind rivers has swept the
+soil for miles and defied three generations of artificial plantations.
+And sometimes the mountain speaks directly to the soul. I recall such
+an occasion one late spring. We had been skirting the range toward
+Riverside all afternoon, having the fall of the land seaward always
+in view, noting how, in spite of the absurd predilection of men for
+square fields and gridiron arrangements, the main lines of cultivation
+were being pulled into beauty by the sheer necessity of humouring
+the harvest. It was that lagging hour between the noon splendour and
+the gathering of the light for its dramatic passage into night. The
+orange orchards lay dead green in the hollows, unplanted ridges showed
+scarcely a trace of atmospheric blueness; unlaced, unbuskined, the
+land rested. And all in the falling of a leaf, in the scuttle of a
+horned toad in the dust of the roadway, it lifted into eerie life. It
+bared its teeth; the veil of the mountain was rent. Nothing changed,
+nothing stirred or glimmered, but the land had spoken. As if it had
+taken a step forward, as if a hand were raised, the mountain stood
+over us. And then it sank again. While the chill was still on us, the
+grip of terror, there lay the easy land, the comfortable crops, the red
+geraniums about the bungalows. But never again for me would the Sierra
+Madre be a mere geographical item, a feature of the landscape; it was
+Power, immanent and inescapable. Shall not the mother of the land do
+what she will with it?
+
+Entering the cañons of the San Gabriel, one is struck with the
+endearing quality of their charm. In a country which disdains every
+sort of prettiness, and dares even to use monotony as an element of
+beauty, as California does, it is surprising to find, cut in the solid
+granite wall, little dells all laced with fern and saxifrage, and
+wind swung, frail, flowery bells. Little streams come dashing down the
+runways with an elfin movement, with here and there a miniature fall
+"singing like a bird," as Muir described it, between moss-encrusted
+banks.
+
+  [Illustration: GLENDALE, VALLEY OF THE SAN GABRIEL]
+
+Into the open mouths of such cañons have retreated the hosts of
+wildflowers that once in the wet seasons overran all that country from
+San Bernardino to the sea,--the white sage, most honeyful of all the
+sages, the poppies, gilias, cream cups, nemophilias which twenty-five
+years ago were as common as meadow grass, as thick as the planted
+fields of alfalfa which have usurped them. Settlers who came into
+this country when the trail over the San Gorgiono had not yet hardened
+between iron rails, tell of riding belly deep for miles in wild oats
+and waving bloom, and where the trail goes out over the San Fernando,
+toward Camulas, the yellow mustard reached its scriptural height, and
+the birds of the air built their nests in it. Now and then in very
+wet years a faint yellow tinge, high up under the bases of the hills,
+is all that is left of the seed which, by report, the Padres sowed
+along the coastwise trails, to mark where they trod the circuit of the
+Missions.
+
+Everywhere within the cañons, honeyful flowers abound, and up from the
+rocky floors the slopes are stiff with chaparral. This characteristic
+growth, which, seen from the open valley flooded by dry sun, appears as
+a mere scurf, a roughened lichen on the mountain wall, is in reality a
+riot of manzanita, mahogany, ceanothus, cherry and black sage, from ten
+to fifteen feet high, all but impassable. Elsewhere in the ranges to
+the north, the chaparral is loose enough to admit fern and herbaceous
+plants, carpeting the earth, but here the rigid, spiny stems contend
+for three or four feet, thick as the carving in old cathedral choirs,
+before they attain light and air enough to put forth leaf or twig. On
+the seaward side of the mountains, miles and miles of this dense growth
+flow over the ranges, parted here and there by knife-edge ridges, or
+by huge bosses of country rock, affording a great sweep to the eye,
+reaching far to seaward. From here the lower country shrinks to its
+proper proportion--a toy landscape planted with Noah's Ark trees--and
+the noise of men is overlaid by the great swells of the Pacific which
+come thundering in, lifting far and faint reverberations along the
+ranges.
+
+On either side of these vast conning towers it is still possible to
+trace the indefinite tracks which wild creatures make, running clear
+and well defined for short distances and then melting unaccountably
+into the scrub again. Occasionally still they discover traces of the
+wild life in which the Sierra Madre once abounded. Deer are known to
+take advantage of such natural outlooks in protecting themselves from
+their natural enemies, and from the evidence of frequent visits here,
+bears and foxes and bobcats must have made much the same use of them.
+From such high escarpments the Indians would have seen Cabrillo's
+winged boats go by, and from them, all up the coast, ascended the
+pillars of smoke that attended the galleon of Francis Drake.
+
+Once within the portals of the range, the granite walls sheer away
+from sequestered parks of oak, madroño, and Douglas spruce. The trees
+are not thickly set here as in the north, but admit of sunny space
+and murmurous bee pasture between their gracefully contrasting boles,
+and to a thousand bright-feathered and scaled things unknown to the
+all-pine or all-redwood forests. Such parks or basins vary from a few
+yards to an acre or two in extent, threaded like beads upon a single
+stream. One thinks indeed of the old-fashioned "charm string" in which
+each meadow space has its peculiar virtue:--open sunny shallows, arrowy
+cascades, troops of lilies standing high as a man's head, forested
+fern, columbine, delphinum, and scarlet mimulus along the water
+borders.
+
+They grow slighter as the trail ascends--it is possible now to make
+nearly the whole distance in gravity cars for that purpose provided,
+but I recommend a sure-footed mule for the true mountain-lover--until
+above the source of the streams, from dips and saddles of the range,
+above the summer-shrunken glaciers, where the trees are bowed and the
+chaparral creeps as if awed and dizzy, it is possible to have a glimpse
+of the still unconquered and unconquerable "sage brush county." All
+along the back of the Sierra Madre wall the desert laps like a slow
+tide, rolling up and receding with the drouths and rains. The eye takes
+it in no less slowly than the imagination. It stretches, in fact, to
+the Colorado, but a haze of heat obscures its eastern border; long
+whitened lines of alkali, like wave marks, set the seasonal limit of
+its encroachments. Here and there shows the dark checkering of fertile
+patches, spilled over from the rich west-lying valleys; trending east
+by south lies the Sierra Madre like an arm, guarding the favoured
+region.
+
+And yet in her very favour the Mother Mountain is impartial, for
+equally as she saves the south from desertness, she has denied to us
+the one instrument by which the desert could be mastered. Mighty as
+man is in transforming the face of the earth, he is nothing without the
+Rains.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE COASTS OF ADVENTURE
+
+
+Old trails, older than the memory of man, go out from the southern
+country by way of Cahuenga, by Eagle Rock, toward that part of the
+shelving coast where the Padre's mustard gold lingered longest, as if
+to mark the locality where the gold they missed was first uncovered.
+But suppose, on that day of the year '41, Francisco Lopez, _major-domo_
+of the Mission San Fernando, had not had an appetite for onions? Who
+knows how history would have made itself?
+
+The speculation is idle; anybody named Lopez has always a
+taste for onions because they are the nearest thing to garlic.
+Señor Francisco,--I suppose one may grant him the title at this
+distance--rested under an oak and dug up the wild root with his
+knife, and the tide of the world's emigration set toward the Coasts
+of Adventure. I have, holding my papers as I write, an Indian basket
+reputed to be one of those in which, in those days, placer gold was
+washed out of the sandy loam; it was given me by one who had it from
+Don Antonio Coronel, and has a pattern about it of the low serried
+hills of the coast district. Where it breaks, as all patterns of Indian
+baskets do, to give egress to the spirit resident in things dedicated
+to human use, there are two figures of men with arms outstretched, but
+divided as the pioneers who carried the cross into that country were
+from those who followed the lure of gold. The basket wears with time,
+but the pattern holds, inwoven with its texture as Romance is woven
+with the history of all that region lying between San Francisco on the
+north and Cahuenga where, after a bloodless battle, was consummated the
+cession of California from Mexico.
+
+  [Illustration: A CAÑON IN THE SIERRA MADRES]
+
+From the white landmark of San Juan Capistrano to a point opposite
+Santa Inez, saints thick as sea-birds, standing seaward, break the
+long Pacific swell: San Clemente, Santa Catalina, Santa Rosa--their
+deep-scored cliffs searched by the light, revealing their kinship
+with the parallel mainland ranges. But there are hints here, in the
+plant and animal life and in the climate, milder even than that of
+the opposing channel ports, hints which not even the Driest-Dustiness
+dare despise, of those mellower times than ours from which all fables
+of Blessed Islands are sprung. Islands "very near the terrestrial
+paradise" the old Spanish romancer described them. Often as not the
+imagination sees more truly than the eye. I myself am ready to affirm
+that something of man's early Eden drifted thither on the Kuro-Siwa,
+that warm current deflected to our coast, which, for all we know of it,
+might well be one of the four great rivers that went about the Garden
+and watered it. Great golden sun-fish doze upon the island tides,
+flying-fish go by in purple and silver streaks, and under the flat
+bays, which take at times colour that rivals the lagoons of Venice,
+forests of kelp, a-crawl with rainbow-coloured life, sleep and sway
+upon tides unfelt of men. There are days at Catalina so steeped with
+harmonies of sea and sun that the singing of the birds excites the
+soothed sense no more than if the lucent air had that moment dripped in
+sound. These are the days when the accounts that Cabrillo left of his
+findings there, of a civil and religious development superior to the
+tribes of the mainland, beguile the imagination.
+
+One thinks of the watery highway between the west coast and the
+channel islands as another _Camino Real_ of the sea, where in place
+of mule trains and pacing Padres, went balsas, skin canoes, galleons,
+far-blown Chinese junks, Russian traders, slipping under the cliffs
+of San Juan for untaxed hides and tallow, Atlantic whalers, packets
+rounding the Horn, sunk past the load line with Argonauts of '49,
+opium smugglers dropping a contraband cask or an equally prohibited
+coolie under the very wing of San Clemente. So many things could have
+happened--Odysseys, Æneids--that it is with a sigh one resigns the
+peaks of the submerged range, paling and purpling on the west, to the
+student of sea-birds and sea-nourished plants.
+
+Looking from the islands landward, the locked shores have still for
+long stretches the aspect of undiscovered country. Hills break abruptly
+in the surf or run into narrow moon-shaped belts of sand where a
+mountain arm curves out or the sea eats inward. And yet for nearly four
+centuries the secret of the land was blazoned to all the ships that
+passed, in the great fields of poppy gold that every wet season flamed
+fifty miles or more to seaward.
+
+One must have seen the Eschscholtzia so, smouldering under the mists
+of spring, to understand the thrill that comes of finding them later
+scattered as they are, throughout the gardens of the world. I recall
+how at Rome, coming up suddenly out of the catacombs--we had gone down
+by another entrance and had been wandering for hours in the mortuary
+gloom--memory leaped up to find a great bed of golden poppies tended
+by brown, bearded Franciscans. They couldn't say--Fray Filippo, whom I
+questioned, had no notion--whence the sun-bright cups had come, except
+that they were common in the gardens of his order. It seemed a natural
+sort of thing for some Mission Padre, seeking a memento of himself to
+send back to his Brothers of St. Francis half a world away, to have
+chosen these shining offsprings of the sun. There was confirmation in
+the fact that Fray Filippo knew them not by the unspellable botanical
+name, but by the endearing Castilian "dormidera," sleepy-eyed, in
+reference to their habit of unfolding only to the light; but the
+connecting thread was lost. Channel fishermen still, in spite of the
+obliterating crops, can trace the blue lines of lupins between faint
+streaks of poppy fires, and catch above the reek of their boats, when
+the land wind begins, blown scents of _islay_ and ceanothus.
+
+No rivers of water of notable size pour down this west coast, but
+rivers of green flood the shallow cañons. Here and there from the crest
+of the range one catches an arrowy glimpse of a seasonal stream, but
+from the sea-view the furred chaparral is unbroken except for bare
+ridges, wind-swept even of the round-headed oaks. This coast country is
+a favourite browsing place for deer; they can be seen there still in
+early summer, feeding on the acorns of the scrub oaks, and especially
+on the tender twigs of wind-fallen trees, or herding at noon in the
+deep fern which closes like cleft waters over their heads. Until
+within a few years it was no unlikely thing to hear little black bears
+snorting and snuffing under the manzanita, of the berries of which
+they are inordinately fond. This lovely shrub with its twisty, satiny
+stems of wine-red, suffusing brown, its pale conventionalised leaves
+and flat little umbels of berries, suggests somehow the carving on old
+Gothic choirs, as though it borrowed its characteristic touch from an
+external shaping hand; as if with its predetermined habit of growth it
+had a secret affinity for man, and waited but to be transplanted into
+gardens. It needs, however, no garden facilities, but shapes itself
+to the most inhospitable conditions. About the time it begins to put
+forth its thousand waxy bells, in December or January, the toyon, the
+native holly, is at its handsomest. This is a late summer flowering
+shrub that in mid-winter loses a little of its glossy green, and above
+its yellowing foliage bears berries in great scarlet clusters. Between
+these two overlapping ends, the gaumet of the chaparral is run in blues
+of wild lilac, reds and purples of rhus and buckthorn and the wide,
+white umbels of the alder, which here becomes a tree fifty to sixty
+feet in height. It is the only one of the tall chaparral which has
+edible fruit, for though bears and Indians make a meal of manzanita,
+it does not commend itself to cultivated taste. More humble species,
+huckleberry, thimble, and blackberry, crowd the open spaces under the
+oak-madroño forests, or, as if they knew their particular usefulness
+to man, come hurrying to clearings of the axe, and may be seen holding
+hands as they climb to cover the track of careless fires. In June whole
+hill-slopes, under the pine and madroños, burn crimson with sweet, wild
+strawberries. The wild currant and the fuchsia-flowered gooseberry are
+not edible, but they are under no such obligation; they "make good"
+with long wands of jewel-red, drooping blossoms, and in the case of
+the currant, with delicate pink racemes, thrown out almost before
+the leaves while the earth still smells of winter dampness. Though
+nobody seems to know how it travelled so far, the "incense shrub" is
+a favourite of English gardens where, before the primroses begin, it
+serves the same purpose as in the west coast cañons, quickening the
+sense into anticipations of beauty on every side.
+
+Inland the close, round-backed hills draw into ranks and ranges, making
+way for chains of fertile valleys which also fill out the Californian's
+calendar of saints. But, in fact, your true Californian prays to his
+land as much as ever the early Roman did, and pours on it libations
+of water and continuous incense of praise. Every one of these longish,
+north-trending basins is superlatively good for something,--olives or
+wheat, perhaps; Pajaro produces apples and Santa Clara has become the
+patroness of prunes.
+
+Nothing could be more ethereally lovely than the spring aspect of the
+orchard country. It begins with the yellowing of the meadow lark's
+breast, and then of early mornings, with the appearance, as if flecks
+of the sky had fallen, of great flocks of bluebirds that blow about
+in the ploughed lands and are dissolved in rain. Then the poppies
+spring up like torchmen in the winter wheat, and along the tips of
+the apricots, petals begin to show, crumpled as the pink lips of
+children shut upon mischievous secrets; a day or two of this and then
+the blossoms swarm as bees, white fire breaks out among the prunes,
+it scatters along the foothills like the surf. Toward the end of the
+blooming season all the country roads are defined by thin lines of
+petal drift, and any wind that blows is alive with whiteness. After
+which, thick leafage covers the ripening fruit and the valley dozes
+through the summer heat with the farms outlined in firm green, like a
+patchwork quilt drawn up across the mountains' knees.
+
+The tree that gives the memorable touch to the landscape of the coast
+valleys is the oak, both the roble and encinas varieties. There are
+others with greater claims to distinction, the sequoia, the "big
+tree," lurking in the Santa Cruz mountains, the madroño, red-breeched,
+green-coated, a very Robin Hood of trees, sequestered in cool cañons,
+and the redwood, the _palo colorado_, discovered by the first Governor,
+Don Gaspar de Portola, on his search for the lost port of Monte Rey.
+All these keep well back from the main lines of travel. The most that
+the rail tourist sees of them is a line of redwoods, perhaps, climbing
+up from the sea-fronting cañons to peer and whisper on the ridges above
+the fruiting orchards. But the oaks go on, keeping well in the laps
+of the hills, avoiding the wind rivers, marching steadily across the
+alluvial basins on into the hot interior. They are more susceptible to
+wind influence than almost any other, and mark the prevailing direction
+of the seasonal air currents with their three-hundred-year-old trunks
+as readily as reeds under a freshet. You can see them hugging the
+lee side of any cañon, leaning as far as they may out of the sea-born
+draughts, but standing apart, true aristocrats among trees, disdaining
+alike one another and the whole race of orchard inmates. When in full
+leaf, for the _roble_ is deciduous, they are both of them distinctly
+paintable, particularly when in summer the trunks, grey and aslant,
+upbearing cloud-shaped masses of dark green, make an agreeable
+note against the fawn-coloured hills. The _roble_ is a noble tree,
+high-crowned, with a great sweep of branches, but seen in winter
+stripped of its thick, small leafage, it loses interest. Its method of
+branching is fussy, too finely divided, and without grace.
+
+  [Illustration: THE CEMETERY, SANTA BARBARA MISSION]
+
+Around Santa Margarita and Paso Robles filmy moss spreads a veil over
+the _robles_ as of Druid meditation; one fancies them aloof from the
+stir of present-day life as they were from the bears that used to
+feed on the mast under them. A hundred years or so ago the Franciscans
+drove out the bears by an incantation--I mean by the exorcism of the
+Church enforced with holy water and a procession with banners around
+the Mission precinct: "I adjure you, O Bears, by the true God, by the
+Holy God ... to leave the fields to our flocks, not to molest them nor
+come near them." But bears or _homo sapiens_, it is all one to the oaks
+of San Antonio; indeed, if legend is to be credited, the four-footed
+brothers would have been equally as acceptable to the patron of the
+Mission where this interesting ceremony took place. I can testify,
+however, that after all this lapse of time the exorcism is still in
+force, for though I have been up and down that country many times I
+have seen no bears in it.
+
+Things more pestiferous than bears are driven out, humours of the
+blood, stiffness of the joints, by the medicinal waters that bubble
+and seep along certain ancient fissures of the country rock. This has
+always seemed to me the very insolence of superfluity. Who wishes, when
+all the air is censed with the fragrance of wild vines, to have his
+nose assaulted with fumes of sulphur, even though it is known to be
+good for a number of things? But there are some people who could never
+be got to observe the noble proportions of five-hundred-year-old oaks
+with the wild grapes going from tree to tree like a tent, except as a
+by-process incident to the drinking of nasty waters. So the land has
+its way even with our weaknesses.
+
+  [Illustration: SYCAMORES, A COAST RANGE CAÑON]
+
+Besides these excursions inland, which bring us in almost every case to
+one of the ancient Franciscan foundations, there are two or three ports
+of call on the sea front worth lingering at for more things than the
+pleasant air and the radiant wild bloom. One of these is Santa Barbara
+which Santa Inez holds in its lap, curving like a scimitar opposite
+the most northerly of the channel islands. Understand, however, that
+no good comes of thinking of Santa Barbara as a place on the map. It
+is a Sargossa of Romance, a haven of last things, the last Mission in
+the hands of the Franciscans, the last splendour of the Occupation, the
+last place where mantillas were worn and they danced the _fandango_ and
+_la jota_; an eddy into which have drifted remnants of every delightful
+thing that has passed on the highways of land and sea, which here hail
+one another across the curving moon-white beach. Summer has settled
+there, California summer which never swelters, never scorches. Frost
+descends at times from Santa Inez to the roofs, but lays no finger on
+the fuchsias, poinsettias, and the heliotropes climbing to second-story
+windows. The wild thickets which connect the territory with the town,
+are vocal with night-singing mocking-birds; along the foreshore white
+pelicans divide the mountain-shadowed waters. The waters, taking all
+the sky's changes, race to the fairy islands, the chaparral runs back
+to the flanks of Santa Inez showing yellowly through the distant blue
+of pines; overhead a sky clouded with light. This is not a paradox but
+an attempt to express the misty luminosity of a heaven filled with
+refractions of the summer-tinted slope, the glaucous leafage of the
+chaparral, the white sand and sapphire-glinting water. The sky _beyond_
+the enclosing mountains has the cambric blueness of the superheated
+interior, but directly overhead it has depth and immensity of colour
+unequalled except along the Mediterranean.
+
+Santa Barbara is a port of distinguished visitors; more, and more
+varieties, of sea-birds put in there on the long flight from the Arctic
+to the Isthmus than is easily believable. In the Estero--_esteril_,
+sterile--an ill-smelling tide pool lying behind the town, may be found
+at one season or another, all the western species that delight the
+ornithologist. The black brant, going by night, and wild swans, as
+many as a score of them together, have been noted in its backwaters,
+and scarcely any stroll along the receding surf but is enlivened by
+the resonant, sweet whistle of the plover. In hollows of the sands
+thousands of beach-haunting birds may be seen camping for the night,
+looking like some sea-coloured, strange vegetation, and early mornings
+when the channel racing by, leaves the bay placid, tens of thousands
+of shearwaters sleep in shouldering ranks that sway with the incoming
+swell as the kelp sways, without being scattered by it. One can see
+the same sight, augmented as to numbers, around Monterey, a long day's
+journey to the north as the car goes, long enough and lovely enough to
+deserve another chapter.
+
+
+
+
+  [Illustration: TALL CHAPARRAL, SANTA CRUZ]
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE PORT OF MONTEREY
+
+
+Without doubt history is made quite as much by the mistakes of men
+as by their utmost certainties. The persistent belief of the ancient
+geographers in the existence of the Straits of Anian, the traditional
+North-West Passage, led to some romancing, and to the exploration of
+the California coast a century or so before it was of any particular
+use to anybody. It led also to the bluest bay. Viscaino took possession
+of it for Philip of Spain as early as 1602, nearly two hundred years
+before the Franciscans planted a cross there under Viscaino's very
+tree. During all that time the same oaks staggered up the slope
+away from the wind, and the scimitar curve of the beach kept back
+the brilliant waters. There is a figure of immensity in this more
+terrifying than the mere lapse of years. Not how many times but with
+what sureness for every day the sapphire deep shudders into chrysoprase
+along the white line of the breakers. We struggle so to achieve a
+little brief moment of beauty, but every hour at Monterey it is given
+away.
+
+The bay lies squarely fronting the Pacific swell, about a hundred
+miles south of the Golden Gate, between the horns of two of the little
+tumbled coast ranges, cutting back to receive the waters of the Pajaro
+and the Salinas. From the south the hill juts out sharply, taking
+the town and the harbour between its knees, but the north shore is
+blunted by the mountains of Santa Cruz. The beach is narrow, and all
+along its inner curve blown up into dunes contested every season by
+the wind and by the quick, bright growth of sand verbena, lupins, and
+mesembryanthemums. The waters of the rivers are set back by the tides,
+they are choked with bars and sluiced out by winter floods. For miles
+back into the valleys of Pajaro and Salinas, blue and yellow lupins
+continue the colour of the sand and the pools of tide water. They climb
+up the landward slope of the high dunes and set the shore a little
+seaward against the diminished surf. Then the equinoctial tide rises
+against the land that the lupins have taken and smooths out their
+lovely gardens with a swift, white hand, to leave the beach smooth
+again for the building of pale, wind-pointed cones.
+
+  [Illustration: LOOKING DOWN ON MONTEREY AND THE BAY]
+
+The valley of the Salinas, which has its only natural outlet on the
+bay, is of the type of coast valleys, long, narrow and shallow, given
+over to farming and to memories of Our Lady of Solitude lying now as
+a heap of ruins in a barley field. It is a place set apart, where any
+morning you might wake to find the sea has entered between the little,
+brooding hills to rest.
+
+Gulls follow the plough there, and pines avoid the river basin as
+though each of them knew very well their respective rights in it. One
+has, however, to make a point of such discoveries, for the entrance to
+the valley is obscured by its very candour, lying all open as it does
+to drifting dune and variable sea marshes.
+
+It is even more worth while to follow the flat-bordered Pajaro into the
+shut valley where dozes the little town of San Juan Bautista, taking
+on its well-sunned mesa, those placid lapses of self-forgetfulness
+which are to the aged as a foretaste of the long sleep. Here it was
+that the magic muse of Music came into the country. It came in a
+little tin-piped, wooden hand-organ, built by one Benjamin Dobson of
+22 Swan Street, London, in the year 1735, but of all its history until
+it was unpacked from mule-back by Padre Lausan in 1797, there is not
+a word current. Our acquaintance with it begins on the day that the
+Padre set it up in the hills and played, "The Siren's Waltz," "Lady
+Campbell's Reel," and all its repertoire of favourite London airs, of
+which the least appropriate to its present mission must have been the
+one called "Go to the Devil." Which only goes to prove that the spirit
+of the Franciscans was often superior to their means, for what the
+simple savages did do as soon as they had overcome their superstitious
+fear of the noise box, was to come to Mass to hear it as often as
+possible. There remain three old volumes of music written later for
+the Mission which came true to its founding and excelled in all sweet
+sounds, but none, it is said, pleased the Indians so much or so raised
+their spirits as "The Siren's Waltz." No doubt its inspiriting strains
+added something to the warlike spirit which led here to the only
+local resistance opposed to the American invasion, for it was on the
+Gavilan heights above the little town that Frémont, on the tallest
+tree that he could find, raised the Stars and Stripes, gallantly if
+somewhat prematurely. It was from San Juan that Castro's men marched
+to the final capitulation of Cahuenga, and finally from here the last
+remnant of the old life drains away. One hears the echo of it faint as
+the sea sounds that on rare days come trembling up the valley on the
+translucent air.
+
+Returning to the bay, one finds all interest centering about the Point
+of Pines, a very ancient, rocky termination of the most westerly of
+the coast barriers. The Point, which is really a peninsula, is one
+of the most notable landmarks between Point Conception on the south
+and Fort Point at San Francisco. Its lighthouse stands well out on a
+rocky finger, ringed with incessant, clanging buoys; between it and
+Santa Cruz light is a roadstead for an empire. A windy bay at best,
+deep tides, and squally surfaces, the waters of Monterey have other
+values than the colourist finds in them. Sardines, salmon, cod, tuna,
+yellow tail run with its tides. At most seasons of the year whales
+may be seen spouting there, or are cast upon its shoals. At one time
+the port enjoyed a certain prosperity as a whaling station, of which
+small trace remains beside the bleaching vertebræ that border certain
+of the old gardens and the persistent whalebone souvenirs of the curio
+dealer. Lateen-rigged fisher fleets flock in and out of the harbour,
+butterfly winged; and all about the rock beaches creep the square-toed
+boats of the Japanese and Chinese abalone gatherers. Thousands of
+purple sea-urchins, squid, hundred-fingered star-fish, and all manner
+of slimy sea delicacies, these slant-eyed Orientals draw up out of
+the rainbow rock pools and the deeps below the receding surf. They go
+creeping and peering about the ebb, their guttural hunting cries borne
+inshore on the quiet air, seeming as much a native sea speech as the
+gabble of the gulls. So in their skin canoes and balsas the Indians
+must have crept about the inlets for as long as it requires to lay a
+yard or two of mould over the ancient middens of the tribe, as long as
+it takes to build a barrier of silver dunes half a mile seaward. Even
+at that distance the plough turns up the soil evenly sprinkled with
+crumbling shell which holds to the last a shred of its old iridescence.
+Far inland, past the Sierra Wall even to the country of Lost Borders,
+I have found amulets of this loveliest of the pearl shells, traded for
+and treasured by a people to whom the "Big Water" is a half-credited
+traveller's tale.
+
+About five hundred yards outside the surf, from Laboratory Point,
+circling the peninsula to Mission Point on the south, the submerged
+rocky ridge has grown a great, tawny mane of kelp. Every year it is
+combed and cut by the equinoctial tides, and cast ashore in brown,
+sea-smelling wind-rows, and every year it grows again to be the
+feeding-ground of a million water-haunting birds. Here the Ancient
+Murrelet fattens for the long flight to the Alaskan breeding-grounds,
+and in the wildest gales the little nocturnal auklets may be heard
+calling to one another above the warring thunder of the surf, or
+when the nights are clear and the mists all banded low beneath the
+moon, they startle the beach wanderer with their high keen notes and
+beetle whirring wings. Long triangular flights of curlew drop down
+these beaches against the westering sun, with wings extended straight
+above their heads, furling like the little lateen sails come home from
+fishing. Sandpipers, sanderlings, all the ripple runners, the skimmers
+of the receding foam, all the scavengers of the tide, the gulls,
+glaucous-winged, ringbilled, and the species that take their name from
+the locality, may be found here following the plough as robins do in
+the spring. When the herring school in the bay nothing could exceed the
+multitude and clamour of the herring gulls. They stretch out in close
+order, wing beating against wing, actually over square miles of the
+ruffling water between Point Pinos and the anchorage. But any attempt
+to render an account of the wild, winged life that flashes about the
+bays of Carmel and Monterey would read like an ornithologist's record.
+
+After storms that divide the waters outside the bay into great toppling
+mountains, in the quiet strip between the kelp and the beaches,
+thousands of shearwaters may be seen sleeping in long, swaying,
+feathered pontoons, shoulder to shoulder. The island rocks standing
+within the surf, from the Point of Pines all down the coast to Point
+Sur, are famous rookeries of cormorant. Watchful and black against the
+guano-whitened rocks, they guard their ancestral nests, redecorated
+each season with gay weed, pulled from the painted gardens of the deep;
+turning their long necks this way and that like revolving turret-tops,
+they beat off the gluttonous gulls with a devotion which would seem to
+demand some better excuse than the naked, greasy, wide-mouthed young.
+Warm mornings these can be seen stretching black-stemmed, gaping bills
+from the nesting hollows, waving this way and that like the tips of
+voracious sea anemones. Other rocks, white with salty rime, are given
+by mutual consent to rookeries of the yelping seals, the "sea lions" of
+this coast. Moonlight nights they can be seen playing there, with the
+weird half-human suggestion as of some mythical sea creatures.
+
+Other and less fortunate adventurers on the waters of Monterey have
+left strange traces on that coast; one stumbles on a signboard set up
+among the rocks to mark where such and such a vessel went to pieces in
+a night of storm. Buried deep in the beach beyond the anchorage is the
+ancient teakwood hull of the _Natala_, the ship that carried Napoleon
+to Elba. It brought secularisation to the Missions also, after which
+unfriendly service the wind woke in the night and broke it against the
+shore. Just off Point Lobos, the Japanese divers after abalones report
+a strange, uncharted, sunken craft, a Chinese junk blown out of her
+course perhaps, or one of those unreported galleons that followed a
+phantom trail of gold all up the west coast of the New World. Strange
+mosses come ashore here, tide by tide, all lacy and scarf-coloured, and
+once we found on the tiny strand below Pescadero, a log of sandal-wood
+with faint waterworn traces of tool marks still upon it.
+
+Most mysterious of all the hints held by the farthest west--for
+behold, when you have come to land again, sailing from this port, it is
+east!--of a time before our time, is the Monterey cypress.
+
+Across the neck of the peninsula, a matter of six or eight miles,
+cuts in the little bay of Carmel, a blue jewel set in silver sand.
+Two points divide it from the racing Pacific, the southern limb of
+Punta Pinos, and the deeply divided rocky ledge of Lobos--Lobos,
+the wolf, with thin, raking, granite jaws. Now on these two points,
+and nowhere else in the world, are found natural plantations of the
+trees that might have grown in Dante's Purgatorio, or in the imagined
+forests where walked the rapt, tormented soul of Blake. Blake, indeed,
+might have had a hint of these from some transplanted seedling on an
+English terrace, for the Monterey cypress is quick-growing for the
+first century or so and one of the most widely diffused of trees; but
+only here on the Point and south to Pescadero ranch do they grow of
+God's planting. With writhen trunks and stiff contorted limbs they
+take the storm and flying scud as poppies take the sun. Incredibly
+old, even to the eye, they have no soil, nor seek none other than
+the thousand-year litter of their scaly needles, the husk of their
+nut-shaped, woody cones--the Spirit of the Ancient Rocks come to life
+in a tree. Grown under friendly conditions the young trees spire as do
+other conifers, but here they take on strange enchanted shapes. Their
+flat, wind-depressed tops are resilient as springs; one may lie full
+length along them, scarcely sunk in the minutely-feathered twigs, and
+watch the coasting steamers trail by on seas polished by the heat, or
+the winter surf bursting high in air. Or one could steal through their
+thick plantations unsuspected, from twisty trunk to trunk in the black
+shade, feeling the old earth-mood and man's primeval fear, the pricks
+and warnings of a world half made. The oldest of the cypresses are
+attacked by a red fungus rust, the colour of corroding time. It creeps
+along the under side of boughs and eats away the green, but even then
+the twisted heart wood will outlast most human things.
+
+  [Illustration: PESCADERO, A CHINESE FISHING VILLAGE, MONTEREY BAY]
+
+The pines of Monterey, though characteristic enough of the locality
+to take on its identifying name, are thoroughly plebeian: prolific,
+quick-growing, branching like candelabra when young; but in a hundred
+years or so their wide limbs, studded with persistent cones, take on
+something of the picturesque eccentricity that may be noticed among
+the old in rural neighbourhoods. They grow freely back into the hills
+till they are warned away from the cañons by the more sequestered _palo
+colorado_. The Monterey pine is one of the long-needled varieties, but
+of a too open growth perhaps, or too flexile to have any voice but a
+faint rustling echo of the ocean. The hill above Monterey, crowned with
+them, is impressive enough; they look lofty and aloof and dark against
+the sky, but growing in a wood they are seen to be too spindling and
+sparse-limbed to be interesting. The oaks do better by the landscape,
+all of the _encinas_ variety, bearing stiff clouds of evergreen foliage
+in lines simple enough to compose beautifully with the slow scimitar
+sweep of the bay and the round cloud-masses that, gathering from the
+sea, hang faintly pearled above the horizon. There are no redwoods
+on the peninsula; straggling lines of them look down from Palo Corona
+on Carmel Bay, walking one after another, with their odd tent-shaped
+tops and long branches all on the windward side, like a procession of
+friars walking against the wind. On the Santa Cruz coast, and in small
+groups near Carmel, grows the tan bark oak, not a true oak, but of the
+genus _Pasania_, whose nearest surviving congeners are no nearer than
+Siam. How it came here, survivor of an earlier world, or drifting in on
+the changing Japanese current, no one knows. Apparently no one cares,
+for the only use the Santa Crucians have found for it is to tan shoe
+leather.
+
+  [Illustration: CYPRESS POINT, NEAR CARMEL]
+
+Three little towns have taken root on the Peninsula: two on the bay
+side, the old pueblo of Monterey with its white-washed adobes still
+contriving to give character to the one wide street; Pacific Grove,
+utterly modern, on the surf side of Punta de Pinos, a town which
+began, I believe, as a resort for the churchly minded--a very clean
+and well-kept and proper town, absolutely exempt, as the deeds are
+drawn to assure us, "from anything having a tendency to lower the moral
+atmosphere," a town where the lovely natural woods have given place to
+houses every fifty feet or so, all nicely soldered together with lines
+of bright scarlet and clashing magentas and rosy pinks of geraniums and
+pelargoniums in a kind of predetermined cheerfulness; in short, a town
+where nobody would think of living who wanted anything interesting to
+happen to him. Above it on the hill, the Presidio commands the naked
+slope, fronting toward Santa Cruz, raking the open roadstead with its
+guns. It was under this hill on the harbour side, where a little creek
+still runs a rill in the rainy season, that Viscaino heard the first
+mass in California, and nearly two hundred years later, Padre Serra set
+up the cross.
+
+On June 30, 1770, that being the Holy Day of Pentecost, was founded
+here the Mission of San Carlos Borromeo, afterward transplanted for
+sufficient reasons, over the hill six miles away, on Carmel River. The
+town is full of reminders of the days of the Spanish Occupation, when
+it was the capital of Alta California. Old gardens here have still the
+high adobe walls, old houses the long galleries and little wrought-iron
+balconies; times yet the tide rises in the streets of the town, and
+still the speech is soft.
+
+It is also possible to buy _tomales_ there and _enchiladas_ and _chile
+concarne_ which will for the moment restore your faith in certain
+conceptions of a hereafter that of late have lost popularity.
+
+Half a mile back from the beach, and divided from the town by the old
+cemetery, in a deep alluvial flat grown to great oaks and creeping
+sycamores, is situated one of the famous winter resorts of the world,
+Hôtel Del Monte. I can recommend it with great freedom to those
+curiously constituted people who have to have an excuse for being out
+of doors. The Del Monte drives and golf links are said by those who
+have used them, to provide such excuse in its most compelling form.
+Those who suffer under no such necessity will do well to take the white
+road climbing the hill out of old Monterey, and drop down the other
+side of it into Carmel.
+
+From the top of this hill the lovely curve of the bay, disappearing far
+to the north under a violet mist, is pure Greek in its power to affect
+the imagination. Its blueness is the colour that lies upon the Gulf of
+Dreams; the ivory rim of the dunes, the shadowed blue of the terraces
+set on a sudden all the tides of recollection back on Salonica,
+Lepanto, the hill of Athens. You are reconciled for a moment to the
+chance of history which whelmed the colourful days of the Spanish
+Occupation. They could never have lived up to it.
+
+But once on the Carmel side of the peninsula, regret comes back very
+poignantly. The bay is a miniature of the other, intensified, the
+connoisseur's collection,--blue like the eye of a peacock's feather,
+fewer dunes but whiter, a more delicate tracery on them of the beach
+verbena, hills of softer contours, tawny, rippled like the coat of a
+great cat sleeping in the sun. Carmel Valley breaks upon the bay by
+way of the river which chokes and bars, runs dry in summer or carries
+the yellow of its sands miles out in winter a winding track across the
+purple inlet. It is a little valley and devious, reaching far inland.
+Above its source the peaks of Santa Lucia stand up; for its southern
+bulwark, Palo Corona. Willows, sycamores, elder, wild honeysuckle, and
+great heaps of blackberry vines hedge the path of its waters.
+
+  [Illustration: SANTA CRUZ MOUNTAINS, THE COAST RANGE]
+
+Where the valley widens behind the low barrier that shuts out the sea,
+sits the Mission of San Carlos Borromeo, once the spiritual capital
+of Alta California. Here Junipero Serra, and after him the other Padre
+Presidentes, held the administration of Mission affairs, and from here
+he wandered forth on foot, up and down this whole coast from San Diego
+to Solano, with pacification and the seeds of civilisation. Here on the
+walls, faintly to be traced beneath the scorn of time, he blazoned with
+his own hands the Burning Heart, the symbol of his own inward flame.
+Here, in his seventy-first year, he died and was buried on the gospel
+side of the altar. It is reported that his last act was to walk to the
+doorway to look once, a long look, on the hills turning amber under
+the August sun, on the heaven-blue water and the white hands of the
+surf beating against the cliffs of Lobos; looked on the fields and the
+orchard planted by his own hand, on the wattled huts of the neophytes
+redeemed, as he believed them, to all eternity, after which he lay down
+and slept. It is further reported in the annals of the Mission that
+it was necessary to place a guard about the wasted body in its shabby
+brown gown, to defend it from the crowding mourners craving each a
+relic of the blessed remains. Had I lived at that time I should have
+been among them, for he was a great soul, and have I not felt even at
+this distance of the years the touch of his high fervours! San Carlos
+is one of the best-conditioned of these abandoned fortresses of the
+faith: the ancient pear trees are still in bearing, the wild mustard
+yellows in the fields, its architecture still betrays the uncertain
+hand of the savage; back in unsearchable recesses of the hills linger
+still some Indians whose garbled greeting is a memory of the _Ama Dios_
+which the padres taught them. Until a few years ago the prayer-post,
+a rude slab with the triple-knotted cord of the Franciscans carved
+around it, still stood on the hill at the end of the path their devout
+feet made, resorting to it for courage and consolation. These mementos
+fade, but year by year the impress of the great spirit of Serra grows
+plainer, like one of those trodden paths of long ago which show not at
+all if you seek them in the grass or near at hand, but from the vantage
+of Palo Corona are traceable far across the landscape.
+
+The modern Carmel is a place of resort for painter and poet folk.
+Beauty is cheap there; it may be had in superlative quality for the
+mere labour of looking out of the window. It is the absolute setting
+for romance. No shipping ever puts in at the singing beaches. The
+freighting teams from the Sur with their bells a-jangle, go by on the
+country road, but great dreams have visited the inhabitants thereof.
+Spring visits it also with yellow violets all up the wooded hills,
+and great fountain sprays of sea-blue ceanothus. Summer reddens the
+berries of the manzanita and mellows the poppy-blazoned slopes to tawny
+saffron. Strong tides arrive unheralded from some far-off deep-sea
+disturbance and shake the beaches. Suddenly, on the quietest days, some
+flying squadron of the deep breaks high over Lobos and neighs in her
+narrow caverns. Blown foam, whipped all across the Pacific, is cast
+up like weed along the sand and skims the wave-marks with a winged
+motion. Whole flocks of these foam-birds may be seen scudding toward
+the rock-corners of Mission Point after the equinoctial winds. Other
+tides the sea slips far out on new-made level reaches, and leaves the
+wet sand shining after the sun goes down like the rosy inside pearl of
+the abalone.
+
+The forests of Point Pinos are sanctuary. It is still possible to hear
+there at long intervals the demoniac howl of the little grey dog of
+the wilderness, "Brother Coyote," the butt, the cat's-paw, the Jack
+Dullard of Indian folklore, and sometimes in the open country below
+Point Lobos to see one curious and agaze from brown, naked bosses of
+the hills. Any warm afternoon, by lying very still a long time in the
+_encinal_, one may observe the country-coloured bobcat, tawny as the
+grass in summer, slipping from shade to shade. Sometimes if startled
+he will turn and face you with his blinking, yellow, half-hypnotic
+stare before he returns to his unguessed errand. Any morning you may
+find about your bungalow innumerable prints as of baby palms pressed
+downward in the dust, the tracks of the friendly little racoons who
+may be heard bubbling in the shallow cañons any moonlight night. Often
+I have left a cut melon under my window for the sake of seeing, an
+hour after moonrise, two or three of them scooping out the pink heart,
+spatting one another for helpings out of turn, keeping, in spite
+of the little gluttons you know them to be, a great affectation of
+daintiness. The night-cry of these little creatures is difficult to
+distinguish from the love-call of the horned owl, who on the undark
+nights of summer skims the low foreshore for the sake of the field-mice
+and gophers that feed on the seeds of the beach grasses. Every sort of
+migratory bird that passes up and down this coast lingers a while in
+the neighbourhood of Monterey, and some species, like the Point Pinos
+juncos, take from it their distinctive name. But if, when you walk
+in the woods, the Stellar jay has first sight of you, you will find
+them singularly empty, for these blue-jacketed policemen of the pines
+permit nothing to pass them unannounced. Of all the wood-folk, the wise
+quail alone ignores their strident warnings. The quail have learned not
+only the certainty of safety but its absolute limit. I have seen whole
+flocks of them, scared by the gun, whirring out of the public lands to
+a point not out of gunshot but within the forbidden ground, from which
+they send back soft twitterings of defiance. It is not, however, their
+habit to flush except in great danger, but to run to cover, moving with
+a peculiar elusive rhythm, like the rippling of a snake. This plump
+little partridge, for it is only in the common speech that he becomes
+a quail, is the apt spirit of the chaparral--cheerful, social, strong
+in the domestic virtues; his crest not floating backward in warrior
+fashion, but cocked forward over an eye, he has all the air of the
+militant bourgeois, who could fight of course, but finds that running
+matches better with his inclinations. Just at the end of rains, before
+mating begins, hundreds of them may be seen feeding in the flock on
+open hillsides, and the thickets of buckthorn and ceanothus ring with
+their soft Spanish _Cuidado!_--Have a care!
+
+Three roads go up out of the peninsula to entice the imagination--that
+which we have already taken to the hills of Salinas and the little
+town of San Juan, the road to Carmel Valley, and the adventurous
+trail which leads all down the well-bitten coast past Sur and Pieoras
+Blancos. The Valley road turns off at the top of the divide between
+Carmel and Monterey; it passes on the landward side of the Mission
+into the river-bottom and skirts the narrow chain of farms, rising
+with the rise of the thinly-forested hills toward Tasajara, the Place
+of Springs. Here it is lost in the intricacies of the "back country."
+Deer-hunters go that way in the season, and those whose delight it is
+to lose themselves in the wilderness, to taste wild fruit and know no
+roof but the windy tent of stars. Years since there used to come out
+of that country shy-spoken, bearded men with bear-meat to sell and wild
+honey in the honeycomb, rifled from hiving rocks and hollow trees; but
+I fancy they are all dead now, or translated into the tall moss-bearded
+pines.
+
+The coast road, after it leaves Point Lobos behind, goes south and
+south, between high trackless hills and the lineless Pacific floor.
+From the Point you can see it rise over bare, sea-breasting hills, and
+disappear in narrow cañons down which, it is reported, immeasurable
+redwoods follow the white-footed creeks almost to the surf. Dim,
+violet-tinted islands rise offshore to break the sea's assault. Now
+and then one ventures in that direction as far as Arbolado, to return
+prophesying. But the most of us are wiser, understanding that the best
+service the road can render us is to remain a dramatic and unlimned
+possibility.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+OLD SPANISH GARDENS
+
+
+Dona Ina Manuelita Echivarra had come to the time of life when waists
+were not to be mentioned. It took all the evidence of her name to
+convince you that her cheek had once known tints of the olive and
+apricot. Tio Juan, who sunned himself daily in her patio, had achieved
+the richness of weathered teak; his moustachios were whitened as with
+the rime that collects on old adobes sometimes near the sea-shore.
+But Dona Ina, who missed by a score of years his mark of the days of
+_mañana por la mañana_, was muddily dark, and her moustache--but one
+does not suggest such things of a lady, and that Dona Ina was a lady
+could be proved by a foot so delicately arched and pointed, an ankle so
+neat that there was not another like it in your acquaintance save the
+mate to it.
+
+Once you had seen it peeping forth from under the black skirt--have
+not Castilian ladies worn black immemorially?--you did not require
+the assurance of Tio Juan that there was no one in her day could have
+danced _la jota_ with Dona Ina Manuelita.
+
+She would clack the castanets for you occasionally still, just to
+show how it was done, or with the guitar resting on the arm of her
+chair--laps were no more to be thought of than waists were--she would
+quaver a song, _La Golindrina_ for choice, or _La Noche esta Serena_.
+But unquestionably Dona Ina's time had gone by for shining at anything
+but conversation. She could talk, and never so fruitfully as when the
+subject was her garden.
+
+A Spanish garden is a very intimate affair. It is the innermost
+under-garment of the family life. Dona Ina's was walled away from the
+world by six feet of adobe, around the top of which still lingered the
+curved red tiles of Mission manufacture. It was not spoken of as the
+garden at all, it was the patio, an integral part of the dwelling.
+There was, in fact, a raw hide cot on the long gallery which gave
+access to it, and Dona Ina's drawn-work chemises bleaching in the
+sun. The patio is a gift to us from Andalusia; it is more Greek than
+Oriental, and the English porch has about as much relation to it as
+the buttons on the back of a man's coat to the sword-belt they were
+once supposed to accommodate. The patio is the original mud-walled
+enclosure of a people who preferred living in the open but were driven
+to protection; the rooms about three sides of it were an afterthought.
+
+  [Illustration: THE PATIO, OLD SPANISH RESIDENCE]
+
+The Echivarra patio did not lack the indispensable features of the
+early California establishment, the raised grill or cooking platform,
+and the ramada, the long vine-covered trellis where one took wine
+with one's friends, or the ladies of the family sat sewing at their
+interminable drawn work, _enramada_. The single vine which covered the
+twenty-foot trellis was of Mission stock, and had been planted by Dona
+Ina's father in the year the Pathfinder came over Tejon Pass into the
+great twin valleys. In Dona Ina's childhood a wine-press had stood in
+the corner of the patio where now there was a row of artichokes, which
+had been allowed to seed in order that their stiff silken tassels,
+dyed blue and crimson, might adorn the pair of china vases on either
+side the high altar. Dona Ina was nothing if not religious. In the
+corner of the patio farthest from the gallery, a fig-tree--this also
+is indispensable--hung over the tiled wall like a cloud. There was a
+weeping willow in the midst of the garden, and just outside, on either
+side the door, two great pepper trees of the very stock of the parent
+of all pepper trees in Alta California, which a sea captain from South
+America gave to the Padre at San Luis Rey. Along the east wall there
+were pomegranates.
+
+A pomegranate is the one thing that makes me understand what a pretty
+woman is to some men--the kind of prettiness that was Dona Ina's in the
+days when she danced _la jota_. The flower of the pomegranate has the
+crumpled scarlet of lips that find their excuse in simply being scarlet
+and folded like the petals of a flower; and then the fruit, warm from
+the sunny wall, faintly odorous, dusky flushed! It is so tempting when
+broken open--that sort opens of its own accord if you leave it long
+enough on the bush--the rich heart colour, and the pleasant uncloying,
+sweet, sub-acid taste. One tastes and tastes--but when all is said and
+done there is nothing to a pomegranate except colour and flavour, and
+at least if it does not nourish neither does it give you indigestion.
+That is what suggests the comparison; there are so many people who
+would like to find a pretty woman in the same category. Always when
+we sat together nibbling the rosy seeds, I could believe, even without
+the evidence of the ankles, that Dona Ina had had her pomegranate days.
+Only, of course, she would not have smelled so of musk and--there is
+no denying it--of garlic. Thick-walled old adobes of the period of the
+Spanish Occupation give off a faint reek of this compelling condiment
+at every pore, and as for the musk, it was always about the gallery in
+saucers and broken flower-pots.
+
+And yet Dona Ina was sensitive to odours: she told me that she had had
+the datura moved from the place where her mother had planted it, to the
+far end of the patio, where after nightfall its heavy, slightly fetid
+perfume, unnoticeable by day, scented all the air. She added that she
+felt convicted by this aversion of a want of sentiment toward a plant
+whose wide, papery-white bells went by the name of "Angels' trumpets."
+
+On the day that she told me about the datura, which I had only
+recognised by its resemblance to its offensive wayside congener, the
+"jimson weed," the Señora Echivarra had been washing her hair with a
+tonic made of oil expressed from the seeds of the megharizza after a
+recipe which her mother had had from _her_ mother, who had it from an
+Indian who used to peddle vegetables from the Mission, driving in every
+Saturday in an ancient caretta. I was interested to know if it were
+any more efficacious than the young shoots of the golden poppy fried
+in olive oil, which I had already tried. So we fell to talking of the
+virtues of plants and their application.
+
+We began with the blessed "herb of the saints," dried bunches of which
+hung up under the rafters of the gallery as an unfailing resort in
+affections of the respiratory tract, and _yerba buena_, in which she
+was careful to distinguish between the creeping, aromatic _del campo_
+of the woodlands and the _yerba buena del poso_, "herb of the well,"
+the common mint of damp places. When she added that the buckskin bag on
+the wall contained shavings of _cascara sagrada_, the sacred bark of
+the native buckthorn, indispensable to all nurseries, I knew that she
+had named two of the three most important contributions of the west to
+the modern pharmacopœia. This particular bag of bark had been sent from
+Sonoma County, for south of Monterey it grows too thin to be worth the
+gathering. The Grindelia, she told me, had come from the salt marshes
+about the mouth of the Pajaro, where Don Gaspar de Portola must have
+crossed going northward.
+
+"And were you then at such pains to secure them?"
+
+"In the old days, yes," she assured me. In her mother's time there
+was a regular traffic carried on by means of roving Indians in healing
+herbs and simples; things you could get now by no means whatever.
+
+"As for instance----?" I was curious.
+
+Well, there was creosote gum, which came from the desert beyond the
+Sierra Wall, valuable for sores and for rheumatism. It took me a moment
+or two, however, to recognise in her appellation of it (_hideondo_,
+stinking) the shiny, shellac-covered _larrea_ of the arid regions.
+There were roots also of the holly-leaved barberry, which came from wet
+mountains northward, and of the "skunk cabbage," which were to be found
+only in soggy mountain meadows, where any early spring, almost before
+the frost was out of the ground, bears could be seen rooting it from
+the sod, fairly burying themselves in the black, peaty loam.
+
+But when it came to _yerba mansa_, Dona Ina averred, her mother would
+trust nobody for its gathering. She would take an Indian or two and
+as many of her ten children as could not be trusted to be left at
+home, and make long _pasears_ into the coast ranges for this succulent
+cure-all. I knew it well for one of the loveliest of meadow-haunting
+plants; wherever springs babbled, wherever a mountain stream lost
+itself under the roble oaks, the _yerba mansa_ lifted above its
+heart-shaped leaves of pale green, quaint, winged cones on pink,
+pellucid stems. But I had never heard one half of the curative wonders
+which Dona Ina related of it. Efficacious in rheumatism, invaluable in
+pulmonary complaints, its bruised leaves reduced swellings, the roots
+were tonic and alterative.
+
+I spare you the whole list, for Dona Ina was directly of the line of
+that lovely Señorita who had disdainfully described the English as the
+race who "pay for everything," and to her mind it took a whole category
+of virtues to induce so much effort as a trip into the mountains
+which had not a _baile_ or a _fiesta_ at the end of it. Other things
+that were sought for by the housewives of the Spanish Occupation were
+_amole_, or soap-root, the bulbs of a delicate, orchid-like lily which
+comes up in the late summer among the stems of the chaparral, and the
+roots of the wild gourd, the _chili-cojote_, a powerful purgative.
+Green fruit of this most common pest, said Dona Ina, pounded to a pulp,
+did wonders in the way of removing stains from clothing.
+
+Then there was artemisia, romero, azalea, the blue-eyed grass of our
+meadows, upon an infusion of which fever patients can subsist for days,
+and elder, potent against spells, and there was Virgin's bower, which
+brought us back to the patio, for a great heap of it lay on the roof
+of the gallery, contesting the space there with the yellow banksia
+roses. I had supposed, until the Señora Echivarra mentioned it, that
+its purpose was purely ornamental, but I was to learn that it had come
+into the garden as _yerba de chivato_ about the time the barbed-wire
+fences of the gringo began to make a remedy for cuts indispensable to
+the ranchero who valued the appearance of his live stock. When the eye,
+travelling along its twisty stems and twining leaf-stalks, came to a
+clump of yarrow growing at the root of it I began at once to suspect
+the whole garden. Was not the virtue of yarrow known even to the
+Greeks?
+
+There was thyme flowering in the damp corner beyond the dripping
+faucet, and pot-marigold, lavender, rosemary, and lemon verbena, all
+plants that grow deep into the use and remembrance of man.
+
+No friend of our race, not even the dog, has been more faithful. The
+stock of these had come overseas from Spain--were not the Phœnicians
+credited with introducing the pomegranate into Hispaniola?--and thence
+by way of the Missions.
+
+All the borders of Dona Ina's garden were edged with rosy thrift, a
+European variety; and out on the headlands, a mile away, a paler,
+native cousin of it bloomed gaily with beach asters and yellow
+sand verbenas, but there was no one who knew by what winds, what
+communicating rootlets, they had exchanged greetings.
+
+Observation, travelling by way of the borders, came to the datura,
+which was to set the conversation off again, this time not of plants
+curative, but hurtful. We knew of the stupefying effects of the bruised
+pods and roots of this species, and--this was my contribution--how
+the Paiute Indians used to administer the commoner variety, called
+_main-oph-weep_, to their warriors to produce the proper battle frenzy,
+and especially to young women about to undergo the annual ordeal of the
+"Dance of Marriageable Maidens."
+
+Every year, at the spring gathering of the tribes, the maidens piled
+their dowries in a heap, and for three days, fasting, danced about it.
+If they fell or fainted, it was a sure sign they were not yet equal to
+the duties of housekeeping and childbearing; but I had had Paiute women
+tell me that they would never have endured the trial without a mild
+decoction of _main-oph-weep_.
+
+"It was different with us," insisted Dona Ina; "many a time we have
+danced the sun up over the mountain, and been ready to begin again the
+next evening...." But I wished to talk of the properties of plants, not
+of young ladies.
+
+The mystery of poison plants oppressed me. One may understand how a
+scorpion stings in self-protection, but what profit has the "poison
+oak" of its virulence? It is not oak at all, but _Rhus trilobata_, and
+in the spring whole hillsides are enlivened by the shining bronze of
+its young foliage, or made crimson in September. But the pollen that
+floats from it in May in clouds, the sticky sap, or even the acrid
+smoke from the clearing where it is being exterminated, is an active
+poison to the human skin, though I had not heard that any animal
+suffered similarly. Dona Ina opined that there was never an evil plant
+let loose in the gardens of the Lord but the remedy was set to grow
+beside it. A wash of manzanita tea, Grindelia, or even buckthorn, she
+insisted, was excellent for poison oak. Best of all was a paste of
+pounded "soap root." She knew a plant, too, which was corrective of
+the form of madness induced by the "loco" weed, whose pale foliage and
+delicately tinted, bladdery pods may be found always about the borders
+of the chaparral. For the convulsions caused by wild parsnip there was
+the wonder-working _yerba del pasmo_. This she knew also as a specific
+for snake-bite and tetanus. So greatly was it valued by mothers of
+families in the time of the Spanish Occupation, that when a clearing
+was made for a house and patio, in any country where it grew, a plant
+or two was always left standing. But it was not until I had looked for
+it, where she said I would find it between the oleander and the lemon
+verbena, that I recognised the common "grease-wood," the chamise of the
+mesa country.
+
+"But were there no plants, Dona Ina, which had another meaning, flowers
+of affection, corrective to the spirit?"
+
+"Angelica," she considered doubtfully. Young maids, on occasions of
+indecision, would pin a sprig of it across their bosoms, she said,
+and after they had been to church would find their doubts resolved;
+and there was yarrow, which kept your lover true, particularly if you
+plucked it with the proper ceremony from a young man's grave.
+
+Dona Ina remembered a fascinating volume of her mother's time, the
+_Album Mexicana_, in which the sentimental properties of all flowers
+were set forth. "There was the camelia, a beautiful woman without
+virtue, and the pomegranate----"
+
+"But the flowers of New Spain, Dona Ina, was there nothing of these?"
+I insisted.
+
+"Of a truth, yes, there was the cactus flower, not the opunta, the
+broad-leaved spiny sort, of which hedges were built in the old days,
+but the low, flamy-blossomed, prickly variety of hot sandy places. If
+a young man wore such a one pinned upon his velvet jacket it signified,
+'I burn for you.'"
+
+"And if he wore no flower at all, how then?"
+
+Dona Ina laughed, "_Si me quieros, no me quieros_"; she referred to the
+common yellow composite which goes by the name of "sunshine," or in the
+San Joaquin, where miles of it mixed with blue phacelias brighten with
+the spring, as "fly-flower." "In the old Spanish playing-cards," said
+Dona Ina, "the Jack of spades had such a one in his hand, but when I
+was a girl no caballero would have been caught saying, 'Love me, love
+me not!' They left all that to the señoritas."
+
+There was a Castilian rose growing beside me. Now a Castilian rose
+is not in the least what you expect it to be. It is a thick, cabbagy
+florescence, the petals short and not recurved, the pink hardly deeper
+than that of the common wild rose, the leafage uninteresting. One has
+to remember that it distinguished itself long before the time of the
+tea and garden hybrids, and, I suspect, borrowed half its charm from
+the faces it set off. For there was never but one way in the world for
+a rose to be worn, and that is the way Castilian beauties discovered so
+long ago that centuries have not made any improvement in it. Set just
+behind the ear and discreetly veiled by the mantilla, it suggests the
+effulgent charm of Spain, tempered by mystery. The Señora Echivarra had
+followed my glance, and nodded acquiescence to my thought. "In dressing
+for a _baile_, one would have as soon left off the rose as one's fan.
+One wore it even when the dress was wreathed with other flowers."
+
+"And did you, then, go wreathed in flowers?"
+
+"Assuredly; from the garden if we had them, or from the field.
+I remember once I was all blue larkspurs, here and here ..." she
+illustrated on her person, "and long flat festoons of the _yerba buena_
+holding them together."
+
+"It would have taken hoop skirts for that?" I opined.
+
+"That also. It was the time that the waltz had been learned from the
+officers of the American ships, and we were quite wild about it. The
+good Padre had threatened to excommunicate us all if we danced it
+... but we danced ... we danced...." Dona Ina's pretty feet twitched
+reminiscently. The conversation wandered a long time in the past before
+it came back to the patio lying so still, divided from the street by
+the high wall, the clouding fig, and the gnarly pear tree. Beyond the
+artichokes a low partition wall shut off the vegetable plot; strings
+of chili reddened against it. There was not a blade of grass in
+sight, only the flat, black adobe paths worn smooth by generations of
+treading, house and enclosing walls all of one earth.
+
+"But if so much came into the garden from the field, Señora, did
+nothing ever go out?"
+
+Ah, yes, yes--the land is gracious; there was mustard of course, and
+pepper grass and horehound, blessed herb, which spread all over the
+west with healing. The pimpernel, too, crept out of the enclosing
+wall, and the tree mallow which came from the Channel Islands by way
+of the gardens and has become a common hedge plant on the sandy lands
+about the bay of San Francisco. Along streams which ran down from
+the unfenced gardens of the _Americanos_, callas had domesticated
+themselves and lifted their pure white spathes serenely amid a tangle
+of mint and wild blackberries and painted cup. The almond, the rude
+stock on which the tender sorts were grafted, if allowed to bear
+its worthless bitter nuts would take to hillsides naturally. It is
+not, after all, walls which hold gardens but water. This is all that
+constrains the commingling of wild and cultivated species; they care
+little for man, their benefactor. Give them water, said Dona Ina,
+and they come to your door like a fed dog, or if you like the figure
+better, like grateful children. They repay you with sweetness and
+healing.
+
+A swift darted among the fig, marigolds, and portulacca of the
+inevitable rock-work which was the pride of the old Spanish gardens.
+Great rockets of tritoma flamed against the wall, on the other side of
+which traffic went unnoted and unsuspecting.
+
+"But we, Dona Ina, we Americans, when we make a garden, make it in the
+sight of all so that all may have pleasure in it."
+
+"Eh, the _Americanos_ ..." she shrugged; she moved to give a drink
+to the spotted musk, flowering in a chipped saucer; the subject did
+not interest her; her thought, like her flowers, had grown up in an
+enclosure.
+
+
+
+
+ [Illustration: THE GOLDEN GATE AND BLACK POINT, FROM HYDE STREET, SAN
+  FRANCISCO. (SITE OF THE PANAMA EXPOSITION, 1915)]
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE LAND OF THE LITTLE DUCK
+
+
+Where the twin rivers set back the tides from the bay, the Land of the
+Little Duck begins. The tides come head-on past the Golden Gate and the
+river answers to their tremendous compulsion far inland, past the point
+where the Sacramento and San Joaquin flow together. On the lee side
+of the headland which makes the southern pilaster of the Gate, sits
+San Francisco, making of the name she borrowed from the bay a new and
+distinguished thing, as some women do with their husbands' titles. A
+better location for a city is Carquinez Strait; the Mexican comandante
+resident at Sonoma would have had it there, bearing the name of his
+wife, Francesca. Said he to the newly arrived American authorities,
+"Do so, and I will furnish you the finest site in the world, with State
+house and Residence complete." But it appears the land has chosen its
+own name.
+
+All the years after the Pope had divided the New World between Spain
+and the Portuguese, the harbour lay hidden. Cabrillo, Drake, Maldonado,
+Juan de Fuca, Viscaino passed it in the night or veiled in obscuring
+fogs. And then Saint Francis showed it clear and lovely to Don Gaspar
+Portola, having for that revelation led him with holden eyes past his
+journey's objective. Likewise, when the time was ripe, he put it into
+the mind of the Yankee alcalde at Yerba Buena, a trading-post in the
+neighbourhood of Mission Dolores, that if the hamlet should be called
+San Francisco it might catch by implication the vessels clearing all
+ports of the world for San Francisco bay.
+
+O Chance, Chance! says the historian and turns another page. But it
+is my opinion that among the birds to which Saint Francis preached was
+included the Little Duck.
+
+The piers of the city front east, they face the Berkeley Hills,
+the Oaklands, the lands of the Sycamore, or, as the first settlers
+named them, the Alamedas. From thence vast settlements take their
+name, feeding the city as sea-birds do, from their own breasts.
+Back and forth between them the shuttling ferries weave thin webs of
+glistening wakes, duck-bodied tugs chugg and scuttle, busy still at
+world-building. From the promontory which makes the northern barrier of
+the Gate, Tamalpias swims out of atmospheric blueness. On its seaward
+slope, hardly out of reach of the siren's bellowing note, Muir Park
+preserves the ancient forest, rooted in the litter of a thousand years.
+And round about the foot of city and mountain the waters of the bay
+are blue, the hills are bluer. The hills melt down to greenness in the
+spring, the water runs to liquid emerald, flashing amber; the hills are
+tawny after rains, the waters tone to the turbid, clayey river-floods;
+land and sea they pursue one another as lovers through changing moods
+of colour; they have mists for mystery between revealing suns. Unless
+these things count for something, San Francisco is the very worst
+site in the world for a city. You take your heart in your mouth every
+time you go out to afternoon tea in the tram-cars that dip and swing
+like cockles at sea. They cut across streets so steep that grass grows
+between the cobbles where no traffic ever passes, to plunge down lanes
+of dwellings perched precariously as sea-birds' nests on the bare bones
+of hills that for true hilliness shame Rome's imperial seven. The bay
+side of the peninsula is mud, the Pacific side is sand. There great
+wasteful dunes blow up, they shift and pile, they take the contours of
+the wind-lashed waters--the very worst site in the world for a great
+city's pleasure-ground, and yet somehow it is there.
+
+For this city is one of those which have souls; it is a spirit sitting
+on a height, taking to itself form and the offices of civilisation.
+This is a thing that we know, because we have seen the land shake it
+as a terrier shakes a rat, until the form of the city was broken; it
+dissolved in smoke and flame. And then as a polyp of the sea draws out
+of the fluent water form and perpetuity for itself, we saw our city
+draw back its shapes of wood and stone, and statelier, more befitting
+a spirit that has endured so much. Nobody knows really what a city is
+except that it is something more than a collocation of houses. From
+Telegraph Hill, where the old semaphore stood, which signalled the
+far-between arrivals of ships around the Horn, you can see the trade
+of the world pass and repass the pillars of the Gate, the wall-sided
+warships. But none of these things really explain how San Francisco
+came to be clinging there to the leeward of a windy spit of land, like
+a great, grey sea-bird with palpitating wings.
+
+  [Illustration: TAMALPIAS]
+
+True to her situation, San Francisco is nothing if not dramatic. One
+recalls that the earliest foundation was dedicated to Our Lady of
+Dolors, _Nuestro Señora de Dolores_; the Indians fought here as they
+did nowhere else against Christian dominion. There were more burials
+than baptisms, and in the old cemetery of Yerba Buena the dead were
+so abandoned of all grace that the sand refused to hold them. One who
+spent his boyhood in the shifting purlieus of the old Laguna told me
+how in the hollows where the scrub oaks shrugged off the wind and the
+sand waved like water, the nameless coffins were covered and uncovered
+between a night and day. But if the dead could not hold their tenancy,
+the living succeeded. They did it by the very force of that dramatic
+instinct awakened by the plot and counterplot of natural forces.
+
+No Greek tragedy moved to more relentless measures than the moral
+upheaval of '56, when the whole city, in solemn funeral train behind
+the victim of one of those wild outbursts of lawlessness peculiar to
+the "gold rush," saw the lifeless bodies of the perpetrators hanging
+from the upper windows of the Vigilance Committee. Fifty years later
+came a wilder rout, down streets searched out by fire, snatching
+at humour as they ran, as so many points of contact for the city's
+rebuilding.
+
+The very worst location in the world, as I have remarked, is this windy
+promontory past which the grey tides race, but so long as a city can
+dramatise itself, one situation will do as well as another in which to
+render itself immortal.
+
+The bay of San Francisco with its contingencies is one of the most
+interesting of inland yachting waters, full of adventurous weather. It
+is possible to sail in one general direction from Alviso to the city of
+Sacramento, a hundred and fifty miles, and that without attempting the
+thousand miles of estuary and slough through which the waters slink and
+wind.
+
+At this season of the year the river is pushed backward by the tide a
+matter of ten miles or more above Sacramento City: on the San Joaquin
+it is felt as far as Crow's Landing. At Antioch it begins to be
+saltish, and down through Suisun and Carquinez the river-water fights
+its way as far as San Pablo before its identity is wholly lost. At
+flood-times it may be traced, a yellowish, turgid streak, as far as
+Alcatraz. This is the islet of the albatross which lies south of the
+tide race, as Tiburon is on the north, fragments all of them of that
+salt-rimed ledge outside the gate where hoarse sea-lions play, and
+brother to the castellated cloud far along on the sea's horizon, the
+very capital of the kingdom of the Little Duck.
+
+  [Illustration: MILL VALLEY, AND BACKWATER OF SAN FRANCISCO BAY]
+
+The Faralone Light is the last dropped astern by the Island steamships
+sagging south to the equator; it is also the sea-birds' city of
+refuge. This is the great murre rookery of the west coast, and formerly
+thousands of dozens of eggs were regularly taken from the Faralones
+to the San Francisco market; but since the islands became a Government
+station the murres have no enemy but the pirates of the air. In clefts
+and ledges close against the wall-sided cliffs they defend their
+shallow nests against the sheering gulls, or, hard beset, will push
+their single, new-hatched nestling into the friendlier sea, darting to
+break its fall with incredible swiftness, for a swimming gait is one
+of the things that come out of the shell with the native-born at the
+Faralones. On the same shelving rocks puffins rear their ratty young in
+burrows or under sheltering boulders, and the ashy petrel, the "little
+Peter" of the sea, walking by night before the storm, comes ashore here
+to hide his seldom nest. On the south Faralone the fierce cormorant
+builds her house of painted weed, which often the gulls steal from her
+as fast as she brings it ashore, for the gulls are the grafters of the
+sea-birds' city. This particular variety, known as the western gull,
+neither fishes for himself nor forages for building material. He feeds
+on the eggs and nestlings of his neighbours, or waits to snatch the
+day's catch from the beak that brought it up from the sea. He has the
+virtue of all predatory classes, an exemplary domesticity. His nest is
+soft and clean, his nestlings handsome. The western gull is often found
+marauding far up the estuary of Sacramento, but it is his congener,
+the herring gull, who follows the long white wake the ferries make
+ploughing the windy bay; or, distinguished among the silent shore birds
+for multitude and clamour, scavenges its reedy borders.
+
+Except for the promontories north and south, and the bold front of the
+Berkeley Hills opposing the Gate, the inland borders of the bay are
+flat tide-lands and sea-smelling lagunas. Stilts, avocets, herons,
+all the waders that haunt this coast or visit it in their seasonal
+flights, may be seen stalking the shallows for minnows, or where the
+marsh grass reddens, poised like some strange tide-land blossom, lifted
+on two slender stems. Low over them any clear day may be seen the grey
+old marsh hawk sailing, or the "duck hawk," the peregrine of falconry,
+following fiercely in the wake of the migrating hordes of water-fowl.
+All about Alviso the guttural cry of the black-crowned night-heron
+sounds eerily above the marshes, along with the peculiar "pumping"
+love-song of the bittern.
+
+For some reason the air of the marshes is friendly to the mistletoe
+infesting the oaks and sycamores which stand back from the tide-line;
+but the marshes themselves are treeless. They have their own sorts
+of growth, cane and cat-tails and tule, goosefoot, samphire, and the
+tasselled sedges. This samphire of Shakespeare, _l'herbe de Saint
+Pierre_ of the Normandy Marshes, is the glory of the Franciscan
+tide-lands; miles of it, barely above the level of the slow-moving
+water, spread a magic carpet of blending crimsons, purples, and
+bronzes. Under the creeping mists and subject to the changes of the
+water, beaten to gold and copper under the sun, it redeems the flat
+lines of the landscape with a touch of Oriental splendour.
+
+For it is a flat kingdom, that of the Little Duck--the hills hanging
+remotely on the horizon, the few trees and scattered hugging the low
+shore of the sloughs as the shipwrecked cling to their rafts, desperate
+of rescue. The rich web of the samphire, the shifting colour of the
+water, faintly reminiscent of Venice, borrow another foreign touch
+from the names under which the borders recommended themselves to
+attention:--Sausalito, "little willows," Tiburon, Corta Madero, San
+Quentin, San Raphael. Approached from the water, these names, with
+the exception of San Quentin, do no more than stir the imagination.
+San Quentin, on one of those courtesy islands newly rescued from the
+primordial mud, shows itself uncompromisingly for what it is, one of
+those places for the sequestration of public offenders, which is itself
+such an offence to our common humanity--to say nothing of our common
+sense. Free tides, free sails go by, and long, untrammelled lines of
+birds; south above the blue bay and bluer shore, the ethereal blue
+dome of Diablo lifts into the free air. Across the upper end of San
+Pablo Bay, which is really the north arm of the bay of San Francisco
+extending inland, Mare Island lies so low on the water that if it had
+not been made a naval reserve station it is difficult to know to what
+other use it could be put. One expects to have the land dip and swing
+from under like the ship's deck. It is in line with the guns which lie
+beside the Gate like watchful, muzzle-pointed dogs, and commands the
+whole upper bay and the opposing bluffs of Contra Costa in a manner
+highly commendable to those curious persons whose chief excitement
+lies in anticipating an Asiatic invasion. Nevertheless, along with
+the bastions of San Quentin it strikes, somehow, the note of human
+distrust amid all this charm of light and line and elusive colour,
+as if suddenly one should discover the tip of a barbed tail under the
+skirt of some seductive stranger.
+
+Between San Quentin and the Straits, all about the curve of the bay,
+winding, wide-mouthed sloughs give access to a land as fertile as
+Egypt. A slough is a mere wallow of unprofitable waters, waters unused
+by men and still reluctant of the sea. Pushed aside by the compelling
+tides, too undisciplined to make proper banks for themselves, they are
+neglected by all but a few fringing willows and shapeless sycamores in
+which the herons nest.
+
+Often at evening the white-faced ibis can be seen flying in long,
+voiceless lines, just clearing the twilight-tinted water, to their
+accustomed night perches in the wind-beaten willows. They return there,
+if undisturbed, year after year, accompanied in few and far-between
+seasons by the egret and the snowy heron, grown man-shy, or if they
+but knew the purpose for which their nuptial plumage is sacrificed,
+woman-shy, and seldom seen even by the most wishful eyes.
+
+At Napa a few bull-headed oaks come down almost to the tide-line, and
+in Sonoma a clump of alien blue gums huddles aloof and unregarded,
+but from the water little is visible beside the stilted cabins of some
+gun club or the ramshackle resorts of the flat-nosed, slow craft that
+wind on mysterious errands between the sunken lands. Whole families
+of half-amphibious humans appear to live comfortably on these drifting
+scows, but one never by any chance catches them doing any distinctive
+thing.
+
+The waters of the sloughs come down from the little inland valleys,
+where summer nests and broods in a blue haze along the redwood-serried
+hills. Whether it is white with cherry bloom at Napa, or purple with
+winy clusters at Sonoma, there is always something interesting going
+on there of the large process by which granite mountains are made food
+for man. It is worth a visit if only to learn that a country which does
+that sort of thing supremely well, finds it also worth while to do it
+beautifully. Yachting off San Rafael, it is possible to catch at times
+the scent of roses on an off-shore wind above the salt smell of the
+marshes.
+
+The last rip of the tide is through the Straits of Carquinez into the
+back-water of Suisun. From here on, it is a rhythmic heaving to and fro
+as of well-matched wrestlers, the river-water is set back to Crow's
+Landing on the San Joaquin, and miles above Sacramento it returns
+again past Antioch and the Suisun islands. It is lost in a wilderness
+of tules, through which the sluggish currents blindly wind. Here we
+have nothing to do with men, our business is all with the tribe of the
+Little Duck: mallard, teal, tern, coot, heron, eared grebe, and awkward
+loon.
+
+The tule is a round leafless reed. It springs up along the tide-lands
+or in the stagnant back-water of the rivers, or by any least dribble
+of a desert spring. No condition daunts it but absolute dearth of
+water; far-called, it travels on the wind over mountain ranges, over
+great wastes of waterless plain to find the one absolute condition, a
+pool--white rimmed with alkali or poisonous green with arsenic. I have
+seen it flourish by springs so charged with mineral that each slender
+column is ringed with its stony deposit, but I do not recall any
+standing water where tules are not. The stems are filled with papery
+pith so light that the Indians of the San Joaquin made boats of bundles
+of them, faggoted together and tied upon a wooden frame.
+
+Year by year the tules reclaim the muddy confluence of the twin rivers.
+They make an annual growth, die palely, and are beaten down by the
+wind; between their matted stems the young green comes up again. In the
+Land of the Little Duck, miles upon miles of them, and not one other
+thing, stand up on either side the winding water-lanes, man-high and
+impenetrable.
+
+The Tulare--the place of the tule--is the haunt not only of water-birds
+but innumerable insect-catchers, and especially of the red-winged
+blackbirds. In the spring these betake themselves to the reed-fringed
+marshes in hundreds, building their nests in such neighbourly proximity
+that the young can hop from rim to rim of the tight-slung, grassy
+hammocks. Great clouds of the young birds can be seen, just before
+mating and after nesting in the fall, rising from the low islands
+of the river-junction. In the season also the male yellow-headed
+blackbird may be heard singing his sweet but noisy cheering-song to
+his sombre mate as she weaves marsh grass and wet pond-weed together
+as a foundation for her home, always prudently completed some weeks in
+advance of any need of it.
+
+  [Illustration: WAITING FOR DUCK--LOS BAÑOS]
+
+Where the tules thin out along the moving currents, numerous woven
+balls of marsh vegetation hang like some strange fruit safely above the
+summer rise of the waters. These are the nests of the tule wren, built
+by the industrious male, with who knows what excess of parental care
+or what intention to deceive. All the while he is at work upon them,
+in one, the least conspicuous and apparently the least skilfully built,
+the mother bird nurses the brown nestlings with which, suddenly at the
+end of July, all the whispering galleries of the tulares are alive.
+
+One who has the courage to penetrate deeper within the tulares, past
+the crazy wooden landings of nameless ports at which the flat scows
+put in, past the broken willows where the herons nest and the weedy
+back-waters lie all smoothly green with the deceptive duck-weed, will
+see many wished-for sights. Just before dawn and after nightfall the
+inner marshes are vocal with the varied cries of coot and mallard
+and the complaining skirl of the mud-hen, the whistling redwing,
+the bittern booming from his dingy pool, and all the windy beat of
+wings. But by day a stillness falls through which the clicking whisper
+of the reeds and the croon of the great rivers cradling to the sea
+reaches the sense almost with sound. The air is all alive with the
+metallic glint of dragon-flies; now and then the plop of some shining
+turtle dropping into the smooth lagoon, or the frightened splash of a
+marsh-nesting bird, flecks the silence with a flash of sound. Here one
+might see all the duck kind leading forth their young broods, or the
+eared grebe swimming with her day-old nestlings on her back. If the
+day is dark--black clouds with lightnings playing under--one may hear
+the voice of the loon sliding through his sonorous scale to shaking,
+witless laughter. Or perhaps the day's sight might be a flock of
+pelicans on their way to their nesting-ground in Buena Vista, breasting
+the shallows, and with beating wings driving a school of minnows into
+some tiny inlet where they may be scooped up in the pouched bills, a
+dozen to a mouthful. Better still, some morning mist might rise for
+you suddenly on a strip of sandy shore the cranes had chosen for their
+wild dances, from which the stately measures of the Greek are said to
+be derived. Against the yellow sand, as on the background of a vase,
+the dipping figures and white outstretched wing draperies make the
+connection clear to you for the moment, along with some other things
+long overlaid in the racial memory.
+
+Always at evening in the tulares the air is winnowed by the clanging
+hordes of geese and ducks. Triangular flights of teal wing by you,
+whizzing like bullets, hazy with speed. Beach-nesting birds, paddlers
+in the foodful creeks, go seaward. Now and then some winged frigate of
+the open sea, an albatross perhaps blown inland on a storm, will climb
+the air to the sea-going wind. Low on the twilight-coloured waters the
+tule fog creeps in.
+
+You emerge properly from the vast intricacies of the tulares--if you
+emerge at all, and are not completely mazed and lost in them--at
+Sacramento, a city but barely rescued from the marsh, and still
+marsh-coloured with the damp-loving lichens. _La Dame aux Camelias_, to
+the eye, rich in that exotic blossom as no city in the world, but with
+a past, oh, unmistakably, and a touch of hectic disorder. The Russians
+possessed her, and then the breed of Jack Hamlin, and then--but it
+is unfair to list the lovers of a lady of so much charm and such
+indubitable capacity for reformation. Sacramento is the State capital,
+the geographical pivot of the great twin valleys; she divides with
+Stockton on the San Joaquin the tribute of their waters. It was here
+on her banks that the overland emigrant trains sat down to wait for
+the subsidence of waters in the new world of the West, from here they
+scattered to all its hopeful quarters.
+
+If the part the city has played in history has been that of a hostel, a
+distributing station, at least she has played it to some purpose. There
+are few empires richer than the land the twin rivers drain.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE TWIN VALLEYS
+
+
+It is geographical courtesy merely, to treat of intramontane California
+as a valley; it is in reality a vast, rolling plain. Several little
+kingdoms of Europe could be tucked away in it. North and south it has
+no natural line of demarcation other than the rivers meeting for their
+single assault upon the sea, but its diversity deserves the double
+name. They make, the Sacramento rushing from the wooded north and the
+sluggish San Joaquin, one of the most interesting waterways of the
+world. I should say they made, for of the San Joaquin one must be able
+to speak in the past also, to understand it. One must have seen it
+before man had tamed it and taught it, supine as a lioness in the sun.
+
+To arrive at a proper feeling for the continuity of the great central
+plain, it must be approached from the south, by way of the old Tejon
+Pass, up from San Fernando, or down the Tehachapi grade where the
+railroad loops and winds through the confluence of the Coast Range with
+the Sierra Nevada. Here the hills curve graciously about the vast oval
+of the lower San Joaquin. The downthrow of the mountain, stippled with
+sage-brush, gives way to tawny sand glistening here and there with
+white patches of alkali, mottled with dark blocks of irrigated land.
+Its immensity is obscured by the haze of heat.
+
+One is reduced to the figures of the real estate "booster" for terms of
+proportion. That modest checkering of green, hours away to the left,
+is a forty-mile field of alfalfa; beyond it lie the vineyards that in
+less than a quarter of a century relegated Spain to a second place in
+the raisin industry of the world. This is the San Joaquin of to-day
+and to-morrow. The white-tilted vans of the Argonauts saw it as one
+vast, overlapping field of radiant corollas, blue of lupins, phacelias,
+nemophilias, gold of a hundred packed species of composite. Wet years
+it is still possible for the settler in the unirrigated districts to
+wake some morning to blossomy lakes of sky-blueness in the hollows;
+from San Emigdio in the Temblors, I have seen, across the whole width of
+the valley, the smouldering poppy fires along the bluffs of Kern River.
+On the mesa below Tejon the moon-white gilia that the children call
+"evening snow" unfurls its musky-scented drifts mile after mile. But
+the prevailing note of the San Joaquin is tawny russet; gold it will
+be in the season, resplendent as those idols which the Incas overlaid
+yearly with fresh-beaten leaf, and in September the barrancas above
+Bakersfield and Visalia as yellow as brass, but all up and down the
+hill-rimmed hollow is every lion-coloured tint contending still with
+the thin belts of planted orchard.
+
+  [Illustration: MIRROR LAKE, YOSEMITE]
+
+Twenty-five years of cultivation have served to shift the lines of
+greenness but not greatly to modify the desert key. Once it was all
+massed in the tulares which fringed the series of lakes and connecting
+sloughs, continuing northward from the lowest point of the San Joaquin.
+Kern, Kings, Kaweah, Tule, Merced, and Tuolumne, mighty rivers, and a
+hundred lesser singing streams fed it. Elk by thousands ramped in its
+reedy borders. It was a haven of nesting water-birds. Whole islands
+were populated by pelicans, repairing there annually for the strange,
+sidling wing-dances that attend their mating. Blue herons nested in
+the tulares; they could be seen trailing their long dangly legs for
+hours above the shallows. Indians paddled in their frail balsas, built
+of papery, dry reeds, down intricate water-lanes in which white men
+venturing, lost themselves and were mazed to madness. Malaria of a
+surpassing virulence rode up and down that country on the "tule fogs."
+Even yet it is the dread of the cities of the plain to find themselves
+beleaguered by the thick, ghost-white mists that at long intervals roll
+along the ground, retaking the ancient marshes.
+
+Into this potential opulence the cattleman precipitated himself.
+He bought--it is more exact to say he acquired--vast acreage of
+Spanish grants; along the rim of the Coast Ranges, territory equal to
+principalities was given over to long-horned, lean herds. All about the
+old beach-line of the San Joaquin may still be seen the remnant of the
+cattle ranches, low formless houses with purlieus of pomegranate and
+pampas grass and black figs, and the high, stockaded, acrid-smelling
+corrals, to mark the receding waves of the cattle industry. On the
+Sierra side the guttered mesas, the hoof-worn foothills advertise
+the devastation of the wandering flocks. Early in the 'sixties these
+appeared, little, long-armed French and Basques, with hungry hordes
+of sheep at their heels, pasturing on the public lands. They ate into
+the roots of the lush grass and left the quick rains to cut the soil.
+The wool in the hand was always worth the next season's feed to the
+sheep-herder.
+
+  [Illustration: AMONG THE REDWOODS OF THE GREAT TWIN VALLEYS]
+
+Never was a land so planned for the uses of man, its shielding
+mountains, its deep alluvial terraces sloping gently to the sun. Men
+read it in the hieroglyphic the glistening waters spelled between the
+dark patches of the tulares, but it took some experimenting to read the
+message aright.
+
+After the cattle and the flocks came the wheat. Up from the meeting
+waters the land billowed with grain. Owners buckled the ploughs
+together and drove them with engines by tens and twenties across the
+thousand-acre fields. But men and engines, they were alike driven
+by the drouth. In wet years the wheat rancher rode to view his
+shoulder-high harvest, but when the rains, going high and wide over
+the valley to break along the saw-teeth of the Sierras, left the wheat
+unwatered, the same thing happened to the crops that had happened to
+the cattle and the sheep. And at last, amid the rotting carcases and
+the shrivelled acres, the message came clear--not the land, but the
+water. So they shut up the rivers in the cañons and the day of the
+orchardist began.
+
+Geographically it begins at Bakersfield, below the gap where the Kern
+comes down from the giant sequoias and is constrained to the wide,
+willow-planted canals, governed by head-gates and weirs. Such waters as
+find again their ancient levels, do so by way of the loose sandy soil
+through which they are filtered in vineyard and orchard. The tulares
+have been turned under; the elk are strictly preserved in the hope
+that enough of them will breed to serve the purposes of curiosity.
+The antelope bands that once flashed their white rumps from bench
+to bench of the tawny mesas were reduced, the last time I saw them,
+to a scant half-score roving the Tejon under the watchful eye of the
+superintendent. But with all this change, nowhere as at this diminished
+end, does one gather such an impression of the variety, the imperial
+extent of the San Joaquin. For at Bakersfield is one of the world's
+largest petroleum fields. The gaunt derricks rear along the unwatered
+hills like half-formed prehistoric creatures come up out of the ground
+to see what men are about. Reservoirs, fed with the stinking juices
+of a time decayed, squat along the barrancas, considering with a slow
+leech-like intelligence the tank cars in the form of a Gargantuan
+joint-worm of the same period that produced the derricks, as they clank
+between the oil-fields and the town. One of the largest oil-fields in
+the world--and yet the turn of the road drops it out of sight in the
+valley's immensity!
+
+Bakersfield is a heaven of roses. Doubtless there are other things by
+which the inhabitants would be glad to have it remembered, but this is
+the item that the traveller in the season carries away with him. Roses
+do not die there, they fall apart of their own sweetness, wafts of
+which envelop the town for miles out on the highway. After nightfall,
+when each particular attar distils upon the quiescent air, the
+townspeople walk abroad in the streets and the moon comes up full-orbed
+across the Temblors at about the level of the clock-tower. Overhead
+and beyond it the sky retains a deep velvety blueness until long past
+midnight. Traces of colour can be seen sometimes in the zenith when the
+glimmer along the knife-edge of the Sierras announces the dawn.
+
+North of Bakersfield, as the valley widens, the Coast Range fades
+to a mere shadow mountain, the peaks of Kaweah stand out above the
+banded haze, angel-white like the ranked Host. As the road swings in
+to the Sierra outposts, broad-headed oaks begin to appear; it skirts
+the foot of the great Sierra fault close enough for the landscape to
+borrow something from the dark, impending pines. But for the most part
+what the observer has to consider is soil and water and the miraculous
+product of these two. One must learn to think of the land in terms of
+human achievement.
+
+  [Illustration: CLEAR LAKE, LAKE COUNTY]
+
+North from the delta of Kern River lies a hundred miles of country
+scarcely disputed with the flocks, far-called and few, which still
+at the set time of the year forgather in green swales behind the
+town for the annual shearing, for the herders to play hand-ball at
+Noriegas', to grow riotously claret drunk and render an evanescent
+foreign touch to the brisk modern community. And every foot of that
+hundred miles is rife with the seeds of life, awaiting the touch of
+the impregnating water. One holds to that conviction as to a friendly
+assuring hand. In the presence of that vast plain, palpitating with
+the heat, the sluggish, untamed water lolling in the midst of it, the
+white-fanged Sierra combing the cloudless blue, beauty becomes a poor
+word: appreciation is shipwrecked and cast away. With relief one hails
+the beginning of a stripe, dark green like a scarf, scalloping the
+foothills--the citrus belt. From Portersville, Lindsay, Exeter it runs
+north past the meeting of the waters into the valley of the Sacramento,
+and for quality and early fruiting sets the figure of the world market.
+As if its waters had some special virtue, wherever a river is poured
+out upon the plain some particular crop is favoured. About Fresno
+it is raisins, at Madera port wine, sherry, and mild muscatel. The
+Merced, which takes its rise in the valley of Yosemite, is partial to
+melons and figs. But everywhere are prunes, peaches, apricots, almonds,
+sugar-beets, alfalfa, unmeasurable acreage of barley, beans, and
+asparagus. Anything is impressive if the scale be large enough, even a
+field of onions. Here the league-long rows are as terrible as an army.
+
+Up and down this empire belt proceed two great companies, the hordes
+of "fruit-hands" and the army of the bees, following its successive
+waves of fruit and bloom. Gangs of pruners, pickers, and packers
+are shifted and shunted as the crop demands. Interesting economic
+experiments transact themselves under the worried producer's eye; alien
+race contending with alien race. The jarring interests of men have by
+no means worked out the absolute solution, but the bees have long ago
+settled their business. They kill the drones and gather the honey for
+the gods who kindly provide them with hives--the more fortunate perhaps
+in knowing what their particular gods require.
+
+Wherever along the belt the rivers fail, the pumps take up the work;
+strenuous little Davids contending against the Goliaths of drouth. They
+can be heard chugging away like the active pulse of the vineyards,
+completing the ribbon of greenness that spans from ridge to ridge of
+the down-plunging hills.
+
+And then one must take account of the cities of the plain! Twenty-five
+years ago they fringed the Sierra base, mere feeders to the mines, the
+cattle ranches, the sheep country. They had the manners of the frontier
+and the decaying, tawdry vices that filtered down from San Francisco,
+sluiced out by intermittent spasms of reform. They were "wide open."
+Hairy little herders with jabbering tongues knifed one another in the
+shearing season, vaqueros "shot up the town" occasionally; it is still
+within memory that prominent citizen "packed a gun" for prominent
+citizen. Twenty years ago the last, most southerly, of the chain of
+settlements was a very cesspool of the iniquities driven to a last
+stand by the influx of home-seekers. I who went through the years of
+change with it could tell tales if I would--but, thank Heaven, nobody
+would believe them! Now in those old places of unsavoury renown rise
+handsome "business blocks," the true mark of cities. Homes heaped
+with roses spread on either side of miles of palm-fringed boulevard.
+Over it all flows the clear, inspiring current of Sierra-cooled air,
+sliding down from the ranked peaks that, whitened from flank to flank
+by perpetual snows, hover like phalanxes of protecting wings.
+
+  [Illustration: CASTLE CRAG, RATTLESNAKE CAÑON]
+
+Into the very thick of the cities drop down from the high Sierras
+trails to all its places of delight, the sequoia groves, King's River
+cañon, and all the lordly peaks about Mt. Whitney and Yosemite; and
+setting hillward from San Francisco the old Stockton-Sonora road
+along which surged the undisciplined rout of the gold-seekers of
+'forty-nine. It leads, this earliest of valley highways, across the
+basin of the Stanislaus, past places made famous by the red-shirted,
+lusty miners, the sleek-coated gamblers of Bret Harte. It passes the
+twenty-eight Mile House where Jack Hamlin ran a poker game, and many a
+scene rendered memorable by the gay ladies of Poker Flat. It reaches,
+by way of a deep-rutted, ancient track, choked with the characteristic
+red dust of the country, Table Mountain, the home of Truthful James.
+Table Mountain, having consideration for the near-by Sierras, is a hill
+merely, with a flat deposit of _malpais_, the "black rock" of regions
+far north and east. Beyond Sonora lie the old placer "diggings," every
+foot of which has been combed and sifted for gold. The bones of the
+earth are laid bare; all the masking clay, tossed and tumbled, clogged
+with rusty pipes and decaying sluices, lies in heaps and depressions
+where the gold-seekers cast it. The sense of violation is heightened by
+the hue of the soil, redder than the hills of Devon, redder than a red
+heifer--but the river furnishes the more descriptive figure, the martyr
+hue of the Sacrament. In the flood season it carries the tint of its
+ensanguined clays far down into the bay's blueness.
+
+The remnant of that riotous life,--the abandoned cabins, the towns
+falling into dissolution,--like the remaining specimens of the fir and
+redwood forests cut off to timber the Mother Lode, is left standing by
+unfitness. The best of it is a little nugget of remembrance of Francis
+Bret Harte and Mark Twain.
+
+  [Illustration: McCLOUD RIVER, UPPER SACRAMENTO VALLEY]
+
+It was at Angels in the foothills of Calaveras that Twain, to his
+everlasting fame, was so impressed with the performance of the Jumping
+Frog. But life at Angels and all up and down that placer country is
+as heavy with desuetude as the frog was after the bar-keeper had fed
+him with buckshot. As well try to get a draught of that old time as a
+drink at any of the dismantled bars, high, ornate, black walnut affairs
+across which, in dust and nuggets, passed and repassed probably as much
+gold as would serve to buy the orange belt of the San Joaquin--and for
+a figure of magnificence you would find nothing more acceptable to its
+inhabitants.
+
+Much of the history of that country is written in the names. Here the
+soft Spanish locutions give place to harsher, but not less descriptive,
+Americanisms--Jimtown, Jackass Hill, Squaw Creek; the cañons become
+"gulches," the mesas "flats." Later both of these were overlaid by
+-villes and -tons, the plain rural names of Anglo-Saxon derivation,
+Coulterville, Farmington, Turlock. They smell of orchards. Prosperity
+is coming back on the surface of the fruitful waters, but the redwood
+forests have not come back. Centuries, nothing less, are required for
+the building of one of these towers of greenness, and it is barely
+forty years since all that district was one roaring blast of mining
+life, rioting, jostling, snatching each from each. In the language
+of the country, the Italian truck gardeners will "beat them to it."
+They have smoothed over the old "slickens" and comforted the land with
+crops.
+
+As one travels north, the bulk of the Sierra lessens, the pines climb
+higher, the oaks march well down into the middle valley to catch the
+wet coast winds, the character of the plantations change, there are
+more grain fields, more neat little farms. Finally the old Overland
+emigrant trail climbs down from Donner Lake and Emigrant Gap, and you
+find yourself deep in the Valley of the Sacramento.
+
+By an air-line from the meeting of the waters, its geographical
+frontier is passed in the neighbourhood of Sonora; perhaps the bridge
+over the Mokelumne is a better indicator, since that river joins the
+San Joaquin at the estuary, but it is not until the Overland road is
+crossed that the character of the country definitely betrays the upper
+valley.
+
+Ascending the river, the works of man are less and less, the forest
+and the mountains more. The rapid rise of the wooded slopes keeps
+the Sacramento troublous. Tributaries, not large but swift and of
+tremendous volume, pour into it. Occasionally from dark cañons is
+heard the steady pound of the quartz mill, working some ancient lead,
+or a smelter blocks out a whole forested slope with its poisonous
+exhalations; but for the most part the northern valley is given over to
+brooding quiet, to unending green, and streams as swift as adders.
+
+In Mendocino county, on the coast side, the Range begins to lift
+toward the snow-line; on the Sierra side the alpine crest shears away.
+From time to time the "logging" industry cuts a wide track down the
+redwood forest. One hears above the singing rivers, the clucking of
+the donkey-engine or the rip of a mill still going in the midst of its
+self-created, sawdust desert. The glutting of the lumber region has
+been accomplished as wastefully, as violently, as the search for gold.
+All up the valley tall prophets of the rain have been butchered to
+make a lumberman's fat purse. But, link by link, the forestry bureau
+is closing in the line of the reserves against the lumber "kings," the
+Ahabs of a grasping time.
+
+The hills fall into a certain order, serried rank on rank. Deciduous
+growth of the lower slopes gives way to redwoods and Shasta fir. Miles
+upon miles of them stand so thick that when one dies it does not fall
+but remains erect in the arms of its brothers. Great columnar boles
+rise out of the river-basins, soaring high over what, except for their
+dwarfing proportions, would be a considerable grove of graceful oak
+and bay and glistening, magnolia-leafed, crimson-shafted madroño.
+Over these the redwoods rise, as over the heads of worshippers the
+clustered columns of Milan seek the dome. High up the tops are caught
+in a froth of pale-green foliage through which the sunlight filters
+blue. This characteristic refraction from their yellowish, inch-long
+needles dwells about the redwood as an aura, and far on the horizon
+distinguishes their ranks from the hill-slopes masked with pines. So,
+blue ridge on ridge, they advance on the imperious height of Shasta.
+
+  [Illustration: DONNER LAKE, ON THE OLD EMIGRANT TRAIL]
+
+Shasta is a brother of Fuji and Tacoma, one of those solitary crater
+peaks whose whiteness is the honourable age of fiery youth, a good
+mountain dead and gone to heaven. Do not go up on it; you will see
+a great deal more of what you have seen, wooded hills on hills and
+perhaps the sapphire belt of the sea, the glitter of lovely, sail-less
+lakes, but you will not understand it any better, for Shasta has no
+more to do with the abutting ranges than a great genius with the stock
+which produced him. This is a prophet among mountains, a vent from
+the burning heart of creation. One is not surprised to learn that the
+Indians hereabout count their descent from the Spirit of Shasta and
+the Grizzly Bear. That dark belt of forest circling the mountain's
+base looks to be the proper haunt for him, the lumbering, little-eyed
+embodiment of brute creation. It is well to think of those two things
+together, the rip of those mighty claws with a ton or two of brute bulk
+behind them, and the awful witness towering to the blue, and suffer the
+soul-satisfying fear that lies in wait for man in the great places of
+the earth. All our modern fears are mean, fears of the common opinion
+and the bill collector. Shasta will have done its best for you if it
+enables you to quake in the very marrow of consciousness.
+
+After this it is well to turn southward along the Coast Range, camping
+by the trout-abounding rivers, losing yourself in the stiff laurels and
+azaleas of Mendocino, fishing at the clear lakes cupped in the hollows.
+If the season is right there will be salmon running in Klamath and
+Trinity rivers or deer in the steep-sided cañons. And everywhere there
+will be the redwoods. It is not, however, in the crowds that the tree
+reveals itself. Far down the deforested hills of Sonoma, in isolated
+groves, in small groups or singles on the tops of bossy, brass-coloured
+hills, it takes on character and charm.
+
+A redwood grove is a three-story affair. On the ground floor, turned
+rusty brown, as though the sunlight filtering through had mellowed
+there a thousand years, creep the wild ginger, the rosy-flowered
+oxalis, trilliums, and violets. All these lower rooms are crowded with
+dogwood, with the great berried manzanitas, woodwardias, man-high,
+and glistening bays, silver-tipped with light. By one of those
+strange but charming affinities of wild life, the redwood grove is
+the peculiar haunt of lilies. Every variation of the soil--the peat
+bogs of the coast, the high sandy ridges, the damp meadows--has each
+its appropriate variety; and not merely lilies, but droves of them,
+hundreds of swaying stems, files of them up the line of seeping springs
+or round the bases of great boulders, lilies breast high, lilies
+overhead, ruby-spotted, golden-throated, shining white, dowered with
+the special genius of perfume. Along the chaparral-covered slope and
+deep within the cañons one tracks them by the subtle, intoxicating
+scent spreading, as I am persuaded no other perfume does, by a
+conscious distillation on the melting air.
+
+  [Illustration: LAUREL LAKE, UPPER SACRAMENTO]
+
+The second redwood story, that wondrous space of blue-diffusing sun,
+between the deciduous underforest and the fairy web of redwood green,
+is bird and squirrel haunted. Jays flash back and forth, bright
+flickers of the humming-bird go buzzing by. Woodpeckers may be heard
+calling the ever-missing "Jacob, Jacob!" who must in their opinion
+be concealing himself somewhere about the upper story. The wire-drawn
+warble of the brown creeper follows the singer up and down the deeply
+corrugated trunks. Wrens, sparrows, juncos, all manner of little
+feathered folk in whose coats the tones of brown predominate, frequent
+the pillared middle rooms. Once I heard what I thought to be a hermit
+thrush, singing out of the dusk of Muir Wood. But I have not the art
+of knowing birds by note. People who live much in the redwoods find
+them silent; I think it might more easily be that the great trunks
+and green-shot glooms have the same quality of dwarfing sound as size.
+Redwoods, as I know them, are really lighter and more alive than any
+other coniferous forests, but the _effect_ of umbrageous stillness is
+induced by vast proportions.
+
+As for what goes on in the upper rooms, who has been there? What birds
+arise to their three- or four-hundred-foot heights? The few and slight
+boughs, the feathery layers of foliage rounding in age to sloping
+crowns, who knows them but the wind and the snows that neither stir nor
+are stayed by them? There are some matters that the great Twin Valleys
+keep even from the men for whom they have borne an empire.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE HIGH SIERRAS AND THE SAGE-BRUSH COUNTRY
+
+
+The proper vehicle for mountain study is not yet available. A great
+mountain range is like a great public character, there is much more
+to it than is presented to the observation, and it is not open to
+familiarity. But if one could fly high and wide over its cloud-lifting
+summits, one might learn something of its private relations.
+
+From such a vantage it would instantly appear how distinct are the
+Nevadas (_nieve_, snowy) among the Sierras of California. A very
+Bonaparte of mountains, new-born and lording it over the ancient
+ranges, not content with its vast empery but swinging north into the
+unpre-empted icy regions. San Bernardino and San Jacinto are as far
+from it as the Faubourg St. Germain from an island in the sea. Sierra
+Madre is of the Coast Range; Shasta a fire-hole, a revolutionist; the
+true Sierra is the midriff of a continent. From its northern extremity
+one sees the sun in a circle and the Northern Lights; that portion of
+it we know as Sierra Nevada swings into the state above Honey Lake,
+and ends southward in a tumble of blunt peaks below Kern River. This
+is quite enough, however, for Californians to make free with, and more
+than they can appreciate.
+
+Geographically the range begins on the south at Tehachapi, but at
+Walker's Pass, a day's journey to the north, is the first appearance
+of its most salient characteristic, the great Sierra Fault. In its
+youth the range suffered incredible cataclysms. For two hundred
+miles the great eastern plain dropped; weighted as it was with its
+withered aristocracy of hills--how weazened and old you can see to
+this day--it tore sharply downward, and the depth of that fall from
+the heaven-affronting peak of Whitney to the desert valley of Inyo is
+a matter of two miles of sheer descent.
+
+The whole Sierra along the line of faultage has the contour of a
+wave about to break. It swings up in long water-shaped lines from
+the valley of the San Joaquin, and rears its jagged crest above the
+abrupt desert shore. Seen from close under, some of these two- and
+three-thousand-foot precipices have the pitch of toppling waters. As
+they rose new-riven from the earth their proportions must have been
+more than terrifying.
+
+Later the Ice Age bore downward from the north, and through
+immeasurable years carved the fractured granite into shapes of enduring
+beauty. It rounded the great jutting fronts, it insured them against
+the tooth of time with the keen icy polish with which they shine
+still against the morning. It gouged narrow wall-sided cañons, cut the
+course of rivers, and sinking like a graver's tool into the heart of
+the range, scooped out deep wells of pleasantness. Afterward, when the
+ice was old, it must have moved more slowly, for the lines it left,
+retreating northward, are more flowing, the hill-crowns rounder. And
+then the mountain was besieged with trees. They stormed it, scaled its
+free precipices; you can see by the thick mould of the valleys what
+ranks and ranks of them went down, and along the snow-line how by the
+persistence of assault they are bent and contorted.
+
+This is the whole effect of the sombre swathes of pine that mask the
+Sierra slopes. They march along the water-courses, they climb up sheer
+precipices in staggering files, trooping in the passes; across the
+smooth meadow spaces they lock arms, they await the word of command.
+By a very little observation they are seen to be ranged in orderly
+companies. Here a warm current of air travelling steadily from the
+superheated valleys carries the life zone higher, there a defiant
+bony ridge drops it a few thousand feet, but the relative arrangement
+of species does not greatly vary. The broad oaks, like reverend
+grandsires, from the foothills see the procession go by, they follow
+as far as the gates of the mountain, crutched and bowed. All the lower
+cañons are full of a rabble of deciduous trees, chinquapins, scrub oak,
+madroño, full of gay camp-followers, lilac, dogwood, azaleas, strumpet
+penstemons, flaunting lupins, monk's-hood, columbine.
+
+  [Illustration: YOSEMITE FALLS]
+
+The grey nut pine, wide-branched, unwarlike but serviceable, opens
+the ranks of conifers. Then the long-leaved pines begin, _ponderoso_,
+_Coulteri_, and the slender, arrowy, fire-resisting _attenuata_. On the
+western slope, increasing as they go northward, the redwood holds all
+the open country, but it is no climber like _monticola_, the largest
+of all true pines, the captain of the Sierra forests. The firs usurp
+the water-borders and the low moraines; clannish, incommunicable, they
+seem not to find it worth while to grow unless they grow stately. Above
+all these range the thin-barked pines, the lodgepole, Douglas spruce,
+librocedrus, and hardy junipers in windy passes. About the meadows and
+lake-borders the quaking asps push like children between the knees
+along the line; and highest, most persistent, the creeping-limbed,
+wind-depressed white-barked pine, under whose matted boughs the wild
+sheep bed.
+
+The trees have each their own voice--a degree of flexibility or length
+of needles upon which the wind harps to produce its characteristic
+note. The traveller in the dark of mountain nights knows his way among
+them as by the street cries of his own city. The creaking of the firs,
+the sough of the long-leaved pines, the whispering whistle of the
+lodgepole pine, the delicate frou-frou of the redwoods in a wind, these
+come out for him in the darkness with the night scent of moth-haunted
+flowers. But there is one tree that for the footer of the mountain
+trails is voiceless; it speaks no doubt, but it speaks only to the
+austere mountain-heads, to the mindful winds and the watching stars.
+It speaks as men speak to one another and are not heard by the little
+ants crawling over their boots. This is the "big tree," the sequoia. In
+something less than a score of forest patches about the rim of the Twin
+Valleys, the sequoia abides, out of some possible preglacial period,
+out of some past of which nothing is left to us but the fading memory
+of the "giants in those days." The age of individual big trees can
+be computed in terms of human history. There are evidences written in
+the rings of these that they endured the drouth which made the famine
+in the days of Ahab the king, against which Elijah prayed. These are
+growing trees whose seeds are fertile.
+
+One might make a very dramatic collocation of the rise and fall of
+empires against the life period of a single sequoia, and that would
+be easier than to transcribe by mere phrases the impression of one
+of these green towers of silence on the sense. Single and deeply
+corrugated as a Corinthian column, with only a lightly-branched crown
+for a capital, they spire for five thousand years or so, and then the
+leaf-crown becomes rounded to a dome in which the winds breed. Warm
+days of Spring, their young nestling zephyrs come fluttering down the
+deep wells of shade to shake the saplings of a hundred years. In Summer
+the fine-leafed foliage catches the sun like spray, diffusing vaporous
+blueness; but the majesty of their gigantic trunks is incommunicable.
+After a while the stifling sense of awe breaks before it, and you go
+on with your small affairs as children will go on playing even in the
+royal presence.
+
+  [Illustration: BLUE LAKE, LAKE COUNTY]
+
+The name _Sequoia_ is one of the few cheering notes among our habitual
+botanical stupidities--an attempt to express quality as it is humanly
+measured in a name. There was once an American Cadmus, Sequoyah, a
+Cherokee who invented an Indian alphabet and taught his tribe to read.
+Seeing them outnumbered in their own territory, he started west with
+the idea of founding a great Indian empire. He was last seen trailing
+north across the desert and was heard of no more. Tradition has it that
+he reached the forest of the upper Kern River and gave the trees his
+name. At least no botanist with his nose in a book has usurped it.
+
+Forests are for cover. They mask not only the naked rock, but the paths
+of deer and bear and bighorn. Under the spire-pointed ranks of conifers
+that look so black from above, verging to blueness, a world of furtive
+folk goes on. A world of birds is in its branches, squirrels nimble
+as sparrows, but scarcely anything of this is visible to the watcher
+on the heights. Rabbits playing on your lawn would be more noticeable
+in proportion than the seldom-seen bighorn leading his light-footed
+young from ledge to rocky ledge. The jealous trees cover the trails and
+obscure the passes.
+
+As you come up through them you observe the flat, soddy spaces of
+old lake basins, green as jewels, and the hanging meadows gay with
+cascades of flowers, the stream tangles, the new-made moraines bright
+with bindweed and sulphur-flower. But from the heights all this lovely
+detail is hidden by the overlapping tents of boughs. Here and there a
+stream leaps forth at the falls like a sword from a green scabbard,
+or higher up, may be traced as the silver wire on which are strung
+unrippled lakes as blue as cobalt. Great chains of such lakes lead down
+from the snow-line to the foothill borders, encroached upon by the
+silent ranks of trees. As they go down they show soddy borders, they
+tend to fill and to grow meadows where presently deep-rooting trees
+assume their stations. This is the strategic rule for the taking of a
+granite mountain. First the grinding ice and the disintegrating water;
+what the streams wash down collects in the glacier-ploughed basins. It
+makes lake borders by which the grass comes in--the small grass that
+is mightier than mountains, that eats them for its food. Lakes at the
+lower levels become meadows, then trees arrive; they overrun the soddy
+ground, the snow-manured moraines. The trees themselves take centuries
+to fruition. At a later stage men dispossess the forest and build
+cities, but this has not yet come to the Sierras. There is something
+indomitable in the will of the trees to spread and climb. In the floor
+of Yosemite and Hetch Hetchy there are hundred-year-old oaks of full
+form and generous growth, and on the slopes above them the same oaks
+and of almost the same age are so dwarfed by drouth and altitude that
+they are not knee-high to a man, but they keep the due proportions of
+their type. A white bark pine will climb where the weight of the winter
+drifts is so heavy that it is never able to lift its decumbent trunk
+from the ground, clinging like ivy to the wall in which it roots.
+
+In the Spring the rich florescence of the conifers sheds pollen in
+drifts that, carried down the melting water, warn the sheep-herder and
+the orchardist a hundred miles away of the advancing season. A pine
+forest in flower is one of the things worth seeing which is most seldom
+seen, for at its best the high passes are still choked by snow, the
+lakes ice-locked, the trails dangerous. And then the blossoms, yellow
+and crimson tassels and rosy spathes, are carried on the leafy crowns
+high over the heads of the most adventurous foresters. What one finds,
+as late as the end of June when the trails are open, is a stain of
+pollen on the lingering snow, and great clouds of it flying wherever a
+bough is brushed by a light wing. In the autumn the whole wood is full
+of the click and glint of the winged seeds. Storms of them, like clouds
+of locusts, are carried past on the wind, to be dropped in the nearest
+clearing or to find a chance lodging in a moss-lined crevice of the
+weathered headlands.
+
+  [Illustration: LAKE TAHOE, THE HIGH SIERRAS]
+
+But from the heights, all feeling for the process of the forest is
+lost in the sense of its irresistible march--it creeps and winds, it
+waits darkly for the word. Above the tree-line no sound ascends but a
+faint vibration, the body of sound making itself felt in the silence.
+On windless days the forest lies black like weed at the bottom of a
+lake of air as clear as a vacuum. When the great wind rivers pour about
+the peaks, it can be seen lashing like weed in the currents, but still
+almost soundlessly--the roar of it passes down the cañons, and is heard
+in the cities of the plain. But if the peaks cannot hear what the trees
+are plotting about, it is not so with the voices of the water. These
+are sharper, more definitive; they rise re-echoing from the rocky walls
+and are recognisable each by its distinctive note at incredible heights
+of the sheer, glassy, granite frontlets.
+
+In the glacial valleys, such as Yosemite, Tehipite, and Hetch Hetchy,
+where young rivers drop from the headlands in long streaming falls,
+the noise of them contending with the wind makes mimic thunder. Immense
+curtains of falling water are tossed this way and that, they are caught
+up and suspended in mid-air, and let fall crashing to the lower levels.
+When the wind blows straight up the cañon they will rear against it,
+and leap out a shining arc, shattering in mid-air like bursting bombs
+of spray. But later in the season, when the streams are heavy with the
+melting snows, the wind itself is shattered by the weight of falling
+water--it exhausts itself in obscuring clouds of silver dust. When from
+Whitney or Williamson or King's Mountain you can see half-a-hundred
+such young rivers roaring to the morning, it is as beautiful and as
+terrifying as the sight of youth to timorous age. They go leaping with
+their shining shields, and their shouting shakes the rocks. Neither
+you nor they believe that the most and the best they will come to is an
+irrigating canal between sober rows of prunes and barley.
+
+Higher than the forests, or the waters rising out of them, is the
+_Py-weack_, the Land of Shining Rocks. They shine with glacier polish;
+horses on the high trails sniff suspiciously at their glittering
+surfaces. Time can lay slight hold on them by thunder, by frost, and
+the little grey moss; it has not yet subdued the front of Oppapago.
+Here between snowless ribs and buttresses are the shrunken glaciers
+that feed the streams, little toy models of the ancient rivers of ice.
+The snowfields of the Sierras are not so inconsiderable as they seem:
+they are dwarfed by the precipices among which they hide. Inaccessible
+to ordinary mountain travel, they make their best showing from the
+surrounding plains, where, lifted in the middle air, they glow with
+ethereal whiteness. Close by they display a bewildering waste of broken
+ice, boulders, and crevasses, made bleaker by the cobalt shadows.
+
+  [Illustration: MOUNT SHASTA--SIERRA GLOW]
+
+North the line of peaks stretches, broken by the passes that give
+access to the west. Between them, above the source of streams, in the
+ice-gouged hollows, lie unfathomable waters that take all their life
+from the sky. Or perhaps they are reservoirs from which the sky is
+made, fluid jade and azulite and hyacinth and chrysoprase, as if the
+skies of many days had run their colours in those bleak bowls. For at
+this altitude the wave contour of the range comes out most sharply; the
+sky is strangely deep and darker, as if through its translucence one
+glimpsed the void of space. One sees the moon and the planets wandering
+there with pale lamps held aloft.
+
+No life of any sort is visible from here. Farther down toward the
+coast, over the forested moraines, the condor may be seen leaning
+against the wind at sunrise. On the edge of the abysmal cañons eagles
+make their nests and go dropping down the shadowy depths to seek their
+food from God, but they do not rise to these stark heights. Sometimes
+a clanging horde of water-fowl, beating up from the Gulf of California
+overland to the Canadian marshes, will grow bewildered in the face of
+the great wall-sided cliffs; circling they attempt the forward flight,
+only to circle and rise anew, until, wing-weary in that thin air, they
+sink exhausted to the margin of a mountain lake, satisfied at last to
+thread their way humbly along the creek-beds to open country.
+
+The live forces of the High Sierra are the forces of wind and light.
+One feels the push of tremendous currents flowing between the peaks
+as among rocky islands. Day by day they may be charted by the cloud
+fragments floating on them, by the banners of dry snow dust, streaming
+out like long grass from the island shores. Thundering fleets of cumuli
+drift up the wind rivers and assault the great domes of Whitney and
+Oppapago. The light breaks through all the varying cloud strata, and
+colours them with splendour; the glow of the clouds reflected on the
+snow is caught by the watchful mountain-lover far down the valleys of
+Inyo and San Joaquin. This painted hour of sunset is the apotheosis of
+mountains, but for me it has less of majesty than the morning after
+deep snows. These come usually early in the season. The air for days
+will be full of the formless stir, then the range withdraws itself
+behind a veil which closes from tented peak to peak, and includes
+sometimes the parallel desert ranges which lie along its eastern coast.
+Twenty feet will fall in a single session of the white gods behind the
+veil. Then comes a morning blue and sharp as a spear-thrust. Every tree
+is like an arrow feathered in green and white. Airy bridges built upon
+the bending stems shut in the water-courses; the moraines are smooth
+and soft as the backs of huddled sheep. By night the range shows from
+the valley as a procession of winged figures holding the snows upon
+their bosoms. And that, after all, is the business of mountains. The
+western front of the Sierra Nevada, which receives the full force of
+the Pacific storms, is rewarded with the stateliest forests. Before
+those extended snowy mountain arms lie the great Twin Valleys; behind
+them stretches the illimitable sage-brush country, the backyard of the
+Sierra.
+
+  [Illustration: VALLEY OF THE YOSEMITE]
+
+"Sage-brush country" is one of those local terms that stand for a type
+of landscape as distinctive as the moors of England and the campagna
+of Italy. It means first of all, open country, great space of sky,
+what the inhabitants of it call "eye-reach," treeless except for a few
+cotton-woods and willows along the sink of intermittent streams, and
+stippled with low shrubs of artemesia. This is the true "sage-brush,"
+though it is no sage, the sacred bush of Diana, _Artemisia tridentata_.
+It may grow in favoured districts man-high, but ordinarily not more
+than two or three feet in the arid regions which it haunts. Other
+social shrubs will be found pre-empting miles of the territory to
+which the artemesia gives its name, _coleogeny_, _pursia_, _dalia_,
+"creosote," but none other gives it the distinctive feature, the web of
+pale, silky sage-green against the sun-burned sand.
+
+Other items of the sage-brush landscape are so constant that they
+are immediately suggested by it: mountains hanging on the horizon in
+opalescent haze, low flowing lines of hills overlaid by old lava-flows,
+the "black rock" simulating cloud shadows on the distant ranges, dry
+red cones of ancient volcanic ash, and great flat table-topped "buttes"
+of the painted desert.
+
+White-crested ranges on the one hand and buttes on the other mark the
+limits of the sage; for where snow-caps are, there are trees, and where
+the buttes begin the cactus and the palo verde reign.
+
+A sage-brush country is a cattle country primarily; perhaps there may
+be mines; where there is water to be stored for irrigation there will
+be towns, but the virtue of the sage is that it grows in lands that
+man, at least, has found no other use for.
+
+It can thrive on an allowance of water that will support no larger
+thing than a chipmunk or a lizard, and, growing, feeds the cattle
+on a thousand hills. Therefore it is indispensable to any picture of
+the sage-brush country that there should be herds at large in it and
+vaqueros riding, or far down the bleached valley the dust of a rodeo
+rising. It is impossible to think of such a land and not think of these
+things, free life, and air as clear and vibrant with vitality as a
+bell. I can never think of it myself without seeing, in addition, the
+vultures making a merry-go-round over Panamint, and up from Coso the
+creaking line of a twenty-mule team.
+
+The sage-brush country of California begins properly at the foot of
+the Sierras where the state-line sheers east by south from Lake Tahoe.
+It covers the high valleys that divide the true Sierra from the older,
+lesser ranges that keep it company as far south as Olancha. Below
+Mono Lake, that part of the gold region made immortal by Mark Twain,
+it gives to the chrome- and ochre-tinted soil its distinguishing
+characteristic. From the long arm of Death Valley it begins to be
+encroached upon by the mesquite, and at Indian Wells it is driven close
+under the lee of the last Sierra. The range of which San Bernardino
+and San Jacinto are outposts carries the artemisia farther desertward,
+almost to the Colorado River in fact, and south again about the Salton
+Sea it holds its own with sahuro and palo verde. Its eastern border,
+like that of the wild tribes along the Mojave line, is lost in pure
+desertness. Formerly much of that country from San Bernardino to
+the sea was native to the sage, and all the southern end of the San
+Joaquin. But now all this is replaced with orchards, for the artemisia
+proves nothing so much of the soil on which it grows as that, given a
+due allowance of water, it is as desirable for other things.
+
+  [Illustration: THE HALF DOME, YOSEMITE]
+
+All this country which I have described to you has so recently been sea
+that the mark of its old beach-line is plainly to be traced along the
+east Sierra wall. Still the evaporating water leaves vast deposits of
+salt and alkali, blinking white in the sink of Death Valley. There are
+lakes there still where the salt crusts over hard and clear like ice,
+and deep thick puddles of bitter minerals, the lees of that ancient
+inland ocean. From the top of any of the denuded desert ranges it is
+possible to trace the winding bays and estuaries, and, with an eye for
+location, to choose the points at which one may fairly expect to find
+potsherds, amulets, fire-blackened hearthstones, and the middens of a
+nameless people who built their primitive towns along its beaches. It
+must have had much to recommend it in those days before the sage-brush
+took it, for this inland sea, rather than the more mountainous Pacific
+shore, was the route taken by the ancient migratory peoples who left
+their undecipherable signs scored into the rocks from the Aztec country
+to the Arctic. On isolated igneous rocks near their old encampments,
+and high on the walls of the box canons, such as might have been
+tide-rifts, high above any mechanical contrivance of the present-day
+Indians, the records resist equally the shifts of sea and sand and the
+efforts of modern science to read them.
+
+Whether the ghosts of the departed peoples ever revisit the ancient
+beaches, the ghosts of waters haunt there daily. Morning and
+mid-afternoon the rivers of mirage arise; they well out of the past
+and are poured trembling on the plain; phantom fogs blow across them,
+wraiths of trees grow up and are reflected in false streams. Often
+in very early light there are strange suggestions of----dunes and
+boulders perhaps? Only no boulders in that country are flat-topped like
+the houses built in lands of the sun, and no dunes are wall-sided.
+Mirage, we are told, is but a picture of distant things, mirrored on
+atmospheric planes, but then maybe a ghost is only a mirage deflected
+on our atmosphere from worlds outside our ken, and it is always easy
+in the desert to see things that you cannot possibly believe. Whatever
+they are, mirages are real to the eye. I mean that they are not to
+be winked away nor dissipated by contact. I have watched a vaquero
+ride into one of them and drown to all appearances, or seem to be
+swimming his horse across its billows, all of him below its surface as
+completely hidden as by rivers of water. Moreover, mirages tend always
+to occur under given conditions and in the same places. I recall one
+of the stations on the old Mojave stage road, which, approached from
+the north about an hour after sunrise, would instantly duplicate: two
+houses, two lines of poplars, two high corrals.
+
+  [Illustration: SHASTA--SNOW CLOUDS]
+
+Occasionally along the edge of the sage-brush country one may see that
+surpassing wonder, the moon mirage, poured like quicksilver along the
+narrow valleys, as if the thirsty land had dreamed of water.
+
+It is odd how this suggestion of sea and river clings to a country
+where there is nothing harder to come by than good water to drink.
+For any other purpose it is not to be thought of. After one of those
+terrible wind storms, the only really incommoding desert weather, it is
+possible to find great spaces all rippled and lined in water-markings
+like a sea that has suddenly undergone a magic transformation into
+sand. The contours of the desert ranges are billowy; they rise out
+of the plain like the grey-backed breakers of open sea. The valleys
+between are narrow and trough-like; the shores of them are lined with
+crawling dunes that, under the steady pressure of wind currents, are
+for ever sliding up their own peaks and down the other side, changing
+place without ever once losing the long slope to windward and the
+abrupt landward fall of waves.
+
+Another item which adds to the suggestion of the illimitable spread
+of sage-brush country, like the sea, is the way the sparse forests
+of the mountain-tops appear to be islanded by it. For the sage-brush
+extends on across the Great Basin, it stretches into Montana and
+south to Arizona and New Mexico, it works about the lower end of the
+Rocky Mountains and well into the great central plain. The ranges
+lie thick in it as ocean swells, as I have said, and stepping from
+crest to crest has come the fox-tail pine, _Pinus flexilis_, all the
+way from Humboldt Mountain to San Jacinto. A sinewy, thinly-branched
+species, as straight-backed as an Indian, it has little affinity for
+its noble congeners of the Sierra forests, but keeps to the dry and
+open ridges, nourished by clouds and by infrequent shallow snows. With
+it, but at lower levels to which the _flexilis_ will never come, is
+found frequently the one-leaved piñon pine, the food-crop of the wild
+tribes. But the piñon is a pushing sort, it establishes itself upon the
+slightest invitation.
+
+There is a story told in the desert of how this grey, round-headed tree
+was once a very great _capitan_, who, in order that his death might be
+as beneficent to his people as his life had been, was changed into the
+foodful pine. Whether the legend is true or not, certain it is that
+if you sit down by a piñon, wherever found, and stay long enough, you
+will see Indians. They might come in the Spring looking for _taboose_,
+or later for willows and grasses for basketry, for seeds of sunflower
+and chia, to shoot doves by the water-holes or to hunt chuckwallas. A
+chuckwalla is a lizard, a kind of dragon in miniature, barred black and
+white, and as offensive to look at as he is harmless, in fact very good
+eating and not too plentiful. Mojaves, Shoshones, Paiutes, Pimas, all
+the tribes of the sage-brush country, have this in common, that they
+live very close to the earth; roots, seeds, reptiles, thick pads of
+the cholla cactus, even the grass of the field, serve them. They look,
+indeed, as though they had been made of the earth on the very spot that
+produced them, of the black rock, the brown sand, and the dark water
+that collects in polished basins of the wind-denuded ranges.
+
+Very little rain gets past the heaven-raking crest of the Sierra Nevada
+into the sage-brush country; the most that falls is blown up from the
+Gulf of California along the draw created by the close, parallel desert
+ranges. It is precipitated usually under atmospheric conditions that
+produce violent drops and changes. All that the traveller is likely to
+find of it is in these rock reservoirs under the run-off of some bare
+granite cliff, or in the rare, persistent "water-holes" hollowed out by
+beasts or men, marked in the landscape by one lone tree perhaps, or a
+clump of shrubby willows. Often there will be no mark at all except the
+frequency along the trail of skeleton cattle or wild sheep, pointing
+all in one direction, as they died on their way to the far-between
+drinking-places. There are districts in this back-door country where
+evaporation from the body is so rapid that death overtakes the chance
+prospector even with water in sight or in his canteen across his back.
+For years a notorious outlaw protected himself in the Death Valley
+region, by filling in all the springs in a circle about the territory
+to which he had retreated. Beyond that waterless rim even the law could
+not penetrate.
+
+And yet how the land repays the slightest moisture! Years when the
+Kuro-Siwa swings closer to our coast and the winds are friendly,
+I have seen all that country, from Tehachapi, outside the wall, to
+San Gorgiono, one sheet of blue and gold. Seeds of a hundred tender
+annuals lie in the loose sands for years between the shrubby sage,
+their vitality unimpaired by the delayed resurrection of a chance wet
+spring. Often I have sifted the sand in my fingers looking for a sign
+of the life-giving principle which bursts so suddenly into beauty,
+without finding it. Yet after years in which there is no alteration
+in the aspect of the country, except the insensible change of the sage
+tints from grey to green and grey again, the miracle takes place, the
+blossomy wonder is upon the world.
+
+As a matter of fact, the sage-brush country is by no means the desert
+that it looks to the casual eye. Besides the social shrubs which have
+each their own blossom and seed time, even the driest years will
+afford a few blooms of crimson mallow, and in the shelter of every
+considerable shrub some dwarfed and delicate phacelia or nemophilia.
+Even out of dunes which bury its hundred old trunks to the new season's
+twigs, the mesquite will bear its sweet foodful pods. If you know at
+what hours to look for it, wild life is never absent, but it is not
+ordinarily to be found by white men blundering about in broad noon.
+
+It is only when you meet, in the midst of great open valleys wherein
+there is nothing growing higher than the knees of your horse, and
+nothing moving bigger than the little horned toad under the cactus
+bush, bands of Indians well fed, cushiony with fat of mesquite meal and
+chia, that you understand how little you know of the land in which you
+move.
+
+There is a Paiute proverb to the effect that no man should attempt the
+country east of the Sierras until he has learned to sleep in the shade
+of his arrows. This is a picturesque way of saying that he must be able
+to reduce his wants to the limit of necessity. Those who have been able
+to do so, and have trusted the land to repay them, have discovered that
+the measure is over-full.
+
+A man may not find wealth there, nor too much of food even, but he
+often finds himself, which is much more important.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+_The illustrations are indexed in italics._
+
+
+     Alcatraz, 112
+
+     Alviso, 112
+
+     Angels, 138
+
+     Antioch, 112, 119
+
+     Arbolado, 84
+
+     "Arroya," definition of, 30
+
+
+     Bakersfield, 129, 132, 133
+
+     Berkeley Hills, 108, 114
+
+     _Blue Lake, Lake County_, 155
+
+     Buena Vista, 122
+
+
+     Cabrillo, 49, 108
+
+     Cahuenga, 47, 48, 67
+
+     Calaveras, 139
+
+     Camulas, 41
+
+     _Cañon in the Sierra Madres_, 49
+
+     Carmel, 74, 77, 80, 83
+
+     Carmel River, 76
+
+     Carmel Valley, 78
+
+     Carquinez, 112
+
+     Carquinez Strait, 107, 119
+
+     _Castle Crag, Rattlesnake Cañon_, 136
+
+     Castro, 66
+
+     Catalina, 49
+
+     _Cemetery, The, Santa Barbara Mission_, 56
+
+     Cession of California from Mexico, 48
+
+     _Clear Lake, Lake County_, 134
+
+     "Coasts of Adventure, The," 47-60
+
+     Colorado River, 166
+
+     Contra Costa, 117
+
+     Coronado, 23
+
+     Coronel, Don Antonio, 48
+
+     Corta Madero, 116
+
+     Coso, 165
+
+     Coulterville, 139
+
+     _Cypress Point, near Carmel_, 75
+
+
+     Death Valley, 166, 172
+
+     _Donner Lake_, 142
+
+     Donner Lake, 140
+
+     Drake, Sir Francis, 9, 43, 108
+
+
+     Eagle Rock, 47
+
+     Emigrant Gap, 140
+
+     _Eucalyptus Grove, A_, 33
+
+     Exeter, 135
+
+
+     Faralones, The, 113
+
+     Farmington, 139
+
+     Fort Point, 67
+
+     Francis of Assisi, 10, 108
+
+     Franciscan "Frailes," 9, 12
+
+     Frémont, 66
+
+     Fresno, 135
+
+     Fuca, Juan de, 108
+
+
+     _Glendale, Valley of the San Gabriel_, 40
+
+     Golden Gate, 107
+
+     _Golden Gate and Black Point_, 107
+
+     Gulf of California, 161, 171
+
+
+     _Half Dome, The, Yosemite_, 166
+
+     Hamlin, Jack, 137
+
+     Harte, Bret, 137, 138
+
+     Hetch Hetchy Valley, 159
+
+     "High Sierras and the Sage-Brush Country, The" 149-174
+
+     Hôtel Del Monte, 76
+
+     Humboldt Mountain, 170
+
+
+     Indian Wells, 166
+
+     Inyo Valley, 162
+
+
+     Jackass Hill, 139
+
+     Jimtown, 139
+
+     Jumping Frog, the, 139
+
+
+     Kaweah Mountain, 133
+
+     Kaweah River, 129
+
+     Kern River, 129, 132, 134, 155
+
+     King's Mountain, 159
+
+     King's River, 129
+
+     King's River Cañon, 137
+
+     Klamath River, 143
+
+     Kuro-Siwa Current, 49, 172
+
+
+     Laboratory Point, 68
+
+     Lake Mono, 165
+
+     Lake Tahoe, 165
+
+     _Lake Tahoe_, 158
+
+     "Land of the Little Duck, The," 107-124
+
+     _Laurel Lake, Upper Sacramento_, 145
+
+     Lindsay, 135
+
+     _Looking down on Monterey and the Bay_, 65
+
+     Lopez, Francisco, 47
+
+     Los Angeles, 29, 35
+
+     Los Angeles River, 30
+
+
+     _McCloud River_, 139
+
+     Madera, 135
+
+     Maldonado, 108
+
+     Mare Island, 116
+
+     Mendocino Country, 141
+
+     Merced River, 129, 135
+
+     _Mill Valley_, 113
+
+     _Mirror Lake, Yosemite_, 129
+
+     Mission Dolores, 108
+
+     Mission Point, 69, 81
+
+     Mission River, 17
+
+     Mission of San Carlos Borromeo, 76, 78
+
+     Mission San Fernando, 47
+
+     Missions, ruins of, 19
+
+     Mokelumne River, 140
+
+     Monterey, 11, 18, 35, 55, 60
+
+     "Monterey, the Port of," 63-84
+
+     Monterey Cypress, 72
+
+     "Mothering Mountains," 27-24
+
+     Mount Oppapago, 160, 162
+
+     Mount Shasta, 5, 143, 150
+
+     _Mount Shasta_, 161
+
+     Mount Whitney, 6, 137, 150, 159, 162
+
+     Mount Williamson, 159
+
+
+     Napa, 118
+
+     Noriega's, 134
+
+
+     Olancha, 165
+
+     "Old Spanish Gardens," 87-103
+
+
+     Pacific Grove, 75
+
+     Padre Jayme Bravo, 7, 17, 18
+
+     Padre Lausan, 66
+
+     Padre Serra (Junipero Serra), 11, 76, 78
+
+     Paiute Indians, 96
+
+     Pajaro, 54, 93
+
+     Pajaro river, 64
+
+     Pala, 19
+
+     "Palatingwas," 20
+
+     Palo Corona, 80
+
+     Panamint, 165
+
+     Pasadena, 34
+
+     Paso Robles, 56
+
+     _Patio, The, Old Spanish Residence_, 88
+
+     _Pescadero, Monterey Bay_, 72
+
+     Pieoras Blancos, 83
+
+     Point Conception, 67
+
+     Point Lobos, 71, 81, 84
+
+     Point of Pines, 67
+
+     Point Pinos, 70, 81
+
+     Point Sur, 70
+
+     Portersville, 135
+
+     Portola, Don Gaspar de, 11, 55, 93, 108
+
+
+     _Redlands_, 16
+
+     _Redwoods_, 131
+
+     "Rio," A, 30
+
+     Riverside, 33, 39
+
+
+     Sacramento, 112, 123
+
+     Sacramento River, 107, 127, 135, 140
+
+     "Sage-Brush country," meaning of term, 163
+
+     Salinas, 83
+
+     Salinas River, 64
+
+     Salton Sea, 166
+
+     Sausalito, 116
+
+     San Antonio, 57
+
+     "San Antonio," the, 10
+
+     San Bernardino, 7, 33, 39, 149, 166
+
+     San Carlos, 79
+
+     San Clemente, 48
+
+     San Diego, 22, 78
+
+     San Diego, Bay of, 9
+
+     _San Diego, looking towards Point Loma_, 9
+
+     San Emigdio, 128
+
+     San Fernando, 41, 128
+
+     San Francisco, 67, 107, 108, 110
+
+     San Francisco, Bay of, 112
+
+     San Gabriel, 36
+
+     San Gabriel Valley, 27, 33, 40
+
+     San Gorgiono, 41, 172
+
+     San Gorgiono, Pass of, 6
+
+     San Jacinto, 5, 27, 149, 166, 170
+
+     San Joaquin, 128, 132, 139, 166
+
+     San Joaquin River, 107, 112, 123, 127, 129, 130, 140, 150
+
+     San Joaquin Valley, 162
+
+     San Jose, Señor, 10
+
+     San Juan, 83
+
+     San Juan Bautista, 65, 66
+
+     San Juan Capistrano, 18, 48, 50
+
+     San Luis Rey, 19
+
+     San Pablo, 112
+
+     San Pablo Bay, 116
+
+     San Quentin, 116
+
+     San Raphael, 116, 118
+
+     Santa Barbara, 58
+
+     Santa Catalina, 48
+
+     Santa Clara, 54
+
+     Santa Cruz Coast, 74
+
+     Santa Cruz Mountains, 55, 64
+
+     _Santa Cruz Mountains, the Coast Range_, 78
+
+     Santa Inez, 48, 58
+
+     Santa Margarita, 56
+
+     Santa Rosa, 48
+
+     Sequoia, origin of name, 155
+
+     _Shasta--Snow Clouds_, 168
+
+     Sierra Madre, 27, 28, 37, 40, 42, 44, 149
+
+     Sierra Nevada, 128, 163, 171
+
+     Sierra Nevada, origin of name, 149
+
+     Sierras, the, 4
+
+     Solano, 78
+
+     Sonoma, 107, 118, 144
+
+     Sonoma County, 92
+
+     Sonora, 138, 140
+
+     "Sparrow-Hawk's Own, The," 3-23
+
+     Squaw Creek, 139
+
+     Stanislaus River, 137
+
+     Stockton, 123
+
+     Suisun, 112, 119
+
+     Sur, 80, 83
+
+     _Sycamores, a Coast Range Cañon_, 59
+
+
+     Table Mountain, 138
+
+     _Tall Chaparral, Santa Cruz_, 62
+
+     Tamalpias, Mount, 109
+
+     _Tamalpias_, 110
+
+     Tasajara, 83
+
+     Tehachapi, 128, 150, 172
+
+     Tehipite Valley, 159
+
+     Tejon, 129
+
+     Tejon Pass, 89, 128, 132
+
+     Temblors, The, 128, 133
+
+     _"Three Brothers, The," Yosemite_--_Frontispiece_
+
+     Tiburon, 112, 116
+
+     Trinity River, 143
+
+     Truthful James, 138
+
+     Tulare, the, 120
+
+     Tule River, 129
+
+     Tuolumne River, 129
+
+     Turlock, 139
+
+     Twain, Mark, 138, 139, 165
+
+     "Twin Valleys, The," 127-146
+
+
+     _Valley of the Yosemite_, 163
+
+     Visalia, 129
+
+     Viscaino, Sebastian, 9, 63, 76, 108
+
+
+     _Waiting for Duck--Los Baños_, 120
+
+     Walker's Pass, 150
+
+     Warner's Ranch, 20
+
+
+     Yerba Buena, 108
+
+     _Yosemite Falls_, 152
+
+     Yosemite Valley, 135, 137, 157, 159
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+_Printed by_ R. & R. Clark, Limited, _Edinburgh_.
+
+  [Illustration: SKETCH MAP ACCOMPANYING "CALIFORNIA" BY SUTTON PALMER
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of California, by Mary Austin
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 44764 ***
diff --git a/44764-h/44764-h.htm b/44764-h/44764-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0381692
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/44764-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,6439 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of California, by Sutton Palmer and Mary Austin.
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+
+body {
+    margin-left: 10%;
+    margin-right: 10%;
+}
+
+h1{
+    text-align: center;
+    clear: both;
+    margin-top: 6em;
+}
+
+h2 {text-align: center;
+    clear: both;
+    margin-top: 4em;
+    margin-bottom: 1em;
+    font-size: 1.2em;
+}
+
+p {
+    margin-top: .75em;
+    text-align: left;
+    margin-bottom: .75em;
+}
+
+.pagenum {
+    position: absolute;
+    left: 92%;
+    font-size: smaller;
+    text-align: right;
+    font-style: normal;
+}
+hr {
+    width: 33%;
+    margin-top: 1em;
+    margin-bottom: 1em;
+    margin-left: 33%;
+    margin-right: auto;
+    clear: both;
+}
+
+hr.l15 { width: 15%;
+         margin-left: 42%; }
+
+.center { text-align: center; }
+
+.smcap { font-variant: small-caps; }
+
+.caption {
+	font-weight: bold;
+    margin-left: 15%;
+    margin-right: 15%;
+    text-align: center;
+    margin-bottom: 2em;
+}
+
+ul.none { list-style-type:none;
+         margin-left: 20%; }
+.alpha {margin-top: 1.5em;}
+
+.figcenter {
+    margin: auto;
+    text-align: center;
+}
+
+.poetry-container {  text-align: center; }
+
+.poem {
+    display: inline-block;
+	font-size: 95%;
+	margin-bottom: 1em;
+	text-align: left;
+}
+
+@media handheld {
+  .poem  {
+         display: block;
+         margin-left: 5%;
+         margin-right: 10%;
+   }
+}
+
+.poem .stanza {
+	margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;
+}
+
+.poem p {
+	margin: 0;
+	padding-left: 3em;
+	text-indent: -3em; }
+
+.p2   {margin-top: 2em;}
+.p4   {margin-top: 4em;}
+.p6   {margin-top: 6em;}
+
+.b20	{font-size:2.0em;}
+.b13	{font-size:1.3em;}
+.s08 	{font-size:.8em;}
+.s05 	{font-size:.5em;}
+
+table {
+	margin-left: auto;
+	margin-right: auto;
+	empty-cells: show;
+}
+
+td {padding-left: 1em;
+    padding-right: 1em;
+    padding-top: .3em;
+    padding-bottom: .3em;
+    vertical-align: top;
+}
+.tdr { text-align: right; }
+
+.tdh { text-indent: -1em;
+       margin-left: 1em;
+       padding-bottom: 1.25em;}
+
+.tnbox {
+	margin-left: auto;
+    margin-right: auto;
+    margin-bottom: 8em;
+    margin-top: auto;
+    text-align: center;
+    border: 1px solid;
+    padding: 1em;
+    color: black;
+    background-color: #f6f2f2;
+    width: 25em;
+}
+
+    </style>
+  </head>
+<body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 44764 ***</div>
+
+<div class="tnbox">
+<p class="center"><b>Transcriber's Note:</b></p>
+<p>Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
+Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation in the original
+document have been preserved.</p>
+<p>On page 18, "arroya" should possibly be "arroyo."</p>
+<p>On page 53, "gaumet" should possibly be "gamut."</p>
+<p>On page 134, the text is "Noriegas'."  The Index shows "Noriega's."</p>
+<p>"Tamalpias" should possibly be "Tamalpais."</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i001" id="i001"></a>
+<img src="images/i-001.jpg" width="404" height="550" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">THE THREE BROTHERS, YOSEMITE VALLEY
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<h1>
+CALIFORNIA
+</h1>
+
+<p class="center p6">
+<i>BY THE SAME AUTHOR</i>
+</p>
+
+<hr class="l15" />
+
+<p class="center">
+THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN<br />
+A WOMAN OF GENIUS<br />
+THE LOVELY LADY<br />
+ETC.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center p4">
+AGENTS
+</p>
+
+<table summary="Publishers">
+<tr>
+<td><span class='smcap'>America</span></td>
+<td class="tdh"><span class='smcap'>The Macmillan Company</span><br />
+                    <span class='smcap'>64 &amp; 66 Fifth Avenue, New York</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><span class='smcap'>Australasia</span></td>
+<td class="tdh"><span class='smcap'>The Oxford University Press</span><br />
+                    <span class='smcap'>205 Flinders Lane, Melbourne</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><span class='smcap'>Canada</span></td>
+<td class="tdh"><span class='smcap'>The Macmillan Company of Canada, Ltd.</span><br />
+                    <span class='smcap'>St. Martin's House, 70 Bond Street, Toronto</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><span class='smcap'>India</span></td>
+<td class="tdh"><span class='smcap'>Macmillan &amp; Company, Ltd.</span><br />
+                    <span class='smcap'>Macmillan Building, Bombay</span><br />
+                    <span class='smcap'>309 Bow Bazaar Street, Calcutta</span></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<div class="figcenter p6">
+<img src="images/i-006.jpg" width="324" height="550" alt="titlePage" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="center p6">
+<span class="b20">CALIFORNIA</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="b13">THE LAND OF THE SUN</span></p>
+
+<p class="center p2">PAINTED BY<br />
+<br />
+<span class="b13">SUTTON PALMER</span><br />
+<br />
+DESCRIBED BY<br />
+<br />
+<span class="b13">MARY AUSTIN</span></p>
+
+<p class="center p4"><span class="b13">ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK</span><br />
+4, 5, &amp; 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.</p>
+
+<p class="center p6 s08">
+<i>Published Autumn 1914</i>
+</p>
+
+<h2>
+CONTENTS
+</h2>
+
+<table summary="Table of Contents">
+  <tr>
+    <td colspan="2">&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="tdr"><span class="s08">PAGE</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">I.</td>
+    <td><span class='smcap'>The Sparrow Hawk's Own</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">II.</td>
+    <td><span class='smcap'>Mothering Mountains</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_25">25</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">III.</td>
+    <td><span class='smcap'>The Coasts of Adventure</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_45">45</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">IV.</td>
+    <td><span class='smcap'>The Port of Monterey</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_61">61</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">V.</td>
+    <td><span class='smcap'>Old Spanish Gardens</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_85">85</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">VI.</td>
+    <td><span class='smcap'>The Land of the Little Duck</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_105">105</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">VII.</td>
+    <td><span class='smcap'>The Twin Valleys</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_125">125</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">VIII.</td>
+    <td><span class='smcap'>The High Sierras and the Sage-brush Country</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_147">147</a></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+<p>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_vii' name='Page_vii'>[vii]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<h2>
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+</h2>
+
+<table summary="List of Illustrations">
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">1.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i001">The Three Brothers, Yosemite Valley</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><i>Frontispiece</i></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="tdr"><span class="s05">FACING PAGE</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">2.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i021">San Diego, looking across the Bay toward Point Loma</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">9</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">3.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i034">Redlands, looking toward San Bernardino Range</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">16</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">4.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i053">A Eucalyptus Grove</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">33</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">5.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i066">Glendale, Valley of the San Gabriel</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">40</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">6.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i077">A Cañon in the Sierra Madre</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">49</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">7.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i090">The Cemetery, Santa Barbara Mission</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">56</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">8.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i095">Sycamores, a Coast Range Cañon</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">59</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">9.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i104">Tall Chaparral, Santa Cruz</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">62</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">10.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i109">Looking down on Monterey and the Bay</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">65</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">11.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i122">Pescadero, a Chinese Fishing Village, Monterey Bay</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">72</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">12.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i127">Cypress Point, near Carmel</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">75</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">13.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i136">Santa Cruz Mountains, the Coast Range</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">78</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">14.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i150">The Patio, Old Spanish Residence</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">88</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">15.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i171">The Golden Gate and Black Point, from Hyde Street, San Francisco. (Site of the Panama Exposition, 1915)</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">107</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">16.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i180">Tamalpias</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">110</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">17.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i185">Mill Valley, and Backwater of San Francisco Bay</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">113<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_viii' name='Page_viii'>[viii]</a></span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">18.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i198">Waiting for Duck&mdash;Los Baños</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">120</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">19.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i209">Mirror Lake, Yosemite</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">129</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">20.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i215">Among the Redwoods of the Great Twin Valleys</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">131</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">21.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i224">Clear Lake, Lake County</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">134</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">22.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i230">Castle Crag, Rattlesnake Cañon</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">136</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">23.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i235">McCloud River, Upper Sacramento Valley</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">139</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">24.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i244">Donner Lake, on the old Emigrant Trail</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">142</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">25.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i249">Laurel Lake, Upper Sacramento</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">145</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">26.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i262">Yosemite Falls</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">152</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">27.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i267">Blue Lake, Lake County</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">155</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">28.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i276">Lake Tahoe, the High Sierras</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">158</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">29.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i281">Mount Shasta&mdash;Sierra Glow</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">161</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">30.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i287">Valley of the Yosemite</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">163</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">31.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i296">The Half Dome, Yosemite</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">166</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">32.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i302">Shasta&mdash;Snow Clouds</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">168</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i><a href="#i314">Sketch Map at end of Volume.</a></i></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_1' name='Page_1'></a></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_3' name='Page_3'></a></span></p>
+<h2>
+I
+<br /><br />
+<span class="s08">
+THE SPARROW-HAWK'S OWN
+
+</span></h2>
+
+<p>
+For a graphic and memorable report of the
+contours of any country, see always the aboriginal
+account of its making. That will give you the
+lie of the land as no geographer could sketch it
+forth for you. California was made by Padahoon
+the Sparrow-Hawk and the Little Duck, who
+brooded on the face of the waters in the Beginning
+of Things.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is no knowing where the tale comes
+from, for Winnenap the Medicine-Man who told it
+to me, was eclectic in his faiths as in his practice.
+Winnenap was a Shoshone, one of the group
+who had been forced southward into Death
+Valley when the great Pah Ute nation had split
+their tribes like a wedge. In the last of their
+wars he had been taken as a hostage by the Paiutes
+and brought up by them. He might have remembered
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_4' name='Page_4'>[4]</a></span>
+the story, or his wife might have
+told him. She was a tall brown woman out of
+Tejon, and <i>her</i> mother was of that band of captives
+taken from San Gabriel by the Mojaves, Mission-bred.
+Wherever it came from, the tale has its
+roots deep in the land it explains.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Padahoon, being wearied of going to and fro
+under the heavens, said to the Little Duck that
+it was time there should be mountains; so the
+Little Duck dived and brought up the primordial
+mud of which even the geographers are agreed
+mountains are made.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he brought it the Sparrow-Hawk built a
+round beautiful ring of mountains enclosing a quiet
+space of sea. Said the Little Duck, "I choose
+this side," coming up with his bill full of mud
+toward the west. Whereupon the Sparrow-Hawk
+built the other side higher. When it
+was all done and the Little Duck surveyed it,
+he observed, as people will to this day, the
+discrepancy between the low western hills and
+the high Sierras, and he thought the builder had
+not played him fair. "Very well, then," said
+the Sparrow-Hawk, "since you are resolved to
+be so greedy," and he bit out pieces of the Sierras
+with his bill, and threw them over his shoulder.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_5' name='Page_5'>[5]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You can see the bites still deep and sharp about
+Mt. Whitney.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the Little Duck would not be satisfied;
+he took hold by the great bulk of Shasta and
+began to pull, and Padahoon pulled on his side
+until the beautiful ring was pulled out in a long
+oval and began to break on the west where the
+bay of San Francisco comes in. So they were
+forced to divide the mountain range north and
+south and make what they could of it. But the
+Sparrow-Hawk, remembering the pieces he had
+thrown over his shoulder, chose the south, where
+you can still see him sailing any clear day about
+four in the afternoon, over all his stolen territory.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There you have the bones of the land as neatly
+laid out for you as they could do it in Kensington
+Museum: the long oval, breaking seaward, the
+high, bitten, westward peaks, and the Sparrow-Hawk's
+Own, tailing south like the quirk of an
+attenuated Q.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They serve, these fragmentary ranges, for the
+outposts of habitableness between the sea wind
+and the forces of pure desertness. Always there
+is skirmish and assault going on about them.
+Showers rush up the slope of San Jacinto, all
+their shining spears a-tilt. Great gusts of wind
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_6' name='Page_6'>[6]</a></span>
+roar through the Pass of San Gorgiono, the old
+Puerto de San Carlos. Seasonally they are
+beleaguered by stealthy rushes of the fogs that
+from the Gulf hear the peaks about Whitney
+calling, or by the yellow murk of sand-storms
+on which the whole face of the desert is lifted
+up as it travels toward its destiny in orchard row
+and vineyard. Always the edge of the wind is
+against the stone. They shine, the frontlets of
+the sentinel saints, in that keen polish, as the faces
+of saints must with benignity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Just beyond the pilæ of the broken mountains&mdash;the
+Pillars of Hercules of the West&mdash;the desert
+winds about the eastern bases of the range in deep
+indented bays, white-rimmed with the wave marks
+of its ancient sea. Out a very little way, where
+the shuddering heat-waves trick the imagination,
+it seems about to be retaken by the ghost of
+tumbling billows. Nothing else moves in it;
+nothing sounds. Plantations of growing things
+near the Pass lean all a little toward it, edging,
+peering&mdash;the wild, spiny, thorny things of the
+desert to enter the rain-fed paradise, the full-leafed
+offspring of the sea wind plotting to take the unfriended
+sandy spaces. They creep a little forward
+or back as the years run wet or dry. The green
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_7' name='Page_7'>[7]</a></span>
+things stand up, they march along the cliffs, they
+balance on the edge of precipices, but desperation
+is in every contorted stem of <i><span lang='es_ES'>mesquite</span></i> and <i><span lang='es_ES'>palo
+verde</span></i>. And with all this struggle, so still! East
+on the desert rim the Colorado ramps like a stallion
+between its walls, westward the Pacific rings the
+low foreshore with thunder; but the land never
+cries out, quartz mountains disintegrate but they
+do not murmur.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is odd here in a land rife with the naked
+struggle of great pagan forces, to find the
+promontories so lend themselves to the gentle
+names of saints. Perhaps the Padres were not so
+far from nature as one thinks; in the southerly
+range which, with San Bernardino on the north,
+sentinels the Pass by which the iron-rimmed
+Emigrant trail enters the coast valleys, they
+rendered for once the pagan touch. San Jacinto&mdash;St.
+Hyacinth&mdash;was he ever anything but a
+Christianised memory of a Grecian myth, or does
+it matter at all so long as there are men to see,
+in the deep purple light that dies along the heights,
+the colour of blood that is shed for love? Perhaps
+the best thing beauty can say to Greek or Christian
+is that there are still things worth dying for.
+No doubt the veins of Padre Jayme Bravo were
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_8' name='Page_8'>[8]</a></span>
+as rich in martyr passion as the stained air of
+the mountain is in purples, paling to rose at
+morning, thinning at noon to pure aerial blues.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Seen from the coast the range has a finny contour
+as of some huge creature risen from the sea,
+with low hills about it like dolphins playing; but
+the prevailing note of the landscape is always blue,
+repeating the tints of the wild brodiæa that may
+be found on the lomas early in April, sending up its
+clustered heads between two slender curving spears.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Near at hand the masking growth is seen to be
+green, the dark olivaceous green of the chamisal.
+Nowhere does one get the force of the Spanish
+termination <i><span lang='es_ES'>al</span></i>&mdash;the place where&mdash;as in that word.
+The chamisal is the place of the chamise: miles
+and miles of it, with scarcely another shrub allowed,
+spread over the mesa and well up into laps and
+bays of the hills. It grows breast high, man high
+in the favoured regions; but even where under the
+influence of drouth and altitude it creeps to the
+knees, it abates nothing of its social character.
+Its ever-green foliage has a dull shining from the
+resinous coating which protects it from evaporation,
+and a slight sticky feel, characteristics that no
+doubt won it the name of "greasewood" from
+the emigrants who valued it chiefly because it
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_9' name='Page_9'>[9]</a></span>
+could be burned green. The spring winds blowing
+up from the bay whip all its fretted surface to a
+froth of panicled white bloom, that, stirring a little
+as the wind shifts, full of bee-murmur, touches the
+imagination with the continual reminder of the
+sea. Higher up the thick lacy chaparral flecks
+and ripples, showing the light underside of leaves,
+and tosses up great fountain sprays of ceanothus,
+sea-blue and lilac-scented.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i021" id="i021"></a>
+<img src="images/i-021.jpg" width="550" height="328" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">SAN DIEGO, LOOKING ACROSS THE BAY TOWARD
+POINT LOMA
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+All the human interest of this region centres
+about the city on the bay of San Diego, a low
+locked harbour with a long spit of sand breaking
+the mild Pacific swell, as it bides its time for
+the shipping of the south-western world. It has
+already waited longer than most people suppose.
+Just fifty years after the landing of Columbus on
+the Bahamas, Cabrillo discovered it; Sir Francis
+Drake, romping up that coast with his buccaneers,
+must have seen it though he left no note of any
+visit, and in 1602 Sebastian Viscaino anchored
+there and gave it its present name. Just about
+the time the mixed Dutch and English on the
+Atlantic coast were beginning to think of themselves
+as Americans and to act accordingly, the
+Franciscan <i><span lang='es_ES'>Frailes</span></i> settled on San Diego bay.
+Nobody will know why it was reserved for the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_10' name='Page_10'>[10]</a></span>
+brown-skirted brothers of St. Francis to undertake
+the subjugation of Alta California, until it is
+known why the King of Spain quarrelled with the
+Jesuits. They were accused of plotting against
+His Majesty, but in those days it was possible to
+accuse the Jesuits of almost anything without
+going very far wrong in the popular estimate. I
+have my own opinion about it, which is that a
+great land, like a great lady, has her way with men.
+And no land has called its own as has California:&mdash;poet
+or painter or pioneer, the world's rim under.
+No better patron could be found for this blossoming
+West than Francis of Assisi, who preached to his
+little brothers of the air and would have made a convert
+of the coyote. Perhaps the first settlers of a
+country leave their stripe on all the land's later offspring:
+if it was a way the West took to breed fervour
+and faith and the spirit of prophecy in the young
+generation, who shall say she has not succeeded?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In January of 1769 two expeditions by land and
+sea set forth in the name of God and the King of
+Spain, under the patronage of Señor San Jose,
+indubitable patron of all journeys since the flight
+into Egypt. In April the ship <i>San Antonio</i>
+anchored in the placid bay, there to await the live
+stock driven up from Velicatá. So the old world
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_11' name='Page_11'>[11]</a></span>
+came to the new with a whole collocation of sainted
+personages flocking like doves to her banners.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it was not saints that the land wanted so
+much as the stuff that goes to make them. The
+expedition starved, sickened; their eyes were
+holden. Governor Portola, with the greater part
+of the expedition, made a long <i><span lang='es_ES'>pasear</span></i> on foot to
+find the lost port of Monterey, and came back,
+with armour rust on his doublet sleeves and
+nothing much gained beside, to declare the expedition
+a failure. But Padre Serra&mdash;Junipero
+Serra, father president of Missions, juniper of
+God's own planting, sapling of that stock of which
+the founder of the order had wished for a whole
+forest full&mdash;Padre Serra claimed a churchman's
+privilege. He demanded time for a <i><span lang='es_ES'>novena</span></i>, a
+nine days' cycle of prayer to the patron who was
+so unaccountably hiding the relief ship in the fogs
+and indecisions of the uncharted coast. It is my
+belief that the Padre chose the <i><span lang='es_ES'>novena</span></i> simply
+because it was the longest possible time he could
+hope to delay the return of the expedition. Nine
+days they drew in their belts and told their beads,
+and on the last hour of the last day, far on the sea
+rim, behold the white wings of succour!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Patron, who could never be at a loss for an
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_12' name='Page_12'>[12]</a></span>
+expedient, contrived that the ship should lose an
+anchor which compelled it to put in at San Diego,
+where they had no expectation of finding any of
+the party. It was so that the land tried them out
+and approved, for from that day the founding went
+forward steadily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is a fine growing city now on the site of
+the early landing, regularly stratified through all
+the architectural periods of California, from the
+low thick-walled adobe of the Spanish occupation
+to the newest shingle-stained bungalow of the
+latest one-lunged millionaire; but the land has not
+lost, in a century and a half, one mark by which
+the brown-skirted <i><span lang='es_ES'>Frailes</span></i> found their way about
+in it. It has its distinctive mark, the Sparrow-Hawk's
+land, the seal of a private and peculiar
+affection. Here about the mouth of one of its
+swift seasonal rivers, and touching as with a finger-tip
+the opposing shore of the island of Santa Rosa,
+is the habitat of the Torrey pine. Japanesque,
+unrelated, drinking the sea air, never spreading
+inland, it hugs the sea-worn edges of La Jolla, as
+though, as some botanists believe, the species
+came to life there out of the jewel-tinted water
+and the spirit of the desert dust.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is also possible to think of it as a relict of
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_13' name='Page_13'>[13]</a></span>
+the land of which the broken Channel Islands
+were made, but in any case it is a pity that science
+could not have retained for this lonely, restricted
+species the name the <i><span lang='es_ES'>Frailes</span></i> gave to its fostering
+waters, Soledad&mdash;the solitary. Behind the town
+the mesa rises abruptly, knife-cut by the gullies
+of intermittent streams; and far back where the
+mountains break down into foothills, and these
+into the lomas&mdash;little low mounds of detritus&mdash;the
+sea air collects all the blue rays of the diffused
+light and holds them there all day in the hollows,
+in memory of the sea from which they rose.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In April of the year of the Occupation the
+white panicles of the chamise would be tossing
+here and there, and the yellow violets run thin
+lines as of fire among the grasses. You would not
+believe there were so many yellow violets in the
+world as a day's riding will still show you. At
+this season, <i><span lang='es_ES'>islay</span></i>, the wild cherry, will be shaking
+out its fine white spray of bloom, the button
+willow begins, the sycamore, the buckthorn, <i><span lang='es_ES'>cascara
+sagrada</span></i>; the great berried manzanita, which shed
+its waxen bells as early as December, will be
+reddening its apples. Here also the chia, the true
+sage, the honey-maker, bread of the wild tribes,
+makes itself known by the penetrating pungent
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_14' name='Page_14'>[14]</a></span>
+odour of its unfolding foliage. Binding all the
+leafy thickets, runs the succulent starry bloom of
+the megarrhiza that, from its hidden root, as large
+as a man's body, sends up smothering tendrils so
+sensitive to their opportunity that you have only
+to sit down beside them on one of these long growing
+afternoons, to find all their tips curling in your
+direction and the stems moving sensibly across the
+grass in the direction of support. As early as
+February the foot-long vines can be seen locating
+the nearest shrub or the cañon wall, farther away
+than you could detect it by any tactile sense.
+And how quickly, once the objective is sensed, the
+questing Force is withdrawn from the unsuccessful
+members! Perhaps this one to the right may keep
+on in the direction in which it has caught the
+invisible communicating thread from the nearest
+buckthorn, but the other three or four green
+tentacles, finding no invitation from any quarter,
+not only stop growing but seem to shrink and
+dwindle in the interests of the climbing brother.
+Sometimes in a particularly lusty growth, all the
+young vines will be drawn toward some conspicuous
+support, so that by the third day those that lay out
+starlike, with inquiring tips raised a little, delicately
+feeling, will swing through all their points
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_15' name='Page_15'>[15]</a></span>
+to the one hopeful direction. These warm
+sensuous days toward the end of April, just after
+rain, when the very earth is full of a subtle intoxication,
+one has but to thrust a finger among the
+bourgeoning tips and tendrils of the megarrhiza to
+see them stir with live response. One must suppose,
+since the megarrhiza is of no discoverable use
+to anybody, that the Force uses it to its own ends,
+an ascending, uprearing Force, rehearsing itself for
+a more serviceable instrument.&mdash;This, however, is
+a digression; probably the Padres found no time
+for philosophising about anything, much less so
+useless a specimen as the wild cucumber.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What the Franciscans saw first in Alta
+California was what all pioneers look for in new
+lands&mdash;the witness of their faith. They saw the
+waxberry bush from which they were to gather
+the thin coating of the berries into candles for
+their improvised altars, saw the crepitant, aromatic
+<i><span lang='es_ES'>yerba buena</span></i>, and the shrubby, glutinous-leaved
+herb of the Saints, given to them for healing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+More than all else they must have seen in the
+month of the Virgin Mother, high on the altar
+slopes of San Jacinto and San Bernardino, the
+white thyrses of the yucca, called The Candles of
+Our Lord. Back where the green exclusiveness
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_16' name='Page_16'>[16]</a></span>
+of the chamise gives place to the chaparral, the
+tall shafts arise. They grow in blossoming, the
+bells climbing with the aspiring stalk until as
+many as six thousand of them may hang pure and
+stiff along the lance-like stem between the bayonet-bristling
+leaves. Long after the white flame has
+burnt out, the stalks remain, rank on rank, as
+though battalions of Spanish spearmen had fallen
+there, holding each his spear aloft in his dead hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is only back there where the yuccas begin,
+that the small, swift life of the mesa goes on,
+very much as it did in the days of the Spanish
+<i><span lang='es_ES'>Frailes</span></i>. The doves begin it, voicing the mesa
+dawn in notes of a cool blueness; then the sleek
+and stately quail, moving down in twittering
+droves to the infrequent water-holes. The rhythm
+of a flock in motion is like the ripple of muscles
+in the sides of a great snake. After them the
+road runner, <i><span lang='es_ES'>corredor del camino</span></i>, the cock of the
+chaparral, crest down, rudder aslant, swifter than
+a horse, incarnate spirit of the hopeful dust
+through which he flirts and flits. Then the blueness
+is folded up, it lies packed in the cañons,
+the mountains flatten; high in his airy haunts
+the Sparrow-Hawk sails, and the furry, frisk-tailed
+folk begin the day's affairs.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_17' name='Page_17'>[17]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i034" id="i034"></a>
+<img src="images/i-034.jpg" width="550" height="366" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">REDLANDS, LOOKING TOWARD SAN BERNARDINO RANGE
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+The secret of learning the mesa life is to sit
+still, to sit still and to keep on sitting still. The
+only other secret is to be learned in the wattled
+huts stuck like the heaps of the house-building
+rats in the dry washes, inwoven with the boughs
+of buckthorn and <i><span lang='es_ES'>islay</span></i>, except for size scarcely
+distinguishable from them. For the Indian has
+gone through all that green woof with the thread
+of kinship and found it an ordered world. He is
+choke-full as is the chamisal of wild life, of the
+tag ends of instincts and understandings left over
+from the days when he was brother to the beast&mdash;those
+sleek-bellied rats, stealing to lay another
+foot-long, dried stick to the characterless heap of
+their dwelling,&mdash;bad Indians to him, trying to
+remember their ways when they were men;
+that brown feathered bunch, in and out of the
+chia bush,&mdash;she was present at the making of man.
+Your aboriginal has the true sense of proportion:
+not size but vitality. You can cover the sage wren
+with the hollow of your hand, but you cannot hop
+so far for your size nor be so brave about it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Very different from the spring flutter and fullness,
+must have been the look of the land in the
+year of the martyrdom of Padre Jayme Bravo,
+which was the year of Bunker Hill and the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_18' name='Page_18'>[18]</a></span>
+Republic. The green of the chamisal was overlaid
+then by the brown tones of its seeding. <i><span lang='es_ES'>Islay</span></i> had
+shed its crimson drupes; the cactus fires had died
+down to the dull purples of the fruiting prickly
+pear; the sycamores by the dwindling waters of
+the arroya had scarcely a palsied leaf to wag. The
+Mission had been moved, for what reasons must be
+guessed by whoever has had occasion to observe
+the effect of a standing army on the subjugated
+peoples, back from the sea marsh to a little valley
+of what is known now as Mission River. Sixty
+converts had come down out of the hills to receive
+the Medicine of the Soft-Hearted God. That is
+the way they must have looked at it&mdash;rood and cup
+and sprinkling water, and the bells louder than the
+medicine drums. Back in the dry gullies the
+drums would have been going night and day where
+the <i>tingaivashes</i>, the Medicine-Men, lashed themselves
+into a fury over this apostasy. Certain of
+the renegades heard them between their orisons;
+they fled back to the muttering roll and the
+pound of the dancing feet. In the night after
+that, eight hundred of the Dieguenos, clothed in
+frantic fervour and very little else, came down to
+make an end of the "long gowns." How the soul
+of Padre Jayme must have leaped up as he heard
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_19' name='Page_19'>[19]</a></span>
+them yelling outside his unguarded hut: the
+appetite for martyrdom is deeper than all our
+dreaming. He ran toward them with arms extended.
+"Love God, my children!" he cried, and
+received their arrows. When it was reported to
+the Padre President at Monterey, "Thank God,"
+he said; "now the soil is watered." It did indeed
+repay them such a crop of souls as any watering
+produces in that soil; but at San Juan Capistrano,
+where a new foundation was in progress, they
+buried the bells and returned to the presidio.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Few people understand why Californians so
+love their Missions, the meagre ruins of them,
+scant as a last year's nest. But two priests, a
+corporal, and three men in the unmapped land with
+eight hundred angry savages&mdash;it is the mark of the
+Western breed to love odds such as that! It is not
+to the campanile at Pala nor the ruined arches of
+San Luis Rey that men made pilgrimages but to
+the spirit of enterprise that built the West.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All about the upper mesa there are traces,
+scarcely more evident to the eye than the Missions,
+that the inhabitants of it have been dreamers,
+dreaming greatly. I do not now refer to the court
+of San Luis Rey, from the roofs of which a joyous
+populace once cheered a governor of California in
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_20' name='Page_20'>[20]</a></span>
+the part of toreador, in a neighbourhood where
+Raphael-eyed muchachitos who have never heard of
+the Five Little Pigs that Went to Market can still
+repeat you the rhyme that begins
+</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<p>
+Up in Heaven there is a bull fight,</p>
+<p>
+The bull has horns of silver and a tail of gold.</p>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p>
+Heaven enough under those conditions to the
+children of the Occupation! Nor am I thinking
+of a road on which, when there is a light wind
+moving from the sea, you can still hear at midnight
+the pounding feet of the Indian riders
+galloping down to the bay, only to see their
+beloved Padre blessing them from the ship's side
+in departing. I do not think even&mdash;because I
+make a practice of thinking as little as possible
+of a matter so discreditable to us as our Indian
+policy&mdash;of the procession of the evicted <i>Palatingwas</i>,
+even though the whole region of Warner's
+ranch is still full of the shame of it and the
+rending cry. The struggle of men with men is
+at best a sick and squalid affair for one of the
+parties; but men contriving against the gods for
+possession of the earth is your true epic. The
+brave little towns which start up there with their
+too early florescence of avenue and public square,
+the courageous acres which the vineyardist clears
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_21' name='Page_21'>[21]</a></span>
+in the chamisal and the chamise takes again!
+All along the upper mesa, Pan and the homesteader
+keep up the ancient fight. And with
+what unequal weapons! The wild gourd, the
+bindweed, the megarrhiza, at the mere rumour
+of a cleared space, come beckoning and joining
+hands. Though he goes gunning all day without
+finding one young rabbit for his pot, the bark of
+the homesteader's orchard trees will be gnawed
+by them at the precise sappy moment. At dawn
+the quail may be heard with soft contented
+noises between the rows of bearing vines, plunging
+their beaks in the ripest berries. Then the mule-deer
+will spend the night in the carefully fenced
+enclosure, ruining the largest bunches with
+selective bites; after which the homesteader,
+if he is wise, will know that he is beaten. The
+mule-deer can go over any fence, though usually
+he prefers to go between the wires, which he
+can do without altering his stride. Detected,
+even at its most leafless, the antlered chaparral
+makes cover for him until, after hours of following,
+he is glimpsed at last, scaling at his stiff
+bounding gait some inaccessible rocky stair from
+which nothing comes back but the bullet's deflected
+whine. Now and then some pot-hunter
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_22' name='Page_22'>[22]</a></span>
+who remembers when the mule-deer could be
+heard barking to the does in any deep gully,
+when the moon rose hot on the flushed trail
+of the October day, will tell you that there
+are no more of his kind on San Jacinto. But
+so long as there are homesteaders to be fended
+from the hill borders, the mule-deer will come
+back. And when the mule-deer is gone there
+will still be drouth. Let the coast currents swing
+out a few degrees, or the Gulf winds blow contrarily
+for consecutive seasons, and the stoutest
+homesteader fails. After a few years you can
+guess where he has been by finding the chamise
+growing taller in the ploughed places.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Incurable wild hills and wild sufficing sea, and
+the little strip between which they give to one
+another&mdash;Indian giving!&mdash;conceded by the years of
+rain and demanded back by drouth; shoals that the
+tide piles and the sea eats again! It lies like a many-coloured
+dancer's scarf, and hearts are still caught
+in its folds as in the days of the Spanish Occupation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There's a stripe of aquamarine turning to chrysoprase,
+that's for the sea; amber then for the
+hollow cliffs of La Jolla and San Juan, smugglers'
+cliffs eaten well under the shore; a stripe of scarlet,
+spangled with viscid diamond dew, that's for the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_23' name='Page_23'>[23]</a></span>
+mesembryanthemums crowding the foreshore; pale
+green of the lupins with a white thread through it
+of the highway, green again for the chamisal, and
+blue of the mountains' unassailable sea thought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nature is a great symbolist; what she makes
+out of her own materials is but the shadow of
+what man in any country will make finally of
+his. San Diego by the sea dreams of a great
+sea empery. What by all the signs she is bound
+to produce, is a poet. There in the scarf-coloured,
+low shore is the vocal forecast of him in the night-singing
+mocking-bird. Especially in the fringing
+island of Coronado out of the waxberry bush
+he can be heard gurgling like a full fountain
+with jets and rushes of pure crystal sound. From
+moonrise on until dawn he scatters from a tireless
+throat, music like light and laughter. It is
+as impossible to close the eyes under it as in
+the glare of the sun. And if the moon, the
+measurer, be gone on a journey to the other
+side of the world, still he sings, all his notes
+muffled by the dark; he sways and sings, dozes
+and sings, dreaming and wakes to sing. So it
+should be with poets whether anybody wishes
+them to or not. "The lands of the sun expand
+the soul," says the proverb.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_25' name='Page_25'>[25]</a></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_24' name='Page_24'></a></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_27' name='Page_27'></a></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_26' name='Page_26'></a></span>
+</p>
+
+<h2>
+II
+<br /><br />
+<span class="s08">
+MOTHERING MOUNTAINS
+
+</span></h2>
+
+<p>
+It is all part of that subtle relation between the
+observer and the landscape of the west, which
+goes by the name of "atmosphere," that one
+returns again and again to the reality of Christian
+feeling in the Franciscan Pioneers, as witnessed
+by the names they left us&mdash;one of the most
+charming proofs, if proof were wanted, of the
+power of religion to illuminate the mind to a
+degree often denied to generations of art and
+culture. How many book-fed tourists rounding
+the blue ranks of San Jacinto to face the noble
+front of the Coast Range as it swings back from
+the San Gabriel valley, would have found for it
+a name at once so absolute, so understanding as
+Sierra Madre, Mother Mountain?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There you have it all in one comprehensive
+sweep: the brooding, snow-touched, virginal peaks,
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_28' name='Page_28'>[28]</a></span>
+visited and encompassed by the sacred spirit of
+the sea, and below it the fertile valley, the little
+huddling, skirting hills fed from her breast. The
+very lights that die along the heights, the airs that
+play there, the swelling fecund slopes, have in
+them something so richly maternal; the virtue of
+the land is the virtue that we love most in the
+mothers of men. And if you want facts under
+the poetry, see how the Sierra receives the rain
+and sends it down laden with the rich substance
+of her granite bosses, making herself lean to fatten
+the valleys. The great gorges and swift angles of
+the hills which fade and show in the evening glow,
+are wrought there by the ceaseless contribution of
+the mountain to the tillable land. And what a
+land it has become! There have been notable
+kingdoms of the past of fewer and less productive
+acres. Yet even in the great avenues of palms
+that flick the light a thousand ways from their wind-stirred,
+serrate edges, is a reminder of the host of
+bristling, spiny growth the land once entertained.
+It is as if the sinister forces of the desert lurked
+somewhere not far under the surface, ready at
+any moment to retake all this wonder of fertility,
+should the beneficence of the Mother Mountain
+fail. The Padre pioneers must have felt these
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_29' name='Page_29'>[29]</a></span>
+two contending forces many a time when they
+lay down at night under the majestic Sierra, for
+they named the first spot where they made an
+abiding place, in honour of the protecting influence,
+<i><span lang='es_ES'>Nuestro Señora, Reina de Los Angeles</span></i>, Our Lady
+the Queen of the Angels. There she hovered,
+snow-whitened amid tall candles of the stars, while
+south and west the coyote barked the menace of
+the unwatered lands. Now this is remarkable, and
+one of the things that go to show we are vastly
+more susceptible to influences of nature than some
+hard-headed members of society suppose, that in
+this group of low hills and shallow valleys between
+the Sierra Madre and the sea, the most conspicuous
+human achievement has been a new form of domestic
+architecture.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This is the thing that most strikes the attention
+of the traveller: not the orchards and the gardens,
+which are not appreciably different in kind from
+those of the Riviera and some favoured parts
+of Italy, but the homes, the number of them,
+their extraordinary adaptability to the purposes
+of gracious living. The Angelenos call them
+bungalows, in respect to the type from which
+the later form developed, but they deserve a
+name as distinctive as they have in character
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_30' name='Page_30'>[30]</a></span>
+become. These little thin-walled dwellings, all
+of desert-tinted native woods and stones, are as
+indigenous to the soil as if they had grown up
+out of it, as charming in line and the perfection of
+utility as some of those wild growths which show
+a delicate airy florescence above ground, but under
+it have deep, man-shaped, resistant roots. With
+their low and flat-pitched roofs they present a
+certain likeness to the aboriginal dwellings which
+the Franciscans found scattered like wasps' nests
+among the chaparral along the river,&mdash;which is only
+another way of saying that the spirit of the land
+shapes the art that is produced there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One must pause a little by the dry wash of this
+river, so long ago turned into an irrigating ditch that
+it is only in seasons of unusual flood it remembers
+its ancient banks, and finds them, in spite of all that
+real estate agencies have done to obliterate such
+natural boundaries. This river of Los Angeles betrays
+the streak of original desertness in the country
+by flowing bottom-side up, for which it receives
+the name of <i><span lang='es_ES'>arroya</span></i>, and even <i><span lang='es_ES'>arroya seca</span></i> as against
+the <i><span lang='es_ES'>rio</span></i> of the full-flowing Sacramento and San
+Juan. A <i><span lang='es_ES'>rio</span></i> is chiefly water, but an <i><span lang='es_ES'>arroya</span></i>, and
+especially that one which travels farthest from the
+Mothering Mountains toward the sea, is at most
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_31' name='Page_31'>[31]</a></span>
+seasons of the year a small trickle of water among
+stones in a wide, deep wash, overgrown with button
+willow and sycamores that click their gossiping
+leaves in every breath of wind or in no wind at
+all. Tiny gold and silver backed ferns climb down
+the banks to drink, and as soon as the spring
+freshet has gone by, brodiæas and blazing stars
+come up between the boulders worn as smooth
+as if by hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Farther up, where the stream narrows, it is
+overgrown by willows, alders, and rock maples,
+and leaps white-footed into brown pools for trout.
+Deer drink at the shallows, and it is not so long
+ago that cinnamon bear and grizzlies tracked the
+wet clay of its borders. This is the guarantee
+that this woman-country is in no danger of too
+much mothering. No climate which is acceptable
+to trout and grizzlies is in the least likely to prove
+enervating; men and beasts, they run pretty much
+to the same vital, sporting qualities.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All that country which extends from the foot
+of the Sierra Madre to the sea, is so cunningly
+patterned off with ranks of low hills and lomas
+that its vastness is disguised, or rather revealed
+by subtle change and swift surprises as a discreet
+woman reveals her charms. This renders it one of
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_32' name='Page_32'>[32]</a></span>
+the most delightful of motoring countries. The
+car swings over a perfect road into snug little
+orchard nooks as safe and secret seeming as a
+nest, climbs a round-breasted hill to greet the
+wide horizon of the sea, or a mesa stretching
+away into blue and amber desertness, which when
+adventured upon, discloses in unsuspected hollows
+white, peaceful towns girt by great acres of orange
+groves, or the orderly array of vines trimmed low
+and balancing like small, wide-skirted figures in a
+minuet. And then the ground opens suddenly
+to deep, dry gullies where little handfuls of the grey
+soil gather themselves up and scuttle mysteriously
+under the cactus bushes, and dried seeds of the
+megarrhiza rattle with a muffled sound as the pods
+blow about. Here one meets occasionally the last
+survivors of the old way of life before men found it:
+<i><span lang='es_ES'>neotoma</span></i>, the house-building rat, with his conical
+heap of rubbish; or a road runner, tilting his tail
+and practising his short, sharp runs in the powdery
+sand under the rabbit brush; here, too, the lurking
+desert shows its spiny tips like a creature half-buried
+in the sand, not dead, but drowsing.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i053" id="i053"></a>
+<img src="images/i-053.jpg" width="398" height="550" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">A EUCALYPTUS GROVE
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+As artists know colour, and poets know it, this is
+the most colourful corner of the world. The blue
+and silver tones of the Sparrow-Hawk's land give
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_33' name='Page_33'>[33]</a></span>
+place to airy violets, fawns, and rich ambers. It is
+curious, that obstinate preference which a locality
+has for colour schemes of its own adoption; man
+can break up and re-form them, but he can never
+quite overcome the original key. Here the bright,
+instant note of the geraniums that shore up the
+bungalows, even the insult of the magenta-coloured
+Bougainvillea is subdued by the aerial softness that
+lies along the hills like the bloom on fruit. The
+sheets of Eschscholtzia gold that once spread over
+miles of the San Gabriel valley, and still linger in
+torn fragments about Altadena, have been sheared
+by the plough, to vanish and reappear again in the
+solid globes of orange, distilled from the saps and
+juices of the soil.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One of the most interesting of the instruments
+by which the cultivated landscape has gathered
+up and fixed the evanescent greens that spread
+thinly yet over the uncropped hills in spring,
+is the eucalyptus. All the tints are there, from
+the olive greens of the chaparral to the sombre
+darkness of the evergreen oak; young shoots of
+it have the silvery finish of the artemisia which
+once gave the note of the mesas about Riverside
+and San Bernardino. No other imported tree has
+quite to such a degree the air of the <i>habitué</i>; one
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_34' name='Page_34'>[34]</a></span>
+wonders indeed if it could have been half so much
+at home in Australia, from whence it has returned
+like some wandering heir to the ancestral acre.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It proves its blood royal by its facile adaptiveness
+to the prevailing lines of the landscape, taking the
+rounded, leaning outline of the live oaks on the
+wind-driven hills, or in sheltered ravines springing
+upward straight as the silver firs. Perhaps its most
+charming possibilities are revealed in the middle
+distance where, lifted high on columnar stems, its
+leaf crowns take on the blunt, flowing contours of
+the hills. At all times it has a beautiful resilience
+to the wind, bowing with a certain courtliness without
+compulsion, and recovering as if by conscious
+harmonious movement. The pepper tree, however,
+most magnificent specimens of which may be
+found lining the avenues of Pasadena, or in some
+unexpected corner of the hills marking the site of
+some old Spanish hacienda, is always an alien.
+It is like the Spaniards who brought it, perhaps,
+in its drooping grace, in the careless prodigality
+with which it sheds its fragile crimson fruits.
+Something of old-worldliness persists in its spicy
+odours, and in the stir of its lacy shadows; when
+the moon comes over the mountain wall and the
+wind is moving, there is the touch of mystery one
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_35' name='Page_35'>[35]</a></span>
+associates with lovely señoritas leaning out of
+balconies. One fancies that the pepper tree will last
+so long as the dying race of Dons and Doñas, and
+with them will cease to be a feature of local interest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is hardly more than a trace in the modern
+city of Los Angeles of <span lang='es_ES'><i><span lang='es_ES'>Nuestra Señora, Reina de
+los Angeles</span></i></span>. The last time I passed through the
+old plaza, the streets of offence encroached upon
+it from the east, and a corner of the sacred precinct
+had been sacrificed to the trolley. The Church of
+Our Lady, over whose door may still be traced the
+fading inscription from which the city takes its
+name, was never a mission, but one of the six
+chapels or <i><span lang='es_ES'>asistencias</span></i> centred about the Mission
+San Gabriel. It was here the first expedition
+passed northward looking for the port of Monterey,
+on the day of the feast of Our Lady in the year
+when the Atlantic Colonies were making up their
+minds to fight the English. It was close to this
+spot and along Downey Street were enacted the
+most pitiful of all the tragic incidents which
+marked the recession of the aboriginal races.
+Bereft of their lands and the protection of their
+Church, they became a prey to the greed of the
+dominant peoples, and used regularly to be incited to
+drunkenness upon their wages on Sunday, arrested
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_36' name='Page_36'>[36]</a></span>
+while in that condition, and sold each Monday
+morning for the amount of their fines to the
+neighbouring ranchers. Things like this lurking
+under the surface of commercial enterprise, as the
+desert lies in wait in sandy stretches, advise us
+that much of our insistence on democracy grows
+out of our inability to trust ourselves to deal equitably
+with our fellows under any other conditions.
+We can keep to the rules of the game we have set
+up more easily than to the unfenced humanities.
+Here in the old plaza full of sleepy light, which
+still retains the indefinable stamp of the people
+to whom to-morrow was always a better day for
+doing things, one sighs for the short-sighted self-interest
+which so wasted the native children of
+the soil.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But after all the land couldn't have loved them
+as it does the race for which it brings forth
+its miraculous harvests. Not that there weren't
+miracles in those days; in fact they began here,
+or rather at San Gabriel, six miles or so beyond
+the river which in those days was called Porcincula,
+a name that linked the old world with the new by
+way of the little chapel in Italy in which the
+beloved Francis received such heavenly favours.
+The miracle of San Gabriel relates to a display
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_37' name='Page_37'>[37]</a></span>
+of a canvas presentiment of Our Lady, at the
+mere sight of which the wild tribes experienced
+exceeding grace. Looking up suddenly at the
+Mother Mountain brooding above the plain, it
+is easy to understand how the symbol of aloof
+but solicitous care came home to the primitive
+mind, always peculiarly open to suggestions of
+humaneness in nature.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The heads of the Sierra Madre are rounded, the
+contours of great dignity. The appeal it makes to
+the eye is of mass and line. Its charms, and it has
+many, of forested slope, leaping waters, and lilied
+meadows, do not offer themselves to the casual
+glance, but must be sought after with great pains.
+The bulk of the range is of warm, grey granite,
+clothed with atmospheric colour as with a garment.
+It borrows more from the sky than the sea, taking
+on at times an aerial transparency, the soul of the
+mountain about to pass trembling into light.
+Pinkish tones are discoverable in even the bluest
+shadows, and at times the peaks are touched with
+the rich, roseate orange of the Alpine-glow. But
+the variations of temperature and atmospheric
+conditions are not sufficiently pronounced to
+present themselves to the sense as the source of
+its aspects of tenderness, of majesty, of virginal
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_38' name='Page_38'>[38]</a></span>
+aloofness. Rather such changes seem to be
+occasioned by palpitations of the Mountain Spirit,
+remote in sacred meditation, glowing, dimming,
+defining itself from within.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It may be that the immense vitality of the land,
+its abundance, the bursting orchards, the rich
+variety of native growth, somehow dwarfs the
+earliest impression of the Sierra Madre, since few,
+if any, gather at first an adequate idea of the
+actual mass and height it represents. It is only
+after appreciation of the really amazing activities
+of the Angelenos is a little dulled by familiarity, at
+early morning when the groves are sleeping and
+the bright plantations of the gardens lack the sun
+to flash their brilliance on the sight, or at evening
+when a sea mist covers the teeming land, one is
+prepared to hear that many of these peaks are
+higher than the Simplon, and that it would be
+possible to wander for months in the intricacies
+of its cañons without having time to grow familiar
+with a single one of them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sometimes the mere mechanics of the land, the
+pull of the wind up the narrow gorges as you pass,
+advises the open mind of power and immensity
+residing in the thinly forested bulks. Passing
+what appears a mere shadowy gulf in the mountain
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_39' name='Page_39'>[39]</a></span>
+wall, you are aware of a murmurous sound as of
+the sea in a shell, and feel suddenly the push of
+the draught on your windshield like a great steady
+hand. In places above San Bernardino, the steady
+pouring of invisible wind rivers has swept the soil
+for miles and defied three generations of artificial
+plantations. And sometimes the mountain speaks
+directly to the soul. I recall such an occasion one
+late spring. We had been skirting the range
+toward Riverside all afternoon, having the fall of
+the land seaward always in view, noting how, in spite
+of the absurd predilection of men for square fields
+and gridiron arrangements, the main lines of
+cultivation were being pulled into beauty by the
+sheer necessity of humouring the harvest. It was
+that lagging hour between the noon splendour and
+the gathering of the light for its dramatic passage
+into night. The orange orchards lay dead green
+in the hollows, unplanted ridges showed scarcely a
+trace of atmospheric blueness; unlaced, unbuskined,
+the land rested. And all in the falling of a leaf,
+in the scuttle of a horned toad in the dust of the
+roadway, it lifted into eerie life. It bared its teeth;
+the veil of the mountain was rent. Nothing
+changed, nothing stirred or glimmered, but the
+land had spoken. As if it had taken a step
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_40' name='Page_40'>[40]</a></span>
+forward, as if a hand were raised, the mountain
+stood over us. And then it sank again. While
+the chill was still on us, the grip of terror, there
+lay the easy land, the comfortable crops, the red
+geraniums about the bungalows. But never again
+for me would the Sierra Madre be a mere geographical
+item, a feature of the landscape; it was
+Power, immanent and inescapable. Shall not the
+mother of the land do what she will with it?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Entering the cañons of the San Gabriel, one is
+struck with the endearing quality of their charm.
+In a country which disdains every sort of prettiness,
+and dares even to use monotony as an element of
+beauty, as California does, it is surprising to find,
+cut in the solid granite wall, little dells all laced
+with fern and saxifrage, and wind swung, frail,
+flowery bells. Little streams come dashing down
+the runways with an elfin movement, with here and
+there a miniature fall "singing like a bird," as
+Muir described it, between moss-encrusted banks.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i066" id="i066"></a>
+<img src="images/i-066.jpg" width="550" height="371" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">GLENDALE, VALLEY OF THE SAN GABRIEL
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Into the open mouths of such cañons have
+retreated the hosts of wildflowers that once in the
+wet seasons overran all that country from San
+Bernardino to the sea,&mdash;the white sage, most
+honeyful of all the sages, the poppies, gilias,
+cream cups, nemophilias which twenty-five years
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_41' name='Page_41'>[41]</a></span>
+ago were as common as meadow grass, as thick as
+the planted fields of alfalfa which have usurped
+them. Settlers who came into this country when
+the trail over the San Gorgiono had not yet
+hardened between iron rails, tell of riding belly
+deep for miles in wild oats and waving bloom,
+and where the trail goes out over the San
+Fernando, toward Camulas, the yellow mustard
+reached its scriptural height, and the birds of the air
+built their nests in it. Now and then in very wet
+years a faint yellow tinge, high up under the bases
+of the hills, is all that is left of the seed which,
+by report, the Padres sowed along the coastwise
+trails, to mark where they trod the circuit of the
+Missions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Everywhere within the cañons, honeyful flowers
+abound, and up from the rocky floors the slopes
+are stiff with chaparral. This characteristic growth,
+which, seen from the open valley flooded by dry
+sun, appears as a mere scurf, a roughened lichen
+on the mountain wall, is in reality a riot of
+manzanita, mahogany, ceanothus, cherry and black
+sage, from ten to fifteen feet high, all but impassable.
+Elsewhere in the ranges to the north, the
+chaparral is loose enough to admit fern and herbaceous
+plants, carpeting the earth, but here the rigid,
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_42' name='Page_42'>[42]</a></span>
+spiny stems contend for three or four feet, thick as
+the carving in old cathedral choirs, before they
+attain light and air enough to put forth leaf or
+twig. On the seaward side of the mountains, miles
+and miles of this dense growth flow over the
+ranges, parted here and there by knife-edge ridges,
+or by huge bosses of country rock, affording a
+great sweep to the eye, reaching far to seaward.
+From here the lower country shrinks to its proper
+proportion&mdash;a toy landscape planted with Noah's
+Ark trees&mdash;and the noise of men is overlaid by the
+great swells of the Pacific which come thundering
+in, lifting far and faint reverberations along the
+ranges.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On either side of these vast conning towers
+it is still possible to trace the indefinite tracks
+which wild creatures make, running clear and
+well defined for short distances and then melting
+unaccountably into the scrub again. Occasionally
+still they discover traces of the wild life in which
+the Sierra Madre once abounded. Deer are known
+to take advantage of such natural outlooks in
+protecting themselves from their natural enemies,
+and from the evidence of frequent visits here, bears
+and foxes and bobcats must have made much the
+same use of them. From such high escarpments
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_43' name='Page_43'>[43]</a></span>
+the Indians would have seen Cabrillo's winged
+boats go by, and from them, all up the coast,
+ascended the pillars of smoke that attended the
+galleon of Francis Drake.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once within the portals of the range, the granite
+walls sheer away from sequestered parks of oak,
+madroño, and Douglas spruce. The trees are not
+thickly set here as in the north, but admit of sunny
+space and murmurous bee pasture between their
+gracefully contrasting boles, and to a thousand
+bright-feathered and scaled things unknown to
+the all-pine or all-redwood forests. Such parks
+or basins vary from a few yards to an acre or
+two in extent, threaded like beads upon a single
+stream. One thinks indeed of the old-fashioned
+"charm string" in which each meadow space has
+its peculiar virtue:&mdash;open sunny shallows, arrowy
+cascades, troops of lilies standing high as a man's
+head, forested fern, columbine, delphinum, and
+scarlet mimulus along the water borders.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They grow slighter as the trail ascends&mdash;it is
+possible now to make nearly the whole distance
+in gravity cars for that purpose provided, but I
+recommend a sure-footed mule for the true
+mountain-lover&mdash;until above the source of the
+streams, from dips and saddles of the range, above
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_44' name='Page_44'>[44]</a></span>
+the summer-shrunken glaciers, where the trees
+are bowed and the chaparral creeps as if awed
+and dizzy, it is possible to have a glimpse of the
+still unconquered and unconquerable "sage brush
+county." All along the back of the Sierra Madre
+wall the desert laps like a slow tide, rolling up and
+receding with the drouths and rains. The eye
+takes it in no less slowly than the imagination.
+It stretches, in fact, to the Colorado, but a haze
+of heat obscures its eastern border; long whitened
+lines of alkali, like wave marks, set the seasonal
+limit of its encroachments. Here and there shows
+the dark checkering of fertile patches, spilled over
+from the rich west-lying valleys; trending east by
+south lies the Sierra Madre like an arm, guarding
+the favoured region.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet in her very favour the Mother Mountain
+is impartial, for equally as she saves the south from
+desertness, she has denied to us the one instrument
+by which the desert could be mastered. Mighty
+as man is in transforming the face of the earth, he
+is nothing without the Rains.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_45' name='Page_45'>[45]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_47' name='Page_47'></a></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_46' name='Page_46'></a></span>
+</p>
+
+<h2>
+III
+<br /><br />
+<span class="s08">
+THE COASTS OF ADVENTURE
+
+</span></h2>
+
+<p>
+Old trails, older than the memory of man, go out
+from the southern country by way of Cahuenga,
+by Eagle Rock, toward that part of the shelving
+coast where the Padre's mustard gold lingered
+longest, as if to mark the locality where the gold
+they missed was first uncovered. But suppose,
+on that day of the year '41, Francisco Lopez,
+<i>major-domo</i> of the Mission San Fernando, had not
+had an appetite for onions? Who knows how
+history would have made itself?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The speculation is idle; anybody named Lopez
+has always a taste for onions because they are
+the nearest thing to garlic. Señor Francisco,&mdash;I
+suppose one may grant him the title at this
+distance&mdash;rested under an oak and dug up the wild
+root with his knife, and the tide of the world's
+emigration set toward the Coasts of Adventure.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_48' name='Page_48'>[48]</a></span>
+I have, holding my papers as I write, an Indian
+basket reputed to be one of those in which, in
+those days, placer gold was washed out of the
+sandy loam; it was given me by one who had it
+from Don Antonio Coronel, and has a pattern
+about it of the low serried hills of the coast district.
+Where it breaks, as all patterns of Indian baskets
+do, to give egress to the spirit resident in things
+dedicated to human use, there are two figures of
+men with arms outstretched, but divided as the
+pioneers who carried the cross into that country
+were from those who followed the lure of gold.
+The basket wears with time, but the pattern holds,
+inwoven with its texture as Romance is woven
+with the history of all that region lying between
+San Francisco on the north and Cahuenga where,
+after a bloodless battle, was consummated the
+cession of California from Mexico.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i077" id="i077"></a>
+<img src="images/i-077.jpg" width="550" height="416" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">A CAÑON IN THE SIERRA MADRES
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+From the white landmark of San Juan Capistrano
+to a point opposite Santa Inez, saints thick
+as sea-birds, standing seaward, break the long
+Pacific swell: San Clemente, Santa Catalina,
+Santa Rosa&mdash;their deep-scored cliffs searched by
+the light, revealing their kinship with the parallel
+mainland ranges. But there are hints here, in the
+plant and animal life and in the climate, milder
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_49' name='Page_49'>[49]</a></span>
+even than that of the opposing channel ports, hints
+which not even the Driest-Dustiness dare despise,
+of those mellower times than ours from which
+all fables of Blessed Islands are sprung. Islands
+"very near the terrestrial paradise" the old Spanish
+romancer described them. Often as not the imagination
+sees more truly than the eye. I myself am
+ready to affirm that something of man's early Eden
+drifted thither on the Kuro-Siwa, that warm
+current deflected to our coast, which, for all we
+know of it, might well be one of the four great
+rivers that went about the Garden and watered it.
+Great golden sun-fish doze upon the island tides,
+flying-fish go by in purple and silver streaks, and
+under the flat bays, which take at times colour that
+rivals the lagoons of Venice, forests of kelp, a-crawl
+with rainbow-coloured life, sleep and sway upon
+tides unfelt of men. There are days at Catalina
+so steeped with harmonies of sea and sun that the
+singing of the birds excites the soothed sense no
+more than if the lucent air had that moment
+dripped in sound. These are the days when the
+accounts that Cabrillo left of his findings there, of
+a civil and religious development superior to the
+tribes of the mainland, beguile the imagination.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One thinks of the watery highway between the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_50' name='Page_50'>[50]</a></span>
+west coast and the channel islands as another
+<i><span lang='es_ES'>Camino Real</span></i> of the sea, where in place of mule
+trains and pacing Padres, went balsas, skin canoes,
+galleons, far-blown Chinese junks, Russian traders,
+slipping under the cliffs of San Juan for untaxed
+hides and tallow, Atlantic whalers, packets rounding
+the Horn, sunk past the load line with
+Argonauts of '49, opium smugglers dropping a
+contraband cask or an equally prohibited coolie
+under the very wing of San Clemente. So many
+things could have happened&mdash;Odysseys, Æneids&mdash;that
+it is with a sigh one resigns the peaks of the
+submerged range, paling and purpling on the west,
+to the student of sea-birds and sea-nourished
+plants.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Looking from the islands landward, the locked
+shores have still for long stretches the aspect of
+undiscovered country. Hills break abruptly in
+the surf or run into narrow moon-shaped belts of
+sand where a mountain arm curves out or the sea
+eats inward. And yet for nearly four centuries
+the secret of the land was blazoned to all the ships
+that passed, in the great fields of poppy gold that
+every wet season flamed fifty miles or more to
+seaward.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One must have seen the Eschscholtzia so, smouldering
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_51' name='Page_51'>[51]</a></span>
+under the mists of spring, to understand the
+thrill that comes of finding them later scattered as
+they are, throughout the gardens of the world. I
+recall how at Rome, coming up suddenly out of
+the catacombs&mdash;we had gone down by another
+entrance and had been wandering for hours in the
+mortuary gloom&mdash;memory leaped up to find a
+great bed of golden poppies tended by brown,
+bearded Franciscans. They couldn't say&mdash;Fray
+Filippo, whom I questioned, had no notion&mdash;whence
+the sun-bright cups had come, except that they
+were common in the gardens of his order. It
+seemed a natural sort of thing for some Mission
+Padre, seeking a memento of himself to send back
+to his Brothers of St. Francis half a world away,
+to have chosen these shining offsprings of the sun.
+There was confirmation in the fact that Fray
+Filippo knew them not by the unspellable botanical
+name, but by the endearing Castilian "dormidera,"
+sleepy-eyed, in reference to their habit of unfolding
+only to the light; but the connecting thread was
+lost. Channel fishermen still, in spite of the
+obliterating crops, can trace the blue lines of lupins
+between faint streaks of poppy fires, and catch
+above the reek of their boats, when the land wind
+begins, blown scents of <i><span lang='es_ES'>islay</span></i> and ceanothus.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_52' name='Page_52'>[52]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No rivers of water of notable size pour down
+this west coast, but rivers of green flood the shallow
+cañons. Here and there from the crest of the
+range one catches an arrowy glimpse of a seasonal
+stream, but from the sea-view the furred chaparral
+is unbroken except for bare ridges, wind-swept even
+of the round-headed oaks. This coast country is a
+favourite browsing place for deer; they can be
+seen there still in early summer, feeding on the
+acorns of the scrub oaks, and especially on the
+tender twigs of wind-fallen trees, or herding at
+noon in the deep fern which closes like cleft waters
+over their heads. Until within a few years it was
+no unlikely thing to hear little black bears snorting
+and snuffing under the manzanita, of the
+berries of which they are inordinately fond. This
+lovely shrub with its twisty, satiny stems of wine-red,
+suffusing brown, its pale conventionalised
+leaves and flat little umbels of berries, suggests
+somehow the carving on old Gothic choirs, as
+though it borrowed its characteristic touch from an
+external shaping hand; as if with its predetermined
+habit of growth it had a secret affinity for man, and
+waited but to be transplanted into gardens. It
+needs, however, no garden facilities, but shapes
+itself to the most inhospitable conditions. About
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_53' name='Page_53'>[53]</a></span>
+the time it begins to put forth its thousand waxy
+bells, in December or January, the toyon, the
+native holly, is at its handsomest. This is a late
+summer flowering shrub that in mid-winter loses
+a little of its glossy green, and above its yellowing
+foliage bears berries in great scarlet clusters.
+Between these two overlapping ends, the gaumet
+of the chaparral is run in blues of wild lilac, reds
+and purples of rhus and buckthorn and the wide,
+white umbels of the alder, which here becomes a
+tree fifty to sixty feet in height. It is the only one
+of the tall chaparral which has edible fruit, for
+though bears and Indians make a meal of manzanita,
+it does not commend itself to cultivated
+taste. More humble species, huckleberry, thimble,
+and blackberry, crowd the open spaces under the
+oak-madroño forests, or, as if they knew their
+particular usefulness to man, come hurrying to
+clearings of the axe, and may be seen holding hands
+as they climb to cover the track of careless fires.
+In June whole hill-slopes, under the pine and madroños,
+burn crimson with sweet, wild strawberries.
+The wild currant and the fuchsia-flowered gooseberry
+are not edible, but they are under no such
+obligation; they "make good" with long wands of
+jewel-red, drooping blossoms, and in the case of the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_54' name='Page_54'>[54]</a></span>
+currant, with delicate pink racemes, thrown out
+almost before the leaves while the earth still smells
+of winter dampness. Though nobody seems to
+know how it travelled so far, the "incense shrub"
+is a favourite of English gardens where, before the
+primroses begin, it serves the same purpose as in
+the west coast cañons, quickening the sense into
+anticipations of beauty on every side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Inland the close, round-backed hills draw into
+ranks and ranges, making way for chains of fertile
+valleys which also fill out the Californian's calendar
+of saints. But, in fact, your true Californian prays
+to his land as much as ever the early Roman did,
+and pours on it libations of water and continuous
+incense of praise. Every one of these longish,
+north-trending basins is superlatively good for
+something,&mdash;olives or wheat, perhaps; Pajaro
+produces apples and Santa Clara has become the
+patroness of prunes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nothing could be more ethereally lovely than
+the spring aspect of the orchard country. It begins
+with the yellowing of the meadow lark's breast,
+and then of early mornings, with the appearance,
+as if flecks of the sky had fallen, of great flocks
+of bluebirds that blow about in the ploughed lands
+and are dissolved in rain. Then the poppies spring
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_55' name='Page_55'>[55]</a></span>
+up like torchmen in the winter wheat, and along
+the tips of the apricots, petals begin to show,
+crumpled as the pink lips of children shut upon
+mischievous secrets; a day or two of this and then
+the blossoms swarm as bees, white fire breaks
+out among the prunes, it scatters along the foothills
+like the surf. Toward the end of the blooming
+season all the country roads are defined by thin
+lines of petal drift, and any wind that blows is
+alive with whiteness. After which, thick leafage
+covers the ripening fruit and the valley dozes
+through the summer heat with the farms outlined
+in firm green, like a patchwork quilt drawn up
+across the mountains' knees.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The tree that gives the memorable touch to the
+landscape of the coast valleys is the oak, both the
+roble and encinas varieties. There are others with
+greater claims to distinction, the sequoia, the "big
+tree," lurking in the Santa Cruz mountains, the
+madroño, red-breeched, green-coated, a very Robin
+Hood of trees, sequestered in cool cañons, and the
+redwood, the <i><span lang='es_ES'>palo colorado</span></i>, discovered by the first
+Governor, Don Gaspar de Portola, on his search
+for the lost port of Monte Rey. All these keep
+well back from the main lines of travel. The most
+that the rail tourist sees of them is a line of redwoods,
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_56' name='Page_56'>[56]</a></span>
+perhaps, climbing up from the sea-fronting
+cañons to peer and whisper on the ridges above the
+fruiting orchards. But the oaks go on, keeping
+well in the laps of the hills, avoiding the wind
+rivers, marching steadily across the alluvial basins
+on into the hot interior. They are more susceptible
+to wind influence than almost any other, and mark
+the prevailing direction of the seasonal air currents
+with their three-hundred-year-old trunks as readily
+as reeds under a freshet. You can see them hugging
+the lee side of any cañon, leaning as far as they
+may out of the sea-born draughts, but standing
+apart, true aristocrats among trees, disdaining alike
+one another and the whole race of orchard inmates.
+When in full leaf, for the <i><span lang='es_ES'>roble</span></i> is deciduous, they
+are both of them distinctly paintable, particularly
+when in summer the trunks, grey and aslant,
+upbearing cloud-shaped masses of dark green,
+make an agreeable note against the fawn-coloured
+hills. The <i><span lang='es_ES'>roble</span></i> is a noble tree, high-crowned,
+with a great sweep of branches, but seen in winter
+stripped of its thick, small leafage, it loses interest.
+Its method of branching is fussy, too finely divided,
+and without grace.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i090" id="i090"></a>
+<img src="images/i-090.jpg" width="550" height="371" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">THE CEMETERY, SANTA BARBARA MISSION
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Around Santa Margarita and Paso Robles filmy
+moss spreads a veil over the <i><span lang='es_ES'>robles</span></i> as of Druid
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_57' name='Page_57'>[57]</a></span>
+meditation; one fancies them aloof from the stir
+of present-day life as they were from the bears
+that used to feed on the mast under them. A
+hundred years or so ago the Franciscans drove
+out the bears by an incantation&mdash;I mean by the
+exorcism of the Church enforced with holy water
+and a procession with banners around the Mission
+precinct: "I adjure you, O Bears, by the true God,
+by the Holy God ... to leave the fields to our
+flocks, not to molest them nor come near them."
+But bears or <i>homo sapiens</i>, it is all one to the oaks
+of San Antonio; indeed, if legend is to be credited,
+the four-footed brothers would have been equally
+as acceptable to the patron of the Mission where
+this interesting ceremony took place. I can testify,
+however, that after all this lapse of time the exorcism
+is still in force, for though I have been up and
+down that country many times I have seen no bears
+in it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Things more pestiferous than bears are driven
+out, humours of the blood, stiffness of the joints,
+by the medicinal waters that bubble and seep along
+certain ancient fissures of the country rock. This
+has always seemed to me the very insolence of
+superfluity. Who wishes, when all the air is censed
+with the fragrance of wild vines, to have his nose
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_58' name='Page_58'>[58]</a></span>
+assaulted with fumes of sulphur, even though it is
+known to be good for a number of things? But
+there are some people who could never be got to
+observe the noble proportions of five-hundred-year-old
+oaks with the wild grapes going from tree
+to tree like a tent, except as a by-process incident
+to the drinking of nasty waters. So the land has
+its way even with our weaknesses.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i095" id="i095"></a>
+<img src="images/i-095.jpg" width="550" height="370" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">SYCAMORES, A COAST RANGE CAÑON
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Besides these excursions inland, which bring us in
+almost every case to one of the ancient Franciscan
+foundations, there are two or three ports of call on
+the sea front worth lingering at for more things
+than the pleasant air and the radiant wild bloom.
+One of these is Santa Barbara which Santa Inez
+holds in its lap, curving like a scimitar opposite the
+most northerly of the channel islands. Understand,
+however, that no good comes of thinking
+of Santa Barbara as a place on the map. It is a
+Sargossa of Romance, a haven of last things, the
+last Mission in the hands of the Franciscans, the
+last splendour of the Occupation, the last place
+where mantillas were worn and they danced the
+<i><span lang='es_ES'>fandango</span></i> and <i><span lang='es_ES'>la jota</span></i>; an eddy into which have
+drifted remnants of every delightful thing that
+has passed on the highways of land and sea, which
+here hail one another across the curving moon-white
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_59' name='Page_59'>[59]</a></span>
+beach. Summer has settled there, California
+summer which never swelters, never scorches.
+Frost descends at times from Santa Inez to the
+roofs, but lays no finger on the fuchsias, poinsettias,
+and the heliotropes climbing to second-story
+windows. The wild thickets which connect the
+territory with the town, are vocal with night-singing
+mocking-birds; along the foreshore white
+pelicans divide the mountain-shadowed waters.
+The waters, taking all the sky's changes, race to
+the fairy islands, the chaparral runs back to the
+flanks of Santa Inez showing yellowly through
+the distant blue of pines; overhead a sky clouded
+with light. This is not a paradox but an attempt
+to express the misty luminosity of a heaven filled
+with refractions of the summer-tinted slope, the
+glaucous leafage of the chaparral, the white sand
+and sapphire-glinting water. The sky <i>beyond</i> the
+enclosing mountains has the cambric blueness of
+the superheated interior, but directly overhead it
+has depth and immensity of colour unequalled
+except along the Mediterranean.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Santa Barbara is a port of distinguished visitors;
+more, and more varieties, of sea-birds put in there
+on the long flight from the Arctic to the Isthmus
+than is easily believable. In the Estero&mdash;<i><span lang='es_ES'>esteril</span></i>,
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_60' name='Page_60'>[60]</a></span>
+sterile&mdash;an ill-smelling tide pool lying behind the
+town, may be found at one season or another, all
+the western species that delight the ornithologist.
+The black brant, going by night, and wild swans,
+as many as a score of them together, have been
+noted in its backwaters, and scarcely any stroll
+along the receding surf but is enlivened by the
+resonant, sweet whistle of the plover. In hollows
+of the sands thousands of beach-haunting birds
+may be seen camping for the night, looking like
+some sea-coloured, strange vegetation, and early
+mornings when the channel racing by, leaves the
+bay placid, tens of thousands of shearwaters sleep
+in shouldering ranks that sway with the incoming
+swell as the kelp sways, without being scattered
+by it. One can see the same sight, augmented as
+to numbers, around Monterey, a long day's journey
+to the north as the car goes, long enough and
+lovely enough to deserve another chapter.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_61' name='Page_61'>[61]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_63' name='Page_63'></a></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_62' name='Page_62'></a></span>
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i104" id="i104"></a>
+<img src="images/i-104.jpg" width="550" height="407" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">TALL CHAPARRAL, SANTA CRUZ
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<h2>
+IV
+<br /><br />
+<span class="s08">
+THE PORT OF MONTEREY
+
+</span></h2>
+
+<p>
+Without doubt history is made quite as much by
+the mistakes of men as by their utmost certainties.
+The persistent belief of the ancient geographers in
+the existence of the Straits of Anian, the traditional
+North-West Passage, led to some romancing,
+and to the exploration of the California coast a
+century or so before it was of any particular use to
+anybody. It led also to the bluest bay. Viscaino
+took possession of it for Philip of Spain as early
+as 1602, nearly two hundred years before the
+Franciscans planted a cross there under Viscaino's
+very tree. During all that time the same oaks
+staggered up the slope away from the wind, and
+the scimitar curve of the beach kept back the
+brilliant waters. There is a figure of immensity in
+this more terrifying than the mere lapse of years.
+Not how many times but with what sureness for
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_64' name='Page_64'>[64]</a></span>
+every day the sapphire deep shudders into chrysoprase
+along the white line of the breakers. We
+struggle so to achieve a little brief moment of
+beauty, but every hour at Monterey it is given
+away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The bay lies squarely fronting the Pacific swell,
+about a hundred miles south of the Golden Gate,
+between the horns of two of the little tumbled
+coast ranges, cutting back to receive the waters of
+the Pajaro and the Salinas. From the south the
+hill juts out sharply, taking the town and the
+harbour between its knees, but the north shore is
+blunted by the mountains of Santa Cruz. The
+beach is narrow, and all along its inner curve
+blown up into dunes contested every season by the
+wind and by the quick, bright growth of sand
+verbena, lupins, and mesembryanthemums. The
+waters of the rivers are set back by the tides, they
+are choked with bars and sluiced out by winter
+floods. For miles back into the valleys of Pajaro
+and Salinas, blue and yellow lupins continue the
+colour of the sand and the pools of tide water.
+They climb up the landward slope of the high
+dunes and set the shore a little seaward against
+the diminished surf. Then the equinoctial tide
+rises against the land that the lupins have taken
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_65' name='Page_65'>[65]</a></span>
+and smooths out their lovely gardens with a swift,
+white hand, to leave the beach smooth again for
+the building of pale, wind-pointed cones.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i109" id="i109"></a>
+<img src="images/i-109.jpg" width="550" height="368" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">LOOKING DOWN ON MONTEREY AND THE BAY
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+The valley of the Salinas, which has its only
+natural outlet on the bay, is of the type of coast
+valleys, long, narrow and shallow, given over to
+farming and to memories of Our Lady of Solitude
+lying now as a heap of ruins in a barley field. It
+is a place set apart, where any morning you might
+wake to find the sea has entered between the little,
+brooding hills to rest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Gulls follow the plough there, and pines avoid
+the river basin as though each of them knew very
+well their respective rights in it. One has, however,
+to make a point of such discoveries, for the entrance
+to the valley is obscured by its very candour, lying
+all open as it does to drifting dune and variable sea
+marshes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is even more worth while to follow the flat-bordered
+Pajaro into the shut valley where dozes
+the little town of San Juan Bautista, taking on its
+well-sunned mesa, those placid lapses of self-forgetfulness
+which are to the aged as a foretaste
+of the long sleep. Here it was that the magic muse
+of Music came into the country. It came in a
+little tin-piped, wooden hand-organ, built by one
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_66' name='Page_66'>[66]</a></span>
+Benjamin Dobson of 22 Swan Street, London, in
+the year 1735, but of all its history until it was
+unpacked from mule-back by Padre Lausan in
+1797, there is not a word current. Our acquaintance
+with it begins on the day that the Padre set it up
+in the hills and played, "The Siren's Waltz," "Lady
+Campbell's Reel," and all its repertoire of favourite
+London airs, of which the least appropriate to its
+present mission must have been the one called
+"Go to the Devil." Which only goes to prove
+that the spirit of the Franciscans was often superior
+to their means, for what the simple savages did do
+as soon as they had overcome their superstitious fear
+of the noise box, was to come to Mass to hear it as
+often as possible. There remain three old volumes
+of music written later for the Mission which came
+true to its founding and excelled in all sweet sounds,
+but none, it is said, pleased the Indians so much
+or so raised their spirits as "The Siren's Waltz."
+No doubt its inspiriting strains added something to
+the warlike spirit which led here to the only local
+resistance opposed to the American invasion, for it
+was on the Gavilan heights above the little town
+that Frémont, on the tallest tree that he could find,
+raised the Stars and Stripes, gallantly if somewhat
+prematurely. It was from San Juan that Castro's
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_67' name='Page_67'>[67]</a></span>
+men marched to the final capitulation of Cahuenga,
+and finally from here the last remnant of the old
+life drains away. One hears the echo of it faint
+as the sea sounds that on rare days come trembling
+up the valley on the translucent air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Returning to the bay, one finds all interest
+centering about the Point of Pines, a very ancient,
+rocky termination of the most westerly of the
+coast barriers. The Point, which is really a
+peninsula, is one of the most notable landmarks
+between Point Conception on the south and Fort
+Point at San Francisco. Its lighthouse stands well
+out on a rocky finger, ringed with incessant,
+clanging buoys; between it and Santa Cruz light
+is a roadstead for an empire. A windy bay at best,
+deep tides, and squally surfaces, the waters of
+Monterey have other values than the colourist
+finds in them. Sardines, salmon, cod, tuna, yellow
+tail run with its tides. At most seasons of the
+year whales may be seen spouting there, or are
+cast upon its shoals. At one time the port
+enjoyed a certain prosperity as a whaling station,
+of which small trace remains beside the bleaching
+vertebræ that border certain of the old gardens and
+the persistent whalebone souvenirs of the curio
+dealer. Lateen-rigged fisher fleets flock in and
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_68' name='Page_68'>[68]</a></span>
+out of the harbour, butterfly winged; and all about
+the rock beaches creep the square-toed boats of
+the Japanese and Chinese abalone gatherers.
+Thousands of purple sea-urchins, squid, hundred-fingered
+star-fish, and all manner of slimy sea
+delicacies, these slant-eyed Orientals draw up
+out of the rainbow rock pools and the deeps below
+the receding surf. They go creeping and peering
+about the ebb, their guttural hunting cries borne
+inshore on the quiet air, seeming as much a native
+sea speech as the gabble of the gulls. So in their
+skin canoes and balsas the Indians must have crept
+about the inlets for as long as it requires to lay a
+yard or two of mould over the ancient middens of
+the tribe, as long as it takes to build a barrier of
+silver dunes half a mile seaward. Even at that
+distance the plough turns up the soil evenly
+sprinkled with crumbling shell which holds to the
+last a shred of its old iridescence. Far inland, past
+the Sierra Wall even to the country of Lost
+Borders, I have found amulets of this loveliest of
+the pearl shells, traded for and treasured by a
+people to whom the "Big Water" is a half-credited
+traveller's tale.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+About five hundred yards outside the surf, from
+Laboratory Point, circling the peninsula to Mission
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_69' name='Page_69'>[69]</a></span>
+Point on the south, the submerged rocky ridge
+has grown a great, tawny mane of kelp. Every
+year it is combed and cut by the equinoctial tides,
+and cast ashore in brown, sea-smelling wind-rows,
+and every year it grows again to be the feeding-ground
+of a million water-haunting birds. Here
+the Ancient Murrelet fattens for the long flight to
+the Alaskan breeding-grounds, and in the wildest
+gales the little nocturnal auklets may be heard
+calling to one another above the warring thunder
+of the surf, or when the nights are clear and the
+mists all banded low beneath the moon, they
+startle the beach wanderer with their high keen
+notes and beetle whirring wings. Long triangular
+flights of curlew drop down these beaches against
+the westering sun, with wings extended straight
+above their heads, furling like the little lateen sails
+come home from fishing. Sandpipers, sanderlings,
+all the ripple runners, the skimmers of the receding
+foam, all the scavengers of the tide, the gulls,
+glaucous-winged, ringbilled, and the species
+that take their name from the locality, may
+be found here following the plough as robins do in
+the spring. When the herring school in the bay
+nothing could exceed the multitude and clamour
+of the herring gulls. They stretch out in close
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_70' name='Page_70'>[70]</a></span>
+order, wing beating against wing, actually over
+square miles of the ruffling water between Point
+Pinos and the anchorage. But any attempt to
+render an account of the wild, winged life that
+flashes about the bays of Carmel and Monterey
+would read like an ornithologist's record.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After storms that divide the waters outside the
+bay into great toppling mountains, in the quiet
+strip between the kelp and the beaches, thousands
+of shearwaters may be seen sleeping in long,
+swaying, feathered pontoons, shoulder to shoulder.
+The island rocks standing within the surf, from
+the Point of Pines all down the coast to Point Sur,
+are famous rookeries of cormorant. Watchful and
+black against the guano-whitened rocks, they guard
+their ancestral nests, redecorated each season with
+gay weed, pulled from the painted gardens of the
+deep; turning their long necks this way and that
+like revolving turret-tops, they beat off the
+gluttonous gulls with a devotion which would
+seem to demand some better excuse than the
+naked, greasy, wide-mouthed young. Warm
+mornings these can be seen stretching black-stemmed,
+gaping bills from the nesting hollows,
+waving this way and that like the tips of voracious
+sea anemones. Other rocks, white with salty
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_71' name='Page_71'>[71]</a></span>
+rime, are given by mutual consent to rookeries of
+the yelping seals, the "sea lions" of this coast.
+Moonlight nights they can be seen playing there,
+with the weird half-human suggestion as of some
+mythical sea creatures.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Other and less fortunate adventurers on the
+waters of Monterey have left strange traces on
+that coast; one stumbles on a signboard set up
+among the rocks to mark where such and such a
+vessel went to pieces in a night of storm. Buried
+deep in the beach beyond the anchorage is the
+ancient teakwood hull of the <i>Natala</i>, the ship that
+carried Napoleon to Elba. It brought secularisation
+to the Missions also, after which unfriendly
+service the wind woke in the night and broke it
+against the shore. Just off Point Lobos, the
+Japanese divers after abalones report a strange,
+uncharted, sunken craft, a Chinese junk blown out
+of her course perhaps, or one of those unreported
+galleons that followed a phantom trail of gold all
+up the west coast of the New World. Strange
+mosses come ashore here, tide by tide, all lacy and
+scarf-coloured, and once we found on the tiny strand
+below Pescadero, a log of sandal-wood with faint
+waterworn traces of tool marks still upon it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Most mysterious of all the hints held by the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_72' name='Page_72'>[72]</a></span>
+farthest west&mdash;for behold, when you have come to
+land again, sailing from this port, it is east!&mdash;of a
+time before our time, is the Monterey cypress.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Across the neck of the peninsula, a matter of
+six or eight miles, cuts in the little bay of Carmel,
+a blue jewel set in silver sand. Two points divide
+it from the racing Pacific, the southern limb of
+Punta Pinos, and the deeply divided rocky ledge
+of Lobos&mdash;Lobos, the wolf, with thin, raking,
+granite jaws. Now on these two points, and
+nowhere else in the world, are found natural
+plantations of the trees that might have grown
+in Dante's Purgatorio, or in the imagined forests
+where walked the rapt, tormented soul of Blake.
+Blake, indeed, might have had a hint of these from
+some transplanted seedling on an English terrace,
+for the Monterey cypress is quick-growing for the
+first century or so and one of the most widely
+diffused of trees; but only here on the Point and
+south to Pescadero ranch do they grow of God's
+planting. With writhen trunks and stiff contorted
+limbs they take the storm and flying scud as
+poppies take the sun. Incredibly old, even to the
+eye, they have no soil, nor seek none other than
+the thousand-year litter of their scaly needles, the
+husk of their nut-shaped, woody cones&mdash;the Spirit
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_73' name='Page_73'>[73]</a></span>
+of the Ancient Rocks come to life in a tree.
+Grown under friendly conditions the young trees
+spire as do other conifers, but here they take
+on strange enchanted shapes. Their flat, wind-depressed
+tops are resilient as springs; one may
+lie full length along them, scarcely sunk in the
+minutely-feathered twigs, and watch the coasting
+steamers trail by on seas polished by the heat, or
+the winter surf bursting high in air. Or one
+could steal through their thick plantations unsuspected,
+from twisty trunk to trunk in the black
+shade, feeling the old earth-mood and man's
+primeval fear, the pricks and warnings of a world
+half made. The oldest of the cypresses are attacked
+by a red fungus rust, the colour of corroding
+time. It creeps along the under side of boughs
+and eats away the green, but even then the twisted
+heart wood will outlast most human things.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i122" id="i122"></a>
+<img src="images/i-122.jpg" width="550" height="398" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">PESCADERO, A CHINESE FISHING VILLAGE,
+MONTEREY BAY
+</p>
+
+</div>
+<p>
+The pines of Monterey, though characteristic
+enough of the locality to take on its identifying
+name, are thoroughly plebeian: prolific, quick-growing,
+branching like candelabra when young;
+but in a hundred years or so their wide limbs,
+studded with persistent cones, take on something
+of the picturesque eccentricity that may be noticed
+among the old in rural neighbourhoods. They
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_74' name='Page_74'>[74]</a></span>
+grow freely back into the hills till they are warned
+away from the cañons by the more sequestered
+<i><span lang='es_ES'>palo colorado</span></i>. The Monterey pine is one of the
+long-needled varieties, but of a too open growth
+perhaps, or too flexile to have any voice but a
+faint rustling echo of the ocean. The hill above
+Monterey, crowned with them, is impressive
+enough; they look lofty and aloof and dark against
+the sky, but growing in a wood they are seen to be
+too spindling and sparse-limbed to be interesting.
+The oaks do better by the landscape, all of the
+<i><span lang='es_ES'>encinas</span></i> variety, bearing stiff clouds of evergreen
+foliage in lines simple enough to compose beautifully
+with the slow scimitar sweep of the bay and
+the round cloud-masses that, gathering from the sea,
+hang faintly pearled above the horizon. There
+are no redwoods on the peninsula; straggling lines
+of them look down from Palo Corona on Carmel
+Bay, walking one after another, with their odd
+tent-shaped tops and long branches all on the
+windward side, like a procession of friars walking
+against the wind. On the Santa Cruz coast, and
+in small groups near Carmel, grows the tan bark
+oak, not a true oak, but of the genus <i>Pasania</i>,
+whose nearest surviving congeners are no nearer
+than Siam. How it came here, survivor of an
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_75' name='Page_75'>[75]</a></span>
+earlier world, or drifting in on the changing
+Japanese current, no one knows. Apparently no
+one cares, for the only use the Santa Crucians have
+found for it is to tan shoe leather.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i127" id="i127"></a>
+<img src="images/i-127.jpg" width="550" height="371" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">CYPRESS POINT, NEAR CARMEL
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Three little towns have taken root on the
+Peninsula: two on the bay side, the old pueblo
+of Monterey with its white-washed adobes still
+contriving to give character to the one wide
+street; Pacific Grove, utterly modern, on the surf
+side of Punta de Pinos, a town which began, I
+believe, as a resort for the churchly minded&mdash;a
+very clean and well-kept and proper town, absolutely
+exempt, as the deeds are drawn to assure
+us, "from anything having a tendency to lower
+the moral atmosphere," a town where the lovely
+natural woods have given place to houses every
+fifty feet or so, all nicely soldered together with
+lines of bright scarlet and clashing magentas and
+rosy pinks of geraniums and pelargoniums in a
+kind of predetermined cheerfulness; in short, a
+town where nobody would think of living who
+wanted anything interesting to happen to him.
+Above it on the hill, the Presidio commands
+the naked slope, fronting toward Santa Cruz,
+raking the open roadstead with its guns. It was
+under this hill on the harbour side, where a little
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_76' name='Page_76'>[76]</a></span>
+creek still runs a rill in the rainy season, that
+Viscaino heard the first mass in California, and
+nearly two hundred years later, Padre Serra set up
+the cross.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On June 30, 1770, that being the Holy Day
+of Pentecost, was founded here the Mission of
+San Carlos Borromeo, afterward transplanted for
+sufficient reasons, over the hill six miles away, on
+Carmel River. The town is full of reminders of
+the days of the Spanish Occupation, when it was
+the capital of Alta California. Old gardens here
+have still the high adobe walls, old houses the long
+galleries and little wrought-iron balconies; times
+yet the tide rises in the streets of the town, and
+still the speech is soft.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is also possible to buy <i><span lang='es_ES'>tomales</span></i> there and
+<i><span lang='es_ES'>enchiladas</span></i> and <i><span lang='es_ES'>chile concarne</span></i> which will for the
+moment restore your faith in certain conceptions
+of a hereafter that of late have lost popularity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Half a mile back from the beach, and divided
+from the town by the old cemetery, in a deep
+alluvial flat grown to great oaks and creeping
+sycamores, is situated one of the famous winter
+resorts of the world, Hôtel Del Monte. I can
+recommend it with great freedom to those curiously
+constituted people who have to have an excuse for
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_77' name='Page_77'>[77]</a></span>
+being out of doors. The Del Monte drives and
+golf links are said by those who have used them,
+to provide such excuse in its most compelling
+form. Those who suffer under no such necessity
+will do well to take the white road climbing the
+hill out of old Monterey, and drop down the other
+side of it into Carmel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the top of this hill the lovely curve of the
+bay, disappearing far to the north under a violet
+mist, is pure Greek in its power to affect the
+imagination. Its blueness is the colour that lies
+upon the Gulf of Dreams; the ivory rim of the
+dunes, the shadowed blue of the terraces set on
+a sudden all the tides of recollection back on
+Salonica, Lepanto, the hill of Athens. You are
+reconciled for a moment to the chance of history
+which whelmed the colourful days of the Spanish
+Occupation. They could never have lived up
+to it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But once on the Carmel side of the peninsula,
+regret comes back very poignantly. The bay is a
+miniature of the other, intensified, the connoisseur's
+collection,&mdash;blue like the eye of a peacock's feather,
+fewer dunes but whiter, a more delicate tracery on
+them of the beach verbena, hills of softer contours,
+tawny, rippled like the coat of a great cat sleeping
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_78' name='Page_78'>[78]</a></span>
+in the sun. Carmel Valley breaks upon the bay
+by way of the river which chokes and bars, runs
+dry in summer or carries the yellow of its sands
+miles out in winter a winding track across the
+purple inlet. It is a little valley and devious,
+reaching far inland. Above its source the peaks
+of Santa Lucia stand up; for its southern bulwark,
+Palo Corona. Willows, sycamores, elder, wild
+honeysuckle, and great heaps of blackberry vines
+hedge the path of its waters.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i136" id="i136"></a>
+<img src="images/i-136.jpg" width="415" height="550" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">SANTA CRUZ MOUNTAINS, THE COAST RANGE
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Where the valley widens behind the low barrier
+that shuts out the sea, sits the Mission of San
+Carlos Borromeo, once the spiritual capital of Alta
+California. Here Junipero Serra, and after him
+the other Padre Presidentes, held the administration
+of Mission affairs, and from here he wandered forth
+on foot, up and down this whole coast from San
+Diego to Solano, with pacification and the seeds of
+civilisation. Here on the walls, faintly to be traced
+beneath the scorn of time, he blazoned with his
+own hands the Burning Heart, the symbol of his
+own inward flame. Here, in his seventy-first year,
+he died and was buried on the gospel side of the
+altar. It is reported that his last act was to walk
+to the doorway to look once, a long look, on the
+hills turning amber under the August sun, on the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_79' name='Page_79'>[79]</a></span>
+heaven-blue water and the white hands of the surf
+beating against the cliffs of Lobos; looked on the
+fields and the orchard planted by his own hand, on
+the wattled huts of the neophytes redeemed, as he
+believed them, to all eternity, after which he lay
+down and slept. It is further reported in the
+annals of the Mission that it was necessary to
+place a guard about the wasted body in its shabby
+brown gown, to defend it from the crowding
+mourners craving each a relic of the blessed
+remains. Had I lived at that time I should have
+been among them, for he was a great soul, and
+have I not felt even at this distance of the years
+the touch of his high fervours! San Carlos is one
+of the best-conditioned of these abandoned fortresses
+of the faith: the ancient pear trees are still in
+bearing, the wild mustard yellows in the fields, its
+architecture still betrays the uncertain hand of the
+savage; back in unsearchable recesses of the hills
+linger still some Indians whose garbled greeting is
+a memory of the <i><span lang='es_ES'>Ama Dios</span></i> which the padres
+taught them. Until a few years ago the prayer-post,
+a rude slab with the triple-knotted cord of
+the Franciscans carved around it, still stood on the
+hill at the end of the path their devout feet made,
+resorting to it for courage and consolation. These
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_80' name='Page_80'>[80]</a></span>
+mementos fade, but year by year the impress of
+the great spirit of Serra grows plainer, like one of
+those trodden paths of long ago which show not
+at all if you seek them in the grass or near at
+hand, but from the vantage of Palo Corona are
+traceable far across the landscape.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The modern Carmel is a place of resort for
+painter and poet folk. Beauty is cheap there; it
+may be had in superlative quality for the mere
+labour of looking out of the window. It is the
+absolute setting for romance. No shipping ever
+puts in at the singing beaches. The freighting
+teams from the Sur with their bells a-jangle, go by
+on the country road, but great dreams have visited
+the inhabitants thereof. Spring visits it also with
+yellow violets all up the wooded hills, and great
+fountain sprays of sea-blue ceanothus. Summer
+reddens the berries of the manzanita and mellows
+the poppy-blazoned slopes to tawny saffron.
+Strong tides arrive unheralded from some far-off
+deep-sea disturbance and shake the beaches.
+Suddenly, on the quietest days, some flying
+squadron of the deep breaks high over Lobos and
+neighs in her narrow caverns. Blown foam,
+whipped all across the Pacific, is cast up like weed
+along the sand and skims the wave-marks with a
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_81' name='Page_81'>[81]</a></span>
+winged motion. Whole flocks of these foam-birds
+may be seen scudding toward the rock-corners of
+Mission Point after the equinoctial winds. Other
+tides the sea slips far out on new-made level
+reaches, and leaves the wet sand shining after the
+sun goes down like the rosy inside pearl of the
+abalone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The forests of Point Pinos are sanctuary. It is
+still possible to hear there at long intervals the
+demoniac howl of the little grey dog of the wilderness,
+"Brother Coyote," the butt, the cat's-paw, the
+Jack Dullard of Indian folklore, and sometimes in
+the open country below Point Lobos to see one
+curious and agaze from brown, naked bosses of the
+hills. Any warm afternoon, by lying very still a
+long time in the <i><span lang='es_ES'>encinal</span></i>, one may observe the
+country-coloured bobcat, tawny as the grass in
+summer, slipping from shade to shade. Sometimes
+if startled he will turn and face you with his blinking,
+yellow, half-hypnotic stare before he returns
+to his unguessed errand. Any morning you may
+find about your bungalow innumerable prints as of
+baby palms pressed downward in the dust, the
+tracks of the friendly little racoons who may be
+heard bubbling in the shallow cañons any moonlight
+night. Often I have left a cut melon under
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_82' name='Page_82'>[82]</a></span>
+my window for the sake of seeing, an hour after
+moonrise, two or three of them scooping out the
+pink heart, spatting one another for helpings out
+of turn, keeping, in spite of the little gluttons you
+know them to be, a great affectation of daintiness.
+The night-cry of these little creatures is difficult
+to distinguish from the love-call of the horned owl,
+who on the undark nights of summer skims the
+low foreshore for the sake of the field-mice and
+gophers that feed on the seeds of the beach grasses.
+Every sort of migratory bird that passes up and
+down this coast lingers a while in the neighbourhood
+of Monterey, and some species, like the Point
+Pinos juncos, take from it their distinctive name.
+But if, when you walk in the woods, the Stellar
+jay has first sight of you, you will find them
+singularly empty, for these blue-jacketed policemen
+of the pines permit nothing to pass them unannounced.
+Of all the wood-folk, the wise quail
+alone ignores their strident warnings. The quail
+have learned not only the certainty of safety but
+its absolute limit. I have seen whole flocks of
+them, scared by the gun, whirring out of the public
+lands to a point not out of gunshot but within the
+forbidden ground, from which they send back soft
+twitterings of defiance. It is not, however, their
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_83' name='Page_83'>[83]</a></span>
+habit to flush except in great danger, but to run to
+cover, moving with a peculiar elusive rhythm, like
+the rippling of a snake. This plump little partridge,
+for it is only in the common speech that he becomes
+a quail, is the apt spirit of the chaparral&mdash;cheerful,
+social, strong in the domestic virtues; his crest not
+floating backward in warrior fashion, but cocked
+forward over an eye, he has all the air of the
+militant bourgeois, who could fight of course, but
+finds that running matches better with his inclinations.
+Just at the end of rains, before mating begins,
+hundreds of them may be seen feeding in the flock
+on open hillsides, and the thickets of buckthorn
+and ceanothus ring with their soft Spanish
+<i><span lang='es_ES'>Cuidado!</span></i>&mdash;Have a care!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Three roads go up out of the peninsula to
+entice the imagination&mdash;that which we have
+already taken to the hills of Salinas and the little
+town of San Juan, the road to Carmel Valley, and
+the adventurous trail which leads all down the well-bitten
+coast past Sur and Pieoras Blancos. The
+Valley road turns off at the top of the divide
+between Carmel and Monterey; it passes on the
+landward side of the Mission into the river-bottom
+and skirts the narrow chain of farms, rising with
+the rise of the thinly-forested hills toward Tasajara,
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_84' name='Page_84'>[84]</a></span>
+the Place of Springs. Here it is lost in the
+intricacies of the "back country." Deer-hunters
+go that way in the season, and those whose delight
+it is to lose themselves in the wilderness, to taste
+wild fruit and know no roof but the windy tent of
+stars. Years since there used to come out of that
+country shy-spoken, bearded men with bear-meat
+to sell and wild honey in the honeycomb, rifled
+from hiving rocks and hollow trees; but I fancy
+they are all dead now, or translated into the tall
+moss-bearded pines.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The coast road, after it leaves Point Lobos
+behind, goes south and south, between high trackless
+hills and the lineless Pacific floor. From the
+Point you can see it rise over bare, sea-breasting
+hills, and disappear in narrow cañons down which,
+it is reported, immeasurable redwoods follow the
+white-footed creeks almost to the surf. Dim,
+violet-tinted islands rise offshore to break the sea's
+assault. Now and then one ventures in that direction
+as far as Arbolado, to return prophesying.
+But the most of us are wiser, understanding that
+the best service the road can render us is to remain
+a dramatic and unlimned possibility.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_85' name='Page_85'>[85]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_87' name='Page_87'></a></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_86' name='Page_86'></a></span>
+</p>
+
+<h2>
+V
+<br /><br />
+<span class="s08">
+OLD SPANISH GARDENS
+
+</span></h2>
+
+<p>
+Dona Ina Manuelita Echivarra had come
+to the time of life when waists were not to be
+mentioned. It took all the evidence of her name
+to convince you that her cheek had once known
+tints of the olive and apricot. Tio Juan, who
+sunned himself daily in her patio, had achieved
+the richness of weathered teak; his moustachios
+were whitened as with the rime that collects on
+old adobes sometimes near the sea-shore. But
+Dona Ina, who missed by a score of years his mark
+of the days of <i><span lang='es_ES'>mañana por la mañana</span></i>, was muddily
+dark, and her moustache&mdash;but one does not suggest
+such things of a lady, and that Dona Ina was a
+lady could be proved by a foot so delicately arched
+and pointed, an ankle so neat that there was not
+another like it in your acquaintance save the mate
+to it.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_88' name='Page_88'>[88]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once you had seen it peeping forth from under
+the black skirt&mdash;have not Castilian ladies worn
+black immemorially?&mdash;you did not require the
+assurance of Tio Juan that there was no one in
+her day could have danced <i><span lang='es_ES'>la jota</span></i> with Dona Ina
+Manuelita.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She would clack the castanets for you occasionally
+still, just to show how it was done, or with
+the guitar resting on the arm of her chair&mdash;laps
+were no more to be thought of than waists were&mdash;she
+would quaver a song, <i><span lang='es_ES'>La Golindrina</span></i> for choice,
+or <i><span lang='es_ES'>La Noche esta Serena</span></i>. But unquestionably
+Dona Ina's time had gone by for shining at anything
+but conversation. She could talk, and never
+so fruitfully as when the subject was her garden.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A Spanish garden is a very intimate affair. It
+is the innermost under-garment of the family life.
+Dona Ina's was walled away from the world by
+six feet of adobe, around the top of which still
+lingered the curved red tiles of Mission manufacture.
+It was not spoken of as the garden at
+all, it was the patio, an integral part of the
+dwelling. There was, in fact, a raw hide cot on
+the long gallery which gave access to it, and
+Dona Ina's drawn-work chemises bleaching in
+the sun. The patio is a gift to us from Andalusia;
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_89' name='Page_89'>[89]</a></span>
+it is more Greek than Oriental, and the English
+porch has about as much relation to it as the
+buttons on the back of a man's coat to the sword-belt
+they were once supposed to accommodate.
+The patio is the original mud-walled enclosure of
+a people who preferred living in the open but were
+driven to protection; the rooms about three sides
+of it were an afterthought.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i150" id="i150"></a>
+<img src="images/i-150.jpg" width="550" height="438" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">THE PATIO, OLD SPANISH RESIDENCE
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+The Echivarra patio did not lack the indispensable
+features of the early California establishment,
+the raised grill or cooking platform, and the ramada,
+the long vine-covered trellis where one took wine
+with one's friends, or the ladies of the family sat
+sewing at their interminable drawn work, <i><span lang='es_ES'>enramada</span></i>.
+The single vine which covered the twenty-foot
+trellis was of Mission stock, and had been planted
+by Dona Ina's father in the year the Pathfinder
+came over Tejon Pass into the great twin valleys.
+In Dona Ina's childhood a wine-press had stood in
+the corner of the patio where now there was a
+row of artichokes, which had been allowed to seed
+in order that their stiff silken tassels, dyed blue
+and crimson, might adorn the pair of china vases
+on either side the high altar. Dona Ina was
+nothing if not religious. In the corner of the
+patio farthest from the gallery, a fig-tree&mdash;this
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_90' name='Page_90'>[90]</a></span>
+also is indispensable&mdash;hung over the tiled wall like
+a cloud. There was a weeping willow in the midst
+of the garden, and just outside, on either side the
+door, two great pepper trees of the very stock of
+the parent of all pepper trees in Alta California,
+which a sea captain from South America gave to
+the Padre at San Luis Rey. Along the east wall
+there were pomegranates.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A pomegranate is the one thing that makes me
+understand what a pretty woman is to some men&mdash;the
+kind of prettiness that was Dona Ina's in the
+days when she danced <i><span lang='es_ES'>la jota</span></i>. The flower of the
+pomegranate has the crumpled scarlet of lips that
+find their excuse in simply being scarlet and folded
+like the petals of a flower; and then the fruit, warm
+from the sunny wall, faintly odorous, dusky flushed!
+It is so tempting when broken open&mdash;that sort
+opens of its own accord if you leave it long enough
+on the bush&mdash;the rich heart colour, and the pleasant
+uncloying, sweet, sub-acid taste. One tastes and
+tastes&mdash;but when all is said and done there is
+nothing to a pomegranate except colour and
+flavour, and at least if it does not nourish neither
+does it give you indigestion. That is what
+suggests the comparison; there are so many
+people who would like to find a pretty woman
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_91' name='Page_91'>[91]</a></span>
+in the same category. Always when we sat
+together nibbling the rosy seeds, I could believe,
+even without the evidence of the ankles, that
+Dona Ina had had her pomegranate days. Only,
+of course, she would not have smelled so of musk
+and&mdash;there is no denying it&mdash;of garlic. Thick-walled
+old adobes of the period of the Spanish
+Occupation give off a faint reek of this compelling
+condiment at every pore, and as for the musk,
+it was always about the gallery in saucers and
+broken flower-pots.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet Dona Ina was sensitive to odours: she
+told me that she had had the datura moved from
+the place where her mother had planted it, to
+the far end of the patio, where after nightfall its
+heavy, slightly fetid perfume, unnoticeable by day,
+scented all the air. She added that she felt
+convicted by this aversion of a want of sentiment
+toward a plant whose wide, papery-white bells
+went by the name of "Angels' trumpets."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the day that she told me about the datura,
+which I had only recognised by its resemblance
+to its offensive wayside congener, the "jimson
+weed," the Señora Echivarra had been washing
+her hair with a tonic made of oil expressed from
+the seeds of the megharizza after a recipe which
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_92' name='Page_92'>[92]</a></span>
+her mother had had from <i>her</i> mother, who had
+it from an Indian who used to peddle vegetables
+from the Mission, driving in every Saturday in
+an ancient caretta. I was interested to know if
+it were any more efficacious than the young shoots
+of the golden poppy fried in olive oil, which I had
+already tried. So we fell to talking of the virtues
+of plants and their application.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We began with the blessed "herb of the saints,"
+dried bunches of which hung up under the rafters
+of the gallery as an unfailing resort in affections of
+the respiratory tract, and <i><span lang='es_ES'>yerba buena</span></i>, in which she
+was careful to distinguish between the creeping,
+aromatic <i><span lang='es_ES'>del campo</span></i> of the woodlands and the <i><span lang='es_ES'>yerba
+buena del poso</span></i>, "herb of the well," the common
+mint of damp places. When she added that the
+buckskin bag on the wall contained shavings of
+<i><span lang='es_ES'>cascara sagrada</span></i>, the sacred bark of the native
+buckthorn, indispensable to all nurseries, I knew
+that she had named two of the three most
+important contributions of the west to the modern
+pharmacopœia. This particular bag of bark had
+been sent from Sonoma County, for south of
+Monterey it grows too thin to be worth the
+gathering. The Grindelia, she told me, had come
+from the salt marshes about the mouth of the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_93' name='Page_93'>[93]</a></span>
+Pajaro, where Don Gaspar de Portola must have
+crossed going northward.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And were you then at such pains to secure
+them?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"In the old days, yes," she assured me. In
+her mother's time there was a regular traffic carried
+on by means of roving Indians in healing herbs
+and simples; things you could get now by no
+means whatever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"As for instance&mdash;&mdash;?" I was curious.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Well, there was creosote gum, which came from
+the desert beyond the Sierra Wall, valuable for
+sores and for rheumatism. It took me a moment
+or two, however, to recognise in her appellation
+of it (<i><span lang='es_ES'>hideondo</span></i>, stinking) the shiny, shellac-covered
+<i><span lang='es_ES'>larrea</span></i> of the arid regions. There were roots also
+of the holly-leaved barberry, which came from wet
+mountains northward, and of the "skunk cabbage,"
+which were to be found only in soggy mountain
+meadows, where any early spring, almost before
+the frost was out of the ground, bears could be seen
+rooting it from the sod, fairly burying themselves in
+the black, peaty loam.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But when it came to <i><span lang='es_ES'>yerba mansa</span></i>, Dona Ina
+averred, her mother would trust nobody for its
+gathering. She would take an Indian or two and
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_94' name='Page_94'>[94]</a></span>
+as many of her ten children as could not be trusted
+to be left at home, and make long <i><span lang='es_ES'>pasears</span></i> into the
+coast ranges for this succulent cure-all. I knew it
+well for one of the loveliest of meadow-haunting
+plants; wherever springs babbled, wherever a
+mountain stream lost itself under the roble oaks,
+the <i><span lang='es_ES'>yerba mansa</span></i> lifted above its heart-shaped
+leaves of pale green, quaint, winged cones on
+pink, pellucid stems. But I had never heard
+one half of the curative wonders which Dona
+Ina related of it. Efficacious in rheumatism,
+invaluable in pulmonary complaints, its bruised
+leaves reduced swellings, the roots were tonic and
+alterative.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I spare you the whole list, for Dona Ina was
+directly of the line of that lovely Señorita who
+had disdainfully described the English as the race
+who "pay for everything," and to her mind it took
+a whole category of virtues to induce so much
+effort as a trip into the mountains which had
+not a <i><span lang='es_ES'>baile</span></i> or a <i><span lang='es_ES'>fiesta</span></i> at the end of it. Other
+things that were sought for by the housewives
+of the Spanish Occupation were <i><span lang='es_ES'>amole</span></i>, or soap-root,
+the bulbs of a delicate, orchid-like lily which
+comes up in the late summer among the stems
+of the chaparral, and the roots of the wild gourd,
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_95' name='Page_95'>[95]</a></span>
+the <i><span lang='es_ES'>chili-cojote</span></i>, a powerful purgative. Green fruit
+of this most common pest, said Dona Ina, pounded
+to a pulp, did wonders in the way of removing
+stains from clothing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then there was artemisia, romero, azalea, the
+blue-eyed grass of our meadows, upon an infusion
+of which fever patients can subsist for days, and
+elder, potent against spells, and there was Virgin's
+bower, which brought us back to the patio, for a
+great heap of it lay on the roof of the gallery,
+contesting the space there with the yellow banksia
+roses. I had supposed, until the Señora Echivarra
+mentioned it, that its purpose was purely ornamental,
+but I was to learn that it had come into
+the garden as <i><span lang='es_ES'>yerba de chivato</span></i> about the time the
+barbed-wire fences of the gringo began to make
+a remedy for cuts indispensable to the ranchero who
+valued the appearance of his live stock. When the
+eye, travelling along its twisty stems and twining
+leaf-stalks, came to a clump of yarrow growing
+at the root of it I began at once to suspect the
+whole garden. Was not the virtue of yarrow
+known even to the Greeks?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was thyme flowering in the damp corner
+beyond the dripping faucet, and pot-marigold,
+lavender, rosemary, and lemon verbena, all plants
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_96' name='Page_96'>[96]</a></span>
+that grow deep into the use and remembrance
+of man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No friend of our race, not even the dog, has
+been more faithful. The stock of these had come
+overseas from Spain&mdash;were not the Phœnicians
+credited with introducing the pomegranate into
+Hispaniola?&mdash;and thence by way of the Missions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All the borders of Dona Ina's garden were
+edged with rosy thrift, a European variety; and
+out on the headlands, a mile away, a paler, native
+cousin of it bloomed gaily with beach asters and
+yellow sand verbenas, but there was no one who
+knew by what winds, what communicating rootlets,
+they had exchanged greetings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Observation, travelling by way of the borders,
+came to the datura, which was to set the conversation
+off again, this time not of plants curative,
+but hurtful. We knew of the stupefying effects
+of the bruised pods and roots of this species, and&mdash;this
+was my contribution&mdash;how the Paiute Indians
+used to administer the commoner variety, called
+<i>main-oph-weep</i>, to their warriors to produce the
+proper battle frenzy, and especially to young
+women about to undergo the annual ordeal of
+the "Dance of Marriageable Maidens."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Every year, at the spring gathering of the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_97' name='Page_97'>[97]</a></span>
+tribes, the maidens piled their dowries in a heap,
+and for three days, fasting, danced about it. If
+they fell or fainted, it was a sure sign they were
+not yet equal to the duties of housekeeping and
+childbearing; but I had had Paiute women tell
+me that they would never have endured the trial
+without a mild decoction of <i>main-oph-weep</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It was different with us," insisted Dona Ina;
+"many a time we have danced the sun up over
+the mountain, and been ready to begin again the
+next evening...." But I wished to talk of the
+properties of plants, not of young ladies.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The mystery of poison plants oppressed me.
+One may understand how a scorpion stings in
+self-protection, but what profit has the "poison
+oak" of its virulence? It is not oak at all, but
+<i>Rhus trilobata</i>, and in the spring whole hillsides
+are enlivened by the shining bronze of its young
+foliage, or made crimson in September. But the
+pollen that floats from it in May in clouds, the
+sticky sap, or even the acrid smoke from the
+clearing where it is being exterminated, is an active
+poison to the human skin, though I had not heard
+that any animal suffered similarly. Dona Ina
+opined that there was never an evil plant let loose
+in the gardens of the Lord but the remedy was
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_98' name='Page_98'>[98]</a></span>
+set to grow beside it. A wash of manzanita tea,
+Grindelia, or even buckthorn, she insisted, was
+excellent for poison oak. Best of all was a paste
+of pounded "soap root." She knew a plant, too,
+which was corrective of the form of madness induced
+by the "loco" weed, whose pale foliage and
+delicately tinted, bladdery pods may be found
+always about the borders of the chaparral. For
+the convulsions caused by wild parsnip there was
+the wonder-working <i><span lang='es_ES'>yerba del pasmo</span></i>. This she
+knew also as a specific for snake-bite and tetanus.
+So greatly was it valued by mothers of families
+in the time of the Spanish Occupation, that when
+a clearing was made for a house and patio, in any
+country where it grew, a plant or two was always
+left standing. But it was not until I had looked
+for it, where she said I would find it between the
+oleander and the lemon verbena, that I recognised
+the common "grease-wood," the chamise of the
+mesa country.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But were there no plants, Dona Ina, which
+had another meaning, flowers of affection, corrective
+to the spirit?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Angelica," she considered doubtfully. Young
+maids, on occasions of indecision, would pin a sprig
+of it across their bosoms, she said, and after they
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_99' name='Page_99'>[99]</a></span>
+had been to church would find their doubts resolved;
+and there was yarrow, which kept your
+lover true, particularly if you plucked it with the
+proper ceremony from a young man's grave.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dona Ina remembered a fascinating volume of
+her mother's time, the <i>Album Mexicana</i>, in which
+the sentimental properties of all flowers were set
+forth. "There was the camelia, a beautiful woman
+without virtue, and the pomegranate&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But the flowers of New Spain, Dona Ina, was
+there nothing of these?" I insisted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Of a truth, yes, there was the cactus flower, not
+the opunta, the broad-leaved spiny sort, of which
+hedges were built in the old days, but the low,
+flamy-blossomed, prickly variety of hot sandy
+places. If a young man wore such a one pinned
+upon his velvet jacket it signified, 'I burn for
+you.'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And if he wore no flower at all, how then?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dona Ina laughed, "<span lang='es_ES'><i><span lang='es_ES'>Si me quieros, no me
+quieros</span></i></span>"; she referred to the common yellow composite
+which goes by the name of "sunshine," or in
+the San Joaquin, where miles of it mixed with
+blue phacelias brighten with the spring, as "fly-flower."
+"In the old Spanish playing-cards," said
+Dona Ina, "the Jack of spades had such a one
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_100' name='Page_100'>[100]</a></span>
+in his hand, but when I was a girl no caballero
+would have been caught saying, 'Love me, love me
+not!' They left all that to the señoritas."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a Castilian rose growing beside me.
+Now a Castilian rose is not in the least what you
+expect it to be. It is a thick, cabbagy florescence,
+the petals short and not recurved, the pink hardly
+deeper than that of the common wild rose, the
+leafage uninteresting. One has to remember that
+it distinguished itself long before the time of the
+tea and garden hybrids, and, I suspect, borrowed
+half its charm from the faces it set off. For there
+was never but one way in the world for a rose
+to be worn, and that is the way Castilian beauties
+discovered so long ago that centuries have not
+made any improvement in it. Set just behind the
+ear and discreetly veiled by the mantilla, it suggests
+the effulgent charm of Spain, tempered by mystery.
+The Señora Echivarra had followed my glance,
+and nodded acquiescence to my thought. "In
+dressing for a <i><span lang='es_ES'>baile</span></i>, one would have as soon left
+off the rose as one's fan. One wore it even when
+the dress was wreathed with other flowers."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And did you, then, go wreathed in flowers?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Assuredly; from the garden if we had them,
+or from the field. I remember once I was all blue
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_101' name='Page_101'>[101]</a></span>
+larkspurs, here and here ..." she illustrated on
+her person, "and long flat festoons of the <i><span lang='es_ES'>yerba
+buena</span></i> holding them together."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It would have taken hoop skirts for that?" I
+opined.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"That also. It was the time that the waltz
+had been learned from the officers of the American
+ships, and we were quite wild about it. The good
+Padre had threatened to excommunicate us all
+if we danced it ... but we danced ... we
+danced...." Dona Ina's pretty feet twitched
+reminiscently. The conversation wandered a long
+time in the past before it came back to the patio
+lying so still, divided from the street by the high
+wall, the clouding fig, and the gnarly pear tree.
+Beyond the artichokes a low partition wall shut off
+the vegetable plot; strings of chili reddened against
+it. There was not a blade of grass in sight, only
+the flat, black adobe paths worn smooth by generations
+of treading, house and enclosing walls all of
+one earth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But if so much came into the garden from the
+field, Señora, did nothing ever go out?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ah, yes, yes&mdash;the land is gracious; there was
+mustard of course, and pepper grass and horehound,
+blessed herb, which spread all over the west
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_102' name='Page_102'>[102]</a></span>
+with healing. The pimpernel, too, crept out of the
+enclosing wall, and the tree mallow which came
+from the Channel Islands by way of the gardens
+and has become a common hedge plant on the
+sandy lands about the bay of San Francisco.
+Along streams which ran down from the unfenced
+gardens of the <i><span lang='es_ES'>Americanos</span></i>, callas had domesticated
+themselves and lifted their pure white spathes
+serenely amid a tangle of mint and wild blackberries
+and painted cup. The almond, the rude
+stock on which the tender sorts were grafted, if
+allowed to bear its worthless bitter nuts would
+take to hillsides naturally. It is not, after all,
+walls which hold gardens but water. This is all
+that constrains the commingling of wild and
+cultivated species; they care little for man, their
+benefactor. Give them water, said Dona Ina, and
+they come to your door like a fed dog, or if you
+like the figure better, like grateful children. They
+repay you with sweetness and healing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A swift darted among the fig, marigolds, and
+portulacca of the inevitable rock-work which was
+the pride of the old Spanish gardens. Great
+rockets of tritoma flamed against the wall, on the
+other side of which traffic went unnoted and
+unsuspecting.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_103' name='Page_103'>[103]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But we, Dona Ina, we Americans, when we
+make a garden, make it in the sight of all so that
+all may have pleasure in it."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Eh, the <i><span lang='es_ES'>Americanos</span></i> ..." she shrugged; she
+moved to give a drink to the spotted musk, flowering
+in a chipped saucer; the subject did not interest
+her; her thought, like her flowers, had grown up in
+an enclosure.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_105' name='Page_105'>[105]</a></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_104' name='Page_104'></a></span>
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i171" id="i171"></a>
+<img src="images/i-171.jpg" width="550" height="334" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">THE GOLDEN GATE AND BLACK POINT, FROM HYDE
+STREET, SAN FRANCISCO. (SITE OF THE PANAMA
+EXPOSITION, 1915)</p>
+</div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_107' name='Page_107'>[107]</a></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_106' name='Page_106'></a></span>
+</p>
+
+<h2>
+VI
+<br /><br />
+<span class="s08">
+THE LAND OF THE LITTLE DUCK
+
+</span></h2>
+
+<p>
+Where the twin rivers set back the tides from
+the bay, the Land of the Little Duck begins. The
+tides come head-on past the Golden Gate and the
+river answers to their tremendous compulsion far
+inland, past the point where the Sacramento and
+San Joaquin flow together. On the lee side of the
+headland which makes the southern pilaster of the
+Gate, sits San Francisco, making of the name she
+borrowed from the bay a new and distinguished
+thing, as some women do with their husbands'
+titles. A better location for a city is Carquinez
+Strait; the Mexican comandante resident at Sonoma
+would have had it there, bearing the name of his
+wife, Francesca. Said he to the newly arrived
+American authorities, "Do so, and I will furnish
+you the finest site in the world, with State house
+and Residence complete." But it appears the land
+has chosen its own name.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_108' name='Page_108'>[108]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All the years after the Pope had divided the
+New World between Spain and the Portuguese, the
+harbour lay hidden. Cabrillo, Drake, Maldonado,
+Juan de Fuca, Viscaino passed it in the night or
+veiled in obscuring fogs. And then Saint Francis
+showed it clear and lovely to Don Gaspar Portola,
+having for that revelation led him with holden
+eyes past his journey's objective. Likewise, when
+the time was ripe, he put it into the mind of the
+Yankee alcalde at Yerba Buena, a trading-post in
+the neighbourhood of Mission Dolores, that if the
+hamlet should be called San Francisco it might
+catch by implication the vessels clearing all ports
+of the world for San Francisco bay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+O Chance, Chance! says the historian and turns
+another page. But it is my opinion that among
+the birds to which Saint Francis preached was
+included the Little Duck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The piers of the city front east, they face the
+Berkeley Hills, the Oaklands, the lands of the
+Sycamore, or, as the first settlers named them, the
+Alamedas. From thence vast settlements take
+their name, feeding the city as sea-birds do, from
+their own breasts. Back and forth between them
+the shuttling ferries weave thin webs of glistening
+wakes, duck-bodied tugs chugg and scuttle, busy
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_109' name='Page_109'>[109]</a></span>
+still at world-building. From the promontory
+which makes the northern barrier of the Gate,
+Tamalpias swims out of atmospheric blueness. On
+its seaward slope, hardly out of reach of the siren's
+bellowing note, Muir Park preserves the ancient
+forest, rooted in the litter of a thousand years.
+And round about the foot of city and mountain
+the waters of the bay are blue, the hills are bluer.
+The hills melt down to greenness in the spring,
+the water runs to liquid emerald, flashing amber;
+the hills are tawny after rains, the waters tone to
+the turbid, clayey river-floods; land and sea they
+pursue one another as lovers through changing
+moods of colour; they have mists for mystery
+between revealing suns. Unless these things count
+for something, San Francisco is the very worst
+site in the world for a city. You take your heart
+in your mouth every time you go out to afternoon
+tea in the tram-cars that dip and swing like cockles
+at sea. They cut across streets so steep that grass
+grows between the cobbles where no traffic ever
+passes, to plunge down lanes of dwellings perched
+precariously as sea-birds' nests on the bare bones of
+hills that for true hilliness shame Rome's imperial
+seven. The bay side of the peninsula is mud, the
+Pacific side is sand. There great wasteful dunes
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_110' name='Page_110'>[110]</a></span>
+blow up, they shift and pile, they take the contours
+of the wind-lashed waters&mdash;the very worst site in
+the world for a great city's pleasure-ground, and
+yet somehow it is there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For this city is one of those which have souls;
+it is a spirit sitting on a height, taking to itself
+form and the offices of civilisation. This is a thing
+that we know, because we have seen the land
+shake it as a terrier shakes a rat, until the form of
+the city was broken; it dissolved in smoke and
+flame. And then as a polyp of the sea draws out
+of the fluent water form and perpetuity for itself,
+we saw our city draw back its shapes of wood and
+stone, and statelier, more befitting a spirit that has
+endured so much. Nobody knows really what a
+city is except that it is something more than a
+collocation of houses. From Telegraph Hill, where
+the old semaphore stood, which signalled the far-between
+arrivals of ships around the Horn, you
+can see the trade of the world pass and repass the
+pillars of the Gate, the wall-sided warships. But
+none of these things really explain how San
+Francisco came to be clinging there to the leeward
+of a windy spit of land, like a great, grey sea-bird
+with palpitating wings.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i180" id="i180"></a>
+<img src="images/i-180.jpg" width="550" height="374" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">TAMALPIAS
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+True to her situation, San Francisco is nothing
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_111' name='Page_111'>[111]</a></span>
+if not dramatic. One recalls that the earliest
+foundation was dedicated to Our Lady of Dolors,
+<i><span lang='es_ES'>Nuestro Señora de Dolores</span></i>; the Indians fought here
+as they did nowhere else against Christian dominion.
+There were more burials than baptisms, and in the
+old cemetery of Yerba Buena the dead were so
+abandoned of all grace that the sand refused to hold
+them. One who spent his boyhood in the shifting
+purlieus of the old Laguna told me how in the
+hollows where the scrub oaks shrugged off the wind
+and the sand waved like water, the nameless coffins
+were covered and uncovered between a night and
+day. But if the dead could not hold their tenancy,
+the living succeeded. They did it by the very
+force of that dramatic instinct awakened by the
+plot and counterplot of natural forces.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No Greek tragedy moved to more relentless
+measures than the moral upheaval of '56, when
+the whole city, in solemn funeral train behind
+the victim of one of those wild outbursts of lawlessness
+peculiar to the "gold rush," saw the lifeless
+bodies of the perpetrators hanging from the upper
+windows of the Vigilance Committee. Fifty years
+later came a wilder rout, down streets searched
+out by fire, snatching at humour as they ran, as so
+many points of contact for the city's rebuilding.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_112' name='Page_112'>[112]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The very worst location in the world, as I have
+remarked, is this windy promontory past which the
+grey tides race, but so long as a city can dramatise
+itself, one situation will do as well as another in
+which to render itself immortal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The bay of San Francisco with its contingencies
+is one of the most interesting of inland yachting
+waters, full of adventurous weather. It is possible
+to sail in one general direction from Alviso to the
+city of Sacramento, a hundred and fifty miles, and
+that without attempting the thousand miles of
+estuary and slough through which the waters slink
+and wind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this season of the year the river is pushed
+backward by the tide a matter of ten miles or
+more above Sacramento City: on the San Joaquin
+it is felt as far as Crow's Landing. At Antioch it
+begins to be saltish, and down through Suisun and
+Carquinez the river-water fights its way as far as
+San Pablo before its identity is wholly lost. At
+flood-times it may be traced, a yellowish, turgid
+streak, as far as Alcatraz. This is the islet of the
+albatross which lies south of the tide race, as
+Tiburon is on the north, fragments all of them of
+that salt-rimed ledge outside the gate where hoarse
+sea-lions play, and brother to the castellated cloud
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_113' name='Page_113'>[113]</a></span>
+far along on the sea's horizon, the very capital of
+the kingdom of the Little Duck.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i185" id="i185"></a>
+<img src="images/i-185.jpg" width="550" height="357" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">MILL VALLEY, AND BACKWATER OF SAN FRANCISCO BAY
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+The Faralone Light is the last dropped astern
+by the Island steamships sagging south to the
+equator; it is also the sea-birds' city of refuge.
+This is the great murre rookery of the west coast,
+and formerly thousands of dozens of eggs were
+regularly taken from the Faralones to the San
+Francisco market; but since the islands became a
+Government station the murres have no enemy
+but the pirates of the air. In clefts and ledges
+close against the wall-sided cliffs they defend their
+shallow nests against the sheering gulls, or, hard
+beset, will push their single, new-hatched nestling
+into the friendlier sea, darting to break its fall with
+incredible swiftness, for a swimming gait is one of
+the things that come out of the shell with the
+native-born at the Faralones. On the same
+shelving rocks puffins rear their ratty young in
+burrows or under sheltering boulders, and the ashy
+petrel, the "little Peter" of the sea, walking by
+night before the storm, comes ashore here to hide
+his seldom nest. On the south Faralone the
+fierce cormorant builds her house of painted weed,
+which often the gulls steal from her as fast as she
+brings it ashore, for the gulls are the grafters of
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_114' name='Page_114'>[114]</a></span>
+the sea-birds' city. This particular variety, known
+as the western gull, neither fishes for himself nor
+forages for building material. He feeds on the eggs
+and nestlings of his neighbours, or waits to snatch
+the day's catch from the beak that brought it up
+from the sea. He has the virtue of all predatory
+classes, an exemplary domesticity. His nest is soft
+and clean, his nestlings handsome. The western
+gull is often found marauding far up the estuary of
+Sacramento, but it is his congener, the herring gull,
+who follows the long white wake the ferries make
+ploughing the windy bay; or, distinguished among
+the silent shore birds for multitude and clamour,
+scavenges its reedy borders.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Except for the promontories north and south,
+and the bold front of the Berkeley Hills opposing
+the Gate, the inland borders of the bay are flat
+tide-lands and sea-smelling lagunas. Stilts, avocets,
+herons, all the waders that haunt this coast or visit
+it in their seasonal flights, may be seen stalking the
+shallows for minnows, or where the marsh grass
+reddens, poised like some strange tide-land blossom,
+lifted on two slender stems. Low over them any
+clear day may be seen the grey old marsh hawk
+sailing, or the "duck hawk," the peregrine of
+falconry, following fiercely in the wake of the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_115' name='Page_115'>[115]</a></span>
+migrating hordes of water-fowl. All about Alviso
+the guttural cry of the black-crowned night-heron
+sounds eerily above the marshes, along with the
+peculiar "pumping" love-song of the bittern.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For some reason the air of the marshes is
+friendly to the mistletoe infesting the oaks and
+sycamores which stand back from the tide-line;
+but the marshes themselves are treeless. They
+have their own sorts of growth, cane and cat-tails
+and tule, goosefoot, samphire, and the tasselled
+sedges. This samphire of Shakespeare, <i><span lang='es_ES'>l'herbe de
+Saint Pierre</span></i> of the Normandy Marshes, is the glory
+of the Franciscan tide-lands; miles of it, barely
+above the level of the slow-moving water, spread
+a magic carpet of blending crimsons, purples, and
+bronzes. Under the creeping mists and subject
+to the changes of the water, beaten to gold and
+copper under the sun, it redeems the flat lines
+of the landscape with a touch of Oriental
+splendour.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For it is a flat kingdom, that of the Little
+Duck&mdash;the hills hanging remotely on the horizon,
+the few trees and scattered hugging the low shore
+of the sloughs as the shipwrecked cling to their
+rafts, desperate of rescue. The rich web of the
+samphire, the shifting colour of the water, faintly
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_116' name='Page_116'>[116]</a></span>
+reminiscent of Venice, borrow another foreign touch
+from the names under which the borders recommended
+themselves to attention:&mdash;Sausalito, "little
+willows," Tiburon, Corta Madero, San Quentin,
+San Raphael. Approached from the water, these
+names, with the exception of San Quentin, do no
+more than stir the imagination. San Quentin, on
+one of those courtesy islands newly rescued from
+the primordial mud, shows itself uncompromisingly
+for what it is, one of those places for the sequestration
+of public offenders, which is itself such an
+offence to our common humanity&mdash;to say nothing
+of our common sense. Free tides, free sails go by,
+and long, untrammelled lines of birds; south above
+the blue bay and bluer shore, the ethereal blue
+dome of Diablo lifts into the free air. Across
+the upper end of San Pablo Bay, which is really
+the north arm of the bay of San Francisco
+extending inland, Mare Island lies so low on the
+water that if it had not been made a naval
+reserve station it is difficult to know to what
+other use it could be put. One expects to have
+the land dip and swing from under like the ship's
+deck. It is in line with the guns which lie beside
+the Gate like watchful, muzzle-pointed dogs, and
+commands the whole upper bay and the opposing
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_117' name='Page_117'>[117]</a></span>
+bluffs of Contra Costa in a manner highly commendable
+to those curious persons whose chief
+excitement lies in anticipating an Asiatic invasion.
+Nevertheless, along with the bastions of San
+Quentin it strikes, somehow, the note of human
+distrust amid all this charm of light and line and
+elusive colour, as if suddenly one should discover
+the tip of a barbed tail under the skirt of some
+seductive stranger.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Between San Quentin and the Straits, all
+about the curve of the bay, winding, wide-mouthed
+sloughs give access to a land as fertile
+as Egypt. A slough is a mere wallow of unprofitable
+waters, waters unused by men and still
+reluctant of the sea. Pushed aside by the compelling
+tides, too undisciplined to make proper
+banks for themselves, they are neglected by all
+but a few fringing willows and shapeless sycamores
+in which the herons nest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Often at evening the white-faced ibis can be
+seen flying in long, voiceless lines, just clearing the
+twilight-tinted water, to their accustomed night
+perches in the wind-beaten willows. They return
+there, if undisturbed, year after year, accompanied
+in few and far-between seasons by the egret and the
+snowy heron, grown man-shy, or if they but knew
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_118' name='Page_118'>[118]</a></span>
+the purpose for which their nuptial plumage is
+sacrificed, woman-shy, and seldom seen even by the
+most wishful eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At Napa a few bull-headed oaks come down
+almost to the tide-line, and in Sonoma a clump
+of alien blue gums huddles aloof and unregarded,
+but from the water little is visible beside the stilted
+cabins of some gun club or the ramshackle resorts
+of the flat-nosed, slow craft that wind on mysterious
+errands between the sunken lands. Whole families
+of half-amphibious humans appear to live comfortably
+on these drifting scows, but one never by any
+chance catches them doing any distinctive thing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The waters of the sloughs come down from the
+little inland valleys, where summer nests and broods
+in a blue haze along the redwood-serried hills.
+Whether it is white with cherry bloom at Napa,
+or purple with winy clusters at Sonoma, there is
+always something interesting going on there of the
+large process by which granite mountains are made
+food for man. It is worth a visit if only to learn
+that a country which does that sort of thing
+supremely well, finds it also worth while to do
+it beautifully. Yachting off San Rafael, it is
+possible to catch at times the scent of roses on an
+off-shore wind above the salt smell of the marshes.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_119' name='Page_119'>[119]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The last rip of the tide is through the Straits
+of Carquinez into the back-water of Suisun. From
+here on, it is a rhythmic heaving to and fro as of
+well-matched wrestlers, the river-water is set back
+to Crow's Landing on the San Joaquin, and miles
+above Sacramento it returns again past Antioch
+and the Suisun islands. It is lost in a wilderness
+of tules, through which the sluggish currents blindly
+wind. Here we have nothing to do with men, our
+business is all with the tribe of the Little Duck:
+mallard, teal, tern, coot, heron, eared grebe, and
+awkward loon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The tule is a round leafless reed. It springs up
+along the tide-lands or in the stagnant back-water
+of the rivers, or by any least dribble of a desert
+spring. No condition daunts it but absolute dearth
+of water; far-called, it travels on the wind over
+mountain ranges, over great wastes of waterless
+plain to find the one absolute condition, a pool&mdash;white
+rimmed with alkali or poisonous green with
+arsenic. I have seen it flourish by springs so
+charged with mineral that each slender column is
+ringed with its stony deposit, but I do not recall
+any standing water where tules are not. The
+stems are filled with papery pith so light that the
+Indians of the San Joaquin made boats of bundles
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_120' name='Page_120'>[120]</a></span>
+of them, faggoted together and tied upon a
+wooden frame.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Year by year the tules reclaim the muddy
+confluence of the twin rivers. They make an
+annual growth, die palely, and are beaten down by
+the wind; between their matted stems the young
+green comes up again. In the Land of the Little
+Duck, miles upon miles of them, and not one other
+thing, stand up on either side the winding water-lanes,
+man-high and impenetrable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Tulare&mdash;the place of the tule&mdash;is the haunt
+not only of water-birds but innumerable insect-catchers,
+and especially of the red-winged blackbirds.
+In the spring these betake themselves to
+the reed-fringed marshes in hundreds, building their
+nests in such neighbourly proximity that the young
+can hop from rim to rim of the tight-slung, grassy
+hammocks. Great clouds of the young birds can
+be seen, just before mating and after nesting in the
+fall, rising from the low islands of the river-junction.
+In the season also the male yellow-headed blackbird
+may be heard singing his sweet but noisy
+cheering-song to his sombre mate as she weaves
+marsh grass and wet pond-weed together as a
+foundation for her home, always prudently completed
+some weeks in advance of any need of it.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_121' name='Page_121'>[121]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i198" id="i198"></a>
+<img src="images/i-198.jpg" width="550" height="371" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">WAITING FOR DUCK&mdash;LOS BAÑOS
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Where the tules thin out along the moving currents,
+numerous woven balls of marsh vegetation hang
+like some strange fruit safely above the summer rise
+of the waters. These are the nests of the tule wren,
+built by the industrious male, with who knows
+what excess of parental care or what intention to
+deceive. All the while he is at work upon them, in
+one, the least conspicuous and apparently the least
+skilfully built, the mother bird nurses the brown
+nestlings with which, suddenly at the end of July,
+all the whispering galleries of the tulares are alive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One who has the courage to penetrate deeper
+within the tulares, past the crazy wooden landings
+of nameless ports at which the flat scows put in,
+past the broken willows where the herons nest and
+the weedy back-waters lie all smoothly green with
+the deceptive duck-weed, will see many wished-for
+sights. Just before dawn and after nightfall the
+inner marshes are vocal with the varied cries of
+coot and mallard and the complaining skirl of the
+mud-hen, the whistling redwing, the bittern booming
+from his dingy pool, and all the windy beat of
+wings. But by day a stillness falls through which
+the clicking whisper of the reeds and the croon
+of the great rivers cradling to the sea reaches the
+sense almost with sound. The air is all alive with
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_122' name='Page_122'>[122]</a></span>
+the metallic glint of dragon-flies; now and then
+the plop of some shining turtle dropping into the
+smooth lagoon, or the frightened splash of a
+marsh-nesting bird, flecks the silence with a flash
+of sound. Here one might see all the duck kind
+leading forth their young broods, or the eared
+grebe swimming with her day-old nestlings on her
+back. If the day is dark&mdash;black clouds with
+lightnings playing under&mdash;one may hear the voice
+of the loon sliding through his sonorous scale to
+shaking, witless laughter. Or perhaps the day's
+sight might be a flock of pelicans on their way to
+their nesting-ground in Buena Vista, breasting the
+shallows, and with beating wings driving a school
+of minnows into some tiny inlet where they may
+be scooped up in the pouched bills, a dozen to a
+mouthful. Better still, some morning mist might
+rise for you suddenly on a strip of sandy shore the
+cranes had chosen for their wild dances, from which
+the stately measures of the Greek are said to be
+derived. Against the yellow sand, as on the background
+of a vase, the dipping figures and white outstretched
+wing draperies make the connection clear
+to you for the moment, along with some other
+things long overlaid in the racial memory.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Always at evening in the tulares the air is
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_123' name='Page_123'>[123]</a></span>
+winnowed by the clanging hordes of geese and
+ducks. Triangular flights of teal wing by you,
+whizzing like bullets, hazy with speed. Beach-nesting
+birds, paddlers in the foodful creeks, go
+seaward. Now and then some winged frigate of
+the open sea, an albatross perhaps blown inland on
+a storm, will climb the air to the sea-going wind.
+Low on the twilight-coloured waters the tule fog
+creeps in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You emerge properly from the vast intricacies
+of the tulares&mdash;if you emerge at all, and are not
+completely mazed and lost in them&mdash;at Sacramento,
+a city but barely rescued from the marsh, and still
+marsh-coloured with the damp-loving lichens.
+<i><span lang='fr_FR'>La Dame aux Camelias</span></i>, to the eye, rich in that
+exotic blossom as no city in the world, but with
+a past, oh, unmistakably, and a touch of hectic
+disorder. The Russians possessed her, and then
+the breed of Jack Hamlin, and then&mdash;but it is
+unfair to list the lovers of a lady of so much charm
+and such indubitable capacity for reformation.
+Sacramento is the State capital, the geographical
+pivot of the great twin valleys; she divides with
+Stockton on the San Joaquin the tribute of their
+waters. It was here on her banks that the overland
+emigrant trains sat down to wait for the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_124' name='Page_124'>[124]</a></span>
+subsidence of waters in the new world of the
+West, from here they scattered to all its hopeful
+quarters.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If the part the city has played in history has
+been that of a hostel, a distributing station, at least
+she has played it to some purpose. There are few
+empires richer than the land the twin rivers drain.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_125' name='Page_125'>[125]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_127' name='Page_127'></a></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_126' name='Page_126'></a></span>
+</p>
+
+<h2>
+VII
+<br /><br />
+<span class="s08">
+THE TWIN VALLEYS
+
+</span></h2>
+
+<p>
+It is geographical courtesy merely, to treat of intramontane
+California as a valley; it is in reality a
+vast, rolling plain. Several little kingdoms of
+Europe could be tucked away in it. North and
+south it has no natural line of demarcation other
+than the rivers meeting for their single assault
+upon the sea, but its diversity deserves the double
+name. They make, the Sacramento rushing from
+the wooded north and the sluggish San Joaquin,
+one of the most interesting waterways of the world.
+I should say they made, for of the San Joaquin one
+must be able to speak in the past also, to understand
+it. One must have seen it before man had
+tamed it and taught it, supine as a lioness in the
+sun.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To arrive at a proper feeling for the continuity
+of the great central plain, it must be approached
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_128' name='Page_128'>[128]</a></span>
+from the south, by way of the old Tejon Pass, up
+from San Fernando, or down the Tehachapi grade
+where the railroad loops and winds through the
+confluence of the Coast Range with the Sierra
+Nevada. Here the hills curve graciously about
+the vast oval of the lower San Joaquin. The
+downthrow of the mountain, stippled with sage-brush,
+gives way to tawny sand glistening here
+and there with white patches of alkali, mottled
+with dark blocks of irrigated land. Its immensity
+is obscured by the haze of heat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One is reduced to the figures of the real estate
+"booster" for terms of proportion. That modest
+checkering of green, hours away to the left, is a
+forty-mile field of alfalfa; beyond it lie the vineyards
+that in less than a quarter of a century
+relegated Spain to a second place in the raisin
+industry of the world. This is the San Joaquin
+of to-day and to-morrow. The white-tilted vans
+of the Argonauts saw it as one vast, overlapping
+field of radiant corollas, blue of lupins, phacelias,
+nemophilias, gold of a hundred packed species of
+composite. Wet years it is still possible for the
+settler in the unirrigated districts to wake some
+morning to blossomy lakes of sky-blueness in the
+hollows; from San Emigdio in the Temblors, I
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_129' name='Page_129'>[129]</a></span>
+have seen, across the whole width of the valley,
+the smouldering poppy fires along the bluffs of
+Kern River. On the mesa below Tejon the moon-white
+gilia that the children call "evening snow"
+unfurls its musky-scented drifts mile after mile.
+But the prevailing note of the San Joaquin is
+tawny russet; gold it will be in the season,
+resplendent as those idols which the Incas overlaid
+yearly with fresh-beaten leaf, and in September
+the barrancas above Bakersfield and Visalia as
+yellow as brass, but all up and down the hill-rimmed
+hollow is every lion-coloured tint contending
+still with the thin belts of planted orchard.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i209" id="i209"></a>
+<img src="images/i-209.jpg" width="391" height="550" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">MIRROR LAKE, YOSEMITE
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Twenty-five years of cultivation have served to
+shift the lines of greenness but not greatly to
+modify the desert key. Once it was all massed
+in the tulares which fringed the series of lakes
+and connecting sloughs, continuing northward from
+the lowest point of the San Joaquin. Kern, Kings,
+Kaweah, Tule, Merced, and Tuolumne, mighty
+rivers, and a hundred lesser singing streams fed it.
+Elk by thousands ramped in its reedy borders.
+It was a haven of nesting water-birds. Whole
+islands were populated by pelicans, repairing there
+annually for the strange, sidling wing-dances that
+attend their mating. Blue herons nested in the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_130' name='Page_130'>[130]</a></span>
+tulares; they could be seen trailing their long
+dangly legs for hours above the shallows. Indians
+paddled in their frail balsas, built of papery, dry
+reeds, down intricate water-lanes in which white
+men venturing, lost themselves and were mazed
+to madness. Malaria of a surpassing virulence
+rode up and down that country on the "tule fogs."
+Even yet it is the dread of the cities of the plain
+to find themselves beleaguered by the thick, ghost-white
+mists that at long intervals roll along the
+ground, retaking the ancient marshes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Into this potential opulence the cattleman precipitated
+himself. He bought&mdash;it is more exact to
+say he acquired&mdash;vast acreage of Spanish grants;
+along the rim of the Coast Ranges, territory equal
+to principalities was given over to long-horned,
+lean herds. All about the old beach-line of the
+San Joaquin may still be seen the remnant of the
+cattle ranches, low formless houses with purlieus
+of pomegranate and pampas grass and black figs,
+and the high, stockaded, acrid-smelling corrals,
+to mark the receding waves of the cattle industry.
+On the Sierra side the guttered mesas, the hoof-worn
+foothills advertise the devastation of the
+wandering flocks. Early in the 'sixties these
+appeared, little, long-armed French and Basques,
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_131' name='Page_131'>[131]</a></span>
+with hungry hordes of sheep at their heels, pasturing
+on the public lands. They ate into the roots
+of the lush grass and left the quick rains to cut
+the soil. The wool in the hand was always worth
+the next season's feed to the sheep-herder.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i215" id="i215"></a>
+<img src="images/i-215.jpg" width="550" height="373" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">AMONG THE REDWOODS OF THE GREAT TWIN VALLEYS
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Never was a land so planned for the uses of
+man, its shielding mountains, its deep alluvial
+terraces sloping gently to the sun. Men read it
+in the hieroglyphic the glistening waters spelled
+between the dark patches of the tulares, but it
+took some experimenting to read the message
+aright.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After the cattle and the flocks came the wheat.
+Up from the meeting waters the land billowed
+with grain. Owners buckled the ploughs together
+and drove them with engines by tens and twenties
+across the thousand-acre fields. But men and
+engines, they were alike driven by the drouth.
+In wet years the wheat rancher rode to view his
+shoulder-high harvest, but when the rains, going
+high and wide over the valley to break along the
+saw-teeth of the Sierras, left the wheat unwatered,
+the same thing happened to the crops that had
+happened to the cattle and the sheep. And at
+last, amid the rotting carcases and the shrivelled
+acres, the message came clear&mdash;not the land, but
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_132' name='Page_132'>[132]</a></span>
+the water. So they shut up the rivers in the
+cañons and the day of the orchardist began.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Geographically it begins at Bakersfield, below
+the gap where the Kern comes down from the
+giant sequoias and is constrained to the wide,
+willow-planted canals, governed by head-gates and
+weirs. Such waters as find again their ancient
+levels, do so by way of the loose sandy soil through
+which they are filtered in vineyard and orchard.
+The tulares have been turned under; the elk are
+strictly preserved in the hope that enough of them
+will breed to serve the purposes of curiosity. The
+antelope bands that once flashed their white rumps
+from bench to bench of the tawny mesas were
+reduced, the last time I saw them, to a scant half-score
+roving the Tejon under the watchful eye of
+the superintendent. But with all this change,
+nowhere as at this diminished end, does one gather
+such an impression of the variety, the imperial
+extent of the San Joaquin. For at Bakersfield is
+one of the world's largest petroleum fields. The
+gaunt derricks rear along the unwatered hills like
+half-formed prehistoric creatures come up out of
+the ground to see what men are about. Reservoirs,
+fed with the stinking juices of a time decayed,
+squat along the barrancas, considering with a slow
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_133' name='Page_133'>[133]</a></span>
+leech-like intelligence the tank cars in the form of
+a Gargantuan joint-worm of the same period that
+produced the derricks, as they clank between the
+oil-fields and the town. One of the largest oil-fields
+in the world&mdash;and yet the turn of the road
+drops it out of sight in the valley's immensity!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bakersfield is a heaven of roses. Doubtless
+there are other things by which the inhabitants
+would be glad to have it remembered, but this is
+the item that the traveller in the season carries
+away with him. Roses do not die there, they fall
+apart of their own sweetness, wafts of which
+envelop the town for miles out on the highway.
+After nightfall, when each particular attar distils
+upon the quiescent air, the townspeople walk
+abroad in the streets and the moon comes up full-orbed
+across the Temblors at about the level of the
+clock-tower. Overhead and beyond it the sky
+retains a deep velvety blueness until long past
+midnight. Traces of colour can be seen sometimes
+in the zenith when the glimmer along the knife-edge
+of the Sierras announces the dawn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+North of Bakersfield, as the valley widens, the
+Coast Range fades to a mere shadow mountain,
+the peaks of Kaweah stand out above the banded
+haze, angel-white like the ranked Host. As the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_134' name='Page_134'>[134]</a></span>
+road swings in to the Sierra outposts, broad-headed
+oaks begin to appear; it skirts the foot of the
+great Sierra fault close enough for the landscape
+to borrow something from the dark, impending
+pines. But for the most part what the observer
+has to consider is soil and water and the miraculous
+product of these two. One must learn to think of
+the land in terms of human achievement.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i224" id="i224"></a>
+<img src="images/i-224.jpg" width="550" height="371" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">CLEAR LAKE, LAKE COUNTY
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+North from the delta of Kern River lies a
+hundred miles of country scarcely disputed with
+the flocks, far-called and few, which still at the set
+time of the year forgather in green swales behind the
+town for the annual shearing, for the herders to play
+hand-ball at Noriegas', to grow riotously claret drunk
+and render an evanescent foreign touch to the brisk
+modern community. And every foot of that
+hundred miles is rife with the seeds of life, awaiting
+the touch of the impregnating water. One holds
+to that conviction as to a friendly assuring hand.
+In the presence of that vast plain, palpitating with
+the heat, the sluggish, untamed water lolling in the
+midst of it, the white-fanged Sierra combing the
+cloudless blue, beauty becomes a poor word:
+appreciation is shipwrecked and cast away. With
+relief one hails the beginning of a stripe, dark green
+like a scarf, scalloping the foothills&mdash;the citrus belt.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_135' name='Page_135'>[135]</a></span>
+From Portersville, Lindsay, Exeter it runs north
+past the meeting of the waters into the valley of the
+Sacramento, and for quality and early fruiting
+sets the figure of the world market. As if its
+waters had some special virtue, wherever a river is
+poured out upon the plain some particular crop is
+favoured. About Fresno it is raisins, at Madera
+port wine, sherry, and mild muscatel. The Merced,
+which takes its rise in the valley of Yosemite, is
+partial to melons and figs. But everywhere are
+prunes, peaches, apricots, almonds, sugar-beets,
+alfalfa, unmeasurable acreage of barley, beans, and
+asparagus. Anything is impressive if the scale be
+large enough, even a field of onions. Here the
+league-long rows are as terrible as an army.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Up and down this empire belt proceed two
+great companies, the hordes of "fruit-hands" and
+the army of the bees, following its successive
+waves of fruit and bloom. Gangs of pruners,
+pickers, and packers are shifted and shunted as the
+crop demands. Interesting economic experiments
+transact themselves under the worried producer's
+eye; alien race contending with alien race. The
+jarring interests of men have by no means worked
+out the absolute solution, but the bees have long
+ago settled their business. They kill the drones
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_136' name='Page_136'>[136]</a></span>
+and gather the honey for the gods who kindly
+provide them with hives&mdash;the more fortunate
+perhaps in knowing what their particular gods
+require.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wherever along the belt the rivers fail, the
+pumps take up the work; strenuous little Davids
+contending against the Goliaths of drouth. They
+can be heard chugging away like the active pulse
+of the vineyards, completing the ribbon of greenness
+that spans from ridge to ridge of the down-plunging
+hills.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then one must take account of the
+cities of the plain! Twenty-five years ago they
+fringed the Sierra base, mere feeders to the mines,
+the cattle ranches, the sheep country. They had
+the manners of the frontier and the decaying,
+tawdry vices that filtered down from San Francisco,
+sluiced out by intermittent spasms of reform.
+They were "wide open." Hairy little herders
+with jabbering tongues knifed one another in the
+shearing season, vaqueros "shot up the town"
+occasionally; it is still within memory that
+prominent citizen "packed a gun" for prominent
+citizen. Twenty years ago the last, most southerly,
+of the chain of settlements was a very cesspool of
+the iniquities driven to a last stand by the influx
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_137' name='Page_137'>[137]</a></span>
+of home-seekers. I who went through the years
+of change with it could tell tales if I would&mdash;but,
+thank Heaven, nobody would believe them! Now
+in those old places of unsavoury renown rise
+handsome "business blocks," the true mark of cities.
+Homes heaped with roses spread on either side of
+miles of palm-fringed boulevard. Over it all flows
+the clear, inspiring current of Sierra-cooled air,
+sliding down from the ranked peaks that, whitened
+from flank to flank by perpetual snows, hover like
+phalanxes of protecting wings.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i230" id="i230"></a>
+<img src="images/i-230.jpg" width="550" height="377" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">CASTLE CRAG, RATTLESNAKE CAÑON
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Into the very thick of the cities drop down
+from the high Sierras trails to all its places of
+delight, the sequoia groves, King's River cañon,
+and all the lordly peaks about Mt. Whitney
+and Yosemite; and setting hillward from San
+Francisco the old Stockton-Sonora road along
+which surged the undisciplined rout of the gold-seekers
+of 'forty-nine. It leads, this earliest of
+valley highways, across the basin of the Stanislaus,
+past places made famous by the red-shirted, lusty
+miners, the sleek-coated gamblers of Bret Harte.
+It passes the twenty-eight Mile House where Jack
+Hamlin ran a poker game, and many a scene
+rendered memorable by the gay ladies of Poker
+Flat. It reaches, by way of a deep-rutted, ancient
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_138' name='Page_138'>[138]</a></span>
+track, choked with the characteristic red dust of
+the country, Table Mountain, the home of Truthful
+James. Table Mountain, having consideration
+for the near-by Sierras, is a hill merely, with a flat
+deposit of <i><span lang='es_ES'>malpais</span></i>, the "black rock" of regions
+far north and east. Beyond Sonora lie the old
+placer "diggings," every foot of which has been
+combed and sifted for gold. The bones of the
+earth are laid bare; all the masking clay, tossed
+and tumbled, clogged with rusty pipes and decaying
+sluices, lies in heaps and depressions where the
+gold-seekers cast it. The sense of violation is
+heightened by the hue of the soil, redder than the
+hills of Devon, redder than a red heifer&mdash;but the
+river furnishes the more descriptive figure, the
+martyr hue of the Sacrament. In the flood season
+it carries the tint of its ensanguined clays far down
+into the bay's blueness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The remnant of that riotous life,&mdash;the abandoned
+cabins, the towns falling into dissolution,&mdash;like the
+remaining specimens of the fir and redwood forests
+cut off to timber the Mother Lode, is left standing
+by unfitness. The best of it is a little nugget of
+remembrance of Francis Bret Harte and Mark
+Twain.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i235" id="i235"></a>
+<img src="images/i-235.jpg" width="415" height="550" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">McCLOUD RIVER, UPPER SACRAMENTO VALLEY
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+It was at Angels in the foothills of Calaveras
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_139' name='Page_139'>[139]</a></span>
+that Twain, to his everlasting fame, was so
+impressed with the performance of the Jumping
+Frog. But life at Angels and all up and down
+that placer country is as heavy with desuetude as
+the frog was after the bar-keeper had fed him with
+buckshot. As well try to get a draught of that
+old time as a drink at any of the dismantled bars,
+high, ornate, black walnut affairs across which, in
+dust and nuggets, passed and repassed probably as
+much gold as would serve to buy the orange belt
+of the San Joaquin&mdash;and for a figure of magnificence
+you would find nothing more acceptable to
+its inhabitants.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Much of the history of that country is written
+in the names. Here the soft Spanish locutions
+give place to harsher, but not less descriptive,
+Americanisms&mdash;Jimtown, Jackass Hill, Squaw
+Creek; the cañons become "gulches," the mesas
+"flats." Later both of these were overlaid by
+-villes and -tons, the plain rural names of Anglo-Saxon
+derivation, Coulterville, Farmington, Turlock.
+They smell of orchards. Prosperity is
+coming back on the surface of the fruitful waters,
+but the redwood forests have not come back.
+Centuries, nothing less, are required for the building
+of one of these towers of greenness, and it is
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_140' name='Page_140'>[140]</a></span>
+barely forty years since all that district was one
+roaring blast of mining life, rioting, jostling,
+snatching each from each. In the language of the
+country, the Italian truck gardeners will "beat
+them to it." They have smoothed over the old
+"slickens" and comforted the land with crops.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As one travels north, the bulk of the Sierra
+lessens, the pines climb higher, the oaks march
+well down into the middle valley to catch the wet
+coast winds, the character of the plantations
+change, there are more grain fields, more neat
+little farms. Finally the old Overland emigrant
+trail climbs down from Donner Lake and Emigrant
+Gap, and you find yourself deep in the Valley of
+the Sacramento.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By an air-line from the meeting of the waters,
+its geographical frontier is passed in the neighbourhood
+of Sonora; perhaps the bridge over the
+Mokelumne is a better indicator, since that river
+joins the San Joaquin at the estuary, but it is not
+until the Overland road is crossed that the
+character of the country definitely betrays the
+upper valley.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ascending the river, the works of man are
+less and less, the forest and the mountains more.
+The rapid rise of the wooded slopes keeps the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_141' name='Page_141'>[141]</a></span>
+Sacramento troublous. Tributaries, not large
+but swift and of tremendous volume, pour into it.
+Occasionally from dark cañons is heard the steady
+pound of the quartz mill, working some ancient
+lead, or a smelter blocks out a whole forested slope
+with its poisonous exhalations; but for the most
+part the northern valley is given over to brooding
+quiet, to unending green, and streams as swift as
+adders.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In Mendocino county, on the coast side, the
+Range begins to lift toward the snow-line; on the
+Sierra side the alpine crest shears away. From
+time to time the "logging" industry cuts a wide
+track down the redwood forest. One hears above
+the singing rivers, the clucking of the donkey-engine
+or the rip of a mill still going in the midst
+of its self-created, sawdust desert. The glutting of
+the lumber region has been accomplished as wastefully,
+as violently, as the search for gold. All up
+the valley tall prophets of the rain have been
+butchered to make a lumberman's fat purse. But,
+link by link, the forestry bureau is closing in the
+line of the reserves against the lumber "kings,"
+the Ahabs of a grasping time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hills fall into a certain order, serried rank
+on rank. Deciduous growth of the lower slopes
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_142' name='Page_142'>[142]</a></span>
+gives way to redwoods and Shasta fir. Miles
+upon miles of them stand so thick that when one
+dies it does not fall but remains erect in the arms
+of its brothers. Great columnar boles rise out of
+the river-basins, soaring high over what, except for
+their dwarfing proportions, would be a considerable
+grove of graceful oak and bay and glistening,
+magnolia-leafed, crimson-shafted madroño. Over
+these the redwoods rise, as over the heads of
+worshippers the clustered columns of Milan seek
+the dome. High up the tops are caught in a froth
+of pale-green foliage through which the sunlight
+filters blue. This characteristic refraction from
+their yellowish, inch-long needles dwells about the
+redwood as an aura, and far on the horizon
+distinguishes their ranks from the hill-slopes
+masked with pines. So, blue ridge on ridge, they
+advance on the imperious height of Shasta.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i244" id="i244"></a>
+<img src="images/i-244.jpg" width="550" height="395" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">DONNER LAKE, ON THE OLD EMIGRANT TRAIL
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Shasta is a brother of Fuji and Tacoma, one of
+those solitary crater peaks whose whiteness is the
+honourable age of fiery youth, a good mountain
+dead and gone to heaven. Do not go up on it;
+you will see a great deal more of what you have
+seen, wooded hills on hills and perhaps the sapphire
+belt of the sea, the glitter of lovely, sail-less lakes,
+but you will not understand it any better, for
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_143' name='Page_143'>[143]</a></span>
+Shasta has no more to do with the abutting ranges
+than a great genius with the stock which produced
+him. This is a prophet among mountains, a vent
+from the burning heart of creation. One is not
+surprised to learn that the Indians hereabout
+count their descent from the Spirit of Shasta
+and the Grizzly Bear. That dark belt of forest
+circling the mountain's base looks to be the proper
+haunt for him, the lumbering, little-eyed embodiment
+of brute creation. It is well to think of
+those two things together, the rip of those mighty
+claws with a ton or two of brute bulk behind
+them, and the awful witness towering to the blue,
+and suffer the soul-satisfying fear that lies in wait
+for man in the great places of the earth. All our
+modern fears are mean, fears of the common
+opinion and the bill collector. Shasta will have
+done its best for you if it enables you to quake in
+the very marrow of consciousness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After this it is well to turn southward along the
+Coast Range, camping by the trout-abounding
+rivers, losing yourself in the stiff laurels and
+azaleas of Mendocino, fishing at the clear lakes
+cupped in the hollows. If the season is right
+there will be salmon running in Klamath and
+Trinity rivers or deer in the steep-sided cañons.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_144' name='Page_144'>[144]</a></span>
+And everywhere there will be the redwoods. It is
+not, however, in the crowds that the tree reveals
+itself. Far down the deforested hills of Sonoma,
+in isolated groves, in small groups or singles on the
+tops of bossy, brass-coloured hills, it takes on
+character and charm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A redwood grove is a three-story affair. On
+the ground floor, turned rusty brown, as though the
+sunlight filtering through had mellowed there a
+thousand years, creep the wild ginger, the rosy-flowered
+oxalis, trilliums, and violets. All these
+lower rooms are crowded with dogwood, with the
+great berried manzanitas, woodwardias, man-high,
+and glistening bays, silver-tipped with light. By
+one of those strange but charming affinities of wild
+life, the redwood grove is the peculiar haunt of
+lilies. Every variation of the soil&mdash;the peat bogs
+of the coast, the high sandy ridges, the damp
+meadows&mdash;has each its appropriate variety; and
+not merely lilies, but droves of them, hundreds of
+swaying stems, files of them up the line of seeping
+springs or round the bases of great boulders, lilies
+breast high, lilies overhead, ruby-spotted, golden-throated,
+shining white, dowered with the special
+genius of perfume. Along the chaparral-covered
+slope and deep within the cañons one tracks
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_145' name='Page_145'>[145]</a></span>
+them by the subtle, intoxicating scent spreading,
+as I am persuaded no other perfume does, by a
+conscious distillation on the melting air.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i249" id="i249"></a>
+<img src="images/i-249.jpg" width="381" height="550" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">LAUREL LAKE, UPPER SACRAMENTO
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+The second redwood story, that wondrous space
+of blue-diffusing sun, between the deciduous underforest
+and the fairy web of redwood green, is bird
+and squirrel haunted. Jays flash back and forth,
+bright flickers of the humming-bird go buzzing by.
+Woodpeckers may be heard calling the ever-missing
+"Jacob, Jacob!" who must in their opinion
+be concealing himself somewhere about the upper
+story. The wire-drawn warble of the brown creeper
+follows the singer up and down the deeply
+corrugated trunks. Wrens, sparrows, juncos, all
+manner of little feathered folk in whose coats the
+tones of brown predominate, frequent the pillared
+middle rooms. Once I heard what I thought to
+be a hermit thrush, singing out of the dusk of
+Muir Wood. But I have not the art of knowing
+birds by note. People who live much in the redwoods
+find them silent; I think it might more easily be
+that the great trunks and green-shot glooms have the
+same quality of dwarfing sound as size. Redwoods,
+as I know them, are really lighter and more alive
+than any other coniferous forests, but the <i>effect</i> of
+umbrageous stillness is induced by vast proportions.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_146' name='Page_146'>[146]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As for what goes on in the upper rooms, who
+has been there? What birds arise to their three- or
+four-hundred-foot heights? The few and slight
+boughs, the feathery layers of foliage rounding in
+age to sloping crowns, who knows them but the
+wind and the snows that neither stir nor are stayed
+by them? There are some matters that the great
+Twin Valleys keep even from the men for whom
+they have borne an empire.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_147' name='Page_147'>[147]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_149' name='Page_149'></a></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_148' name='Page_148'></a></span>
+</p>
+
+<h2>
+VIII
+<br /><br />
+<span class="s08">
+THE HIGH SIERRAS AND THE
+SAGE-BRUSH COUNTRY
+
+</span></h2>
+
+<p>
+The proper vehicle for mountain study is not yet
+available. A great mountain range is like a great
+public character, there is much more to it than is
+presented to the observation, and it is not open to
+familiarity. But if one could fly high and wide
+over its cloud-lifting summits, one might learn
+something of its private relations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From such a vantage it would instantly appear
+how distinct are the Nevadas (<i><span lang='es_ES'>nieve</span></i>, snowy) among
+the Sierras of California. A very Bonaparte of
+mountains, new-born and lording it over the
+ancient ranges, not content with its vast empery
+but swinging north into the unpre-empted icy
+regions. San Bernardino and San Jacinto are as
+far from it as the Faubourg St. Germain from an
+island in the sea. Sierra Madre is of the Coast
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_150' name='Page_150'>[150]</a></span>
+Range; Shasta a fire-hole, a revolutionist; the true
+Sierra is the midriff of a continent. From its
+northern extremity one sees the sun in a circle
+and the Northern Lights; that portion of it we
+know as Sierra Nevada swings into the state above
+Honey Lake, and ends southward in a tumble of
+blunt peaks below Kern River. This is quite
+enough, however, for Californians to make free
+with, and more than they can appreciate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Geographically the range begins on the south
+at Tehachapi, but at Walker's Pass, a day's
+journey to the north, is the first appearance of
+its most salient characteristic, the great Sierra
+Fault. In its youth the range suffered incredible
+cataclysms. For two hundred miles the great
+eastern plain dropped; weighted as it was with
+its withered aristocracy of hills&mdash;how weazened
+and old you can see to this day&mdash;it tore sharply
+downward, and the depth of that fall from the
+heaven-affronting peak of Whitney to the desert
+valley of Inyo is a matter of two miles of sheer
+descent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The whole Sierra along the line of faultage
+has the contour of a wave about to break. It
+swings up in long water-shaped lines from the
+valley of the San Joaquin, and rears its jagged
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_151' name='Page_151'>[151]</a></span>
+crest above the abrupt desert shore. Seen from
+close under, some of these two- and three-thousand-foot
+precipices have the pitch of toppling waters.
+As they rose new-riven from the earth their
+proportions must have been more than terrifying.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Later the Ice Age bore downward from the
+north, and through immeasurable years carved the
+fractured granite into shapes of enduring beauty.
+It rounded the great jutting fronts, it insured
+them against the tooth of time with the keen
+icy polish with which they shine still against the
+morning. It gouged narrow wall-sided cañons,
+cut the course of rivers, and sinking like a
+graver's tool into the heart of the range, scooped
+out deep wells of pleasantness. Afterward, when
+the ice was old, it must have moved more slowly,
+for the lines it left, retreating northward, are
+more flowing, the hill-crowns rounder. And then
+the mountain was besieged with trees. They
+stormed it, scaled its free precipices; you can
+see by the thick mould of the valleys what
+ranks and ranks of them went down, and along
+the snow-line how by the persistence of assault
+they are bent and contorted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This is the whole effect of the sombre swathes
+of pine that mask the Sierra slopes. They march
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_152' name='Page_152'>[152]</a></span>
+along the water-courses, they climb up sheer
+precipices in staggering files, trooping in the
+passes; across the smooth meadow spaces they
+lock arms, they await the word of command.
+By a very little observation they are seen to
+be ranged in orderly companies. Here a warm
+current of air travelling steadily from the superheated
+valleys carries the life zone higher, there
+a defiant bony ridge drops it a few thousand
+feet, but the relative arrangement of species does
+not greatly vary. The broad oaks, like reverend
+grandsires, from the foothills see the procession go
+by, they follow as far as the gates of the mountain,
+crutched and bowed. All the lower cañons are
+full of a rabble of deciduous trees, chinquapins,
+scrub oak, madroño, full of gay camp-followers,
+lilac, dogwood, azaleas, strumpet penstemons,
+flaunting lupins, monk's-hood, columbine.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i262" id="i262"></a>
+<img src="images/i-262.jpg" width="343" height="550" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">YOSEMITE FALLS
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+The grey nut pine, wide-branched, unwarlike
+but serviceable, opens the ranks of conifers. Then
+the long-leaved pines begin, <i><span lang='es_ES'>ponderoso</span></i>, <i>Coulteri</i>,
+and the slender, arrowy, fire-resisting <i>attenuata</i>.
+On the western slope, increasing as they go northward,
+the redwood holds all the open country, but
+it is no climber like <i><span lang='es_ES'>monticola</span></i>, the largest of all
+true pines, the captain of the Sierra forests. The
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_153' name='Page_153'>[153]</a></span>
+firs usurp the water-borders and the low moraines;
+clannish, incommunicable, they seem not to find
+it worth while to grow unless they grow stately.
+Above all these range the thin-barked pines, the
+lodgepole, Douglas spruce, librocedrus, and hardy
+junipers in windy passes. About the meadows
+and lake-borders the quaking asps push like
+children between the knees along the line; and
+highest, most persistent, the creeping-limbed,
+wind-depressed white-barked pine, under whose
+matted boughs the wild sheep bed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The trees have each their own voice&mdash;a degree
+of flexibility or length of needles upon which the
+wind harps to produce its characteristic note. The
+traveller in the dark of mountain nights knows his
+way among them as by the street cries of his own
+city. The creaking of the firs, the sough of the
+long-leaved pines, the whispering whistle of the
+lodgepole pine, the delicate frou-frou of the redwoods
+in a wind, these come out for him in the
+darkness with the night scent of moth-haunted
+flowers. But there is one tree that for the footer
+of the mountain trails is voiceless; it speaks no
+doubt, but it speaks only to the austere mountain-heads,
+to the mindful winds and the watching stars.
+It speaks as men speak to one another and are not
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_154' name='Page_154'>[154]</a></span>
+heard by the little ants crawling over their boots.
+This is the "big tree," the sequoia. In something
+less than a score of forest patches about the rim
+of the Twin Valleys, the sequoia abides, out of
+some possible preglacial period, out of some past
+of which nothing is left to us but the fading
+memory of the "giants in those days." The age
+of individual big trees can be computed in terms
+of human history. There are evidences written
+in the rings of these that they endured the
+drouth which made the famine in the days of
+Ahab the king, against which Elijah prayed.
+These are growing trees whose seeds are fertile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One might make a very dramatic collocation of
+the rise and fall of empires against the life period
+of a single sequoia, and that would be easier than
+to transcribe by mere phrases the impression of
+one of these green towers of silence on the sense.
+Single and deeply corrugated as a Corinthian
+column, with only a lightly-branched crown for a
+capital, they spire for five thousand years or so, and
+then the leaf-crown becomes rounded to a dome
+in which the winds breed. Warm days of Spring,
+their young nestling zephyrs come fluttering
+down the deep wells of shade to shake the saplings
+of a hundred years. In Summer the fine-leafed
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_155' name='Page_155'>[155]</a></span>
+foliage catches the sun like spray, diffusing
+vaporous blueness; but the majesty of their
+gigantic trunks is incommunicable. After a while
+the stifling sense of awe breaks before it, and
+you go on with your small affairs as children will
+go on playing even in the royal presence.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i267" id="i267"></a>
+<img src="images/i-267.jpg" width="550" height="378" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">BLUE LAKE, LAKE COUNTY
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+The name <i>Sequoia</i> is one of the few cheering
+notes among our habitual botanical stupidities&mdash;an
+attempt to express quality as it is humanly
+measured in a name. There was once an
+American Cadmus, Sequoyah, a Cherokee who
+invented an Indian alphabet and taught his tribe
+to read. Seeing them outnumbered in their own
+territory, he started west with the idea of founding
+a great Indian empire. He was last seen trailing
+north across the desert and was heard of no more.
+Tradition has it that he reached the forest of the
+upper Kern River and gave the trees his name.
+At least no botanist with his nose in a book has
+usurped it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Forests are for cover. They mask not only the
+naked rock, but the paths of deer and bear and
+bighorn. Under the spire-pointed ranks of conifers
+that look so black from above, verging to blueness,
+a world of furtive folk goes on. A world of
+birds is in its branches, squirrels nimble as
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_156' name='Page_156'>[156]</a></span>
+sparrows, but scarcely anything of this is visible
+to the watcher on the heights. Rabbits playing
+on your lawn would be more noticeable in
+proportion than the seldom-seen bighorn leading
+his light-footed young from ledge to rocky ledge.
+The jealous trees cover the trails and obscure the
+passes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As you come up through them you observe
+the flat, soddy spaces of old lake basins, green as
+jewels, and the hanging meadows gay with cascades
+of flowers, the stream tangles, the new-made
+moraines bright with bindweed and sulphur-flower.
+But from the heights all this lovely detail is
+hidden by the overlapping tents of boughs. Here
+and there a stream leaps forth at the falls like a
+sword from a green scabbard, or higher up, may be
+traced as the silver wire on which are strung
+unrippled lakes as blue as cobalt. Great chains of
+such lakes lead down from the snow-line to the
+foothill borders, encroached upon by the silent
+ranks of trees. As they go down they show
+soddy borders, they tend to fill and to grow
+meadows where presently deep-rooting trees
+assume their stations. This is the strategic rule
+for the taking of a granite mountain. First the
+grinding ice and the disintegrating water; what the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_157' name='Page_157'>[157]</a></span>
+streams wash down collects in the glacier-ploughed
+basins. It makes lake borders by which the
+grass comes in&mdash;the small grass that is mightier
+than mountains, that eats them for its food.
+Lakes at the lower levels become meadows, then
+trees arrive; they overrun the soddy ground, the
+snow-manured moraines. The trees themselves
+take centuries to fruition. At a later stage men
+dispossess the forest and build cities, but this has
+not yet come to the Sierras. There is something
+indomitable in the will of the trees to spread and
+climb. In the floor of Yosemite and Hetch
+Hetchy there are hundred-year-old oaks of full
+form and generous growth, and on the slopes
+above them the same oaks and of almost the same
+age are so dwarfed by drouth and altitude that
+they are not knee-high to a man, but they keep
+the due proportions of their type. A white bark
+pine will climb where the weight of the winter
+drifts is so heavy that it is never able to lift its
+decumbent trunk from the ground, clinging like
+ivy to the wall in which it roots.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the Spring the rich florescence of the conifers
+sheds pollen in drifts that, carried down the melting
+water, warn the sheep-herder and the orchardist
+a hundred miles away of the advancing season.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_158' name='Page_158'>[158]</a></span>
+A pine forest in flower is one of the things worth
+seeing which is most seldom seen, for at its best
+the high passes are still choked by snow, the lakes
+ice-locked, the trails dangerous. And then the
+blossoms, yellow and crimson tassels and rosy
+spathes, are carried on the leafy crowns high over
+the heads of the most adventurous foresters.
+What one finds, as late as the end of June when
+the trails are open, is a stain of pollen on the
+lingering snow, and great clouds of it flying wherever
+a bough is brushed by a light wing. In the
+autumn the whole wood is full of the click and
+glint of the winged seeds. Storms of them, like
+clouds of locusts, are carried past on the wind, to
+be dropped in the nearest clearing or to find a
+chance lodging in a moss-lined crevice of the
+weathered headlands.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i276" id="i276"></a>
+<img src="images/i-276.jpg" width="550" height="359" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">LAKE TAHOE, THE HIGH SIERRAS
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+But from the heights, all feeling for the process
+of the forest is lost in the sense of its irresistible
+march&mdash;it creeps and winds, it waits darkly for the
+word. Above the tree-line no sound ascends but
+a faint vibration, the body of sound making itself
+felt in the silence. On windless days the forest
+lies black like weed at the bottom of a lake of air
+as clear as a vacuum. When the great wind
+rivers pour about the peaks, it can be seen lashing
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_159' name='Page_159'>[159]</a></span>
+like weed in the currents, but still almost soundlessly&mdash;the
+roar of it passes down the cañons, and
+is heard in the cities of the plain. But if the peaks
+cannot hear what the trees are plotting about, it is
+not so with the voices of the water. These are
+sharper, more definitive; they rise re-echoing from
+the rocky walls and are recognisable each by its
+distinctive note at incredible heights of the sheer,
+glassy, granite frontlets.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the glacial valleys, such as Yosemite, Tehipite,
+and Hetch Hetchy, where young rivers drop
+from the headlands in long streaming falls, the
+noise of them contending with the wind makes
+mimic thunder. Immense curtains of falling
+water are tossed this way and that, they are
+caught up and suspended in mid-air, and let fall
+crashing to the lower levels. When the wind
+blows straight up the cañon they will rear
+against it, and leap out a shining arc, shattering
+in mid-air like bursting bombs of spray. But
+later in the season, when the streams are heavy
+with the melting snows, the wind itself is
+shattered by the weight of falling water&mdash;it
+exhausts itself in obscuring clouds of silver dust.
+When from Whitney or Williamson or King's
+Mountain you can see half-a-hundred such young
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_160' name='Page_160'>[160]</a></span>
+rivers roaring to the morning, it is as beautiful
+and as terrifying as the sight of youth to timorous
+age. They go leaping with their shining shields,
+and their shouting shakes the rocks. Neither you
+nor they believe that the most and the best they
+will come to is an irrigating canal between sober
+rows of prunes and barley.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Higher than the forests, or the waters rising
+out of them, is the <i>Py-weack</i>, the Land of Shining
+Rocks. They shine with glacier polish; horses on
+the high trails sniff suspiciously at their glittering
+surfaces. Time can lay slight hold on them by
+thunder, by frost, and the little grey moss; it has
+not yet subdued the front of Oppapago. Here
+between snowless ribs and buttresses are the
+shrunken glaciers that feed the streams, little toy
+models of the ancient rivers of ice. The snowfields
+of the Sierras are not so inconsiderable as
+they seem: they are dwarfed by the precipices
+among which they hide. Inaccessible to ordinary
+mountain travel, they make their best showing
+from the surrounding plains, where, lifted in the
+middle air, they glow with ethereal whiteness.
+Close by they display a bewildering waste of
+broken ice, boulders, and crevasses, made bleaker
+by the cobalt shadows.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_161' name='Page_161'>[161]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i281" id="i281"></a>
+<img src="images/i-281.jpg" width="550" height="373" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">MOUNT SHASTA&mdash;SIERRA GLOW
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+North the line of peaks stretches, broken by the
+passes that give access to the west. Between
+them, above the source of streams, in the ice-gouged
+hollows, lie unfathomable waters that take
+all their life from the sky. Or perhaps they are
+reservoirs from which the sky is made, fluid jade
+and azulite and hyacinth and chrysoprase, as if
+the skies of many days had run their colours in
+those bleak bowls. For at this altitude the wave
+contour of the range comes out most sharply; the
+sky is strangely deep and darker, as if through its
+translucence one glimpsed the void of space. One
+sees the moon and the planets wandering there with
+pale lamps held aloft.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No life of any sort is visible from here. Farther
+down toward the coast, over the forested moraines,
+the condor may be seen leaning against the wind at
+sunrise. On the edge of the abysmal cañons eagles
+make their nests and go dropping down the
+shadowy depths to seek their food from God, but
+they do not rise to these stark heights. Sometimes
+a clanging horde of water-fowl, beating up
+from the Gulf of California overland to the
+Canadian marshes, will grow bewildered in the
+face of the great wall-sided cliffs; circling they
+attempt the forward flight, only to circle and
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_162' name='Page_162'>[162]</a></span>
+rise anew, until, wing-weary in that thin air, they
+sink exhausted to the margin of a mountain lake,
+satisfied at last to thread their way humbly along
+the creek-beds to open country.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The live forces of the High Sierra are the
+forces of wind and light. One feels the push
+of tremendous currents flowing between the
+peaks as among rocky islands. Day by day
+they may be charted by the cloud fragments
+floating on them, by the banners of dry snow
+dust, streaming out like long grass from the
+island shores. Thundering fleets of cumuli drift
+up the wind rivers and assault the great domes
+of Whitney and Oppapago. The light breaks
+through all the varying cloud strata, and colours
+them with splendour; the glow of the clouds
+reflected on the snow is caught by the watchful
+mountain-lover far down the valleys of Inyo and
+San Joaquin. This painted hour of sunset is the
+apotheosis of mountains, but for me it has less
+of majesty than the morning after deep snows.
+These come usually early in the season. The
+air for days will be full of the formless stir, then
+the range withdraws itself behind a veil which
+closes from tented peak to peak, and includes
+sometimes the parallel desert ranges which lie
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_163' name='Page_163'>[163]</a></span>
+along its eastern coast. Twenty feet will fall in
+a single session of the white gods behind the veil.
+Then comes a morning blue and sharp as a
+spear-thrust. Every tree is like an arrow feathered
+in green and white. Airy bridges built upon the
+bending stems shut in the water-courses; the
+moraines are smooth and soft as the backs of
+huddled sheep. By night the range shows from
+the valley as a procession of winged figures holding
+the snows upon their bosoms. And that, after
+all, is the business of mountains. The western
+front of the Sierra Nevada, which receives the
+full force of the Pacific storms, is rewarded
+with the stateliest forests. Before those extended
+snowy mountain arms lie the great Twin
+Valleys; behind them stretches the illimitable sage-brush
+country, the backyard of the Sierra.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i287" id="i287"></a>
+<img src="images/i-287.jpg" width="550" height="365" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">VALLEY OF THE YOSEMITE
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+"Sage-brush country" is one of those local
+terms that stand for a type of landscape as
+distinctive as the moors of England and the
+campagna of Italy. It means first of all, open
+country, great space of sky, what the inhabitants
+of it call "eye-reach," treeless except for a few
+cotton-woods and willows along the sink of intermittent
+streams, and stippled with low shrubs of
+artemesia. This is the true "sage-brush," though
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_164' name='Page_164'>[164]</a></span>
+it is no sage, the sacred bush of Diana, <i>Artemisia
+tridentata</i>. It may grow in favoured districts
+man-high, but ordinarily not more than two or
+three feet in the arid regions which it haunts.
+Other social shrubs will be found pre-empting
+miles of the territory to which the artemesia
+gives its name, <i>coleogeny</i>, <i>pursia</i>, <i>dalia</i>, "creosote,"
+but none other gives it the distinctive feature, the
+web of pale, silky sage-green against the sun-burned
+sand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Other items of the sage-brush landscape are so
+constant that they are immediately suggested by it:
+mountains hanging on the horizon in opalescent
+haze, low flowing lines of hills overlaid by old
+lava-flows, the "black rock" simulating cloud
+shadows on the distant ranges, dry red cones of
+ancient volcanic ash, and great flat table-topped
+"buttes" of the painted desert.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White-crested ranges on the one hand and
+buttes on the other mark the limits of the sage;
+for where snow-caps are, there are trees, and where
+the buttes begin the cactus and the palo verde
+reign.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A sage-brush country is a cattle country
+primarily; perhaps there may be mines; where
+there is water to be stored for irrigation there will
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_165' name='Page_165'>[165]</a></span>
+be towns, but the virtue of the sage is that it
+grows in lands that man, at least, has found no
+other use for.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It can thrive on an allowance of water that will
+support no larger thing than a chipmunk or a
+lizard, and, growing, feeds the cattle on a thousand
+hills. Therefore it is indispensable to any picture
+of the sage-brush country that there should be
+herds at large in it and vaqueros riding, or far
+down the bleached valley the dust of a rodeo rising.
+It is impossible to think of such a land and not
+think of these things, free life, and air as clear and
+vibrant with vitality as a bell. I can never think
+of it myself without seeing, in addition, the
+vultures making a merry-go-round over Panamint,
+and up from Coso the creaking line of a twenty-mule
+team.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sage-brush country of California begins
+properly at the foot of the Sierras where the state-line
+sheers east by south from Lake Tahoe. It
+covers the high valleys that divide the true Sierra
+from the older, lesser ranges that keep it company
+as far south as Olancha. Below Mono Lake, that
+part of the gold region made immortal by Mark
+Twain, it gives to the chrome- and ochre-tinted soil
+its distinguishing characteristic. From the long
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_166' name='Page_166'>[166]</a></span>
+arm of Death Valley it begins to be encroached
+upon by the mesquite, and at Indian Wells it is
+driven close under the lee of the last Sierra. The
+range of which San Bernardino and San Jacinto
+are outposts carries the artemisia farther desertward,
+almost to the Colorado River in fact, and
+south again about the Salton Sea it holds its own
+with sahuro and palo verde. Its eastern border,
+like that of the wild tribes along the Mojave line,
+is lost in pure desertness. Formerly much of that
+country from San Bernardino to the sea was native
+to the sage, and all the southern end of the San
+Joaquin. But now all this is replaced with
+orchards, for the artemisia proves nothing so much
+of the soil on which it grows as that, given a due
+allowance of water, it is as desirable for other
+things.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i296" id="i296"></a>
+<img src="images/i-296.jpg" width="550" height="409" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">THE HALF DOME, YOSEMITE
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+All this country which I have described to you
+has so recently been sea that the mark of its old
+beach-line is plainly to be traced along the east
+Sierra wall. Still the evaporating water leaves
+vast deposits of salt and alkali, blinking white in
+the sink of Death Valley. There are lakes there
+still where the salt crusts over hard and clear like
+ice, and deep thick puddles of bitter minerals, the
+lees of that ancient inland ocean. From the top
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_167' name='Page_167'>[167]</a></span>
+of any of the denuded desert ranges it is possible
+to trace the winding bays and estuaries, and, with
+an eye for location, to choose the points at which
+one may fairly expect to find potsherds, amulets,
+fire-blackened hearthstones, and the middens of a
+nameless people who built their primitive towns
+along its beaches. It must have had much to
+recommend it in those days before the sage-brush
+took it, for this inland sea, rather than the more
+mountainous Pacific shore, was the route taken by
+the ancient migratory peoples who left their
+undecipherable signs scored into the rocks from
+the Aztec country to the Arctic. On isolated
+igneous rocks near their old encampments, and high
+on the walls of the box canons, such as might have
+been tide-rifts, high above any mechanical contrivance
+of the present-day Indians, the records
+resist equally the shifts of sea and sand and the
+efforts of modern science to read them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Whether the ghosts of the departed peoples ever
+revisit the ancient beaches, the ghosts of waters
+haunt there daily. Morning and mid-afternoon the
+rivers of mirage arise; they well out of the past
+and are poured trembling on the plain; phantom
+fogs blow across them, wraiths of trees grow up
+and are reflected in false streams. Often in very
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_168' name='Page_168'>[168]</a></span>
+early light there are strange suggestions of&mdash;&mdash;dunes
+and boulders perhaps? Only no boulders
+in that country are flat-topped like the houses
+built in lands of the sun, and no dunes are wall-sided.
+Mirage, we are told, is but a picture of
+distant things, mirrored on atmospheric planes, but
+then maybe a ghost is only a mirage deflected on
+our atmosphere from worlds outside our ken, and
+it is always easy in the desert to see things that
+you cannot possibly believe. Whatever they are,
+mirages are real to the eye. I mean that they are
+not to be winked away nor dissipated by contact.
+I have watched a vaquero ride into one of them
+and drown to all appearances, or seem to be
+swimming his horse across its billows, all of him
+below its surface as completely hidden as by rivers
+of water. Moreover, mirages tend always to occur
+under given conditions and in the same places. I
+recall one of the stations on the old Mojave stage
+road, which, approached from the north about
+an hour after sunrise, would instantly duplicate:
+two houses, two lines of poplars, two high
+corrals.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i302" id="i302"></a>
+<img src="images/i-302.jpg" width="550" height="391" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">SHASTA&mdash;SNOW CLOUDS
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Occasionally along the edge of the sage-brush
+country one may see that surpassing wonder, the
+moon mirage, poured like quicksilver along the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_169' name='Page_169'>[169]</a></span>
+narrow valleys, as if the thirsty land had dreamed
+of water.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is odd how this suggestion of sea and river
+clings to a country where there is nothing harder to
+come by than good water to drink. For any other
+purpose it is not to be thought of. After one of
+those terrible wind storms, the only really incommoding
+desert weather, it is possible to find great
+spaces all rippled and lined in water-markings like
+a sea that has suddenly undergone a magic transformation
+into sand. The contours of the desert
+ranges are billowy; they rise out of the plain like
+the grey-backed breakers of open sea. The valleys
+between are narrow and trough-like; the shores of
+them are lined with crawling dunes that, under
+the steady pressure of wind currents, are for ever
+sliding up their own peaks and down the other side,
+changing place without ever once losing the long
+slope to windward and the abrupt landward fall of
+waves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another item which adds to the suggestion of
+the illimitable spread of sage-brush country, like
+the sea, is the way the sparse forests of the
+mountain-tops appear to be islanded by it. For
+the sage-brush extends on across the Great Basin,
+it stretches into Montana and south to Arizona
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_170' name='Page_170'>[170]</a></span>
+and New Mexico, it works about the lower end
+of the Rocky Mountains and well into the great
+central plain. The ranges lie thick in it as ocean
+swells, as I have said, and stepping from crest to
+crest has come the fox-tail pine, <i>Pinus flexilis</i>, all
+the way from Humboldt Mountain to San Jacinto.
+A sinewy, thinly-branched species, as straight-backed
+as an Indian, it has little affinity for its
+noble congeners of the Sierra forests, but keeps to
+the dry and open ridges, nourished by clouds and
+by infrequent shallow snows. With it, but at
+lower levels to which the <i>flexilis</i> will never come,
+is found frequently the one-leaved piñon pine, the
+food-crop of the wild tribes. But the piñon is a
+pushing sort, it establishes itself upon the slightest
+invitation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is a story told in the desert of how this
+grey, round-headed tree was once a very great
+<i><span lang='es_ES'>capitan</span></i>, who, in order that his death might be as
+beneficent to his people as his life had been, was
+changed into the foodful pine. Whether the legend
+is true or not, certain it is that if you sit down by
+a piñon, wherever found, and stay long enough,
+you will see Indians. They might come in the
+Spring looking for <i>taboose</i>, or later for willows and
+grasses for basketry, for seeds of sunflower and chia,
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_171' name='Page_171'>[171]</a></span>
+to shoot doves by the water-holes or to hunt chuckwallas.
+A chuckwalla is a lizard, a kind of dragon in
+miniature, barred black and white, and as offensive
+to look at as he is harmless, in fact very good
+eating and not too plentiful. Mojaves, Shoshones,
+Paiutes, Pimas, all the tribes of the sage-brush
+country, have this in common, that they live very
+close to the earth; roots, seeds, reptiles, thick pads
+of the cholla cactus, even the grass of the field,
+serve them. They look, indeed, as though they
+had been made of the earth on the very spot that
+produced them, of the black rock, the brown sand,
+and the dark water that collects in polished basins
+of the wind-denuded ranges.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Very little rain gets past the heaven-raking
+crest of the Sierra Nevada into the sage-brush
+country; the most that falls is blown up from the
+Gulf of California along the draw created by the
+close, parallel desert ranges. It is precipitated
+usually under atmospheric conditions that produce
+violent drops and changes. All that the traveller
+is likely to find of it is in these rock reservoirs
+under the run-off of some bare granite cliff, or in
+the rare, persistent "water-holes" hollowed out by
+beasts or men, marked in the landscape by one
+lone tree perhaps, or a clump of shrubby willows.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_172' name='Page_172'>[172]</a></span>
+Often there will be no mark at all except the
+frequency along the trail of skeleton cattle or wild
+sheep, pointing all in one direction, as they died
+on their way to the far-between drinking-places.
+There are districts in this back-door country where
+evaporation from the body is so rapid that death
+overtakes the chance prospector even with water in
+sight or in his canteen across his back. For years
+a notorious outlaw protected himself in the Death
+Valley region, by filling in all the springs in a circle
+about the territory to which he had retreated.
+Beyond that waterless rim even the law could not
+penetrate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet how the land repays the slightest
+moisture! Years when the Kuro-Siwa swings
+closer to our coast and the winds are friendly, I
+have seen all that country, from Tehachapi, outside
+the wall, to San Gorgiono, one sheet of blue and
+gold. Seeds of a hundred tender annuals lie in the
+loose sands for years between the shrubby sage,
+their vitality unimpaired by the delayed resurrection
+of a chance wet spring. Often I have sifted the
+sand in my fingers looking for a sign of the life-giving
+principle which bursts so suddenly into
+beauty, without finding it. Yet after years in
+which there is no alteration in the aspect of the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_173' name='Page_173'>[173]</a></span>
+country, except the insensible change of the sage
+tints from grey to green and grey again, the miracle
+takes place, the blossomy wonder is upon the
+world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As a matter of fact, the sage-brush country is by
+no means the desert that it looks to the casual eye.
+Besides the social shrubs which have each their own
+blossom and seed time, even the driest years will
+afford a few blooms of crimson mallow, and in the
+shelter of every considerable shrub some dwarfed
+and delicate phacelia or nemophilia. Even out of
+dunes which bury its hundred old trunks to the
+new season's twigs, the mesquite will bear its sweet
+foodful pods. If you know at what hours to look
+for it, wild life is never absent, but it is not ordinarily
+to be found by white men blundering about in
+broad noon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is only when you meet, in the midst of great
+open valleys wherein there is nothing growing
+higher than the knees of your horse, and nothing
+moving bigger than the little horned toad under
+the cactus bush, bands of Indians well fed, cushiony
+with fat of mesquite meal and chia, that you
+understand how little you know of the land in
+which you move.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is a Paiute proverb to the effect that no
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_174' name='Page_174'>[174]</a></span>
+man should attempt the country east of the Sierras
+until he has learned to sleep in the shade of his
+arrows. This is a picturesque way of saying that
+he must be able to reduce his wants to the limit of
+necessity. Those who have been able to do so, and
+have trusted the land to repay them, have discovered
+that the measure is over-full.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A man may not find wealth there, nor too much
+of food even, but he often finds himself, which is
+much more important.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_175' name='Page_175'>[175]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<h2>
+INDEX
+</h2>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>The illustrations are indexed in italics.</i>
+</p>
+
+<ul class="none">
+<li class="alpha">
+Alcatraz, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Alviso, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Angels, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Antioch, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Arbolado, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+"Arroya," definition of, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+Bakersfield, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Berkeley Hills, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Blue Lake, Lake County</i>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Buena Vista, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+Cabrillo, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Cahuenga, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Calaveras, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Camulas, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Cañon in the Sierra Madres</i>, <a href="#i077">49</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Carmel, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Carmel River, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Carmel Valley, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Carquinez, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Carquinez Strait, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Castle Crag, Rattlesnake Cañon</i>, <a href="#Page_137">136</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Castro, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Catalina, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Cemetery, The, Santa Barbara Mission</i>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Cession of California from Mexico, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Clear Lake, Lake County</i>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+"Coasts of Adventure, The," <a href="#Page_47">47</a>-<a href="#Page_60">60</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Colorado River, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Contra Costa, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Coronado, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Coronel, Don Antonio, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Corta Madero, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Coso, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Coulterville, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Cypress Point, near Carmel</i>, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+Death Valley, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Donner Lake</i>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Donner Lake, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Drake, Sir Francis, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+Eagle Rock, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Emigrant Gap, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Eucalyptus Grove, A</i>, <a href="#i053">33</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Exeter, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+Faralones, The, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Farmington, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Fort Point, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Francis of Assisi, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Franciscan "Frailes," <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Frémont, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Fresno, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Fuca, Juan de, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+<i>Glendale, Valley of the San Gabriel</i>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Golden Gate, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Golden Gate and Black Point</i>, <a href="#i171">107</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Gulf of California, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_176' name='Page_176'>[176]</a></span>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+<i>Half Dome, The, Yosemite</i>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Hamlin, Jack, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Harte, Bret, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Hetch Hetchy Valley, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+"High Sierras and the Sage-Brush Country, The" <a href="#Page_149">149</a>-<a href="#Page_174">174</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Hôtel Del Monte, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Humboldt Mountain, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+Indian Wells, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Inyo Valley, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+Jackass Hill, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Jimtown, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Jumping Frog, the, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+Kaweah Mountain, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Kaweah River, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Kern River, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+King's Mountain, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+King's River, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+King's River Cañon, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Klamath River, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Kuro-Siwa Current, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+Laboratory Point, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Lake Mono, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Lake Tahoe, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Lake Tahoe</i>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+"Land of the Little Duck, The," <a href="#Page_107">107</a>-<a href="#Page_124">124</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Laurel Lake, Upper Sacramento</i>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Lindsay, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Looking down on Monterey and the Bay</i>, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Lopez, Francisco, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Los Angeles, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Los Angeles River, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+<i>McCloud River</i>, <a href="#i235">139</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Madera, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Maldonado, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Mare Island, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Mendocino Country, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Merced River, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Mill Valley</i>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Mirror Lake, Yosemite</i>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Mission Dolores, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Mission Point, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Mission River, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Mission of San Carlos Borromeo, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Mission San Fernando, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Missions, ruins of, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Mokelumne River, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Monterey, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+"Monterey, the Port of," <a href="#Page_63">63</a>-<a href="#Page_84">84</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Monterey Cypress, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+"Mothering Mountains," <a href="#Page_27">27</a>-<a href="#Page_24">24</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Mount Oppapago, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Mount Shasta, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Mount Shasta</i>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Mount Whitney, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Mount Williamson, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+Napa, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Noriega's, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+Olancha, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+"Old Spanish Gardens," <a href="#Page_87">87</a>-<a href="#Page_103">103</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+Pacific Grove, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Padre Jayme Bravo, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Padre Lausan, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Padre Serra (Junipero Serra), <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Paiute Indians, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Pajaro, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Pajaro river, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Pala, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+"Palatingwas," <a href="#Page_20">20</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Palo Corona, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Panamint, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Pasadena, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Paso Robles, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Patio, The, Old Spanish Residence</i>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Pescadero, Monterey Bay</i>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Pieoras Blancos, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Point Conception, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Point Lobos, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Point of Pines, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Point Pinos, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_177' name='Page_177'>[177]</a></span>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Point Sur, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Portersville, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Portola, Don Gaspar de, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+<i>Redlands</i>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Redwoods</i>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+"Rio," A, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Riverside, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+Sacramento, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Sacramento River, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+"Sage-Brush country," meaning of term, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Salinas, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Salinas River, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Salton Sea, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Sausalito, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Antonio, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+"San Antonio," the, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Bernardino, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Carlos, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Clemente, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Diego, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Diego, Bay of, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>San Diego, looking towards Point Loma</i>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Emigdio, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Fernando, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Francisco, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Francisco, Bay of, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Gabriel, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Gabriel Valley, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Gorgiono, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Gorgiono, Pass of, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Jacinto, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Joaquin, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Joaquin River, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Joaquin Valley, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Jose, Señor, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Juan, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Juan Bautista, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Juan Capistrano, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Luis Rey, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Pablo, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Pablo Bay, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Quentin, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Raphael, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Santa Barbara, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Santa Catalina, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Santa Clara, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Santa Cruz Coast, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Santa Cruz Mountains, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Santa Cruz Mountains, the Coast Range</i>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Santa Inez, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Santa Margarita, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Santa Rosa, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Sequoia, origin of name, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Shasta&mdash;Snow Clouds</i>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Sierra Madre, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Sierra Nevada, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Sierra Nevada, origin of name, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Sierras, the, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Solano, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Sonoma, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Sonoma County, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Sonora, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+"Sparrow-Hawk's Own, The," <a href="#Page_3">3</a>-<a href="#Page_23">23</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Squaw Creek, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Stanislaus River, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Stockton, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Suisun, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Sur, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Sycamores, a Coast Range Cañon</i>, <a href="#i095">59</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+Table Mountain, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Tall Chaparral, Santa Cruz</i>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Tamalpias, Mount, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Tamalpias</i>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Tasajara, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Tehachapi, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Tehipite Valley, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Tejon, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Tejon Pass, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Temblors, The, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>"Three Brothers, The," Yosemite</i>&mdash;<i><a href="#i001">Frontispiece</a></i>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Tiburon, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_178' name='Page_178'>[178]</a></span>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Trinity River, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Truthful James, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Tulare, the, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Tule River, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Tuolumne River, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Turlock, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Twain, Mark, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+"Twin Valleys, The," <a href="#Page_127">127</a>-<a href="#Page_146">146</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+<i>Valley of the Yosemite</i>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Visalia, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Viscaino, Sebastian, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+<i>Waiting for Duck&mdash;Los Baños</i>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Walker's Pass, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Warner's Ranch, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+Yerba Buena, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Yosemite Falls</i>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Yosemite Valley, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>
+</li>
+</ul>
+
+<p class="center p4">
+THE END
+</p>
+
+<p class="center s08 p4">
+<i>Printed by</i> <span class='smcap'>R. &amp; R. Clark, Limited</span>, <i>Edinburgh</i>.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_179' name='Page_179'>[179]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i314" id="i314"></a>
+<img src="images/i-314.jpg" width="481" height="550" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">SKETCH MAP ACCOMPANYING "CALIFORNIA" BY SUTTON PALMER AND MARY AUSTIN (A. AND C. BLACK, LONDON).
+</p>
+<p class="caption"><a href="images/i-314lg.jpg">View larger image</a></p>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_180' name='Page_180'>[180]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 44764 ***</div>
+</body>
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-001.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-001.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0c32f42
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-001.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-006.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-006.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d1504c0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-006.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-021.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-021.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ab82a83
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-021.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-034.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-034.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1854b8c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-034.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-053.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-053.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..73de64b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-053.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-066.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-066.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ab26134
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-066.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-077.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-077.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f98fc1c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-077.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-090.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-090.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9406893
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-090.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-095.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-095.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2077ad0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-095.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-104.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-104.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..80340b0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-104.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-109.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-109.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cdcb3a4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-109.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-122.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-122.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e55f738
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-122.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-127.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-127.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ffdec59
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-127.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-136.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-136.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e7b442d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-136.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-150.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-150.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7548bf5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-150.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-171.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-171.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f392c75
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-171.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-180.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-180.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..37b4d82
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-180.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-185.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-185.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ca8e435
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-185.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-198.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-198.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3403a49
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-198.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-209.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-209.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8cdb304
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-209.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-215.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-215.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cf7fecb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-215.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-224.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-224.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..911aaa4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-224.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-230.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-230.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b4de08a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-230.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-235.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-235.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c7ab0eb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-235.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-244.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-244.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e5a1648
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-244.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-249.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-249.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0f4fb7a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-249.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-262.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-262.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..89b517a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-262.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-267.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-267.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c41e359
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-267.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-276.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-276.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7f2e9e1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-276.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-281.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-281.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f9836cd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-281.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-287.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-287.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8cc14b4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-287.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-296.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-296.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..847bc8d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-296.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-302.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-302.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..68a272e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-302.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-314.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-314.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2096240
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-314.jpg
diff --git a/44764-h/images/i-314lg.jpg b/44764-h/images/i-314lg.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..dfb8587
--- /dev/null
+++ b/44764-h/images/i-314lg.jpg
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7a53425
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #44764 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44764)
diff --git a/old/44764-0.txt b/old/44764-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..42cee6f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,4173 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of California, by Mary Austin
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: California
+       The Land of the Sun
+
+Author: Mary Austin
+
+Illustrator: Sutton Palmer
+
+Release Date: January 26, 2014 [EBook #44764]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CALIFORNIA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Melissa McDaniel and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+  Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have
+  been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
+
+  Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
+
+  On page 18, "arroya" should possibly be "arroyo."
+
+  On page 53, "gaumet" should possibly be "gamut."
+
+  On page 134, the text is "Noriegas'."  The Index shows "Noriega's."
+
+  "Tamalpias" should possibly be "Tamalpais."
+
+
+
+
+  [Illustration: THE THREE BROTHERS, YOSEMITE VALLEY]
+
+
+
+
+CALIFORNIA
+
+
+
+
+     _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
+
+     THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN
+     A WOMAN OF GENIUS
+     THE LOVELY LADY
+     ETC.
+
+
+     AGENTS
+
+     America           The Macmillan Company
+                         64 & 66 Fifth Avenue, New York
+
+     Australasia       The Oxford University Press
+                         205 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
+
+     Canada            The Macmillan Company of Canada, Ltd.
+                         St. Martin's House, 70 Bond Street,
+     Toronto
+
+     India             Macmillan & Company, Ltd.
+                         Macmillan Building, Bombay
+                         309 Bow Bazaar Street, Calcutta
+
+
+
+
+     CALIFORNIA
+
+     THE LAND OF THE SUN
+
+     PAINTED BY
+     SUTTON PALMER
+
+     DESCRIBED BY
+     MARY AUSTIN
+
+
+     ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
+     4, 5, & 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.
+
+
+
+
+     _Published Autumn 1914_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                            PAGE
+  I. The Sparrow Hawk's Own                                    1
+  II. Mothering Mountains                                     25
+  III. The Coasts of Adventure                                45
+  IV. The Port of Monterey                                    61
+  V. Old Spanish Gardens                                      85
+  VI. The Land of the Little Duck                            105
+  VII. The Twin Valleys                                      125
+  VIII. The High Sierras and the Sage-brush Country          147
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+  1. The Three Brothers, Yosemite Valley             _Frontispiece_
+                                                        FACING PAGE
+  2. San Diego, looking across the Bay toward Point Loma          9
+  3. Redlands, looking toward San Bernardino Range               16
+  4. A Eucalyptus Grove                                          33
+  5. Glendale, Valley of the San Gabriel                         40
+  6. A Cañon in the Sierra Madre                                 49
+  7. The Cemetery, Santa Barbara Mission                         56
+  8. Sycamores, a Coast Range Cañon                              59
+  9. Tall Chaparral, Santa Cruz                                  62
+  10. Looking down on Monterey and the Bay                       65
+  11. Pescadero, a Chinese Fishing Village, Monterey Bay         72
+  12. Cypress Point, near Carmel                                 75
+  13. Santa Cruz Mountains, the Coast Range                      78
+  14. The Patio, Old Spanish Residence                           88
+  15. The Golden Gate and Black Point, from Hyde Street,
+      San Francisco. (Site of the Panama Exposition,
+      1915)                                                     107
+  16. Tamalpias                                                 110
+  17. Mill Valley, and Backwater of San Francisco Bay           113
+  18. Waiting for Duck--Los Baños                               120
+  19. Mirror Lake, Yosemite                                     129
+  20. Among the Redwoods of the Great Twin Valleys              131
+  21. Clear Lake, Lake County                                   134
+  22. Castle Crag, Rattlesnake Cañon                            136
+  23. McCloud River, Upper Sacramento Valley                    139
+  24. Donner Lake, on the old Emigrant Trail                    142
+  25. Laurel Lake, Upper Sacramento                             145
+  26. Yosemite Falls                                            152
+  27. Blue Lake, Lake County                                    155
+  28. Lake Tahoe, the High Sierras                              158
+  29. Mount Shasta--Sierra Glow                                 161
+  30. Valley of the Yosemite                                    163
+  31. The Half Dome, Yosemite                                   166
+  32. Shasta--Snow Clouds                                       168
+     _Sketch Map at end of Volume._
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE SPARROW-HAWK'S OWN
+
+
+For a graphic and memorable report of the contours of any country, see
+always the aboriginal account of its making. That will give you the lie
+of the land as no geographer could sketch it forth for you. California
+was made by Padahoon the Sparrow-Hawk and the Little Duck, who brooded
+on the face of the waters in the Beginning of Things.
+
+There is no knowing where the tale comes from, for Winnenap the
+Medicine-Man who told it to me, was eclectic in his faiths as in his
+practice. Winnenap was a Shoshone, one of the group who had been forced
+southward into Death Valley when the great Pah Ute nation had split
+their tribes like a wedge. In the last of their wars he had been taken
+as a hostage by the Paiutes and brought up by them. He might have
+remembered the story, or his wife might have told him. She was a tall
+brown woman out of Tejon, and _her_ mother was of that band of captives
+taken from San Gabriel by the Mojaves, Mission-bred. Wherever it came
+from, the tale has its roots deep in the land it explains.
+
+Padahoon, being wearied of going to and fro under the heavens, said
+to the Little Duck that it was time there should be mountains; so the
+Little Duck dived and brought up the primordial mud of which even the
+geographers are agreed mountains are made.
+
+As he brought it the Sparrow-Hawk built a round beautiful ring of
+mountains enclosing a quiet space of sea. Said the Little Duck, "I
+choose this side," coming up with his bill full of mud toward the west.
+Whereupon the Sparrow-Hawk built the other side higher. When it was all
+done and the Little Duck surveyed it, he observed, as people will to
+this day, the discrepancy between the low western hills and the high
+Sierras, and he thought the builder had not played him fair. "Very
+well, then," said the Sparrow-Hawk, "since you are resolved to be so
+greedy," and he bit out pieces of the Sierras with his bill, and threw
+them over his shoulder.
+
+You can see the bites still deep and sharp about Mt. Whitney.
+
+But the Little Duck would not be satisfied; he took hold by the great
+bulk of Shasta and began to pull, and Padahoon pulled on his side until
+the beautiful ring was pulled out in a long oval and began to break on
+the west where the bay of San Francisco comes in. So they were forced
+to divide the mountain range north and south and make what they could
+of it. But the Sparrow-Hawk, remembering the pieces he had thrown over
+his shoulder, chose the south, where you can still see him sailing any
+clear day about four in the afternoon, over all his stolen territory.
+
+There you have the bones of the land as neatly laid out for you as they
+could do it in Kensington Museum: the long oval, breaking seaward, the
+high, bitten, westward peaks, and the Sparrow-Hawk's Own, tailing south
+like the quirk of an attenuated Q.
+
+They serve, these fragmentary ranges, for the outposts of habitableness
+between the sea wind and the forces of pure desertness. Always there
+is skirmish and assault going on about them. Showers rush up the slope
+of San Jacinto, all their shining spears a-tilt. Great gusts of wind
+roar through the Pass of San Gorgiono, the old Puerto de San Carlos.
+Seasonally they are beleaguered by stealthy rushes of the fogs that
+from the Gulf hear the peaks about Whitney calling, or by the yellow
+murk of sand-storms on which the whole face of the desert is lifted up
+as it travels toward its destiny in orchard row and vineyard. Always
+the edge of the wind is against the stone. They shine, the frontlets of
+the sentinel saints, in that keen polish, as the faces of saints must
+with benignity.
+
+Just beyond the pilæ of the broken mountains--the Pillars of Hercules
+of the West--the desert winds about the eastern bases of the range in
+deep indented bays, white-rimmed with the wave marks of its ancient
+sea. Out a very little way, where the shuddering heat-waves trick the
+imagination, it seems about to be retaken by the ghost of tumbling
+billows. Nothing else moves in it; nothing sounds. Plantations of
+growing things near the Pass lean all a little toward it, edging,
+peering--the wild, spiny, thorny things of the desert to enter the
+rain-fed paradise, the full-leafed offspring of the sea wind plotting
+to take the unfriended sandy spaces. They creep a little forward or
+back as the years run wet or dry. The green things stand up, they
+march along the cliffs, they balance on the edge of precipices, but
+desperation is in every contorted stem of _mesquite_ and _palo verde_.
+And with all this struggle, so still! East on the desert rim the
+Colorado ramps like a stallion between its walls, westward the Pacific
+rings the low foreshore with thunder; but the land never cries out,
+quartz mountains disintegrate but they do not murmur.
+
+It is odd here in a land rife with the naked struggle of great pagan
+forces, to find the promontories so lend themselves to the gentle
+names of saints. Perhaps the Padres were not so far from nature as one
+thinks; in the southerly range which, with San Bernardino on the north,
+sentinels the Pass by which the iron-rimmed Emigrant trail enters the
+coast valleys, they rendered for once the pagan touch. San Jacinto--St.
+Hyacinth--was he ever anything but a Christianised memory of a Grecian
+myth, or does it matter at all so long as there are men to see, in
+the deep purple light that dies along the heights, the colour of blood
+that is shed for love? Perhaps the best thing beauty can say to Greek
+or Christian is that there are still things worth dying for. No doubt
+the veins of Padre Jayme Bravo were as rich in martyr passion as the
+stained air of the mountain is in purples, paling to rose at morning,
+thinning at noon to pure aerial blues.
+
+Seen from the coast the range has a finny contour as of some huge
+creature risen from the sea, with low hills about it like dolphins
+playing; but the prevailing note of the landscape is always blue,
+repeating the tints of the wild brodiæa that may be found on the lomas
+early in April, sending up its clustered heads between two slender
+curving spears.
+
+Near at hand the masking growth is seen to be green, the dark
+olivaceous green of the chamisal. Nowhere does one get the force of
+the Spanish termination _al_--the place where--as in that word. The
+chamisal is the place of the chamise: miles and miles of it, with
+scarcely another shrub allowed, spread over the mesa and well up
+into laps and bays of the hills. It grows breast high, man high in
+the favoured regions; but even where under the influence of drouth
+and altitude it creeps to the knees, it abates nothing of its social
+character. Its ever-green foliage has a dull shining from the resinous
+coating which protects it from evaporation, and a slight sticky feel,
+characteristics that no doubt won it the name of "greasewood" from the
+emigrants who valued it chiefly because it could be burned green. The
+spring winds blowing up from the bay whip all its fretted surface to
+a froth of panicled white bloom, that, stirring a little as the wind
+shifts, full of bee-murmur, touches the imagination with the continual
+reminder of the sea. Higher up the thick lacy chaparral flecks and
+ripples, showing the light underside of leaves, and tosses up great
+fountain sprays of ceanothus, sea-blue and lilac-scented.
+
+  [Illustration: SAN DIEGO, LOOKING ACROSS THE BAY TOWARD POINT LOMA]
+
+All the human interest of this region centres about the city on the bay
+of San Diego, a low locked harbour with a long spit of sand breaking
+the mild Pacific swell, as it bides its time for the shipping of the
+south-western world. It has already waited longer than most people
+suppose. Just fifty years after the landing of Columbus on the Bahamas,
+Cabrillo discovered it; Sir Francis Drake, romping up that coast with
+his buccaneers, must have seen it though he left no note of any visit,
+and in 1602 Sebastian Viscaino anchored there and gave it its present
+name. Just about the time the mixed Dutch and English on the Atlantic
+coast were beginning to think of themselves as Americans and to act
+accordingly, the Franciscan _Frailes_ settled on San Diego bay. Nobody
+will know why it was reserved for the brown-skirted brothers of St.
+Francis to undertake the subjugation of Alta California, until it is
+known why the King of Spain quarrelled with the Jesuits. They were
+accused of plotting against His Majesty, but in those days it was
+possible to accuse the Jesuits of almost anything without going very
+far wrong in the popular estimate. I have my own opinion about it,
+which is that a great land, like a great lady, has her way with men.
+And no land has called its own as has California:--poet or painter
+or pioneer, the world's rim under. No better patron could be found
+for this blossoming West than Francis of Assisi, who preached to his
+little brothers of the air and would have made a convert of the coyote.
+Perhaps the first settlers of a country leave their stripe on all the
+land's later offspring: if it was a way the West took to breed fervour
+and faith and the spirit of prophecy in the young generation, who shall
+say she has not succeeded?
+
+In January of 1769 two expeditions by land and sea set forth in the
+name of God and the King of Spain, under the patronage of Señor San
+Jose, indubitable patron of all journeys since the flight into Egypt.
+In April the ship _San Antonio_ anchored in the placid bay, there to
+await the live stock driven up from Velicatá. So the old world came to
+the new with a whole collocation of sainted personages flocking like
+doves to her banners.
+
+But it was not saints that the land wanted so much as the stuff that
+goes to make them. The expedition starved, sickened; their eyes were
+holden. Governor Portola, with the greater part of the expedition, made
+a long _pasear_ on foot to find the lost port of Monterey, and came
+back, with armour rust on his doublet sleeves and nothing much gained
+beside, to declare the expedition a failure. But Padre Serra--Junipero
+Serra, father president of Missions, juniper of God's own planting,
+sapling of that stock of which the founder of the order had wished
+for a whole forest full--Padre Serra claimed a churchman's privilege.
+He demanded time for a _novena_, a nine days' cycle of prayer to the
+patron who was so unaccountably hiding the relief ship in the fogs
+and indecisions of the uncharted coast. It is my belief that the Padre
+chose the _novena_ simply because it was the longest possible time he
+could hope to delay the return of the expedition. Nine days they drew
+in their belts and told their beads, and on the last hour of the last
+day, far on the sea rim, behold the white wings of succour!
+
+The Patron, who could never be at a loss for an expedient, contrived
+that the ship should lose an anchor which compelled it to put in at San
+Diego, where they had no expectation of finding any of the party. It
+was so that the land tried them out and approved, for from that day the
+founding went forward steadily.
+
+There is a fine growing city now on the site of the early landing,
+regularly stratified through all the architectural periods of
+California, from the low thick-walled adobe of the Spanish occupation
+to the newest shingle-stained bungalow of the latest one-lunged
+millionaire; but the land has not lost, in a century and a half, one
+mark by which the brown-skirted _Frailes_ found their way about in
+it. It has its distinctive mark, the Sparrow-Hawk's land, the seal of
+a private and peculiar affection. Here about the mouth of one of its
+swift seasonal rivers, and touching as with a finger-tip the opposing
+shore of the island of Santa Rosa, is the habitat of the Torrey pine.
+Japanesque, unrelated, drinking the sea air, never spreading inland,
+it hugs the sea-worn edges of La Jolla, as though, as some botanists
+believe, the species came to life there out of the jewel-tinted water
+and the spirit of the desert dust.
+
+It is also possible to think of it as a relict of the land of which
+the broken Channel Islands were made, but in any case it is a pity that
+science could not have retained for this lonely, restricted species the
+name the _Frailes_ gave to its fostering waters, Soledad--the solitary.
+Behind the town the mesa rises abruptly, knife-cut by the gullies of
+intermittent streams; and far back where the mountains break down into
+foothills, and these into the lomas--little low mounds of detritus--the
+sea air collects all the blue rays of the diffused light and holds
+them there all day in the hollows, in memory of the sea from which they
+rose.
+
+In April of the year of the Occupation the white panicles of the
+chamise would be tossing here and there, and the yellow violets run
+thin lines as of fire among the grasses. You would not believe there
+were so many yellow violets in the world as a day's riding will still
+show you. At this season, _islay_, the wild cherry, will be shaking out
+its fine white spray of bloom, the button willow begins, the sycamore,
+the buckthorn, _cascara sagrada_; the great berried manzanita, which
+shed its waxen bells as early as December, will be reddening its
+apples. Here also the chia, the true sage, the honey-maker, bread of
+the wild tribes, makes itself known by the penetrating pungent odour
+of its unfolding foliage. Binding all the leafy thickets, runs the
+succulent starry bloom of the megarrhiza that, from its hidden root,
+as large as a man's body, sends up smothering tendrils so sensitive
+to their opportunity that you have only to sit down beside them on
+one of these long growing afternoons, to find all their tips curling
+in your direction and the stems moving sensibly across the grass in
+the direction of support. As early as February the foot-long vines
+can be seen locating the nearest shrub or the cañon wall, farther
+away than you could detect it by any tactile sense. And how quickly,
+once the objective is sensed, the questing Force is withdrawn from
+the unsuccessful members! Perhaps this one to the right may keep on
+in the direction in which it has caught the invisible communicating
+thread from the nearest buckthorn, but the other three or four green
+tentacles, finding no invitation from any quarter, not only stop
+growing but seem to shrink and dwindle in the interests of the climbing
+brother. Sometimes in a particularly lusty growth, all the young vines
+will be drawn toward some conspicuous support, so that by the third
+day those that lay out starlike, with inquiring tips raised a little,
+delicately feeling, will swing through all their points to the one
+hopeful direction. These warm sensuous days toward the end of April,
+just after rain, when the very earth is full of a subtle intoxication,
+one has but to thrust a finger among the bourgeoning tips and tendrils
+of the megarrhiza to see them stir with live response. One must
+suppose, since the megarrhiza is of no discoverable use to anybody,
+that the Force uses it to its own ends, an ascending, uprearing Force,
+rehearsing itself for a more serviceable instrument.--This, however,
+is a digression; probably the Padres found no time for philosophising
+about anything, much less so useless a specimen as the wild cucumber.
+
+What the Franciscans saw first in Alta California was what all pioneers
+look for in new lands--the witness of their faith. They saw the
+waxberry bush from which they were to gather the thin coating of the
+berries into candles for their improvised altars, saw the crepitant,
+aromatic _yerba buena_, and the shrubby, glutinous-leaved herb of the
+Saints, given to them for healing.
+
+More than all else they must have seen in the month of the Virgin
+Mother, high on the altar slopes of San Jacinto and San Bernardino, the
+white thyrses of the yucca, called The Candles of Our Lord. Back where
+the green exclusiveness of the chamise gives place to the chaparral,
+the tall shafts arise. They grow in blossoming, the bells climbing
+with the aspiring stalk until as many as six thousand of them may hang
+pure and stiff along the lance-like stem between the bayonet-bristling
+leaves. Long after the white flame has burnt out, the stalks remain,
+rank on rank, as though battalions of Spanish spearmen had fallen
+there, holding each his spear aloft in his dead hand.
+
+It is only back there where the yuccas begin, that the small, swift
+life of the mesa goes on, very much as it did in the days of the
+Spanish _Frailes_. The doves begin it, voicing the mesa dawn in notes
+of a cool blueness; then the sleek and stately quail, moving down in
+twittering droves to the infrequent water-holes. The rhythm of a flock
+in motion is like the ripple of muscles in the sides of a great snake.
+After them the road runner, _corredor del camino_, the cock of the
+chaparral, crest down, rudder aslant, swifter than a horse, incarnate
+spirit of the hopeful dust through which he flirts and flits. Then
+the blueness is folded up, it lies packed in the cañons, the mountains
+flatten; high in his airy haunts the Sparrow-Hawk sails, and the furry,
+frisk-tailed folk begin the day's affairs.
+
+  [Illustration: REDLANDS, LOOKING TOWARD SAN BERNARDINO RANGE]
+
+The secret of learning the mesa life is to sit still, to sit still and
+to keep on sitting still. The only other secret is to be learned in the
+wattled huts stuck like the heaps of the house-building rats in the
+dry washes, inwoven with the boughs of buckthorn and _islay_, except
+for size scarcely distinguishable from them. For the Indian has gone
+through all that green woof with the thread of kinship and found it an
+ordered world. He is choke-full as is the chamisal of wild life, of
+the tag ends of instincts and understandings left over from the days
+when he was brother to the beast--those sleek-bellied rats, stealing to
+lay another foot-long, dried stick to the characterless heap of their
+dwelling,--bad Indians to him, trying to remember their ways when they
+were men; that brown feathered bunch, in and out of the chia bush,--she
+was present at the making of man. Your aboriginal has the true sense of
+proportion: not size but vitality. You can cover the sage wren with the
+hollow of your hand, but you cannot hop so far for your size nor be so
+brave about it.
+
+Very different from the spring flutter and fullness, must have been the
+look of the land in the year of the martyrdom of Padre Jayme Bravo,
+which was the year of Bunker Hill and the Republic. The green of the
+chamisal was overlaid then by the brown tones of its seeding. _Islay_
+had shed its crimson drupes; the cactus fires had died down to the dull
+purples of the fruiting prickly pear; the sycamores by the dwindling
+waters of the arroya had scarcely a palsied leaf to wag. The Mission
+had been moved, for what reasons must be guessed by whoever has had
+occasion to observe the effect of a standing army on the subjugated
+peoples, back from the sea marsh to a little valley of what is known
+now as Mission River. Sixty converts had come down out of the hills
+to receive the Medicine of the Soft-Hearted God. That is the way they
+must have looked at it--rood and cup and sprinkling water, and the
+bells louder than the medicine drums. Back in the dry gullies the
+drums would have been going night and day where the _tingaivashes_, the
+Medicine-Men, lashed themselves into a fury over this apostasy. Certain
+of the renegades heard them between their orisons; they fled back to
+the muttering roll and the pound of the dancing feet. In the night
+after that, eight hundred of the Dieguenos, clothed in frantic fervour
+and very little else, came down to make an end of the "long gowns." How
+the soul of Padre Jayme must have leaped up as he heard them yelling
+outside his unguarded hut: the appetite for martyrdom is deeper than
+all our dreaming. He ran toward them with arms extended. "Love God, my
+children!" he cried, and received their arrows. When it was reported
+to the Padre President at Monterey, "Thank God," he said; "now the
+soil is watered." It did indeed repay them such a crop of souls as any
+watering produces in that soil; but at San Juan Capistrano, where a new
+foundation was in progress, they buried the bells and returned to the
+presidio.
+
+Few people understand why Californians so love their Missions, the
+meagre ruins of them, scant as a last year's nest. But two priests, a
+corporal, and three men in the unmapped land with eight hundred angry
+savages--it is the mark of the Western breed to love odds such as that!
+It is not to the campanile at Pala nor the ruined arches of San Luis
+Rey that men made pilgrimages but to the spirit of enterprise that
+built the West.
+
+All about the upper mesa there are traces, scarcely more evident to the
+eye than the Missions, that the inhabitants of it have been dreamers,
+dreaming greatly. I do not now refer to the court of San Luis Rey,
+from the roofs of which a joyous populace once cheered a governor
+of California in the part of toreador, in a neighbourhood where
+Raphael-eyed muchachitos who have never heard of the Five Little Pigs
+that Went to Market can still repeat you the rhyme that begins
+
+     Up in Heaven there is a bull fight,
+     The bull has horns of silver and a tail of gold.
+
+Heaven enough under those conditions to the children of the Occupation!
+Nor am I thinking of a road on which, when there is a light wind
+moving from the sea, you can still hear at midnight the pounding feet
+of the Indian riders galloping down to the bay, only to see their
+beloved Padre blessing them from the ship's side in departing. I do
+not think even--because I make a practice of thinking as little as
+possible of a matter so discreditable to us as our Indian policy--of
+the procession of the evicted _Palatingwas_, even though the whole
+region of Warner's ranch is still full of the shame of it and the
+rending cry. The struggle of men with men is at best a sick and squalid
+affair for one of the parties; but men contriving against the gods
+for possession of the earth is your true epic. The brave little towns
+which start up there with their too early florescence of avenue and
+public square, the courageous acres which the vineyardist clears in the
+chamisal and the chamise takes again! All along the upper mesa, Pan
+and the homesteader keep up the ancient fight. And with what unequal
+weapons! The wild gourd, the bindweed, the megarrhiza, at the mere
+rumour of a cleared space, come beckoning and joining hands. Though
+he goes gunning all day without finding one young rabbit for his pot,
+the bark of the homesteader's orchard trees will be gnawed by them at
+the precise sappy moment. At dawn the quail may be heard with soft
+contented noises between the rows of bearing vines, plunging their
+beaks in the ripest berries. Then the mule-deer will spend the night
+in the carefully fenced enclosure, ruining the largest bunches with
+selective bites; after which the homesteader, if he is wise, will know
+that he is beaten. The mule-deer can go over any fence, though usually
+he prefers to go between the wires, which he can do without altering
+his stride. Detected, even at its most leafless, the antlered chaparral
+makes cover for him until, after hours of following, he is glimpsed
+at last, scaling at his stiff bounding gait some inaccessible rocky
+stair from which nothing comes back but the bullet's deflected whine.
+Now and then some pot-hunter who remembers when the mule-deer could be
+heard barking to the does in any deep gully, when the moon rose hot on
+the flushed trail of the October day, will tell you that there are no
+more of his kind on San Jacinto. But so long as there are homesteaders
+to be fended from the hill borders, the mule-deer will come back. And
+when the mule-deer is gone there will still be drouth. Let the coast
+currents swing out a few degrees, or the Gulf winds blow contrarily for
+consecutive seasons, and the stoutest homesteader fails. After a few
+years you can guess where he has been by finding the chamise growing
+taller in the ploughed places.
+
+Incurable wild hills and wild sufficing sea, and the little strip
+between which they give to one another--Indian giving!--conceded by the
+years of rain and demanded back by drouth; shoals that the tide piles
+and the sea eats again! It lies like a many-coloured dancer's scarf,
+and hearts are still caught in its folds as in the days of the Spanish
+Occupation.
+
+There's a stripe of aquamarine turning to chrysoprase, that's for
+the sea; amber then for the hollow cliffs of La Jolla and San Juan,
+smugglers' cliffs eaten well under the shore; a stripe of scarlet,
+spangled with viscid diamond dew, that's for the mesembryanthemums
+crowding the foreshore; pale green of the lupins with a white thread
+through it of the highway, green again for the chamisal, and blue of
+the mountains' unassailable sea thought.
+
+Nature is a great symbolist; what she makes out of her own materials is
+but the shadow of what man in any country will make finally of his. San
+Diego by the sea dreams of a great sea empery. What by all the signs
+she is bound to produce, is a poet. There in the scarf-coloured, low
+shore is the vocal forecast of him in the night-singing mocking-bird.
+Especially in the fringing island of Coronado out of the waxberry bush
+he can be heard gurgling like a full fountain with jets and rushes
+of pure crystal sound. From moonrise on until dawn he scatters from a
+tireless throat, music like light and laughter. It is as impossible to
+close the eyes under it as in the glare of the sun. And if the moon,
+the measurer, be gone on a journey to the other side of the world,
+still he sings, all his notes muffled by the dark; he sways and sings,
+dozes and sings, dreaming and wakes to sing. So it should be with poets
+whether anybody wishes them to or not. "The lands of the sun expand the
+soul," says the proverb.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+MOTHERING MOUNTAINS
+
+
+It is all part of that subtle relation between the observer and the
+landscape of the west, which goes by the name of "atmosphere," that
+one returns again and again to the reality of Christian feeling in the
+Franciscan Pioneers, as witnessed by the names they left us--one of the
+most charming proofs, if proof were wanted, of the power of religion
+to illuminate the mind to a degree often denied to generations of art
+and culture. How many book-fed tourists rounding the blue ranks of San
+Jacinto to face the noble front of the Coast Range as it swings back
+from the San Gabriel valley, would have found for it a name at once so
+absolute, so understanding as Sierra Madre, Mother Mountain?
+
+There you have it all in one comprehensive sweep: the brooding,
+snow-touched, virginal peaks, visited and encompassed by the sacred
+spirit of the sea, and below it the fertile valley, the little
+huddling, skirting hills fed from her breast. The very lights that
+die along the heights, the airs that play there, the swelling fecund
+slopes, have in them something so richly maternal; the virtue of
+the land is the virtue that we love most in the mothers of men. And
+if you want facts under the poetry, see how the Sierra receives the
+rain and sends it down laden with the rich substance of her granite
+bosses, making herself lean to fatten the valleys. The great gorges
+and swift angles of the hills which fade and show in the evening
+glow, are wrought there by the ceaseless contribution of the mountain
+to the tillable land. And what a land it has become! There have been
+notable kingdoms of the past of fewer and less productive acres. Yet
+even in the great avenues of palms that flick the light a thousand
+ways from their wind-stirred, serrate edges, is a reminder of the
+host of bristling, spiny growth the land once entertained. It is as if
+the sinister forces of the desert lurked somewhere not far under the
+surface, ready at any moment to retake all this wonder of fertility,
+should the beneficence of the Mother Mountain fail. The Padre pioneers
+must have felt these two contending forces many a time when they lay
+down at night under the majestic Sierra, for they named the first
+spot where they made an abiding place, in honour of the protecting
+influence, _Nuestro Señora, Reina de Los Angeles_, Our Lady the Queen
+of the Angels. There she hovered, snow-whitened amid tall candles of
+the stars, while south and west the coyote barked the menace of the
+unwatered lands. Now this is remarkable, and one of the things that go
+to show we are vastly more susceptible to influences of nature than
+some hard-headed members of society suppose, that in this group of
+low hills and shallow valleys between the Sierra Madre and the sea,
+the most conspicuous human achievement has been a new form of domestic
+architecture.
+
+This is the thing that most strikes the attention of the traveller:
+not the orchards and the gardens, which are not appreciably different
+in kind from those of the Riviera and some favoured parts of Italy,
+but the homes, the number of them, their extraordinary adaptability to
+the purposes of gracious living. The Angelenos call them bungalows,
+in respect to the type from which the later form developed, but they
+deserve a name as distinctive as they have in character become. These
+little thin-walled dwellings, all of desert-tinted native woods and
+stones, are as indigenous to the soil as if they had grown up out of
+it, as charming in line and the perfection of utility as some of those
+wild growths which show a delicate airy florescence above ground, but
+under it have deep, man-shaped, resistant roots. With their low and
+flat-pitched roofs they present a certain likeness to the aboriginal
+dwellings which the Franciscans found scattered like wasps' nests among
+the chaparral along the river,--which is only another way of saying
+that the spirit of the land shapes the art that is produced there.
+
+One must pause a little by the dry wash of this river, so long ago
+turned into an irrigating ditch that it is only in seasons of unusual
+flood it remembers its ancient banks, and finds them, in spite of
+all that real estate agencies have done to obliterate such natural
+boundaries. This river of Los Angeles betrays the streak of original
+desertness in the country by flowing bottom-side up, for which it
+receives the name of _arroya_, and even _arroya seca_ as against the
+_rio_ of the full-flowing Sacramento and San Juan. A _rio_ is chiefly
+water, but an _arroya_, and especially that one which travels farthest
+from the Mothering Mountains toward the sea, is at most seasons of
+the year a small trickle of water among stones in a wide, deep wash,
+overgrown with button willow and sycamores that click their gossiping
+leaves in every breath of wind or in no wind at all. Tiny gold and
+silver backed ferns climb down the banks to drink, and as soon as the
+spring freshet has gone by, brodiæas and blazing stars come up between
+the boulders worn as smooth as if by hand.
+
+Farther up, where the stream narrows, it is overgrown by willows,
+alders, and rock maples, and leaps white-footed into brown pools for
+trout. Deer drink at the shallows, and it is not so long ago that
+cinnamon bear and grizzlies tracked the wet clay of its borders. This
+is the guarantee that this woman-country is in no danger of too much
+mothering. No climate which is acceptable to trout and grizzlies is in
+the least likely to prove enervating; men and beasts, they run pretty
+much to the same vital, sporting qualities.
+
+All that country which extends from the foot of the Sierra Madre to the
+sea, is so cunningly patterned off with ranks of low hills and lomas
+that its vastness is disguised, or rather revealed by subtle change and
+swift surprises as a discreet woman reveals her charms. This renders it
+one of the most delightful of motoring countries. The car swings over a
+perfect road into snug little orchard nooks as safe and secret seeming
+as a nest, climbs a round-breasted hill to greet the wide horizon of
+the sea, or a mesa stretching away into blue and amber desertness,
+which when adventured upon, discloses in unsuspected hollows white,
+peaceful towns girt by great acres of orange groves, or the orderly
+array of vines trimmed low and balancing like small, wide-skirted
+figures in a minuet. And then the ground opens suddenly to deep, dry
+gullies where little handfuls of the grey soil gather themselves up and
+scuttle mysteriously under the cactus bushes, and dried seeds of the
+megarrhiza rattle with a muffled sound as the pods blow about. Here one
+meets occasionally the last survivors of the old way of life before men
+found it: _neotoma_, the house-building rat, with his conical heap of
+rubbish; or a road runner, tilting his tail and practising his short,
+sharp runs in the powdery sand under the rabbit brush; here, too, the
+lurking desert shows its spiny tips like a creature half-buried in the
+sand, not dead, but drowsing.
+
+  [Illustration: A EUCALYPTUS GROVE]
+
+As artists know colour, and poets know it, this is the most colourful
+corner of the world. The blue and silver tones of the Sparrow-Hawk's
+land give place to airy violets, fawns, and rich ambers. It is curious,
+that obstinate preference which a locality has for colour schemes
+of its own adoption; man can break up and re-form them, but he can
+never quite overcome the original key. Here the bright, instant note
+of the geraniums that shore up the bungalows, even the insult of the
+magenta-coloured Bougainvillea is subdued by the aerial softness
+that lies along the hills like the bloom on fruit. The sheets of
+Eschscholtzia gold that once spread over miles of the San Gabriel
+valley, and still linger in torn fragments about Altadena, have been
+sheared by the plough, to vanish and reappear again in the solid globes
+of orange, distilled from the saps and juices of the soil.
+
+One of the most interesting of the instruments by which the cultivated
+landscape has gathered up and fixed the evanescent greens that spread
+thinly yet over the uncropped hills in spring, is the eucalyptus.
+All the tints are there, from the olive greens of the chaparral to
+the sombre darkness of the evergreen oak; young shoots of it have the
+silvery finish of the artemisia which once gave the note of the mesas
+about Riverside and San Bernardino. No other imported tree has quite
+to such a degree the air of the _habitué_; one wonders indeed if it
+could have been half so much at home in Australia, from whence it has
+returned like some wandering heir to the ancestral acre.
+
+It proves its blood royal by its facile adaptiveness to the prevailing
+lines of the landscape, taking the rounded, leaning outline of the live
+oaks on the wind-driven hills, or in sheltered ravines springing upward
+straight as the silver firs. Perhaps its most charming possibilities
+are revealed in the middle distance where, lifted high on columnar
+stems, its leaf crowns take on the blunt, flowing contours of the
+hills. At all times it has a beautiful resilience to the wind, bowing
+with a certain courtliness without compulsion, and recovering as if
+by conscious harmonious movement. The pepper tree, however, most
+magnificent specimens of which may be found lining the avenues of
+Pasadena, or in some unexpected corner of the hills marking the site of
+some old Spanish hacienda, is always an alien. It is like the Spaniards
+who brought it, perhaps, in its drooping grace, in the careless
+prodigality with which it sheds its fragile crimson fruits. Something
+of old-worldliness persists in its spicy odours, and in the stir of its
+lacy shadows; when the moon comes over the mountain wall and the wind
+is moving, there is the touch of mystery one associates with lovely
+señoritas leaning out of balconies. One fancies that the pepper tree
+will last so long as the dying race of Dons and Doñas, and with them
+will cease to be a feature of local interest.
+
+There is hardly more than a trace in the modern city of Los Angeles of
+_Nuestra Señora, Reina de los Angeles_. The last time I passed through
+the old plaza, the streets of offence encroached upon it from the east,
+and a corner of the sacred precinct had been sacrificed to the trolley.
+The Church of Our Lady, over whose door may still be traced the fading
+inscription from which the city takes its name, was never a mission,
+but one of the six chapels or _asistencias_ centred about the Mission
+San Gabriel. It was here the first expedition passed northward looking
+for the port of Monterey, on the day of the feast of Our Lady in the
+year when the Atlantic Colonies were making up their minds to fight the
+English. It was close to this spot and along Downey Street were enacted
+the most pitiful of all the tragic incidents which marked the recession
+of the aboriginal races. Bereft of their lands and the protection of
+their Church, they became a prey to the greed of the dominant peoples,
+and used regularly to be incited to drunkenness upon their wages on
+Sunday, arrested while in that condition, and sold each Monday morning
+for the amount of their fines to the neighbouring ranchers. Things
+like this lurking under the surface of commercial enterprise, as the
+desert lies in wait in sandy stretches, advise us that much of our
+insistence on democracy grows out of our inability to trust ourselves
+to deal equitably with our fellows under any other conditions. We can
+keep to the rules of the game we have set up more easily than to the
+unfenced humanities. Here in the old plaza full of sleepy light, which
+still retains the indefinable stamp of the people to whom to-morrow was
+always a better day for doing things, one sighs for the short-sighted
+self-interest which so wasted the native children of the soil.
+
+But after all the land couldn't have loved them as it does the race
+for which it brings forth its miraculous harvests. Not that there
+weren't miracles in those days; in fact they began here, or rather at
+San Gabriel, six miles or so beyond the river which in those days was
+called Porcincula, a name that linked the old world with the new by
+way of the little chapel in Italy in which the beloved Francis received
+such heavenly favours. The miracle of San Gabriel relates to a display
+of a canvas presentiment of Our Lady, at the mere sight of which the
+wild tribes experienced exceeding grace. Looking up suddenly at the
+Mother Mountain brooding above the plain, it is easy to understand
+how the symbol of aloof but solicitous care came home to the primitive
+mind, always peculiarly open to suggestions of humaneness in nature.
+
+The heads of the Sierra Madre are rounded, the contours of great
+dignity. The appeal it makes to the eye is of mass and line. Its
+charms, and it has many, of forested slope, leaping waters, and lilied
+meadows, do not offer themselves to the casual glance, but must be
+sought after with great pains. The bulk of the range is of warm,
+grey granite, clothed with atmospheric colour as with a garment. It
+borrows more from the sky than the sea, taking on at times an aerial
+transparency, the soul of the mountain about to pass trembling into
+light. Pinkish tones are discoverable in even the bluest shadows,
+and at times the peaks are touched with the rich, roseate orange of
+the Alpine-glow. But the variations of temperature and atmospheric
+conditions are not sufficiently pronounced to present themselves to
+the sense as the source of its aspects of tenderness, of majesty,
+of virginal aloofness. Rather such changes seem to be occasioned by
+palpitations of the Mountain Spirit, remote in sacred meditation,
+glowing, dimming, defining itself from within.
+
+It may be that the immense vitality of the land, its abundance, the
+bursting orchards, the rich variety of native growth, somehow dwarfs
+the earliest impression of the Sierra Madre, since few, if any, gather
+at first an adequate idea of the actual mass and height it represents.
+It is only after appreciation of the really amazing activities of the
+Angelenos is a little dulled by familiarity, at early morning when
+the groves are sleeping and the bright plantations of the gardens lack
+the sun to flash their brilliance on the sight, or at evening when a
+sea mist covers the teeming land, one is prepared to hear that many of
+these peaks are higher than the Simplon, and that it would be possible
+to wander for months in the intricacies of its cañons without having
+time to grow familiar with a single one of them.
+
+Sometimes the mere mechanics of the land, the pull of the wind up the
+narrow gorges as you pass, advises the open mind of power and immensity
+residing in the thinly forested bulks. Passing what appears a mere
+shadowy gulf in the mountain wall, you are aware of a murmurous sound
+as of the sea in a shell, and feel suddenly the push of the draught
+on your windshield like a great steady hand. In places above San
+Bernardino, the steady pouring of invisible wind rivers has swept the
+soil for miles and defied three generations of artificial plantations.
+And sometimes the mountain speaks directly to the soul. I recall such
+an occasion one late spring. We had been skirting the range toward
+Riverside all afternoon, having the fall of the land seaward always
+in view, noting how, in spite of the absurd predilection of men for
+square fields and gridiron arrangements, the main lines of cultivation
+were being pulled into beauty by the sheer necessity of humouring
+the harvest. It was that lagging hour between the noon splendour and
+the gathering of the light for its dramatic passage into night. The
+orange orchards lay dead green in the hollows, unplanted ridges showed
+scarcely a trace of atmospheric blueness; unlaced, unbuskined, the
+land rested. And all in the falling of a leaf, in the scuttle of a
+horned toad in the dust of the roadway, it lifted into eerie life. It
+bared its teeth; the veil of the mountain was rent. Nothing changed,
+nothing stirred or glimmered, but the land had spoken. As if it had
+taken a step forward, as if a hand were raised, the mountain stood
+over us. And then it sank again. While the chill was still on us, the
+grip of terror, there lay the easy land, the comfortable crops, the red
+geraniums about the bungalows. But never again for me would the Sierra
+Madre be a mere geographical item, a feature of the landscape; it was
+Power, immanent and inescapable. Shall not the mother of the land do
+what she will with it?
+
+Entering the cañons of the San Gabriel, one is struck with the
+endearing quality of their charm. In a country which disdains every
+sort of prettiness, and dares even to use monotony as an element of
+beauty, as California does, it is surprising to find, cut in the solid
+granite wall, little dells all laced with fern and saxifrage, and
+wind swung, frail, flowery bells. Little streams come dashing down the
+runways with an elfin movement, with here and there a miniature fall
+"singing like a bird," as Muir described it, between moss-encrusted
+banks.
+
+  [Illustration: GLENDALE, VALLEY OF THE SAN GABRIEL]
+
+Into the open mouths of such cañons have retreated the hosts of
+wildflowers that once in the wet seasons overran all that country from
+San Bernardino to the sea,--the white sage, most honeyful of all the
+sages, the poppies, gilias, cream cups, nemophilias which twenty-five
+years ago were as common as meadow grass, as thick as the planted
+fields of alfalfa which have usurped them. Settlers who came into
+this country when the trail over the San Gorgiono had not yet hardened
+between iron rails, tell of riding belly deep for miles in wild oats
+and waving bloom, and where the trail goes out over the San Fernando,
+toward Camulas, the yellow mustard reached its scriptural height, and
+the birds of the air built their nests in it. Now and then in very
+wet years a faint yellow tinge, high up under the bases of the hills,
+is all that is left of the seed which, by report, the Padres sowed
+along the coastwise trails, to mark where they trod the circuit of the
+Missions.
+
+Everywhere within the cañons, honeyful flowers abound, and up from the
+rocky floors the slopes are stiff with chaparral. This characteristic
+growth, which, seen from the open valley flooded by dry sun, appears as
+a mere scurf, a roughened lichen on the mountain wall, is in reality a
+riot of manzanita, mahogany, ceanothus, cherry and black sage, from ten
+to fifteen feet high, all but impassable. Elsewhere in the ranges to
+the north, the chaparral is loose enough to admit fern and herbaceous
+plants, carpeting the earth, but here the rigid, spiny stems contend
+for three or four feet, thick as the carving in old cathedral choirs,
+before they attain light and air enough to put forth leaf or twig. On
+the seaward side of the mountains, miles and miles of this dense growth
+flow over the ranges, parted here and there by knife-edge ridges, or
+by huge bosses of country rock, affording a great sweep to the eye,
+reaching far to seaward. From here the lower country shrinks to its
+proper proportion--a toy landscape planted with Noah's Ark trees--and
+the noise of men is overlaid by the great swells of the Pacific which
+come thundering in, lifting far and faint reverberations along the
+ranges.
+
+On either side of these vast conning towers it is still possible to
+trace the indefinite tracks which wild creatures make, running clear
+and well defined for short distances and then melting unaccountably
+into the scrub again. Occasionally still they discover traces of the
+wild life in which the Sierra Madre once abounded. Deer are known to
+take advantage of such natural outlooks in protecting themselves from
+their natural enemies, and from the evidence of frequent visits here,
+bears and foxes and bobcats must have made much the same use of them.
+From such high escarpments the Indians would have seen Cabrillo's
+winged boats go by, and from them, all up the coast, ascended the
+pillars of smoke that attended the galleon of Francis Drake.
+
+Once within the portals of the range, the granite walls sheer away
+from sequestered parks of oak, madroño, and Douglas spruce. The trees
+are not thickly set here as in the north, but admit of sunny space
+and murmurous bee pasture between their gracefully contrasting boles,
+and to a thousand bright-feathered and scaled things unknown to the
+all-pine or all-redwood forests. Such parks or basins vary from a few
+yards to an acre or two in extent, threaded like beads upon a single
+stream. One thinks indeed of the old-fashioned "charm string" in which
+each meadow space has its peculiar virtue:--open sunny shallows, arrowy
+cascades, troops of lilies standing high as a man's head, forested
+fern, columbine, delphinum, and scarlet mimulus along the water
+borders.
+
+They grow slighter as the trail ascends--it is possible now to make
+nearly the whole distance in gravity cars for that purpose provided,
+but I recommend a sure-footed mule for the true mountain-lover--until
+above the source of the streams, from dips and saddles of the range,
+above the summer-shrunken glaciers, where the trees are bowed and the
+chaparral creeps as if awed and dizzy, it is possible to have a glimpse
+of the still unconquered and unconquerable "sage brush county." All
+along the back of the Sierra Madre wall the desert laps like a slow
+tide, rolling up and receding with the drouths and rains. The eye takes
+it in no less slowly than the imagination. It stretches, in fact, to
+the Colorado, but a haze of heat obscures its eastern border; long
+whitened lines of alkali, like wave marks, set the seasonal limit of
+its encroachments. Here and there shows the dark checkering of fertile
+patches, spilled over from the rich west-lying valleys; trending east
+by south lies the Sierra Madre like an arm, guarding the favoured
+region.
+
+And yet in her very favour the Mother Mountain is impartial, for
+equally as she saves the south from desertness, she has denied to us
+the one instrument by which the desert could be mastered. Mighty as
+man is in transforming the face of the earth, he is nothing without the
+Rains.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE COASTS OF ADVENTURE
+
+
+Old trails, older than the memory of man, go out from the southern
+country by way of Cahuenga, by Eagle Rock, toward that part of the
+shelving coast where the Padre's mustard gold lingered longest, as if
+to mark the locality where the gold they missed was first uncovered.
+But suppose, on that day of the year '41, Francisco Lopez, _major-domo_
+of the Mission San Fernando, had not had an appetite for onions? Who
+knows how history would have made itself?
+
+The speculation is idle; anybody named Lopez has always a
+taste for onions because they are the nearest thing to garlic.
+Señor Francisco,--I suppose one may grant him the title at this
+distance--rested under an oak and dug up the wild root with his
+knife, and the tide of the world's emigration set toward the Coasts
+of Adventure. I have, holding my papers as I write, an Indian basket
+reputed to be one of those in which, in those days, placer gold was
+washed out of the sandy loam; it was given me by one who had it from
+Don Antonio Coronel, and has a pattern about it of the low serried
+hills of the coast district. Where it breaks, as all patterns of Indian
+baskets do, to give egress to the spirit resident in things dedicated
+to human use, there are two figures of men with arms outstretched, but
+divided as the pioneers who carried the cross into that country were
+from those who followed the lure of gold. The basket wears with time,
+but the pattern holds, inwoven with its texture as Romance is woven
+with the history of all that region lying between San Francisco on the
+north and Cahuenga where, after a bloodless battle, was consummated the
+cession of California from Mexico.
+
+  [Illustration: A CAÑON IN THE SIERRA MADRES]
+
+From the white landmark of San Juan Capistrano to a point opposite
+Santa Inez, saints thick as sea-birds, standing seaward, break the
+long Pacific swell: San Clemente, Santa Catalina, Santa Rosa--their
+deep-scored cliffs searched by the light, revealing their kinship
+with the parallel mainland ranges. But there are hints here, in the
+plant and animal life and in the climate, milder even than that of
+the opposing channel ports, hints which not even the Driest-Dustiness
+dare despise, of those mellower times than ours from which all fables
+of Blessed Islands are sprung. Islands "very near the terrestrial
+paradise" the old Spanish romancer described them. Often as not the
+imagination sees more truly than the eye. I myself am ready to affirm
+that something of man's early Eden drifted thither on the Kuro-Siwa,
+that warm current deflected to our coast, which, for all we know of it,
+might well be one of the four great rivers that went about the Garden
+and watered it. Great golden sun-fish doze upon the island tides,
+flying-fish go by in purple and silver streaks, and under the flat
+bays, which take at times colour that rivals the lagoons of Venice,
+forests of kelp, a-crawl with rainbow-coloured life, sleep and sway
+upon tides unfelt of men. There are days at Catalina so steeped with
+harmonies of sea and sun that the singing of the birds excites the
+soothed sense no more than if the lucent air had that moment dripped in
+sound. These are the days when the accounts that Cabrillo left of his
+findings there, of a civil and religious development superior to the
+tribes of the mainland, beguile the imagination.
+
+One thinks of the watery highway between the west coast and the
+channel islands as another _Camino Real_ of the sea, where in place
+of mule trains and pacing Padres, went balsas, skin canoes, galleons,
+far-blown Chinese junks, Russian traders, slipping under the cliffs
+of San Juan for untaxed hides and tallow, Atlantic whalers, packets
+rounding the Horn, sunk past the load line with Argonauts of '49,
+opium smugglers dropping a contraband cask or an equally prohibited
+coolie under the very wing of San Clemente. So many things could have
+happened--Odysseys, Æneids--that it is with a sigh one resigns the
+peaks of the submerged range, paling and purpling on the west, to the
+student of sea-birds and sea-nourished plants.
+
+Looking from the islands landward, the locked shores have still for
+long stretches the aspect of undiscovered country. Hills break abruptly
+in the surf or run into narrow moon-shaped belts of sand where a
+mountain arm curves out or the sea eats inward. And yet for nearly four
+centuries the secret of the land was blazoned to all the ships that
+passed, in the great fields of poppy gold that every wet season flamed
+fifty miles or more to seaward.
+
+One must have seen the Eschscholtzia so, smouldering under the mists
+of spring, to understand the thrill that comes of finding them later
+scattered as they are, throughout the gardens of the world. I recall
+how at Rome, coming up suddenly out of the catacombs--we had gone down
+by another entrance and had been wandering for hours in the mortuary
+gloom--memory leaped up to find a great bed of golden poppies tended
+by brown, bearded Franciscans. They couldn't say--Fray Filippo, whom I
+questioned, had no notion--whence the sun-bright cups had come, except
+that they were common in the gardens of his order. It seemed a natural
+sort of thing for some Mission Padre, seeking a memento of himself to
+send back to his Brothers of St. Francis half a world away, to have
+chosen these shining offsprings of the sun. There was confirmation in
+the fact that Fray Filippo knew them not by the unspellable botanical
+name, but by the endearing Castilian "dormidera," sleepy-eyed, in
+reference to their habit of unfolding only to the light; but the
+connecting thread was lost. Channel fishermen still, in spite of the
+obliterating crops, can trace the blue lines of lupins between faint
+streaks of poppy fires, and catch above the reek of their boats, when
+the land wind begins, blown scents of _islay_ and ceanothus.
+
+No rivers of water of notable size pour down this west coast, but
+rivers of green flood the shallow cañons. Here and there from the crest
+of the range one catches an arrowy glimpse of a seasonal stream, but
+from the sea-view the furred chaparral is unbroken except for bare
+ridges, wind-swept even of the round-headed oaks. This coast country is
+a favourite browsing place for deer; they can be seen there still in
+early summer, feeding on the acorns of the scrub oaks, and especially
+on the tender twigs of wind-fallen trees, or herding at noon in the
+deep fern which closes like cleft waters over their heads. Until
+within a few years it was no unlikely thing to hear little black bears
+snorting and snuffing under the manzanita, of the berries of which
+they are inordinately fond. This lovely shrub with its twisty, satiny
+stems of wine-red, suffusing brown, its pale conventionalised leaves
+and flat little umbels of berries, suggests somehow the carving on old
+Gothic choirs, as though it borrowed its characteristic touch from an
+external shaping hand; as if with its predetermined habit of growth it
+had a secret affinity for man, and waited but to be transplanted into
+gardens. It needs, however, no garden facilities, but shapes itself
+to the most inhospitable conditions. About the time it begins to put
+forth its thousand waxy bells, in December or January, the toyon, the
+native holly, is at its handsomest. This is a late summer flowering
+shrub that in mid-winter loses a little of its glossy green, and above
+its yellowing foliage bears berries in great scarlet clusters. Between
+these two overlapping ends, the gaumet of the chaparral is run in blues
+of wild lilac, reds and purples of rhus and buckthorn and the wide,
+white umbels of the alder, which here becomes a tree fifty to sixty
+feet in height. It is the only one of the tall chaparral which has
+edible fruit, for though bears and Indians make a meal of manzanita,
+it does not commend itself to cultivated taste. More humble species,
+huckleberry, thimble, and blackberry, crowd the open spaces under the
+oak-madroño forests, or, as if they knew their particular usefulness
+to man, come hurrying to clearings of the axe, and may be seen holding
+hands as they climb to cover the track of careless fires. In June whole
+hill-slopes, under the pine and madroños, burn crimson with sweet, wild
+strawberries. The wild currant and the fuchsia-flowered gooseberry are
+not edible, but they are under no such obligation; they "make good"
+with long wands of jewel-red, drooping blossoms, and in the case of
+the currant, with delicate pink racemes, thrown out almost before
+the leaves while the earth still smells of winter dampness. Though
+nobody seems to know how it travelled so far, the "incense shrub" is
+a favourite of English gardens where, before the primroses begin, it
+serves the same purpose as in the west coast cañons, quickening the
+sense into anticipations of beauty on every side.
+
+Inland the close, round-backed hills draw into ranks and ranges, making
+way for chains of fertile valleys which also fill out the Californian's
+calendar of saints. But, in fact, your true Californian prays to his
+land as much as ever the early Roman did, and pours on it libations
+of water and continuous incense of praise. Every one of these longish,
+north-trending basins is superlatively good for something,--olives or
+wheat, perhaps; Pajaro produces apples and Santa Clara has become the
+patroness of prunes.
+
+Nothing could be more ethereally lovely than the spring aspect of the
+orchard country. It begins with the yellowing of the meadow lark's
+breast, and then of early mornings, with the appearance, as if flecks
+of the sky had fallen, of great flocks of bluebirds that blow about
+in the ploughed lands and are dissolved in rain. Then the poppies
+spring up like torchmen in the winter wheat, and along the tips of
+the apricots, petals begin to show, crumpled as the pink lips of
+children shut upon mischievous secrets; a day or two of this and then
+the blossoms swarm as bees, white fire breaks out among the prunes,
+it scatters along the foothills like the surf. Toward the end of the
+blooming season all the country roads are defined by thin lines of
+petal drift, and any wind that blows is alive with whiteness. After
+which, thick leafage covers the ripening fruit and the valley dozes
+through the summer heat with the farms outlined in firm green, like a
+patchwork quilt drawn up across the mountains' knees.
+
+The tree that gives the memorable touch to the landscape of the coast
+valleys is the oak, both the roble and encinas varieties. There are
+others with greater claims to distinction, the sequoia, the "big
+tree," lurking in the Santa Cruz mountains, the madroño, red-breeched,
+green-coated, a very Robin Hood of trees, sequestered in cool cañons,
+and the redwood, the _palo colorado_, discovered by the first Governor,
+Don Gaspar de Portola, on his search for the lost port of Monte Rey.
+All these keep well back from the main lines of travel. The most that
+the rail tourist sees of them is a line of redwoods, perhaps, climbing
+up from the sea-fronting cañons to peer and whisper on the ridges above
+the fruiting orchards. But the oaks go on, keeping well in the laps
+of the hills, avoiding the wind rivers, marching steadily across the
+alluvial basins on into the hot interior. They are more susceptible to
+wind influence than almost any other, and mark the prevailing direction
+of the seasonal air currents with their three-hundred-year-old trunks
+as readily as reeds under a freshet. You can see them hugging the
+lee side of any cañon, leaning as far as they may out of the sea-born
+draughts, but standing apart, true aristocrats among trees, disdaining
+alike one another and the whole race of orchard inmates. When in full
+leaf, for the _roble_ is deciduous, they are both of them distinctly
+paintable, particularly when in summer the trunks, grey and aslant,
+upbearing cloud-shaped masses of dark green, make an agreeable
+note against the fawn-coloured hills. The _roble_ is a noble tree,
+high-crowned, with a great sweep of branches, but seen in winter
+stripped of its thick, small leafage, it loses interest. Its method of
+branching is fussy, too finely divided, and without grace.
+
+  [Illustration: THE CEMETERY, SANTA BARBARA MISSION]
+
+Around Santa Margarita and Paso Robles filmy moss spreads a veil over
+the _robles_ as of Druid meditation; one fancies them aloof from the
+stir of present-day life as they were from the bears that used to
+feed on the mast under them. A hundred years or so ago the Franciscans
+drove out the bears by an incantation--I mean by the exorcism of the
+Church enforced with holy water and a procession with banners around
+the Mission precinct: "I adjure you, O Bears, by the true God, by the
+Holy God ... to leave the fields to our flocks, not to molest them nor
+come near them." But bears or _homo sapiens_, it is all one to the oaks
+of San Antonio; indeed, if legend is to be credited, the four-footed
+brothers would have been equally as acceptable to the patron of the
+Mission where this interesting ceremony took place. I can testify,
+however, that after all this lapse of time the exorcism is still in
+force, for though I have been up and down that country many times I
+have seen no bears in it.
+
+Things more pestiferous than bears are driven out, humours of the
+blood, stiffness of the joints, by the medicinal waters that bubble
+and seep along certain ancient fissures of the country rock. This has
+always seemed to me the very insolence of superfluity. Who wishes, when
+all the air is censed with the fragrance of wild vines, to have his
+nose assaulted with fumes of sulphur, even though it is known to be
+good for a number of things? But there are some people who could never
+be got to observe the noble proportions of five-hundred-year-old oaks
+with the wild grapes going from tree to tree like a tent, except as a
+by-process incident to the drinking of nasty waters. So the land has
+its way even with our weaknesses.
+
+  [Illustration: SYCAMORES, A COAST RANGE CAÑON]
+
+Besides these excursions inland, which bring us in almost every case to
+one of the ancient Franciscan foundations, there are two or three ports
+of call on the sea front worth lingering at for more things than the
+pleasant air and the radiant wild bloom. One of these is Santa Barbara
+which Santa Inez holds in its lap, curving like a scimitar opposite
+the most northerly of the channel islands. Understand, however, that
+no good comes of thinking of Santa Barbara as a place on the map. It
+is a Sargossa of Romance, a haven of last things, the last Mission in
+the hands of the Franciscans, the last splendour of the Occupation, the
+last place where mantillas were worn and they danced the _fandango_ and
+_la jota_; an eddy into which have drifted remnants of every delightful
+thing that has passed on the highways of land and sea, which here hail
+one another across the curving moon-white beach. Summer has settled
+there, California summer which never swelters, never scorches. Frost
+descends at times from Santa Inez to the roofs, but lays no finger on
+the fuchsias, poinsettias, and the heliotropes climbing to second-story
+windows. The wild thickets which connect the territory with the town,
+are vocal with night-singing mocking-birds; along the foreshore white
+pelicans divide the mountain-shadowed waters. The waters, taking all
+the sky's changes, race to the fairy islands, the chaparral runs back
+to the flanks of Santa Inez showing yellowly through the distant blue
+of pines; overhead a sky clouded with light. This is not a paradox but
+an attempt to express the misty luminosity of a heaven filled with
+refractions of the summer-tinted slope, the glaucous leafage of the
+chaparral, the white sand and sapphire-glinting water. The sky _beyond_
+the enclosing mountains has the cambric blueness of the superheated
+interior, but directly overhead it has depth and immensity of colour
+unequalled except along the Mediterranean.
+
+Santa Barbara is a port of distinguished visitors; more, and more
+varieties, of sea-birds put in there on the long flight from the Arctic
+to the Isthmus than is easily believable. In the Estero--_esteril_,
+sterile--an ill-smelling tide pool lying behind the town, may be found
+at one season or another, all the western species that delight the
+ornithologist. The black brant, going by night, and wild swans, as
+many as a score of them together, have been noted in its backwaters,
+and scarcely any stroll along the receding surf but is enlivened by
+the resonant, sweet whistle of the plover. In hollows of the sands
+thousands of beach-haunting birds may be seen camping for the night,
+looking like some sea-coloured, strange vegetation, and early mornings
+when the channel racing by, leaves the bay placid, tens of thousands
+of shearwaters sleep in shouldering ranks that sway with the incoming
+swell as the kelp sways, without being scattered by it. One can see
+the same sight, augmented as to numbers, around Monterey, a long day's
+journey to the north as the car goes, long enough and lovely enough to
+deserve another chapter.
+
+
+
+
+  [Illustration: TALL CHAPARRAL, SANTA CRUZ]
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE PORT OF MONTEREY
+
+
+Without doubt history is made quite as much by the mistakes of men
+as by their utmost certainties. The persistent belief of the ancient
+geographers in the existence of the Straits of Anian, the traditional
+North-West Passage, led to some romancing, and to the exploration of
+the California coast a century or so before it was of any particular
+use to anybody. It led also to the bluest bay. Viscaino took possession
+of it for Philip of Spain as early as 1602, nearly two hundred years
+before the Franciscans planted a cross there under Viscaino's very
+tree. During all that time the same oaks staggered up the slope
+away from the wind, and the scimitar curve of the beach kept back
+the brilliant waters. There is a figure of immensity in this more
+terrifying than the mere lapse of years. Not how many times but with
+what sureness for every day the sapphire deep shudders into chrysoprase
+along the white line of the breakers. We struggle so to achieve a
+little brief moment of beauty, but every hour at Monterey it is given
+away.
+
+The bay lies squarely fronting the Pacific swell, about a hundred
+miles south of the Golden Gate, between the horns of two of the little
+tumbled coast ranges, cutting back to receive the waters of the Pajaro
+and the Salinas. From the south the hill juts out sharply, taking
+the town and the harbour between its knees, but the north shore is
+blunted by the mountains of Santa Cruz. The beach is narrow, and all
+along its inner curve blown up into dunes contested every season by
+the wind and by the quick, bright growth of sand verbena, lupins, and
+mesembryanthemums. The waters of the rivers are set back by the tides,
+they are choked with bars and sluiced out by winter floods. For miles
+back into the valleys of Pajaro and Salinas, blue and yellow lupins
+continue the colour of the sand and the pools of tide water. They climb
+up the landward slope of the high dunes and set the shore a little
+seaward against the diminished surf. Then the equinoctial tide rises
+against the land that the lupins have taken and smooths out their
+lovely gardens with a swift, white hand, to leave the beach smooth
+again for the building of pale, wind-pointed cones.
+
+  [Illustration: LOOKING DOWN ON MONTEREY AND THE BAY]
+
+The valley of the Salinas, which has its only natural outlet on the
+bay, is of the type of coast valleys, long, narrow and shallow, given
+over to farming and to memories of Our Lady of Solitude lying now as
+a heap of ruins in a barley field. It is a place set apart, where any
+morning you might wake to find the sea has entered between the little,
+brooding hills to rest.
+
+Gulls follow the plough there, and pines avoid the river basin as
+though each of them knew very well their respective rights in it. One
+has, however, to make a point of such discoveries, for the entrance to
+the valley is obscured by its very candour, lying all open as it does
+to drifting dune and variable sea marshes.
+
+It is even more worth while to follow the flat-bordered Pajaro into the
+shut valley where dozes the little town of San Juan Bautista, taking
+on its well-sunned mesa, those placid lapses of self-forgetfulness
+which are to the aged as a foretaste of the long sleep. Here it was
+that the magic muse of Music came into the country. It came in a
+little tin-piped, wooden hand-organ, built by one Benjamin Dobson of
+22 Swan Street, London, in the year 1735, but of all its history until
+it was unpacked from mule-back by Padre Lausan in 1797, there is not
+a word current. Our acquaintance with it begins on the day that the
+Padre set it up in the hills and played, "The Siren's Waltz," "Lady
+Campbell's Reel," and all its repertoire of favourite London airs, of
+which the least appropriate to its present mission must have been the
+one called "Go to the Devil." Which only goes to prove that the spirit
+of the Franciscans was often superior to their means, for what the
+simple savages did do as soon as they had overcome their superstitious
+fear of the noise box, was to come to Mass to hear it as often as
+possible. There remain three old volumes of music written later for
+the Mission which came true to its founding and excelled in all sweet
+sounds, but none, it is said, pleased the Indians so much or so raised
+their spirits as "The Siren's Waltz." No doubt its inspiriting strains
+added something to the warlike spirit which led here to the only
+local resistance opposed to the American invasion, for it was on the
+Gavilan heights above the little town that Frémont, on the tallest
+tree that he could find, raised the Stars and Stripes, gallantly if
+somewhat prematurely. It was from San Juan that Castro's men marched
+to the final capitulation of Cahuenga, and finally from here the last
+remnant of the old life drains away. One hears the echo of it faint as
+the sea sounds that on rare days come trembling up the valley on the
+translucent air.
+
+Returning to the bay, one finds all interest centering about the Point
+of Pines, a very ancient, rocky termination of the most westerly of
+the coast barriers. The Point, which is really a peninsula, is one
+of the most notable landmarks between Point Conception on the south
+and Fort Point at San Francisco. Its lighthouse stands well out on a
+rocky finger, ringed with incessant, clanging buoys; between it and
+Santa Cruz light is a roadstead for an empire. A windy bay at best,
+deep tides, and squally surfaces, the waters of Monterey have other
+values than the colourist finds in them. Sardines, salmon, cod, tuna,
+yellow tail run with its tides. At most seasons of the year whales
+may be seen spouting there, or are cast upon its shoals. At one time
+the port enjoyed a certain prosperity as a whaling station, of which
+small trace remains beside the bleaching vertebræ that border certain
+of the old gardens and the persistent whalebone souvenirs of the curio
+dealer. Lateen-rigged fisher fleets flock in and out of the harbour,
+butterfly winged; and all about the rock beaches creep the square-toed
+boats of the Japanese and Chinese abalone gatherers. Thousands of
+purple sea-urchins, squid, hundred-fingered star-fish, and all manner
+of slimy sea delicacies, these slant-eyed Orientals draw up out of
+the rainbow rock pools and the deeps below the receding surf. They go
+creeping and peering about the ebb, their guttural hunting cries borne
+inshore on the quiet air, seeming as much a native sea speech as the
+gabble of the gulls. So in their skin canoes and balsas the Indians
+must have crept about the inlets for as long as it requires to lay a
+yard or two of mould over the ancient middens of the tribe, as long as
+it takes to build a barrier of silver dunes half a mile seaward. Even
+at that distance the plough turns up the soil evenly sprinkled with
+crumbling shell which holds to the last a shred of its old iridescence.
+Far inland, past the Sierra Wall even to the country of Lost Borders,
+I have found amulets of this loveliest of the pearl shells, traded for
+and treasured by a people to whom the "Big Water" is a half-credited
+traveller's tale.
+
+About five hundred yards outside the surf, from Laboratory Point,
+circling the peninsula to Mission Point on the south, the submerged
+rocky ridge has grown a great, tawny mane of kelp. Every year it is
+combed and cut by the equinoctial tides, and cast ashore in brown,
+sea-smelling wind-rows, and every year it grows again to be the
+feeding-ground of a million water-haunting birds. Here the Ancient
+Murrelet fattens for the long flight to the Alaskan breeding-grounds,
+and in the wildest gales the little nocturnal auklets may be heard
+calling to one another above the warring thunder of the surf, or
+when the nights are clear and the mists all banded low beneath the
+moon, they startle the beach wanderer with their high keen notes and
+beetle whirring wings. Long triangular flights of curlew drop down
+these beaches against the westering sun, with wings extended straight
+above their heads, furling like the little lateen sails come home from
+fishing. Sandpipers, sanderlings, all the ripple runners, the skimmers
+of the receding foam, all the scavengers of the tide, the gulls,
+glaucous-winged, ringbilled, and the species that take their name from
+the locality, may be found here following the plough as robins do in
+the spring. When the herring school in the bay nothing could exceed the
+multitude and clamour of the herring gulls. They stretch out in close
+order, wing beating against wing, actually over square miles of the
+ruffling water between Point Pinos and the anchorage. But any attempt
+to render an account of the wild, winged life that flashes about the
+bays of Carmel and Monterey would read like an ornithologist's record.
+
+After storms that divide the waters outside the bay into great toppling
+mountains, in the quiet strip between the kelp and the beaches,
+thousands of shearwaters may be seen sleeping in long, swaying,
+feathered pontoons, shoulder to shoulder. The island rocks standing
+within the surf, from the Point of Pines all down the coast to Point
+Sur, are famous rookeries of cormorant. Watchful and black against the
+guano-whitened rocks, they guard their ancestral nests, redecorated
+each season with gay weed, pulled from the painted gardens of the deep;
+turning their long necks this way and that like revolving turret-tops,
+they beat off the gluttonous gulls with a devotion which would seem to
+demand some better excuse than the naked, greasy, wide-mouthed young.
+Warm mornings these can be seen stretching black-stemmed, gaping bills
+from the nesting hollows, waving this way and that like the tips of
+voracious sea anemones. Other rocks, white with salty rime, are given
+by mutual consent to rookeries of the yelping seals, the "sea lions" of
+this coast. Moonlight nights they can be seen playing there, with the
+weird half-human suggestion as of some mythical sea creatures.
+
+Other and less fortunate adventurers on the waters of Monterey have
+left strange traces on that coast; one stumbles on a signboard set up
+among the rocks to mark where such and such a vessel went to pieces in
+a night of storm. Buried deep in the beach beyond the anchorage is the
+ancient teakwood hull of the _Natala_, the ship that carried Napoleon
+to Elba. It brought secularisation to the Missions also, after which
+unfriendly service the wind woke in the night and broke it against the
+shore. Just off Point Lobos, the Japanese divers after abalones report
+a strange, uncharted, sunken craft, a Chinese junk blown out of her
+course perhaps, or one of those unreported galleons that followed a
+phantom trail of gold all up the west coast of the New World. Strange
+mosses come ashore here, tide by tide, all lacy and scarf-coloured, and
+once we found on the tiny strand below Pescadero, a log of sandal-wood
+with faint waterworn traces of tool marks still upon it.
+
+Most mysterious of all the hints held by the farthest west--for
+behold, when you have come to land again, sailing from this port, it is
+east!--of a time before our time, is the Monterey cypress.
+
+Across the neck of the peninsula, a matter of six or eight miles,
+cuts in the little bay of Carmel, a blue jewel set in silver sand.
+Two points divide it from the racing Pacific, the southern limb of
+Punta Pinos, and the deeply divided rocky ledge of Lobos--Lobos,
+the wolf, with thin, raking, granite jaws. Now on these two points,
+and nowhere else in the world, are found natural plantations of the
+trees that might have grown in Dante's Purgatorio, or in the imagined
+forests where walked the rapt, tormented soul of Blake. Blake, indeed,
+might have had a hint of these from some transplanted seedling on an
+English terrace, for the Monterey cypress is quick-growing for the
+first century or so and one of the most widely diffused of trees; but
+only here on the Point and south to Pescadero ranch do they grow of
+God's planting. With writhen trunks and stiff contorted limbs they
+take the storm and flying scud as poppies take the sun. Incredibly
+old, even to the eye, they have no soil, nor seek none other than
+the thousand-year litter of their scaly needles, the husk of their
+nut-shaped, woody cones--the Spirit of the Ancient Rocks come to life
+in a tree. Grown under friendly conditions the young trees spire as do
+other conifers, but here they take on strange enchanted shapes. Their
+flat, wind-depressed tops are resilient as springs; one may lie full
+length along them, scarcely sunk in the minutely-feathered twigs, and
+watch the coasting steamers trail by on seas polished by the heat, or
+the winter surf bursting high in air. Or one could steal through their
+thick plantations unsuspected, from twisty trunk to trunk in the black
+shade, feeling the old earth-mood and man's primeval fear, the pricks
+and warnings of a world half made. The oldest of the cypresses are
+attacked by a red fungus rust, the colour of corroding time. It creeps
+along the under side of boughs and eats away the green, but even then
+the twisted heart wood will outlast most human things.
+
+  [Illustration: PESCADERO, A CHINESE FISHING VILLAGE, MONTEREY BAY]
+
+The pines of Monterey, though characteristic enough of the locality
+to take on its identifying name, are thoroughly plebeian: prolific,
+quick-growing, branching like candelabra when young; but in a hundred
+years or so their wide limbs, studded with persistent cones, take on
+something of the picturesque eccentricity that may be noticed among
+the old in rural neighbourhoods. They grow freely back into the hills
+till they are warned away from the cañons by the more sequestered _palo
+colorado_. The Monterey pine is one of the long-needled varieties, but
+of a too open growth perhaps, or too flexile to have any voice but a
+faint rustling echo of the ocean. The hill above Monterey, crowned with
+them, is impressive enough; they look lofty and aloof and dark against
+the sky, but growing in a wood they are seen to be too spindling and
+sparse-limbed to be interesting. The oaks do better by the landscape,
+all of the _encinas_ variety, bearing stiff clouds of evergreen foliage
+in lines simple enough to compose beautifully with the slow scimitar
+sweep of the bay and the round cloud-masses that, gathering from the
+sea, hang faintly pearled above the horizon. There are no redwoods
+on the peninsula; straggling lines of them look down from Palo Corona
+on Carmel Bay, walking one after another, with their odd tent-shaped
+tops and long branches all on the windward side, like a procession of
+friars walking against the wind. On the Santa Cruz coast, and in small
+groups near Carmel, grows the tan bark oak, not a true oak, but of the
+genus _Pasania_, whose nearest surviving congeners are no nearer than
+Siam. How it came here, survivor of an earlier world, or drifting in on
+the changing Japanese current, no one knows. Apparently no one cares,
+for the only use the Santa Crucians have found for it is to tan shoe
+leather.
+
+  [Illustration: CYPRESS POINT, NEAR CARMEL]
+
+Three little towns have taken root on the Peninsula: two on the bay
+side, the old pueblo of Monterey with its white-washed adobes still
+contriving to give character to the one wide street; Pacific Grove,
+utterly modern, on the surf side of Punta de Pinos, a town which
+began, I believe, as a resort for the churchly minded--a very clean
+and well-kept and proper town, absolutely exempt, as the deeds are
+drawn to assure us, "from anything having a tendency to lower the moral
+atmosphere," a town where the lovely natural woods have given place to
+houses every fifty feet or so, all nicely soldered together with lines
+of bright scarlet and clashing magentas and rosy pinks of geraniums and
+pelargoniums in a kind of predetermined cheerfulness; in short, a town
+where nobody would think of living who wanted anything interesting to
+happen to him. Above it on the hill, the Presidio commands the naked
+slope, fronting toward Santa Cruz, raking the open roadstead with its
+guns. It was under this hill on the harbour side, where a little creek
+still runs a rill in the rainy season, that Viscaino heard the first
+mass in California, and nearly two hundred years later, Padre Serra set
+up the cross.
+
+On June 30, 1770, that being the Holy Day of Pentecost, was founded
+here the Mission of San Carlos Borromeo, afterward transplanted for
+sufficient reasons, over the hill six miles away, on Carmel River. The
+town is full of reminders of the days of the Spanish Occupation, when
+it was the capital of Alta California. Old gardens here have still the
+high adobe walls, old houses the long galleries and little wrought-iron
+balconies; times yet the tide rises in the streets of the town, and
+still the speech is soft.
+
+It is also possible to buy _tomales_ there and _enchiladas_ and _chile
+concarne_ which will for the moment restore your faith in certain
+conceptions of a hereafter that of late have lost popularity.
+
+Half a mile back from the beach, and divided from the town by the old
+cemetery, in a deep alluvial flat grown to great oaks and creeping
+sycamores, is situated one of the famous winter resorts of the world,
+Hôtel Del Monte. I can recommend it with great freedom to those
+curiously constituted people who have to have an excuse for being out
+of doors. The Del Monte drives and golf links are said by those who
+have used them, to provide such excuse in its most compelling form.
+Those who suffer under no such necessity will do well to take the white
+road climbing the hill out of old Monterey, and drop down the other
+side of it into Carmel.
+
+From the top of this hill the lovely curve of the bay, disappearing far
+to the north under a violet mist, is pure Greek in its power to affect
+the imagination. Its blueness is the colour that lies upon the Gulf of
+Dreams; the ivory rim of the dunes, the shadowed blue of the terraces
+set on a sudden all the tides of recollection back on Salonica,
+Lepanto, the hill of Athens. You are reconciled for a moment to the
+chance of history which whelmed the colourful days of the Spanish
+Occupation. They could never have lived up to it.
+
+But once on the Carmel side of the peninsula, regret comes back very
+poignantly. The bay is a miniature of the other, intensified, the
+connoisseur's collection,--blue like the eye of a peacock's feather,
+fewer dunes but whiter, a more delicate tracery on them of the beach
+verbena, hills of softer contours, tawny, rippled like the coat of a
+great cat sleeping in the sun. Carmel Valley breaks upon the bay by
+way of the river which chokes and bars, runs dry in summer or carries
+the yellow of its sands miles out in winter a winding track across the
+purple inlet. It is a little valley and devious, reaching far inland.
+Above its source the peaks of Santa Lucia stand up; for its southern
+bulwark, Palo Corona. Willows, sycamores, elder, wild honeysuckle, and
+great heaps of blackberry vines hedge the path of its waters.
+
+  [Illustration: SANTA CRUZ MOUNTAINS, THE COAST RANGE]
+
+Where the valley widens behind the low barrier that shuts out the sea,
+sits the Mission of San Carlos Borromeo, once the spiritual capital
+of Alta California. Here Junipero Serra, and after him the other Padre
+Presidentes, held the administration of Mission affairs, and from here
+he wandered forth on foot, up and down this whole coast from San Diego
+to Solano, with pacification and the seeds of civilisation. Here on the
+walls, faintly to be traced beneath the scorn of time, he blazoned with
+his own hands the Burning Heart, the symbol of his own inward flame.
+Here, in his seventy-first year, he died and was buried on the gospel
+side of the altar. It is reported that his last act was to walk to the
+doorway to look once, a long look, on the hills turning amber under
+the August sun, on the heaven-blue water and the white hands of the
+surf beating against the cliffs of Lobos; looked on the fields and the
+orchard planted by his own hand, on the wattled huts of the neophytes
+redeemed, as he believed them, to all eternity, after which he lay down
+and slept. It is further reported in the annals of the Mission that
+it was necessary to place a guard about the wasted body in its shabby
+brown gown, to defend it from the crowding mourners craving each a
+relic of the blessed remains. Had I lived at that time I should have
+been among them, for he was a great soul, and have I not felt even at
+this distance of the years the touch of his high fervours! San Carlos
+is one of the best-conditioned of these abandoned fortresses of the
+faith: the ancient pear trees are still in bearing, the wild mustard
+yellows in the fields, its architecture still betrays the uncertain
+hand of the savage; back in unsearchable recesses of the hills linger
+still some Indians whose garbled greeting is a memory of the _Ama Dios_
+which the padres taught them. Until a few years ago the prayer-post,
+a rude slab with the triple-knotted cord of the Franciscans carved
+around it, still stood on the hill at the end of the path their devout
+feet made, resorting to it for courage and consolation. These mementos
+fade, but year by year the impress of the great spirit of Serra grows
+plainer, like one of those trodden paths of long ago which show not at
+all if you seek them in the grass or near at hand, but from the vantage
+of Palo Corona are traceable far across the landscape.
+
+The modern Carmel is a place of resort for painter and poet folk.
+Beauty is cheap there; it may be had in superlative quality for the
+mere labour of looking out of the window. It is the absolute setting
+for romance. No shipping ever puts in at the singing beaches. The
+freighting teams from the Sur with their bells a-jangle, go by on the
+country road, but great dreams have visited the inhabitants thereof.
+Spring visits it also with yellow violets all up the wooded hills,
+and great fountain sprays of sea-blue ceanothus. Summer reddens the
+berries of the manzanita and mellows the poppy-blazoned slopes to tawny
+saffron. Strong tides arrive unheralded from some far-off deep-sea
+disturbance and shake the beaches. Suddenly, on the quietest days, some
+flying squadron of the deep breaks high over Lobos and neighs in her
+narrow caverns. Blown foam, whipped all across the Pacific, is cast
+up like weed along the sand and skims the wave-marks with a winged
+motion. Whole flocks of these foam-birds may be seen scudding toward
+the rock-corners of Mission Point after the equinoctial winds. Other
+tides the sea slips far out on new-made level reaches, and leaves the
+wet sand shining after the sun goes down like the rosy inside pearl of
+the abalone.
+
+The forests of Point Pinos are sanctuary. It is still possible to hear
+there at long intervals the demoniac howl of the little grey dog of
+the wilderness, "Brother Coyote," the butt, the cat's-paw, the Jack
+Dullard of Indian folklore, and sometimes in the open country below
+Point Lobos to see one curious and agaze from brown, naked bosses of
+the hills. Any warm afternoon, by lying very still a long time in the
+_encinal_, one may observe the country-coloured bobcat, tawny as the
+grass in summer, slipping from shade to shade. Sometimes if startled
+he will turn and face you with his blinking, yellow, half-hypnotic
+stare before he returns to his unguessed errand. Any morning you may
+find about your bungalow innumerable prints as of baby palms pressed
+downward in the dust, the tracks of the friendly little racoons who
+may be heard bubbling in the shallow cañons any moonlight night. Often
+I have left a cut melon under my window for the sake of seeing, an
+hour after moonrise, two or three of them scooping out the pink heart,
+spatting one another for helpings out of turn, keeping, in spite
+of the little gluttons you know them to be, a great affectation of
+daintiness. The night-cry of these little creatures is difficult to
+distinguish from the love-call of the horned owl, who on the undark
+nights of summer skims the low foreshore for the sake of the field-mice
+and gophers that feed on the seeds of the beach grasses. Every sort of
+migratory bird that passes up and down this coast lingers a while in
+the neighbourhood of Monterey, and some species, like the Point Pinos
+juncos, take from it their distinctive name. But if, when you walk
+in the woods, the Stellar jay has first sight of you, you will find
+them singularly empty, for these blue-jacketed policemen of the pines
+permit nothing to pass them unannounced. Of all the wood-folk, the wise
+quail alone ignores their strident warnings. The quail have learned not
+only the certainty of safety but its absolute limit. I have seen whole
+flocks of them, scared by the gun, whirring out of the public lands to
+a point not out of gunshot but within the forbidden ground, from which
+they send back soft twitterings of defiance. It is not, however, their
+habit to flush except in great danger, but to run to cover, moving with
+a peculiar elusive rhythm, like the rippling of a snake. This plump
+little partridge, for it is only in the common speech that he becomes
+a quail, is the apt spirit of the chaparral--cheerful, social, strong
+in the domestic virtues; his crest not floating backward in warrior
+fashion, but cocked forward over an eye, he has all the air of the
+militant bourgeois, who could fight of course, but finds that running
+matches better with his inclinations. Just at the end of rains, before
+mating begins, hundreds of them may be seen feeding in the flock on
+open hillsides, and the thickets of buckthorn and ceanothus ring with
+their soft Spanish _Cuidado!_--Have a care!
+
+Three roads go up out of the peninsula to entice the imagination--that
+which we have already taken to the hills of Salinas and the little
+town of San Juan, the road to Carmel Valley, and the adventurous
+trail which leads all down the well-bitten coast past Sur and Pieoras
+Blancos. The Valley road turns off at the top of the divide between
+Carmel and Monterey; it passes on the landward side of the Mission
+into the river-bottom and skirts the narrow chain of farms, rising
+with the rise of the thinly-forested hills toward Tasajara, the Place
+of Springs. Here it is lost in the intricacies of the "back country."
+Deer-hunters go that way in the season, and those whose delight it is
+to lose themselves in the wilderness, to taste wild fruit and know no
+roof but the windy tent of stars. Years since there used to come out
+of that country shy-spoken, bearded men with bear-meat to sell and wild
+honey in the honeycomb, rifled from hiving rocks and hollow trees; but
+I fancy they are all dead now, or translated into the tall moss-bearded
+pines.
+
+The coast road, after it leaves Point Lobos behind, goes south and
+south, between high trackless hills and the lineless Pacific floor.
+From the Point you can see it rise over bare, sea-breasting hills, and
+disappear in narrow cañons down which, it is reported, immeasurable
+redwoods follow the white-footed creeks almost to the surf. Dim,
+violet-tinted islands rise offshore to break the sea's assault. Now
+and then one ventures in that direction as far as Arbolado, to return
+prophesying. But the most of us are wiser, understanding that the best
+service the road can render us is to remain a dramatic and unlimned
+possibility.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+OLD SPANISH GARDENS
+
+
+Dona Ina Manuelita Echivarra had come to the time of life when waists
+were not to be mentioned. It took all the evidence of her name to
+convince you that her cheek had once known tints of the olive and
+apricot. Tio Juan, who sunned himself daily in her patio, had achieved
+the richness of weathered teak; his moustachios were whitened as with
+the rime that collects on old adobes sometimes near the sea-shore.
+But Dona Ina, who missed by a score of years his mark of the days of
+_mañana por la mañana_, was muddily dark, and her moustache--but one
+does not suggest such things of a lady, and that Dona Ina was a lady
+could be proved by a foot so delicately arched and pointed, an ankle so
+neat that there was not another like it in your acquaintance save the
+mate to it.
+
+Once you had seen it peeping forth from under the black skirt--have
+not Castilian ladies worn black immemorially?--you did not require
+the assurance of Tio Juan that there was no one in her day could have
+danced _la jota_ with Dona Ina Manuelita.
+
+She would clack the castanets for you occasionally still, just to
+show how it was done, or with the guitar resting on the arm of her
+chair--laps were no more to be thought of than waists were--she would
+quaver a song, _La Golindrina_ for choice, or _La Noche esta Serena_.
+But unquestionably Dona Ina's time had gone by for shining at anything
+but conversation. She could talk, and never so fruitfully as when the
+subject was her garden.
+
+A Spanish garden is a very intimate affair. It is the innermost
+under-garment of the family life. Dona Ina's was walled away from the
+world by six feet of adobe, around the top of which still lingered the
+curved red tiles of Mission manufacture. It was not spoken of as the
+garden at all, it was the patio, an integral part of the dwelling.
+There was, in fact, a raw hide cot on the long gallery which gave
+access to it, and Dona Ina's drawn-work chemises bleaching in the
+sun. The patio is a gift to us from Andalusia; it is more Greek than
+Oriental, and the English porch has about as much relation to it as
+the buttons on the back of a man's coat to the sword-belt they were
+once supposed to accommodate. The patio is the original mud-walled
+enclosure of a people who preferred living in the open but were driven
+to protection; the rooms about three sides of it were an afterthought.
+
+  [Illustration: THE PATIO, OLD SPANISH RESIDENCE]
+
+The Echivarra patio did not lack the indispensable features of the
+early California establishment, the raised grill or cooking platform,
+and the ramada, the long vine-covered trellis where one took wine
+with one's friends, or the ladies of the family sat sewing at their
+interminable drawn work, _enramada_. The single vine which covered the
+twenty-foot trellis was of Mission stock, and had been planted by Dona
+Ina's father in the year the Pathfinder came over Tejon Pass into the
+great twin valleys. In Dona Ina's childhood a wine-press had stood in
+the corner of the patio where now there was a row of artichokes, which
+had been allowed to seed in order that their stiff silken tassels,
+dyed blue and crimson, might adorn the pair of china vases on either
+side the high altar. Dona Ina was nothing if not religious. In the
+corner of the patio farthest from the gallery, a fig-tree--this also
+is indispensable--hung over the tiled wall like a cloud. There was a
+weeping willow in the midst of the garden, and just outside, on either
+side the door, two great pepper trees of the very stock of the parent
+of all pepper trees in Alta California, which a sea captain from South
+America gave to the Padre at San Luis Rey. Along the east wall there
+were pomegranates.
+
+A pomegranate is the one thing that makes me understand what a pretty
+woman is to some men--the kind of prettiness that was Dona Ina's in the
+days when she danced _la jota_. The flower of the pomegranate has the
+crumpled scarlet of lips that find their excuse in simply being scarlet
+and folded like the petals of a flower; and then the fruit, warm from
+the sunny wall, faintly odorous, dusky flushed! It is so tempting when
+broken open--that sort opens of its own accord if you leave it long
+enough on the bush--the rich heart colour, and the pleasant uncloying,
+sweet, sub-acid taste. One tastes and tastes--but when all is said and
+done there is nothing to a pomegranate except colour and flavour, and
+at least if it does not nourish neither does it give you indigestion.
+That is what suggests the comparison; there are so many people who
+would like to find a pretty woman in the same category. Always when
+we sat together nibbling the rosy seeds, I could believe, even without
+the evidence of the ankles, that Dona Ina had had her pomegranate days.
+Only, of course, she would not have smelled so of musk and--there is
+no denying it--of garlic. Thick-walled old adobes of the period of the
+Spanish Occupation give off a faint reek of this compelling condiment
+at every pore, and as for the musk, it was always about the gallery in
+saucers and broken flower-pots.
+
+And yet Dona Ina was sensitive to odours: she told me that she had had
+the datura moved from the place where her mother had planted it, to the
+far end of the patio, where after nightfall its heavy, slightly fetid
+perfume, unnoticeable by day, scented all the air. She added that she
+felt convicted by this aversion of a want of sentiment toward a plant
+whose wide, papery-white bells went by the name of "Angels' trumpets."
+
+On the day that she told me about the datura, which I had only
+recognised by its resemblance to its offensive wayside congener, the
+"jimson weed," the Señora Echivarra had been washing her hair with a
+tonic made of oil expressed from the seeds of the megharizza after a
+recipe which her mother had had from _her_ mother, who had it from an
+Indian who used to peddle vegetables from the Mission, driving in every
+Saturday in an ancient caretta. I was interested to know if it were
+any more efficacious than the young shoots of the golden poppy fried
+in olive oil, which I had already tried. So we fell to talking of the
+virtues of plants and their application.
+
+We began with the blessed "herb of the saints," dried bunches of which
+hung up under the rafters of the gallery as an unfailing resort in
+affections of the respiratory tract, and _yerba buena_, in which she
+was careful to distinguish between the creeping, aromatic _del campo_
+of the woodlands and the _yerba buena del poso_, "herb of the well,"
+the common mint of damp places. When she added that the buckskin bag on
+the wall contained shavings of _cascara sagrada_, the sacred bark of
+the native buckthorn, indispensable to all nurseries, I knew that she
+had named two of the three most important contributions of the west to
+the modern pharmacopœia. This particular bag of bark had been sent from
+Sonoma County, for south of Monterey it grows too thin to be worth the
+gathering. The Grindelia, she told me, had come from the salt marshes
+about the mouth of the Pajaro, where Don Gaspar de Portola must have
+crossed going northward.
+
+"And were you then at such pains to secure them?"
+
+"In the old days, yes," she assured me. In her mother's time there
+was a regular traffic carried on by means of roving Indians in healing
+herbs and simples; things you could get now by no means whatever.
+
+"As for instance----?" I was curious.
+
+Well, there was creosote gum, which came from the desert beyond the
+Sierra Wall, valuable for sores and for rheumatism. It took me a moment
+or two, however, to recognise in her appellation of it (_hideondo_,
+stinking) the shiny, shellac-covered _larrea_ of the arid regions.
+There were roots also of the holly-leaved barberry, which came from wet
+mountains northward, and of the "skunk cabbage," which were to be found
+only in soggy mountain meadows, where any early spring, almost before
+the frost was out of the ground, bears could be seen rooting it from
+the sod, fairly burying themselves in the black, peaty loam.
+
+But when it came to _yerba mansa_, Dona Ina averred, her mother would
+trust nobody for its gathering. She would take an Indian or two and
+as many of her ten children as could not be trusted to be left at
+home, and make long _pasears_ into the coast ranges for this succulent
+cure-all. I knew it well for one of the loveliest of meadow-haunting
+plants; wherever springs babbled, wherever a mountain stream lost
+itself under the roble oaks, the _yerba mansa_ lifted above its
+heart-shaped leaves of pale green, quaint, winged cones on pink,
+pellucid stems. But I had never heard one half of the curative wonders
+which Dona Ina related of it. Efficacious in rheumatism, invaluable in
+pulmonary complaints, its bruised leaves reduced swellings, the roots
+were tonic and alterative.
+
+I spare you the whole list, for Dona Ina was directly of the line of
+that lovely Señorita who had disdainfully described the English as the
+race who "pay for everything," and to her mind it took a whole category
+of virtues to induce so much effort as a trip into the mountains
+which had not a _baile_ or a _fiesta_ at the end of it. Other things
+that were sought for by the housewives of the Spanish Occupation were
+_amole_, or soap-root, the bulbs of a delicate, orchid-like lily which
+comes up in the late summer among the stems of the chaparral, and the
+roots of the wild gourd, the _chili-cojote_, a powerful purgative.
+Green fruit of this most common pest, said Dona Ina, pounded to a pulp,
+did wonders in the way of removing stains from clothing.
+
+Then there was artemisia, romero, azalea, the blue-eyed grass of our
+meadows, upon an infusion of which fever patients can subsist for days,
+and elder, potent against spells, and there was Virgin's bower, which
+brought us back to the patio, for a great heap of it lay on the roof
+of the gallery, contesting the space there with the yellow banksia
+roses. I had supposed, until the Señora Echivarra mentioned it, that
+its purpose was purely ornamental, but I was to learn that it had come
+into the garden as _yerba de chivato_ about the time the barbed-wire
+fences of the gringo began to make a remedy for cuts indispensable to
+the ranchero who valued the appearance of his live stock. When the eye,
+travelling along its twisty stems and twining leaf-stalks, came to a
+clump of yarrow growing at the root of it I began at once to suspect
+the whole garden. Was not the virtue of yarrow known even to the
+Greeks?
+
+There was thyme flowering in the damp corner beyond the dripping
+faucet, and pot-marigold, lavender, rosemary, and lemon verbena, all
+plants that grow deep into the use and remembrance of man.
+
+No friend of our race, not even the dog, has been more faithful. The
+stock of these had come overseas from Spain--were not the Phœnicians
+credited with introducing the pomegranate into Hispaniola?--and thence
+by way of the Missions.
+
+All the borders of Dona Ina's garden were edged with rosy thrift, a
+European variety; and out on the headlands, a mile away, a paler,
+native cousin of it bloomed gaily with beach asters and yellow
+sand verbenas, but there was no one who knew by what winds, what
+communicating rootlets, they had exchanged greetings.
+
+Observation, travelling by way of the borders, came to the datura,
+which was to set the conversation off again, this time not of plants
+curative, but hurtful. We knew of the stupefying effects of the bruised
+pods and roots of this species, and--this was my contribution--how
+the Paiute Indians used to administer the commoner variety, called
+_main-oph-weep_, to their warriors to produce the proper battle frenzy,
+and especially to young women about to undergo the annual ordeal of the
+"Dance of Marriageable Maidens."
+
+Every year, at the spring gathering of the tribes, the maidens piled
+their dowries in a heap, and for three days, fasting, danced about it.
+If they fell or fainted, it was a sure sign they were not yet equal to
+the duties of housekeeping and childbearing; but I had had Paiute women
+tell me that they would never have endured the trial without a mild
+decoction of _main-oph-weep_.
+
+"It was different with us," insisted Dona Ina; "many a time we have
+danced the sun up over the mountain, and been ready to begin again the
+next evening...." But I wished to talk of the properties of plants, not
+of young ladies.
+
+The mystery of poison plants oppressed me. One may understand how a
+scorpion stings in self-protection, but what profit has the "poison
+oak" of its virulence? It is not oak at all, but _Rhus trilobata_, and
+in the spring whole hillsides are enlivened by the shining bronze of
+its young foliage, or made crimson in September. But the pollen that
+floats from it in May in clouds, the sticky sap, or even the acrid
+smoke from the clearing where it is being exterminated, is an active
+poison to the human skin, though I had not heard that any animal
+suffered similarly. Dona Ina opined that there was never an evil plant
+let loose in the gardens of the Lord but the remedy was set to grow
+beside it. A wash of manzanita tea, Grindelia, or even buckthorn, she
+insisted, was excellent for poison oak. Best of all was a paste of
+pounded "soap root." She knew a plant, too, which was corrective of
+the form of madness induced by the "loco" weed, whose pale foliage and
+delicately tinted, bladdery pods may be found always about the borders
+of the chaparral. For the convulsions caused by wild parsnip there was
+the wonder-working _yerba del pasmo_. This she knew also as a specific
+for snake-bite and tetanus. So greatly was it valued by mothers of
+families in the time of the Spanish Occupation, that when a clearing
+was made for a house and patio, in any country where it grew, a plant
+or two was always left standing. But it was not until I had looked for
+it, where she said I would find it between the oleander and the lemon
+verbena, that I recognised the common "grease-wood," the chamise of the
+mesa country.
+
+"But were there no plants, Dona Ina, which had another meaning, flowers
+of affection, corrective to the spirit?"
+
+"Angelica," she considered doubtfully. Young maids, on occasions of
+indecision, would pin a sprig of it across their bosoms, she said,
+and after they had been to church would find their doubts resolved;
+and there was yarrow, which kept your lover true, particularly if you
+plucked it with the proper ceremony from a young man's grave.
+
+Dona Ina remembered a fascinating volume of her mother's time, the
+_Album Mexicana_, in which the sentimental properties of all flowers
+were set forth. "There was the camelia, a beautiful woman without
+virtue, and the pomegranate----"
+
+"But the flowers of New Spain, Dona Ina, was there nothing of these?"
+I insisted.
+
+"Of a truth, yes, there was the cactus flower, not the opunta, the
+broad-leaved spiny sort, of which hedges were built in the old days,
+but the low, flamy-blossomed, prickly variety of hot sandy places. If
+a young man wore such a one pinned upon his velvet jacket it signified,
+'I burn for you.'"
+
+"And if he wore no flower at all, how then?"
+
+Dona Ina laughed, "_Si me quieros, no me quieros_"; she referred to the
+common yellow composite which goes by the name of "sunshine," or in the
+San Joaquin, where miles of it mixed with blue phacelias brighten with
+the spring, as "fly-flower." "In the old Spanish playing-cards," said
+Dona Ina, "the Jack of spades had such a one in his hand, but when I
+was a girl no caballero would have been caught saying, 'Love me, love
+me not!' They left all that to the señoritas."
+
+There was a Castilian rose growing beside me. Now a Castilian rose
+is not in the least what you expect it to be. It is a thick, cabbagy
+florescence, the petals short and not recurved, the pink hardly deeper
+than that of the common wild rose, the leafage uninteresting. One has
+to remember that it distinguished itself long before the time of the
+tea and garden hybrids, and, I suspect, borrowed half its charm from
+the faces it set off. For there was never but one way in the world for
+a rose to be worn, and that is the way Castilian beauties discovered so
+long ago that centuries have not made any improvement in it. Set just
+behind the ear and discreetly veiled by the mantilla, it suggests the
+effulgent charm of Spain, tempered by mystery. The Señora Echivarra had
+followed my glance, and nodded acquiescence to my thought. "In dressing
+for a _baile_, one would have as soon left off the rose as one's fan.
+One wore it even when the dress was wreathed with other flowers."
+
+"And did you, then, go wreathed in flowers?"
+
+"Assuredly; from the garden if we had them, or from the field.
+I remember once I was all blue larkspurs, here and here ..." she
+illustrated on her person, "and long flat festoons of the _yerba buena_
+holding them together."
+
+"It would have taken hoop skirts for that?" I opined.
+
+"That also. It was the time that the waltz had been learned from the
+officers of the American ships, and we were quite wild about it. The
+good Padre had threatened to excommunicate us all if we danced it
+... but we danced ... we danced...." Dona Ina's pretty feet twitched
+reminiscently. The conversation wandered a long time in the past before
+it came back to the patio lying so still, divided from the street by
+the high wall, the clouding fig, and the gnarly pear tree. Beyond the
+artichokes a low partition wall shut off the vegetable plot; strings
+of chili reddened against it. There was not a blade of grass in
+sight, only the flat, black adobe paths worn smooth by generations of
+treading, house and enclosing walls all of one earth.
+
+"But if so much came into the garden from the field, Señora, did
+nothing ever go out?"
+
+Ah, yes, yes--the land is gracious; there was mustard of course, and
+pepper grass and horehound, blessed herb, which spread all over the
+west with healing. The pimpernel, too, crept out of the enclosing
+wall, and the tree mallow which came from the Channel Islands by way
+of the gardens and has become a common hedge plant on the sandy lands
+about the bay of San Francisco. Along streams which ran down from
+the unfenced gardens of the _Americanos_, callas had domesticated
+themselves and lifted their pure white spathes serenely amid a tangle
+of mint and wild blackberries and painted cup. The almond, the rude
+stock on which the tender sorts were grafted, if allowed to bear
+its worthless bitter nuts would take to hillsides naturally. It is
+not, after all, walls which hold gardens but water. This is all that
+constrains the commingling of wild and cultivated species; they care
+little for man, their benefactor. Give them water, said Dona Ina,
+and they come to your door like a fed dog, or if you like the figure
+better, like grateful children. They repay you with sweetness and
+healing.
+
+A swift darted among the fig, marigolds, and portulacca of the
+inevitable rock-work which was the pride of the old Spanish gardens.
+Great rockets of tritoma flamed against the wall, on the other side of
+which traffic went unnoted and unsuspecting.
+
+"But we, Dona Ina, we Americans, when we make a garden, make it in the
+sight of all so that all may have pleasure in it."
+
+"Eh, the _Americanos_ ..." she shrugged; she moved to give a drink
+to the spotted musk, flowering in a chipped saucer; the subject did
+not interest her; her thought, like her flowers, had grown up in an
+enclosure.
+
+
+
+
+ [Illustration: THE GOLDEN GATE AND BLACK POINT, FROM HYDE STREET, SAN
+  FRANCISCO. (SITE OF THE PANAMA EXPOSITION, 1915)]
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE LAND OF THE LITTLE DUCK
+
+
+Where the twin rivers set back the tides from the bay, the Land of the
+Little Duck begins. The tides come head-on past the Golden Gate and the
+river answers to their tremendous compulsion far inland, past the point
+where the Sacramento and San Joaquin flow together. On the lee side
+of the headland which makes the southern pilaster of the Gate, sits
+San Francisco, making of the name she borrowed from the bay a new and
+distinguished thing, as some women do with their husbands' titles. A
+better location for a city is Carquinez Strait; the Mexican comandante
+resident at Sonoma would have had it there, bearing the name of his
+wife, Francesca. Said he to the newly arrived American authorities,
+"Do so, and I will furnish you the finest site in the world, with State
+house and Residence complete." But it appears the land has chosen its
+own name.
+
+All the years after the Pope had divided the New World between Spain
+and the Portuguese, the harbour lay hidden. Cabrillo, Drake, Maldonado,
+Juan de Fuca, Viscaino passed it in the night or veiled in obscuring
+fogs. And then Saint Francis showed it clear and lovely to Don Gaspar
+Portola, having for that revelation led him with holden eyes past his
+journey's objective. Likewise, when the time was ripe, he put it into
+the mind of the Yankee alcalde at Yerba Buena, a trading-post in the
+neighbourhood of Mission Dolores, that if the hamlet should be called
+San Francisco it might catch by implication the vessels clearing all
+ports of the world for San Francisco bay.
+
+O Chance, Chance! says the historian and turns another page. But it
+is my opinion that among the birds to which Saint Francis preached was
+included the Little Duck.
+
+The piers of the city front east, they face the Berkeley Hills,
+the Oaklands, the lands of the Sycamore, or, as the first settlers
+named them, the Alamedas. From thence vast settlements take their
+name, feeding the city as sea-birds do, from their own breasts.
+Back and forth between them the shuttling ferries weave thin webs of
+glistening wakes, duck-bodied tugs chugg and scuttle, busy still at
+world-building. From the promontory which makes the northern barrier of
+the Gate, Tamalpias swims out of atmospheric blueness. On its seaward
+slope, hardly out of reach of the siren's bellowing note, Muir Park
+preserves the ancient forest, rooted in the litter of a thousand years.
+And round about the foot of city and mountain the waters of the bay
+are blue, the hills are bluer. The hills melt down to greenness in the
+spring, the water runs to liquid emerald, flashing amber; the hills are
+tawny after rains, the waters tone to the turbid, clayey river-floods;
+land and sea they pursue one another as lovers through changing moods
+of colour; they have mists for mystery between revealing suns. Unless
+these things count for something, San Francisco is the very worst
+site in the world for a city. You take your heart in your mouth every
+time you go out to afternoon tea in the tram-cars that dip and swing
+like cockles at sea. They cut across streets so steep that grass grows
+between the cobbles where no traffic ever passes, to plunge down lanes
+of dwellings perched precariously as sea-birds' nests on the bare bones
+of hills that for true hilliness shame Rome's imperial seven. The bay
+side of the peninsula is mud, the Pacific side is sand. There great
+wasteful dunes blow up, they shift and pile, they take the contours of
+the wind-lashed waters--the very worst site in the world for a great
+city's pleasure-ground, and yet somehow it is there.
+
+For this city is one of those which have souls; it is a spirit sitting
+on a height, taking to itself form and the offices of civilisation.
+This is a thing that we know, because we have seen the land shake it
+as a terrier shakes a rat, until the form of the city was broken; it
+dissolved in smoke and flame. And then as a polyp of the sea draws out
+of the fluent water form and perpetuity for itself, we saw our city
+draw back its shapes of wood and stone, and statelier, more befitting
+a spirit that has endured so much. Nobody knows really what a city is
+except that it is something more than a collocation of houses. From
+Telegraph Hill, where the old semaphore stood, which signalled the
+far-between arrivals of ships around the Horn, you can see the trade
+of the world pass and repass the pillars of the Gate, the wall-sided
+warships. But none of these things really explain how San Francisco
+came to be clinging there to the leeward of a windy spit of land, like
+a great, grey sea-bird with palpitating wings.
+
+  [Illustration: TAMALPIAS]
+
+True to her situation, San Francisco is nothing if not dramatic. One
+recalls that the earliest foundation was dedicated to Our Lady of
+Dolors, _Nuestro Señora de Dolores_; the Indians fought here as they
+did nowhere else against Christian dominion. There were more burials
+than baptisms, and in the old cemetery of Yerba Buena the dead were
+so abandoned of all grace that the sand refused to hold them. One who
+spent his boyhood in the shifting purlieus of the old Laguna told me
+how in the hollows where the scrub oaks shrugged off the wind and the
+sand waved like water, the nameless coffins were covered and uncovered
+between a night and day. But if the dead could not hold their tenancy,
+the living succeeded. They did it by the very force of that dramatic
+instinct awakened by the plot and counterplot of natural forces.
+
+No Greek tragedy moved to more relentless measures than the moral
+upheaval of '56, when the whole city, in solemn funeral train behind
+the victim of one of those wild outbursts of lawlessness peculiar to
+the "gold rush," saw the lifeless bodies of the perpetrators hanging
+from the upper windows of the Vigilance Committee. Fifty years later
+came a wilder rout, down streets searched out by fire, snatching
+at humour as they ran, as so many points of contact for the city's
+rebuilding.
+
+The very worst location in the world, as I have remarked, is this windy
+promontory past which the grey tides race, but so long as a city can
+dramatise itself, one situation will do as well as another in which to
+render itself immortal.
+
+The bay of San Francisco with its contingencies is one of the most
+interesting of inland yachting waters, full of adventurous weather. It
+is possible to sail in one general direction from Alviso to the city of
+Sacramento, a hundred and fifty miles, and that without attempting the
+thousand miles of estuary and slough through which the waters slink and
+wind.
+
+At this season of the year the river is pushed backward by the tide a
+matter of ten miles or more above Sacramento City: on the San Joaquin
+it is felt as far as Crow's Landing. At Antioch it begins to be
+saltish, and down through Suisun and Carquinez the river-water fights
+its way as far as San Pablo before its identity is wholly lost. At
+flood-times it may be traced, a yellowish, turgid streak, as far as
+Alcatraz. This is the islet of the albatross which lies south of the
+tide race, as Tiburon is on the north, fragments all of them of that
+salt-rimed ledge outside the gate where hoarse sea-lions play, and
+brother to the castellated cloud far along on the sea's horizon, the
+very capital of the kingdom of the Little Duck.
+
+  [Illustration: MILL VALLEY, AND BACKWATER OF SAN FRANCISCO BAY]
+
+The Faralone Light is the last dropped astern by the Island steamships
+sagging south to the equator; it is also the sea-birds' city of
+refuge. This is the great murre rookery of the west coast, and formerly
+thousands of dozens of eggs were regularly taken from the Faralones
+to the San Francisco market; but since the islands became a Government
+station the murres have no enemy but the pirates of the air. In clefts
+and ledges close against the wall-sided cliffs they defend their
+shallow nests against the sheering gulls, or, hard beset, will push
+their single, new-hatched nestling into the friendlier sea, darting to
+break its fall with incredible swiftness, for a swimming gait is one
+of the things that come out of the shell with the native-born at the
+Faralones. On the same shelving rocks puffins rear their ratty young in
+burrows or under sheltering boulders, and the ashy petrel, the "little
+Peter" of the sea, walking by night before the storm, comes ashore here
+to hide his seldom nest. On the south Faralone the fierce cormorant
+builds her house of painted weed, which often the gulls steal from her
+as fast as she brings it ashore, for the gulls are the grafters of the
+sea-birds' city. This particular variety, known as the western gull,
+neither fishes for himself nor forages for building material. He feeds
+on the eggs and nestlings of his neighbours, or waits to snatch the
+day's catch from the beak that brought it up from the sea. He has the
+virtue of all predatory classes, an exemplary domesticity. His nest is
+soft and clean, his nestlings handsome. The western gull is often found
+marauding far up the estuary of Sacramento, but it is his congener,
+the herring gull, who follows the long white wake the ferries make
+ploughing the windy bay; or, distinguished among the silent shore birds
+for multitude and clamour, scavenges its reedy borders.
+
+Except for the promontories north and south, and the bold front of the
+Berkeley Hills opposing the Gate, the inland borders of the bay are
+flat tide-lands and sea-smelling lagunas. Stilts, avocets, herons,
+all the waders that haunt this coast or visit it in their seasonal
+flights, may be seen stalking the shallows for minnows, or where the
+marsh grass reddens, poised like some strange tide-land blossom, lifted
+on two slender stems. Low over them any clear day may be seen the grey
+old marsh hawk sailing, or the "duck hawk," the peregrine of falconry,
+following fiercely in the wake of the migrating hordes of water-fowl.
+All about Alviso the guttural cry of the black-crowned night-heron
+sounds eerily above the marshes, along with the peculiar "pumping"
+love-song of the bittern.
+
+For some reason the air of the marshes is friendly to the mistletoe
+infesting the oaks and sycamores which stand back from the tide-line;
+but the marshes themselves are treeless. They have their own sorts
+of growth, cane and cat-tails and tule, goosefoot, samphire, and the
+tasselled sedges. This samphire of Shakespeare, _l'herbe de Saint
+Pierre_ of the Normandy Marshes, is the glory of the Franciscan
+tide-lands; miles of it, barely above the level of the slow-moving
+water, spread a magic carpet of blending crimsons, purples, and
+bronzes. Under the creeping mists and subject to the changes of the
+water, beaten to gold and copper under the sun, it redeems the flat
+lines of the landscape with a touch of Oriental splendour.
+
+For it is a flat kingdom, that of the Little Duck--the hills hanging
+remotely on the horizon, the few trees and scattered hugging the low
+shore of the sloughs as the shipwrecked cling to their rafts, desperate
+of rescue. The rich web of the samphire, the shifting colour of the
+water, faintly reminiscent of Venice, borrow another foreign touch
+from the names under which the borders recommended themselves to
+attention:--Sausalito, "little willows," Tiburon, Corta Madero, San
+Quentin, San Raphael. Approached from the water, these names, with
+the exception of San Quentin, do no more than stir the imagination.
+San Quentin, on one of those courtesy islands newly rescued from the
+primordial mud, shows itself uncompromisingly for what it is, one of
+those places for the sequestration of public offenders, which is itself
+such an offence to our common humanity--to say nothing of our common
+sense. Free tides, free sails go by, and long, untrammelled lines of
+birds; south above the blue bay and bluer shore, the ethereal blue
+dome of Diablo lifts into the free air. Across the upper end of San
+Pablo Bay, which is really the north arm of the bay of San Francisco
+extending inland, Mare Island lies so low on the water that if it had
+not been made a naval reserve station it is difficult to know to what
+other use it could be put. One expects to have the land dip and swing
+from under like the ship's deck. It is in line with the guns which lie
+beside the Gate like watchful, muzzle-pointed dogs, and commands the
+whole upper bay and the opposing bluffs of Contra Costa in a manner
+highly commendable to those curious persons whose chief excitement
+lies in anticipating an Asiatic invasion. Nevertheless, along with
+the bastions of San Quentin it strikes, somehow, the note of human
+distrust amid all this charm of light and line and elusive colour,
+as if suddenly one should discover the tip of a barbed tail under the
+skirt of some seductive stranger.
+
+Between San Quentin and the Straits, all about the curve of the bay,
+winding, wide-mouthed sloughs give access to a land as fertile as
+Egypt. A slough is a mere wallow of unprofitable waters, waters unused
+by men and still reluctant of the sea. Pushed aside by the compelling
+tides, too undisciplined to make proper banks for themselves, they are
+neglected by all but a few fringing willows and shapeless sycamores in
+which the herons nest.
+
+Often at evening the white-faced ibis can be seen flying in long,
+voiceless lines, just clearing the twilight-tinted water, to their
+accustomed night perches in the wind-beaten willows. They return there,
+if undisturbed, year after year, accompanied in few and far-between
+seasons by the egret and the snowy heron, grown man-shy, or if they
+but knew the purpose for which their nuptial plumage is sacrificed,
+woman-shy, and seldom seen even by the most wishful eyes.
+
+At Napa a few bull-headed oaks come down almost to the tide-line, and
+in Sonoma a clump of alien blue gums huddles aloof and unregarded,
+but from the water little is visible beside the stilted cabins of some
+gun club or the ramshackle resorts of the flat-nosed, slow craft that
+wind on mysterious errands between the sunken lands. Whole families
+of half-amphibious humans appear to live comfortably on these drifting
+scows, but one never by any chance catches them doing any distinctive
+thing.
+
+The waters of the sloughs come down from the little inland valleys,
+where summer nests and broods in a blue haze along the redwood-serried
+hills. Whether it is white with cherry bloom at Napa, or purple with
+winy clusters at Sonoma, there is always something interesting going
+on there of the large process by which granite mountains are made food
+for man. It is worth a visit if only to learn that a country which does
+that sort of thing supremely well, finds it also worth while to do it
+beautifully. Yachting off San Rafael, it is possible to catch at times
+the scent of roses on an off-shore wind above the salt smell of the
+marshes.
+
+The last rip of the tide is through the Straits of Carquinez into the
+back-water of Suisun. From here on, it is a rhythmic heaving to and fro
+as of well-matched wrestlers, the river-water is set back to Crow's
+Landing on the San Joaquin, and miles above Sacramento it returns
+again past Antioch and the Suisun islands. It is lost in a wilderness
+of tules, through which the sluggish currents blindly wind. Here we
+have nothing to do with men, our business is all with the tribe of the
+Little Duck: mallard, teal, tern, coot, heron, eared grebe, and awkward
+loon.
+
+The tule is a round leafless reed. It springs up along the tide-lands
+or in the stagnant back-water of the rivers, or by any least dribble
+of a desert spring. No condition daunts it but absolute dearth of
+water; far-called, it travels on the wind over mountain ranges, over
+great wastes of waterless plain to find the one absolute condition, a
+pool--white rimmed with alkali or poisonous green with arsenic. I have
+seen it flourish by springs so charged with mineral that each slender
+column is ringed with its stony deposit, but I do not recall any
+standing water where tules are not. The stems are filled with papery
+pith so light that the Indians of the San Joaquin made boats of bundles
+of them, faggoted together and tied upon a wooden frame.
+
+Year by year the tules reclaim the muddy confluence of the twin rivers.
+They make an annual growth, die palely, and are beaten down by the
+wind; between their matted stems the young green comes up again. In the
+Land of the Little Duck, miles upon miles of them, and not one other
+thing, stand up on either side the winding water-lanes, man-high and
+impenetrable.
+
+The Tulare--the place of the tule--is the haunt not only of water-birds
+but innumerable insect-catchers, and especially of the red-winged
+blackbirds. In the spring these betake themselves to the reed-fringed
+marshes in hundreds, building their nests in such neighbourly proximity
+that the young can hop from rim to rim of the tight-slung, grassy
+hammocks. Great clouds of the young birds can be seen, just before
+mating and after nesting in the fall, rising from the low islands
+of the river-junction. In the season also the male yellow-headed
+blackbird may be heard singing his sweet but noisy cheering-song to
+his sombre mate as she weaves marsh grass and wet pond-weed together
+as a foundation for her home, always prudently completed some weeks in
+advance of any need of it.
+
+  [Illustration: WAITING FOR DUCK--LOS BAÑOS]
+
+Where the tules thin out along the moving currents, numerous woven
+balls of marsh vegetation hang like some strange fruit safely above the
+summer rise of the waters. These are the nests of the tule wren, built
+by the industrious male, with who knows what excess of parental care
+or what intention to deceive. All the while he is at work upon them,
+in one, the least conspicuous and apparently the least skilfully built,
+the mother bird nurses the brown nestlings with which, suddenly at the
+end of July, all the whispering galleries of the tulares are alive.
+
+One who has the courage to penetrate deeper within the tulares, past
+the crazy wooden landings of nameless ports at which the flat scows
+put in, past the broken willows where the herons nest and the weedy
+back-waters lie all smoothly green with the deceptive duck-weed, will
+see many wished-for sights. Just before dawn and after nightfall the
+inner marshes are vocal with the varied cries of coot and mallard
+and the complaining skirl of the mud-hen, the whistling redwing,
+the bittern booming from his dingy pool, and all the windy beat of
+wings. But by day a stillness falls through which the clicking whisper
+of the reeds and the croon of the great rivers cradling to the sea
+reaches the sense almost with sound. The air is all alive with the
+metallic glint of dragon-flies; now and then the plop of some shining
+turtle dropping into the smooth lagoon, or the frightened splash of a
+marsh-nesting bird, flecks the silence with a flash of sound. Here one
+might see all the duck kind leading forth their young broods, or the
+eared grebe swimming with her day-old nestlings on her back. If the
+day is dark--black clouds with lightnings playing under--one may hear
+the voice of the loon sliding through his sonorous scale to shaking,
+witless laughter. Or perhaps the day's sight might be a flock of
+pelicans on their way to their nesting-ground in Buena Vista, breasting
+the shallows, and with beating wings driving a school of minnows into
+some tiny inlet where they may be scooped up in the pouched bills, a
+dozen to a mouthful. Better still, some morning mist might rise for
+you suddenly on a strip of sandy shore the cranes had chosen for their
+wild dances, from which the stately measures of the Greek are said to
+be derived. Against the yellow sand, as on the background of a vase,
+the dipping figures and white outstretched wing draperies make the
+connection clear to you for the moment, along with some other things
+long overlaid in the racial memory.
+
+Always at evening in the tulares the air is winnowed by the clanging
+hordes of geese and ducks. Triangular flights of teal wing by you,
+whizzing like bullets, hazy with speed. Beach-nesting birds, paddlers
+in the foodful creeks, go seaward. Now and then some winged frigate of
+the open sea, an albatross perhaps blown inland on a storm, will climb
+the air to the sea-going wind. Low on the twilight-coloured waters the
+tule fog creeps in.
+
+You emerge properly from the vast intricacies of the tulares--if you
+emerge at all, and are not completely mazed and lost in them--at
+Sacramento, a city but barely rescued from the marsh, and still
+marsh-coloured with the damp-loving lichens. _La Dame aux Camelias_, to
+the eye, rich in that exotic blossom as no city in the world, but with
+a past, oh, unmistakably, and a touch of hectic disorder. The Russians
+possessed her, and then the breed of Jack Hamlin, and then--but it
+is unfair to list the lovers of a lady of so much charm and such
+indubitable capacity for reformation. Sacramento is the State capital,
+the geographical pivot of the great twin valleys; she divides with
+Stockton on the San Joaquin the tribute of their waters. It was here
+on her banks that the overland emigrant trains sat down to wait for
+the subsidence of waters in the new world of the West, from here they
+scattered to all its hopeful quarters.
+
+If the part the city has played in history has been that of a hostel, a
+distributing station, at least she has played it to some purpose. There
+are few empires richer than the land the twin rivers drain.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE TWIN VALLEYS
+
+
+It is geographical courtesy merely, to treat of intramontane California
+as a valley; it is in reality a vast, rolling plain. Several little
+kingdoms of Europe could be tucked away in it. North and south it has
+no natural line of demarcation other than the rivers meeting for their
+single assault upon the sea, but its diversity deserves the double
+name. They make, the Sacramento rushing from the wooded north and the
+sluggish San Joaquin, one of the most interesting waterways of the
+world. I should say they made, for of the San Joaquin one must be able
+to speak in the past also, to understand it. One must have seen it
+before man had tamed it and taught it, supine as a lioness in the sun.
+
+To arrive at a proper feeling for the continuity of the great central
+plain, it must be approached from the south, by way of the old Tejon
+Pass, up from San Fernando, or down the Tehachapi grade where the
+railroad loops and winds through the confluence of the Coast Range with
+the Sierra Nevada. Here the hills curve graciously about the vast oval
+of the lower San Joaquin. The downthrow of the mountain, stippled with
+sage-brush, gives way to tawny sand glistening here and there with
+white patches of alkali, mottled with dark blocks of irrigated land.
+Its immensity is obscured by the haze of heat.
+
+One is reduced to the figures of the real estate "booster" for terms of
+proportion. That modest checkering of green, hours away to the left,
+is a forty-mile field of alfalfa; beyond it lie the vineyards that in
+less than a quarter of a century relegated Spain to a second place in
+the raisin industry of the world. This is the San Joaquin of to-day
+and to-morrow. The white-tilted vans of the Argonauts saw it as one
+vast, overlapping field of radiant corollas, blue of lupins, phacelias,
+nemophilias, gold of a hundred packed species of composite. Wet years
+it is still possible for the settler in the unirrigated districts to
+wake some morning to blossomy lakes of sky-blueness in the hollows;
+from San Emigdio in the Temblors, I have seen, across the whole width of
+the valley, the smouldering poppy fires along the bluffs of Kern River.
+On the mesa below Tejon the moon-white gilia that the children call
+"evening snow" unfurls its musky-scented drifts mile after mile. But
+the prevailing note of the San Joaquin is tawny russet; gold it will
+be in the season, resplendent as those idols which the Incas overlaid
+yearly with fresh-beaten leaf, and in September the barrancas above
+Bakersfield and Visalia as yellow as brass, but all up and down the
+hill-rimmed hollow is every lion-coloured tint contending still with
+the thin belts of planted orchard.
+
+  [Illustration: MIRROR LAKE, YOSEMITE]
+
+Twenty-five years of cultivation have served to shift the lines of
+greenness but not greatly to modify the desert key. Once it was all
+massed in the tulares which fringed the series of lakes and connecting
+sloughs, continuing northward from the lowest point of the San Joaquin.
+Kern, Kings, Kaweah, Tule, Merced, and Tuolumne, mighty rivers, and a
+hundred lesser singing streams fed it. Elk by thousands ramped in its
+reedy borders. It was a haven of nesting water-birds. Whole islands
+were populated by pelicans, repairing there annually for the strange,
+sidling wing-dances that attend their mating. Blue herons nested in
+the tulares; they could be seen trailing their long dangly legs for
+hours above the shallows. Indians paddled in their frail balsas, built
+of papery, dry reeds, down intricate water-lanes in which white men
+venturing, lost themselves and were mazed to madness. Malaria of a
+surpassing virulence rode up and down that country on the "tule fogs."
+Even yet it is the dread of the cities of the plain to find themselves
+beleaguered by the thick, ghost-white mists that at long intervals roll
+along the ground, retaking the ancient marshes.
+
+Into this potential opulence the cattleman precipitated himself.
+He bought--it is more exact to say he acquired--vast acreage of
+Spanish grants; along the rim of the Coast Ranges, territory equal to
+principalities was given over to long-horned, lean herds. All about the
+old beach-line of the San Joaquin may still be seen the remnant of the
+cattle ranches, low formless houses with purlieus of pomegranate and
+pampas grass and black figs, and the high, stockaded, acrid-smelling
+corrals, to mark the receding waves of the cattle industry. On the
+Sierra side the guttered mesas, the hoof-worn foothills advertise
+the devastation of the wandering flocks. Early in the 'sixties these
+appeared, little, long-armed French and Basques, with hungry hordes
+of sheep at their heels, pasturing on the public lands. They ate into
+the roots of the lush grass and left the quick rains to cut the soil.
+The wool in the hand was always worth the next season's feed to the
+sheep-herder.
+
+  [Illustration: AMONG THE REDWOODS OF THE GREAT TWIN VALLEYS]
+
+Never was a land so planned for the uses of man, its shielding
+mountains, its deep alluvial terraces sloping gently to the sun. Men
+read it in the hieroglyphic the glistening waters spelled between the
+dark patches of the tulares, but it took some experimenting to read the
+message aright.
+
+After the cattle and the flocks came the wheat. Up from the meeting
+waters the land billowed with grain. Owners buckled the ploughs
+together and drove them with engines by tens and twenties across the
+thousand-acre fields. But men and engines, they were alike driven
+by the drouth. In wet years the wheat rancher rode to view his
+shoulder-high harvest, but when the rains, going high and wide over
+the valley to break along the saw-teeth of the Sierras, left the wheat
+unwatered, the same thing happened to the crops that had happened to
+the cattle and the sheep. And at last, amid the rotting carcases and
+the shrivelled acres, the message came clear--not the land, but the
+water. So they shut up the rivers in the cañons and the day of the
+orchardist began.
+
+Geographically it begins at Bakersfield, below the gap where the Kern
+comes down from the giant sequoias and is constrained to the wide,
+willow-planted canals, governed by head-gates and weirs. Such waters as
+find again their ancient levels, do so by way of the loose sandy soil
+through which they are filtered in vineyard and orchard. The tulares
+have been turned under; the elk are strictly preserved in the hope
+that enough of them will breed to serve the purposes of curiosity.
+The antelope bands that once flashed their white rumps from bench
+to bench of the tawny mesas were reduced, the last time I saw them,
+to a scant half-score roving the Tejon under the watchful eye of the
+superintendent. But with all this change, nowhere as at this diminished
+end, does one gather such an impression of the variety, the imperial
+extent of the San Joaquin. For at Bakersfield is one of the world's
+largest petroleum fields. The gaunt derricks rear along the unwatered
+hills like half-formed prehistoric creatures come up out of the ground
+to see what men are about. Reservoirs, fed with the stinking juices
+of a time decayed, squat along the barrancas, considering with a slow
+leech-like intelligence the tank cars in the form of a Gargantuan
+joint-worm of the same period that produced the derricks, as they clank
+between the oil-fields and the town. One of the largest oil-fields in
+the world--and yet the turn of the road drops it out of sight in the
+valley's immensity!
+
+Bakersfield is a heaven of roses. Doubtless there are other things by
+which the inhabitants would be glad to have it remembered, but this is
+the item that the traveller in the season carries away with him. Roses
+do not die there, they fall apart of their own sweetness, wafts of
+which envelop the town for miles out on the highway. After nightfall,
+when each particular attar distils upon the quiescent air, the
+townspeople walk abroad in the streets and the moon comes up full-orbed
+across the Temblors at about the level of the clock-tower. Overhead
+and beyond it the sky retains a deep velvety blueness until long past
+midnight. Traces of colour can be seen sometimes in the zenith when the
+glimmer along the knife-edge of the Sierras announces the dawn.
+
+North of Bakersfield, as the valley widens, the Coast Range fades
+to a mere shadow mountain, the peaks of Kaweah stand out above the
+banded haze, angel-white like the ranked Host. As the road swings in
+to the Sierra outposts, broad-headed oaks begin to appear; it skirts
+the foot of the great Sierra fault close enough for the landscape to
+borrow something from the dark, impending pines. But for the most part
+what the observer has to consider is soil and water and the miraculous
+product of these two. One must learn to think of the land in terms of
+human achievement.
+
+  [Illustration: CLEAR LAKE, LAKE COUNTY]
+
+North from the delta of Kern River lies a hundred miles of country
+scarcely disputed with the flocks, far-called and few, which still
+at the set time of the year forgather in green swales behind the
+town for the annual shearing, for the herders to play hand-ball at
+Noriegas', to grow riotously claret drunk and render an evanescent
+foreign touch to the brisk modern community. And every foot of that
+hundred miles is rife with the seeds of life, awaiting the touch of
+the impregnating water. One holds to that conviction as to a friendly
+assuring hand. In the presence of that vast plain, palpitating with
+the heat, the sluggish, untamed water lolling in the midst of it, the
+white-fanged Sierra combing the cloudless blue, beauty becomes a poor
+word: appreciation is shipwrecked and cast away. With relief one hails
+the beginning of a stripe, dark green like a scarf, scalloping the
+foothills--the citrus belt. From Portersville, Lindsay, Exeter it runs
+north past the meeting of the waters into the valley of the Sacramento,
+and for quality and early fruiting sets the figure of the world market.
+As if its waters had some special virtue, wherever a river is poured
+out upon the plain some particular crop is favoured. About Fresno
+it is raisins, at Madera port wine, sherry, and mild muscatel. The
+Merced, which takes its rise in the valley of Yosemite, is partial to
+melons and figs. But everywhere are prunes, peaches, apricots, almonds,
+sugar-beets, alfalfa, unmeasurable acreage of barley, beans, and
+asparagus. Anything is impressive if the scale be large enough, even a
+field of onions. Here the league-long rows are as terrible as an army.
+
+Up and down this empire belt proceed two great companies, the hordes
+of "fruit-hands" and the army of the bees, following its successive
+waves of fruit and bloom. Gangs of pruners, pickers, and packers
+are shifted and shunted as the crop demands. Interesting economic
+experiments transact themselves under the worried producer's eye; alien
+race contending with alien race. The jarring interests of men have by
+no means worked out the absolute solution, but the bees have long ago
+settled their business. They kill the drones and gather the honey for
+the gods who kindly provide them with hives--the more fortunate perhaps
+in knowing what their particular gods require.
+
+Wherever along the belt the rivers fail, the pumps take up the work;
+strenuous little Davids contending against the Goliaths of drouth. They
+can be heard chugging away like the active pulse of the vineyards,
+completing the ribbon of greenness that spans from ridge to ridge of
+the down-plunging hills.
+
+And then one must take account of the cities of the plain! Twenty-five
+years ago they fringed the Sierra base, mere feeders to the mines, the
+cattle ranches, the sheep country. They had the manners of the frontier
+and the decaying, tawdry vices that filtered down from San Francisco,
+sluiced out by intermittent spasms of reform. They were "wide open."
+Hairy little herders with jabbering tongues knifed one another in the
+shearing season, vaqueros "shot up the town" occasionally; it is still
+within memory that prominent citizen "packed a gun" for prominent
+citizen. Twenty years ago the last, most southerly, of the chain of
+settlements was a very cesspool of the iniquities driven to a last
+stand by the influx of home-seekers. I who went through the years of
+change with it could tell tales if I would--but, thank Heaven, nobody
+would believe them! Now in those old places of unsavoury renown rise
+handsome "business blocks," the true mark of cities. Homes heaped
+with roses spread on either side of miles of palm-fringed boulevard.
+Over it all flows the clear, inspiring current of Sierra-cooled air,
+sliding down from the ranked peaks that, whitened from flank to flank
+by perpetual snows, hover like phalanxes of protecting wings.
+
+  [Illustration: CASTLE CRAG, RATTLESNAKE CAÑON]
+
+Into the very thick of the cities drop down from the high Sierras
+trails to all its places of delight, the sequoia groves, King's River
+cañon, and all the lordly peaks about Mt. Whitney and Yosemite; and
+setting hillward from San Francisco the old Stockton-Sonora road
+along which surged the undisciplined rout of the gold-seekers of
+'forty-nine. It leads, this earliest of valley highways, across the
+basin of the Stanislaus, past places made famous by the red-shirted,
+lusty miners, the sleek-coated gamblers of Bret Harte. It passes the
+twenty-eight Mile House where Jack Hamlin ran a poker game, and many a
+scene rendered memorable by the gay ladies of Poker Flat. It reaches,
+by way of a deep-rutted, ancient track, choked with the characteristic
+red dust of the country, Table Mountain, the home of Truthful James.
+Table Mountain, having consideration for the near-by Sierras, is a hill
+merely, with a flat deposit of _malpais_, the "black rock" of regions
+far north and east. Beyond Sonora lie the old placer "diggings," every
+foot of which has been combed and sifted for gold. The bones of the
+earth are laid bare; all the masking clay, tossed and tumbled, clogged
+with rusty pipes and decaying sluices, lies in heaps and depressions
+where the gold-seekers cast it. The sense of violation is heightened by
+the hue of the soil, redder than the hills of Devon, redder than a red
+heifer--but the river furnishes the more descriptive figure, the martyr
+hue of the Sacrament. In the flood season it carries the tint of its
+ensanguined clays far down into the bay's blueness.
+
+The remnant of that riotous life,--the abandoned cabins, the towns
+falling into dissolution,--like the remaining specimens of the fir and
+redwood forests cut off to timber the Mother Lode, is left standing by
+unfitness. The best of it is a little nugget of remembrance of Francis
+Bret Harte and Mark Twain.
+
+  [Illustration: McCLOUD RIVER, UPPER SACRAMENTO VALLEY]
+
+It was at Angels in the foothills of Calaveras that Twain, to his
+everlasting fame, was so impressed with the performance of the Jumping
+Frog. But life at Angels and all up and down that placer country is
+as heavy with desuetude as the frog was after the bar-keeper had fed
+him with buckshot. As well try to get a draught of that old time as a
+drink at any of the dismantled bars, high, ornate, black walnut affairs
+across which, in dust and nuggets, passed and repassed probably as much
+gold as would serve to buy the orange belt of the San Joaquin--and for
+a figure of magnificence you would find nothing more acceptable to its
+inhabitants.
+
+Much of the history of that country is written in the names. Here the
+soft Spanish locutions give place to harsher, but not less descriptive,
+Americanisms--Jimtown, Jackass Hill, Squaw Creek; the cañons become
+"gulches," the mesas "flats." Later both of these were overlaid by
+-villes and -tons, the plain rural names of Anglo-Saxon derivation,
+Coulterville, Farmington, Turlock. They smell of orchards. Prosperity
+is coming back on the surface of the fruitful waters, but the redwood
+forests have not come back. Centuries, nothing less, are required for
+the building of one of these towers of greenness, and it is barely
+forty years since all that district was one roaring blast of mining
+life, rioting, jostling, snatching each from each. In the language
+of the country, the Italian truck gardeners will "beat them to it."
+They have smoothed over the old "slickens" and comforted the land with
+crops.
+
+As one travels north, the bulk of the Sierra lessens, the pines climb
+higher, the oaks march well down into the middle valley to catch the
+wet coast winds, the character of the plantations change, there are
+more grain fields, more neat little farms. Finally the old Overland
+emigrant trail climbs down from Donner Lake and Emigrant Gap, and you
+find yourself deep in the Valley of the Sacramento.
+
+By an air-line from the meeting of the waters, its geographical
+frontier is passed in the neighbourhood of Sonora; perhaps the bridge
+over the Mokelumne is a better indicator, since that river joins the
+San Joaquin at the estuary, but it is not until the Overland road is
+crossed that the character of the country definitely betrays the upper
+valley.
+
+Ascending the river, the works of man are less and less, the forest
+and the mountains more. The rapid rise of the wooded slopes keeps
+the Sacramento troublous. Tributaries, not large but swift and of
+tremendous volume, pour into it. Occasionally from dark cañons is
+heard the steady pound of the quartz mill, working some ancient lead,
+or a smelter blocks out a whole forested slope with its poisonous
+exhalations; but for the most part the northern valley is given over to
+brooding quiet, to unending green, and streams as swift as adders.
+
+In Mendocino county, on the coast side, the Range begins to lift
+toward the snow-line; on the Sierra side the alpine crest shears away.
+From time to time the "logging" industry cuts a wide track down the
+redwood forest. One hears above the singing rivers, the clucking of
+the donkey-engine or the rip of a mill still going in the midst of its
+self-created, sawdust desert. The glutting of the lumber region has
+been accomplished as wastefully, as violently, as the search for gold.
+All up the valley tall prophets of the rain have been butchered to
+make a lumberman's fat purse. But, link by link, the forestry bureau
+is closing in the line of the reserves against the lumber "kings," the
+Ahabs of a grasping time.
+
+The hills fall into a certain order, serried rank on rank. Deciduous
+growth of the lower slopes gives way to redwoods and Shasta fir. Miles
+upon miles of them stand so thick that when one dies it does not fall
+but remains erect in the arms of its brothers. Great columnar boles
+rise out of the river-basins, soaring high over what, except for their
+dwarfing proportions, would be a considerable grove of graceful oak
+and bay and glistening, magnolia-leafed, crimson-shafted madroño.
+Over these the redwoods rise, as over the heads of worshippers the
+clustered columns of Milan seek the dome. High up the tops are caught
+in a froth of pale-green foliage through which the sunlight filters
+blue. This characteristic refraction from their yellowish, inch-long
+needles dwells about the redwood as an aura, and far on the horizon
+distinguishes their ranks from the hill-slopes masked with pines. So,
+blue ridge on ridge, they advance on the imperious height of Shasta.
+
+  [Illustration: DONNER LAKE, ON THE OLD EMIGRANT TRAIL]
+
+Shasta is a brother of Fuji and Tacoma, one of those solitary crater
+peaks whose whiteness is the honourable age of fiery youth, a good
+mountain dead and gone to heaven. Do not go up on it; you will see
+a great deal more of what you have seen, wooded hills on hills and
+perhaps the sapphire belt of the sea, the glitter of lovely, sail-less
+lakes, but you will not understand it any better, for Shasta has no
+more to do with the abutting ranges than a great genius with the stock
+which produced him. This is a prophet among mountains, a vent from
+the burning heart of creation. One is not surprised to learn that the
+Indians hereabout count their descent from the Spirit of Shasta and
+the Grizzly Bear. That dark belt of forest circling the mountain's
+base looks to be the proper haunt for him, the lumbering, little-eyed
+embodiment of brute creation. It is well to think of those two things
+together, the rip of those mighty claws with a ton or two of brute bulk
+behind them, and the awful witness towering to the blue, and suffer the
+soul-satisfying fear that lies in wait for man in the great places of
+the earth. All our modern fears are mean, fears of the common opinion
+and the bill collector. Shasta will have done its best for you if it
+enables you to quake in the very marrow of consciousness.
+
+After this it is well to turn southward along the Coast Range, camping
+by the trout-abounding rivers, losing yourself in the stiff laurels and
+azaleas of Mendocino, fishing at the clear lakes cupped in the hollows.
+If the season is right there will be salmon running in Klamath and
+Trinity rivers or deer in the steep-sided cañons. And everywhere there
+will be the redwoods. It is not, however, in the crowds that the tree
+reveals itself. Far down the deforested hills of Sonoma, in isolated
+groves, in small groups or singles on the tops of bossy, brass-coloured
+hills, it takes on character and charm.
+
+A redwood grove is a three-story affair. On the ground floor, turned
+rusty brown, as though the sunlight filtering through had mellowed
+there a thousand years, creep the wild ginger, the rosy-flowered
+oxalis, trilliums, and violets. All these lower rooms are crowded with
+dogwood, with the great berried manzanitas, woodwardias, man-high,
+and glistening bays, silver-tipped with light. By one of those
+strange but charming affinities of wild life, the redwood grove is
+the peculiar haunt of lilies. Every variation of the soil--the peat
+bogs of the coast, the high sandy ridges, the damp meadows--has each
+its appropriate variety; and not merely lilies, but droves of them,
+hundreds of swaying stems, files of them up the line of seeping springs
+or round the bases of great boulders, lilies breast high, lilies
+overhead, ruby-spotted, golden-throated, shining white, dowered with
+the special genius of perfume. Along the chaparral-covered slope and
+deep within the cañons one tracks them by the subtle, intoxicating
+scent spreading, as I am persuaded no other perfume does, by a
+conscious distillation on the melting air.
+
+  [Illustration: LAUREL LAKE, UPPER SACRAMENTO]
+
+The second redwood story, that wondrous space of blue-diffusing sun,
+between the deciduous underforest and the fairy web of redwood green,
+is bird and squirrel haunted. Jays flash back and forth, bright
+flickers of the humming-bird go buzzing by. Woodpeckers may be heard
+calling the ever-missing "Jacob, Jacob!" who must in their opinion
+be concealing himself somewhere about the upper story. The wire-drawn
+warble of the brown creeper follows the singer up and down the deeply
+corrugated trunks. Wrens, sparrows, juncos, all manner of little
+feathered folk in whose coats the tones of brown predominate, frequent
+the pillared middle rooms. Once I heard what I thought to be a hermit
+thrush, singing out of the dusk of Muir Wood. But I have not the art
+of knowing birds by note. People who live much in the redwoods find
+them silent; I think it might more easily be that the great trunks
+and green-shot glooms have the same quality of dwarfing sound as size.
+Redwoods, as I know them, are really lighter and more alive than any
+other coniferous forests, but the _effect_ of umbrageous stillness is
+induced by vast proportions.
+
+As for what goes on in the upper rooms, who has been there? What birds
+arise to their three- or four-hundred-foot heights? The few and slight
+boughs, the feathery layers of foliage rounding in age to sloping
+crowns, who knows them but the wind and the snows that neither stir nor
+are stayed by them? There are some matters that the great Twin Valleys
+keep even from the men for whom they have borne an empire.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE HIGH SIERRAS AND THE SAGE-BRUSH COUNTRY
+
+
+The proper vehicle for mountain study is not yet available. A great
+mountain range is like a great public character, there is much more
+to it than is presented to the observation, and it is not open to
+familiarity. But if one could fly high and wide over its cloud-lifting
+summits, one might learn something of its private relations.
+
+From such a vantage it would instantly appear how distinct are the
+Nevadas (_nieve_, snowy) among the Sierras of California. A very
+Bonaparte of mountains, new-born and lording it over the ancient
+ranges, not content with its vast empery but swinging north into the
+unpre-empted icy regions. San Bernardino and San Jacinto are as far
+from it as the Faubourg St. Germain from an island in the sea. Sierra
+Madre is of the Coast Range; Shasta a fire-hole, a revolutionist; the
+true Sierra is the midriff of a continent. From its northern extremity
+one sees the sun in a circle and the Northern Lights; that portion of
+it we know as Sierra Nevada swings into the state above Honey Lake,
+and ends southward in a tumble of blunt peaks below Kern River. This
+is quite enough, however, for Californians to make free with, and more
+than they can appreciate.
+
+Geographically the range begins on the south at Tehachapi, but at
+Walker's Pass, a day's journey to the north, is the first appearance
+of its most salient characteristic, the great Sierra Fault. In its
+youth the range suffered incredible cataclysms. For two hundred
+miles the great eastern plain dropped; weighted as it was with its
+withered aristocracy of hills--how weazened and old you can see to
+this day--it tore sharply downward, and the depth of that fall from
+the heaven-affronting peak of Whitney to the desert valley of Inyo is
+a matter of two miles of sheer descent.
+
+The whole Sierra along the line of faultage has the contour of a
+wave about to break. It swings up in long water-shaped lines from
+the valley of the San Joaquin, and rears its jagged crest above the
+abrupt desert shore. Seen from close under, some of these two- and
+three-thousand-foot precipices have the pitch of toppling waters. As
+they rose new-riven from the earth their proportions must have been
+more than terrifying.
+
+Later the Ice Age bore downward from the north, and through
+immeasurable years carved the fractured granite into shapes of enduring
+beauty. It rounded the great jutting fronts, it insured them against
+the tooth of time with the keen icy polish with which they shine
+still against the morning. It gouged narrow wall-sided cañons, cut the
+course of rivers, and sinking like a graver's tool into the heart of
+the range, scooped out deep wells of pleasantness. Afterward, when the
+ice was old, it must have moved more slowly, for the lines it left,
+retreating northward, are more flowing, the hill-crowns rounder. And
+then the mountain was besieged with trees. They stormed it, scaled its
+free precipices; you can see by the thick mould of the valleys what
+ranks and ranks of them went down, and along the snow-line how by the
+persistence of assault they are bent and contorted.
+
+This is the whole effect of the sombre swathes of pine that mask the
+Sierra slopes. They march along the water-courses, they climb up sheer
+precipices in staggering files, trooping in the passes; across the
+smooth meadow spaces they lock arms, they await the word of command.
+By a very little observation they are seen to be ranged in orderly
+companies. Here a warm current of air travelling steadily from the
+superheated valleys carries the life zone higher, there a defiant
+bony ridge drops it a few thousand feet, but the relative arrangement
+of species does not greatly vary. The broad oaks, like reverend
+grandsires, from the foothills see the procession go by, they follow
+as far as the gates of the mountain, crutched and bowed. All the lower
+cañons are full of a rabble of deciduous trees, chinquapins, scrub oak,
+madroño, full of gay camp-followers, lilac, dogwood, azaleas, strumpet
+penstemons, flaunting lupins, monk's-hood, columbine.
+
+  [Illustration: YOSEMITE FALLS]
+
+The grey nut pine, wide-branched, unwarlike but serviceable, opens
+the ranks of conifers. Then the long-leaved pines begin, _ponderoso_,
+_Coulteri_, and the slender, arrowy, fire-resisting _attenuata_. On the
+western slope, increasing as they go northward, the redwood holds all
+the open country, but it is no climber like _monticola_, the largest
+of all true pines, the captain of the Sierra forests. The firs usurp
+the water-borders and the low moraines; clannish, incommunicable, they
+seem not to find it worth while to grow unless they grow stately. Above
+all these range the thin-barked pines, the lodgepole, Douglas spruce,
+librocedrus, and hardy junipers in windy passes. About the meadows and
+lake-borders the quaking asps push like children between the knees
+along the line; and highest, most persistent, the creeping-limbed,
+wind-depressed white-barked pine, under whose matted boughs the wild
+sheep bed.
+
+The trees have each their own voice--a degree of flexibility or length
+of needles upon which the wind harps to produce its characteristic
+note. The traveller in the dark of mountain nights knows his way among
+them as by the street cries of his own city. The creaking of the firs,
+the sough of the long-leaved pines, the whispering whistle of the
+lodgepole pine, the delicate frou-frou of the redwoods in a wind, these
+come out for him in the darkness with the night scent of moth-haunted
+flowers. But there is one tree that for the footer of the mountain
+trails is voiceless; it speaks no doubt, but it speaks only to the
+austere mountain-heads, to the mindful winds and the watching stars.
+It speaks as men speak to one another and are not heard by the little
+ants crawling over their boots. This is the "big tree," the sequoia. In
+something less than a score of forest patches about the rim of the Twin
+Valleys, the sequoia abides, out of some possible preglacial period,
+out of some past of which nothing is left to us but the fading memory
+of the "giants in those days." The age of individual big trees can
+be computed in terms of human history. There are evidences written in
+the rings of these that they endured the drouth which made the famine
+in the days of Ahab the king, against which Elijah prayed. These are
+growing trees whose seeds are fertile.
+
+One might make a very dramatic collocation of the rise and fall of
+empires against the life period of a single sequoia, and that would
+be easier than to transcribe by mere phrases the impression of one
+of these green towers of silence on the sense. Single and deeply
+corrugated as a Corinthian column, with only a lightly-branched crown
+for a capital, they spire for five thousand years or so, and then the
+leaf-crown becomes rounded to a dome in which the winds breed. Warm
+days of Spring, their young nestling zephyrs come fluttering down the
+deep wells of shade to shake the saplings of a hundred years. In Summer
+the fine-leafed foliage catches the sun like spray, diffusing vaporous
+blueness; but the majesty of their gigantic trunks is incommunicable.
+After a while the stifling sense of awe breaks before it, and you go
+on with your small affairs as children will go on playing even in the
+royal presence.
+
+  [Illustration: BLUE LAKE, LAKE COUNTY]
+
+The name _Sequoia_ is one of the few cheering notes among our habitual
+botanical stupidities--an attempt to express quality as it is humanly
+measured in a name. There was once an American Cadmus, Sequoyah, a
+Cherokee who invented an Indian alphabet and taught his tribe to read.
+Seeing them outnumbered in their own territory, he started west with
+the idea of founding a great Indian empire. He was last seen trailing
+north across the desert and was heard of no more. Tradition has it that
+he reached the forest of the upper Kern River and gave the trees his
+name. At least no botanist with his nose in a book has usurped it.
+
+Forests are for cover. They mask not only the naked rock, but the paths
+of deer and bear and bighorn. Under the spire-pointed ranks of conifers
+that look so black from above, verging to blueness, a world of furtive
+folk goes on. A world of birds is in its branches, squirrels nimble
+as sparrows, but scarcely anything of this is visible to the watcher
+on the heights. Rabbits playing on your lawn would be more noticeable
+in proportion than the seldom-seen bighorn leading his light-footed
+young from ledge to rocky ledge. The jealous trees cover the trails and
+obscure the passes.
+
+As you come up through them you observe the flat, soddy spaces of
+old lake basins, green as jewels, and the hanging meadows gay with
+cascades of flowers, the stream tangles, the new-made moraines bright
+with bindweed and sulphur-flower. But from the heights all this lovely
+detail is hidden by the overlapping tents of boughs. Here and there a
+stream leaps forth at the falls like a sword from a green scabbard,
+or higher up, may be traced as the silver wire on which are strung
+unrippled lakes as blue as cobalt. Great chains of such lakes lead down
+from the snow-line to the foothill borders, encroached upon by the
+silent ranks of trees. As they go down they show soddy borders, they
+tend to fill and to grow meadows where presently deep-rooting trees
+assume their stations. This is the strategic rule for the taking of a
+granite mountain. First the grinding ice and the disintegrating water;
+what the streams wash down collects in the glacier-ploughed basins. It
+makes lake borders by which the grass comes in--the small grass that
+is mightier than mountains, that eats them for its food. Lakes at the
+lower levels become meadows, then trees arrive; they overrun the soddy
+ground, the snow-manured moraines. The trees themselves take centuries
+to fruition. At a later stage men dispossess the forest and build
+cities, but this has not yet come to the Sierras. There is something
+indomitable in the will of the trees to spread and climb. In the floor
+of Yosemite and Hetch Hetchy there are hundred-year-old oaks of full
+form and generous growth, and on the slopes above them the same oaks
+and of almost the same age are so dwarfed by drouth and altitude that
+they are not knee-high to a man, but they keep the due proportions of
+their type. A white bark pine will climb where the weight of the winter
+drifts is so heavy that it is never able to lift its decumbent trunk
+from the ground, clinging like ivy to the wall in which it roots.
+
+In the Spring the rich florescence of the conifers sheds pollen in
+drifts that, carried down the melting water, warn the sheep-herder and
+the orchardist a hundred miles away of the advancing season. A pine
+forest in flower is one of the things worth seeing which is most seldom
+seen, for at its best the high passes are still choked by snow, the
+lakes ice-locked, the trails dangerous. And then the blossoms, yellow
+and crimson tassels and rosy spathes, are carried on the leafy crowns
+high over the heads of the most adventurous foresters. What one finds,
+as late as the end of June when the trails are open, is a stain of
+pollen on the lingering snow, and great clouds of it flying wherever a
+bough is brushed by a light wing. In the autumn the whole wood is full
+of the click and glint of the winged seeds. Storms of them, like clouds
+of locusts, are carried past on the wind, to be dropped in the nearest
+clearing or to find a chance lodging in a moss-lined crevice of the
+weathered headlands.
+
+  [Illustration: LAKE TAHOE, THE HIGH SIERRAS]
+
+But from the heights, all feeling for the process of the forest is
+lost in the sense of its irresistible march--it creeps and winds, it
+waits darkly for the word. Above the tree-line no sound ascends but a
+faint vibration, the body of sound making itself felt in the silence.
+On windless days the forest lies black like weed at the bottom of a
+lake of air as clear as a vacuum. When the great wind rivers pour about
+the peaks, it can be seen lashing like weed in the currents, but still
+almost soundlessly--the roar of it passes down the cañons, and is heard
+in the cities of the plain. But if the peaks cannot hear what the trees
+are plotting about, it is not so with the voices of the water. These
+are sharper, more definitive; they rise re-echoing from the rocky walls
+and are recognisable each by its distinctive note at incredible heights
+of the sheer, glassy, granite frontlets.
+
+In the glacial valleys, such as Yosemite, Tehipite, and Hetch Hetchy,
+where young rivers drop from the headlands in long streaming falls,
+the noise of them contending with the wind makes mimic thunder. Immense
+curtains of falling water are tossed this way and that, they are caught
+up and suspended in mid-air, and let fall crashing to the lower levels.
+When the wind blows straight up the cañon they will rear against it,
+and leap out a shining arc, shattering in mid-air like bursting bombs
+of spray. But later in the season, when the streams are heavy with the
+melting snows, the wind itself is shattered by the weight of falling
+water--it exhausts itself in obscuring clouds of silver dust. When from
+Whitney or Williamson or King's Mountain you can see half-a-hundred
+such young rivers roaring to the morning, it is as beautiful and as
+terrifying as the sight of youth to timorous age. They go leaping with
+their shining shields, and their shouting shakes the rocks. Neither
+you nor they believe that the most and the best they will come to is an
+irrigating canal between sober rows of prunes and barley.
+
+Higher than the forests, or the waters rising out of them, is the
+_Py-weack_, the Land of Shining Rocks. They shine with glacier polish;
+horses on the high trails sniff suspiciously at their glittering
+surfaces. Time can lay slight hold on them by thunder, by frost, and
+the little grey moss; it has not yet subdued the front of Oppapago.
+Here between snowless ribs and buttresses are the shrunken glaciers
+that feed the streams, little toy models of the ancient rivers of ice.
+The snowfields of the Sierras are not so inconsiderable as they seem:
+they are dwarfed by the precipices among which they hide. Inaccessible
+to ordinary mountain travel, they make their best showing from the
+surrounding plains, where, lifted in the middle air, they glow with
+ethereal whiteness. Close by they display a bewildering waste of broken
+ice, boulders, and crevasses, made bleaker by the cobalt shadows.
+
+  [Illustration: MOUNT SHASTA--SIERRA GLOW]
+
+North the line of peaks stretches, broken by the passes that give
+access to the west. Between them, above the source of streams, in the
+ice-gouged hollows, lie unfathomable waters that take all their life
+from the sky. Or perhaps they are reservoirs from which the sky is
+made, fluid jade and azulite and hyacinth and chrysoprase, as if the
+skies of many days had run their colours in those bleak bowls. For at
+this altitude the wave contour of the range comes out most sharply; the
+sky is strangely deep and darker, as if through its translucence one
+glimpsed the void of space. One sees the moon and the planets wandering
+there with pale lamps held aloft.
+
+No life of any sort is visible from here. Farther down toward the
+coast, over the forested moraines, the condor may be seen leaning
+against the wind at sunrise. On the edge of the abysmal cañons eagles
+make their nests and go dropping down the shadowy depths to seek their
+food from God, but they do not rise to these stark heights. Sometimes
+a clanging horde of water-fowl, beating up from the Gulf of California
+overland to the Canadian marshes, will grow bewildered in the face of
+the great wall-sided cliffs; circling they attempt the forward flight,
+only to circle and rise anew, until, wing-weary in that thin air, they
+sink exhausted to the margin of a mountain lake, satisfied at last to
+thread their way humbly along the creek-beds to open country.
+
+The live forces of the High Sierra are the forces of wind and light.
+One feels the push of tremendous currents flowing between the peaks
+as among rocky islands. Day by day they may be charted by the cloud
+fragments floating on them, by the banners of dry snow dust, streaming
+out like long grass from the island shores. Thundering fleets of cumuli
+drift up the wind rivers and assault the great domes of Whitney and
+Oppapago. The light breaks through all the varying cloud strata, and
+colours them with splendour; the glow of the clouds reflected on the
+snow is caught by the watchful mountain-lover far down the valleys of
+Inyo and San Joaquin. This painted hour of sunset is the apotheosis of
+mountains, but for me it has less of majesty than the morning after
+deep snows. These come usually early in the season. The air for days
+will be full of the formless stir, then the range withdraws itself
+behind a veil which closes from tented peak to peak, and includes
+sometimes the parallel desert ranges which lie along its eastern coast.
+Twenty feet will fall in a single session of the white gods behind the
+veil. Then comes a morning blue and sharp as a spear-thrust. Every tree
+is like an arrow feathered in green and white. Airy bridges built upon
+the bending stems shut in the water-courses; the moraines are smooth
+and soft as the backs of huddled sheep. By night the range shows from
+the valley as a procession of winged figures holding the snows upon
+their bosoms. And that, after all, is the business of mountains. The
+western front of the Sierra Nevada, which receives the full force of
+the Pacific storms, is rewarded with the stateliest forests. Before
+those extended snowy mountain arms lie the great Twin Valleys; behind
+them stretches the illimitable sage-brush country, the backyard of the
+Sierra.
+
+  [Illustration: VALLEY OF THE YOSEMITE]
+
+"Sage-brush country" is one of those local terms that stand for a type
+of landscape as distinctive as the moors of England and the campagna
+of Italy. It means first of all, open country, great space of sky,
+what the inhabitants of it call "eye-reach," treeless except for a few
+cotton-woods and willows along the sink of intermittent streams, and
+stippled with low shrubs of artemesia. This is the true "sage-brush,"
+though it is no sage, the sacred bush of Diana, _Artemisia tridentata_.
+It may grow in favoured districts man-high, but ordinarily not more
+than two or three feet in the arid regions which it haunts. Other
+social shrubs will be found pre-empting miles of the territory to
+which the artemesia gives its name, _coleogeny_, _pursia_, _dalia_,
+"creosote," but none other gives it the distinctive feature, the web of
+pale, silky sage-green against the sun-burned sand.
+
+Other items of the sage-brush landscape are so constant that they
+are immediately suggested by it: mountains hanging on the horizon in
+opalescent haze, low flowing lines of hills overlaid by old lava-flows,
+the "black rock" simulating cloud shadows on the distant ranges, dry
+red cones of ancient volcanic ash, and great flat table-topped "buttes"
+of the painted desert.
+
+White-crested ranges on the one hand and buttes on the other mark the
+limits of the sage; for where snow-caps are, there are trees, and where
+the buttes begin the cactus and the palo verde reign.
+
+A sage-brush country is a cattle country primarily; perhaps there may
+be mines; where there is water to be stored for irrigation there will
+be towns, but the virtue of the sage is that it grows in lands that
+man, at least, has found no other use for.
+
+It can thrive on an allowance of water that will support no larger
+thing than a chipmunk or a lizard, and, growing, feeds the cattle
+on a thousand hills. Therefore it is indispensable to any picture of
+the sage-brush country that there should be herds at large in it and
+vaqueros riding, or far down the bleached valley the dust of a rodeo
+rising. It is impossible to think of such a land and not think of these
+things, free life, and air as clear and vibrant with vitality as a
+bell. I can never think of it myself without seeing, in addition, the
+vultures making a merry-go-round over Panamint, and up from Coso the
+creaking line of a twenty-mule team.
+
+The sage-brush country of California begins properly at the foot of
+the Sierras where the state-line sheers east by south from Lake Tahoe.
+It covers the high valleys that divide the true Sierra from the older,
+lesser ranges that keep it company as far south as Olancha. Below
+Mono Lake, that part of the gold region made immortal by Mark Twain,
+it gives to the chrome- and ochre-tinted soil its distinguishing
+characteristic. From the long arm of Death Valley it begins to be
+encroached upon by the mesquite, and at Indian Wells it is driven close
+under the lee of the last Sierra. The range of which San Bernardino
+and San Jacinto are outposts carries the artemisia farther desertward,
+almost to the Colorado River in fact, and south again about the Salton
+Sea it holds its own with sahuro and palo verde. Its eastern border,
+like that of the wild tribes along the Mojave line, is lost in pure
+desertness. Formerly much of that country from San Bernardino to
+the sea was native to the sage, and all the southern end of the San
+Joaquin. But now all this is replaced with orchards, for the artemisia
+proves nothing so much of the soil on which it grows as that, given a
+due allowance of water, it is as desirable for other things.
+
+  [Illustration: THE HALF DOME, YOSEMITE]
+
+All this country which I have described to you has so recently been sea
+that the mark of its old beach-line is plainly to be traced along the
+east Sierra wall. Still the evaporating water leaves vast deposits of
+salt and alkali, blinking white in the sink of Death Valley. There are
+lakes there still where the salt crusts over hard and clear like ice,
+and deep thick puddles of bitter minerals, the lees of that ancient
+inland ocean. From the top of any of the denuded desert ranges it is
+possible to trace the winding bays and estuaries, and, with an eye for
+location, to choose the points at which one may fairly expect to find
+potsherds, amulets, fire-blackened hearthstones, and the middens of a
+nameless people who built their primitive towns along its beaches. It
+must have had much to recommend it in those days before the sage-brush
+took it, for this inland sea, rather than the more mountainous Pacific
+shore, was the route taken by the ancient migratory peoples who left
+their undecipherable signs scored into the rocks from the Aztec country
+to the Arctic. On isolated igneous rocks near their old encampments,
+and high on the walls of the box canons, such as might have been
+tide-rifts, high above any mechanical contrivance of the present-day
+Indians, the records resist equally the shifts of sea and sand and the
+efforts of modern science to read them.
+
+Whether the ghosts of the departed peoples ever revisit the ancient
+beaches, the ghosts of waters haunt there daily. Morning and
+mid-afternoon the rivers of mirage arise; they well out of the past
+and are poured trembling on the plain; phantom fogs blow across them,
+wraiths of trees grow up and are reflected in false streams. Often
+in very early light there are strange suggestions of----dunes and
+boulders perhaps? Only no boulders in that country are flat-topped like
+the houses built in lands of the sun, and no dunes are wall-sided.
+Mirage, we are told, is but a picture of distant things, mirrored on
+atmospheric planes, but then maybe a ghost is only a mirage deflected
+on our atmosphere from worlds outside our ken, and it is always easy
+in the desert to see things that you cannot possibly believe. Whatever
+they are, mirages are real to the eye. I mean that they are not to
+be winked away nor dissipated by contact. I have watched a vaquero
+ride into one of them and drown to all appearances, or seem to be
+swimming his horse across its billows, all of him below its surface as
+completely hidden as by rivers of water. Moreover, mirages tend always
+to occur under given conditions and in the same places. I recall one
+of the stations on the old Mojave stage road, which, approached from
+the north about an hour after sunrise, would instantly duplicate: two
+houses, two lines of poplars, two high corrals.
+
+  [Illustration: SHASTA--SNOW CLOUDS]
+
+Occasionally along the edge of the sage-brush country one may see that
+surpassing wonder, the moon mirage, poured like quicksilver along the
+narrow valleys, as if the thirsty land had dreamed of water.
+
+It is odd how this suggestion of sea and river clings to a country
+where there is nothing harder to come by than good water to drink.
+For any other purpose it is not to be thought of. After one of those
+terrible wind storms, the only really incommoding desert weather, it is
+possible to find great spaces all rippled and lined in water-markings
+like a sea that has suddenly undergone a magic transformation into
+sand. The contours of the desert ranges are billowy; they rise out
+of the plain like the grey-backed breakers of open sea. The valleys
+between are narrow and trough-like; the shores of them are lined with
+crawling dunes that, under the steady pressure of wind currents, are
+for ever sliding up their own peaks and down the other side, changing
+place without ever once losing the long slope to windward and the
+abrupt landward fall of waves.
+
+Another item which adds to the suggestion of the illimitable spread
+of sage-brush country, like the sea, is the way the sparse forests
+of the mountain-tops appear to be islanded by it. For the sage-brush
+extends on across the Great Basin, it stretches into Montana and
+south to Arizona and New Mexico, it works about the lower end of the
+Rocky Mountains and well into the great central plain. The ranges
+lie thick in it as ocean swells, as I have said, and stepping from
+crest to crest has come the fox-tail pine, _Pinus flexilis_, all the
+way from Humboldt Mountain to San Jacinto. A sinewy, thinly-branched
+species, as straight-backed as an Indian, it has little affinity for
+its noble congeners of the Sierra forests, but keeps to the dry and
+open ridges, nourished by clouds and by infrequent shallow snows. With
+it, but at lower levels to which the _flexilis_ will never come, is
+found frequently the one-leaved piñon pine, the food-crop of the wild
+tribes. But the piñon is a pushing sort, it establishes itself upon the
+slightest invitation.
+
+There is a story told in the desert of how this grey, round-headed tree
+was once a very great _capitan_, who, in order that his death might be
+as beneficent to his people as his life had been, was changed into the
+foodful pine. Whether the legend is true or not, certain it is that
+if you sit down by a piñon, wherever found, and stay long enough, you
+will see Indians. They might come in the Spring looking for _taboose_,
+or later for willows and grasses for basketry, for seeds of sunflower
+and chia, to shoot doves by the water-holes or to hunt chuckwallas. A
+chuckwalla is a lizard, a kind of dragon in miniature, barred black and
+white, and as offensive to look at as he is harmless, in fact very good
+eating and not too plentiful. Mojaves, Shoshones, Paiutes, Pimas, all
+the tribes of the sage-brush country, have this in common, that they
+live very close to the earth; roots, seeds, reptiles, thick pads of
+the cholla cactus, even the grass of the field, serve them. They look,
+indeed, as though they had been made of the earth on the very spot that
+produced them, of the black rock, the brown sand, and the dark water
+that collects in polished basins of the wind-denuded ranges.
+
+Very little rain gets past the heaven-raking crest of the Sierra Nevada
+into the sage-brush country; the most that falls is blown up from the
+Gulf of California along the draw created by the close, parallel desert
+ranges. It is precipitated usually under atmospheric conditions that
+produce violent drops and changes. All that the traveller is likely to
+find of it is in these rock reservoirs under the run-off of some bare
+granite cliff, or in the rare, persistent "water-holes" hollowed out by
+beasts or men, marked in the landscape by one lone tree perhaps, or a
+clump of shrubby willows. Often there will be no mark at all except the
+frequency along the trail of skeleton cattle or wild sheep, pointing
+all in one direction, as they died on their way to the far-between
+drinking-places. There are districts in this back-door country where
+evaporation from the body is so rapid that death overtakes the chance
+prospector even with water in sight or in his canteen across his back.
+For years a notorious outlaw protected himself in the Death Valley
+region, by filling in all the springs in a circle about the territory
+to which he had retreated. Beyond that waterless rim even the law could
+not penetrate.
+
+And yet how the land repays the slightest moisture! Years when the
+Kuro-Siwa swings closer to our coast and the winds are friendly,
+I have seen all that country, from Tehachapi, outside the wall, to
+San Gorgiono, one sheet of blue and gold. Seeds of a hundred tender
+annuals lie in the loose sands for years between the shrubby sage,
+their vitality unimpaired by the delayed resurrection of a chance wet
+spring. Often I have sifted the sand in my fingers looking for a sign
+of the life-giving principle which bursts so suddenly into beauty,
+without finding it. Yet after years in which there is no alteration
+in the aspect of the country, except the insensible change of the sage
+tints from grey to green and grey again, the miracle takes place, the
+blossomy wonder is upon the world.
+
+As a matter of fact, the sage-brush country is by no means the desert
+that it looks to the casual eye. Besides the social shrubs which have
+each their own blossom and seed time, even the driest years will
+afford a few blooms of crimson mallow, and in the shelter of every
+considerable shrub some dwarfed and delicate phacelia or nemophilia.
+Even out of dunes which bury its hundred old trunks to the new season's
+twigs, the mesquite will bear its sweet foodful pods. If you know at
+what hours to look for it, wild life is never absent, but it is not
+ordinarily to be found by white men blundering about in broad noon.
+
+It is only when you meet, in the midst of great open valleys wherein
+there is nothing growing higher than the knees of your horse, and
+nothing moving bigger than the little horned toad under the cactus
+bush, bands of Indians well fed, cushiony with fat of mesquite meal and
+chia, that you understand how little you know of the land in which you
+move.
+
+There is a Paiute proverb to the effect that no man should attempt the
+country east of the Sierras until he has learned to sleep in the shade
+of his arrows. This is a picturesque way of saying that he must be able
+to reduce his wants to the limit of necessity. Those who have been able
+to do so, and have trusted the land to repay them, have discovered that
+the measure is over-full.
+
+A man may not find wealth there, nor too much of food even, but he
+often finds himself, which is much more important.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+_The illustrations are indexed in italics._
+
+
+     Alcatraz, 112
+
+     Alviso, 112
+
+     Angels, 138
+
+     Antioch, 112, 119
+
+     Arbolado, 84
+
+     "Arroya," definition of, 30
+
+
+     Bakersfield, 129, 132, 133
+
+     Berkeley Hills, 108, 114
+
+     _Blue Lake, Lake County_, 155
+
+     Buena Vista, 122
+
+
+     Cabrillo, 49, 108
+
+     Cahuenga, 47, 48, 67
+
+     Calaveras, 139
+
+     Camulas, 41
+
+     _Cañon in the Sierra Madres_, 49
+
+     Carmel, 74, 77, 80, 83
+
+     Carmel River, 76
+
+     Carmel Valley, 78
+
+     Carquinez, 112
+
+     Carquinez Strait, 107, 119
+
+     _Castle Crag, Rattlesnake Cañon_, 136
+
+     Castro, 66
+
+     Catalina, 49
+
+     _Cemetery, The, Santa Barbara Mission_, 56
+
+     Cession of California from Mexico, 48
+
+     _Clear Lake, Lake County_, 134
+
+     "Coasts of Adventure, The," 47-60
+
+     Colorado River, 166
+
+     Contra Costa, 117
+
+     Coronado, 23
+
+     Coronel, Don Antonio, 48
+
+     Corta Madero, 116
+
+     Coso, 165
+
+     Coulterville, 139
+
+     _Cypress Point, near Carmel_, 75
+
+
+     Death Valley, 166, 172
+
+     _Donner Lake_, 142
+
+     Donner Lake, 140
+
+     Drake, Sir Francis, 9, 43, 108
+
+
+     Eagle Rock, 47
+
+     Emigrant Gap, 140
+
+     _Eucalyptus Grove, A_, 33
+
+     Exeter, 135
+
+
+     Faralones, The, 113
+
+     Farmington, 139
+
+     Fort Point, 67
+
+     Francis of Assisi, 10, 108
+
+     Franciscan "Frailes," 9, 12
+
+     Frémont, 66
+
+     Fresno, 135
+
+     Fuca, Juan de, 108
+
+
+     _Glendale, Valley of the San Gabriel_, 40
+
+     Golden Gate, 107
+
+     _Golden Gate and Black Point_, 107
+
+     Gulf of California, 161, 171
+
+
+     _Half Dome, The, Yosemite_, 166
+
+     Hamlin, Jack, 137
+
+     Harte, Bret, 137, 138
+
+     Hetch Hetchy Valley, 159
+
+     "High Sierras and the Sage-Brush Country, The" 149-174
+
+     Hôtel Del Monte, 76
+
+     Humboldt Mountain, 170
+
+
+     Indian Wells, 166
+
+     Inyo Valley, 162
+
+
+     Jackass Hill, 139
+
+     Jimtown, 139
+
+     Jumping Frog, the, 139
+
+
+     Kaweah Mountain, 133
+
+     Kaweah River, 129
+
+     Kern River, 129, 132, 134, 155
+
+     King's Mountain, 159
+
+     King's River, 129
+
+     King's River Cañon, 137
+
+     Klamath River, 143
+
+     Kuro-Siwa Current, 49, 172
+
+
+     Laboratory Point, 68
+
+     Lake Mono, 165
+
+     Lake Tahoe, 165
+
+     _Lake Tahoe_, 158
+
+     "Land of the Little Duck, The," 107-124
+
+     _Laurel Lake, Upper Sacramento_, 145
+
+     Lindsay, 135
+
+     _Looking down on Monterey and the Bay_, 65
+
+     Lopez, Francisco, 47
+
+     Los Angeles, 29, 35
+
+     Los Angeles River, 30
+
+
+     _McCloud River_, 139
+
+     Madera, 135
+
+     Maldonado, 108
+
+     Mare Island, 116
+
+     Mendocino Country, 141
+
+     Merced River, 129, 135
+
+     _Mill Valley_, 113
+
+     _Mirror Lake, Yosemite_, 129
+
+     Mission Dolores, 108
+
+     Mission Point, 69, 81
+
+     Mission River, 17
+
+     Mission of San Carlos Borromeo, 76, 78
+
+     Mission San Fernando, 47
+
+     Missions, ruins of, 19
+
+     Mokelumne River, 140
+
+     Monterey, 11, 18, 35, 55, 60
+
+     "Monterey, the Port of," 63-84
+
+     Monterey Cypress, 72
+
+     "Mothering Mountains," 27-24
+
+     Mount Oppapago, 160, 162
+
+     Mount Shasta, 5, 143, 150
+
+     _Mount Shasta_, 161
+
+     Mount Whitney, 6, 137, 150, 159, 162
+
+     Mount Williamson, 159
+
+
+     Napa, 118
+
+     Noriega's, 134
+
+
+     Olancha, 165
+
+     "Old Spanish Gardens," 87-103
+
+
+     Pacific Grove, 75
+
+     Padre Jayme Bravo, 7, 17, 18
+
+     Padre Lausan, 66
+
+     Padre Serra (Junipero Serra), 11, 76, 78
+
+     Paiute Indians, 96
+
+     Pajaro, 54, 93
+
+     Pajaro river, 64
+
+     Pala, 19
+
+     "Palatingwas," 20
+
+     Palo Corona, 80
+
+     Panamint, 165
+
+     Pasadena, 34
+
+     Paso Robles, 56
+
+     _Patio, The, Old Spanish Residence_, 88
+
+     _Pescadero, Monterey Bay_, 72
+
+     Pieoras Blancos, 83
+
+     Point Conception, 67
+
+     Point Lobos, 71, 81, 84
+
+     Point of Pines, 67
+
+     Point Pinos, 70, 81
+
+     Point Sur, 70
+
+     Portersville, 135
+
+     Portola, Don Gaspar de, 11, 55, 93, 108
+
+
+     _Redlands_, 16
+
+     _Redwoods_, 131
+
+     "Rio," A, 30
+
+     Riverside, 33, 39
+
+
+     Sacramento, 112, 123
+
+     Sacramento River, 107, 127, 135, 140
+
+     "Sage-Brush country," meaning of term, 163
+
+     Salinas, 83
+
+     Salinas River, 64
+
+     Salton Sea, 166
+
+     Sausalito, 116
+
+     San Antonio, 57
+
+     "San Antonio," the, 10
+
+     San Bernardino, 7, 33, 39, 149, 166
+
+     San Carlos, 79
+
+     San Clemente, 48
+
+     San Diego, 22, 78
+
+     San Diego, Bay of, 9
+
+     _San Diego, looking towards Point Loma_, 9
+
+     San Emigdio, 128
+
+     San Fernando, 41, 128
+
+     San Francisco, 67, 107, 108, 110
+
+     San Francisco, Bay of, 112
+
+     San Gabriel, 36
+
+     San Gabriel Valley, 27, 33, 40
+
+     San Gorgiono, 41, 172
+
+     San Gorgiono, Pass of, 6
+
+     San Jacinto, 5, 27, 149, 166, 170
+
+     San Joaquin, 128, 132, 139, 166
+
+     San Joaquin River, 107, 112, 123, 127, 129, 130, 140, 150
+
+     San Joaquin Valley, 162
+
+     San Jose, Señor, 10
+
+     San Juan, 83
+
+     San Juan Bautista, 65, 66
+
+     San Juan Capistrano, 18, 48, 50
+
+     San Luis Rey, 19
+
+     San Pablo, 112
+
+     San Pablo Bay, 116
+
+     San Quentin, 116
+
+     San Raphael, 116, 118
+
+     Santa Barbara, 58
+
+     Santa Catalina, 48
+
+     Santa Clara, 54
+
+     Santa Cruz Coast, 74
+
+     Santa Cruz Mountains, 55, 64
+
+     _Santa Cruz Mountains, the Coast Range_, 78
+
+     Santa Inez, 48, 58
+
+     Santa Margarita, 56
+
+     Santa Rosa, 48
+
+     Sequoia, origin of name, 155
+
+     _Shasta--Snow Clouds_, 168
+
+     Sierra Madre, 27, 28, 37, 40, 42, 44, 149
+
+     Sierra Nevada, 128, 163, 171
+
+     Sierra Nevada, origin of name, 149
+
+     Sierras, the, 4
+
+     Solano, 78
+
+     Sonoma, 107, 118, 144
+
+     Sonoma County, 92
+
+     Sonora, 138, 140
+
+     "Sparrow-Hawk's Own, The," 3-23
+
+     Squaw Creek, 139
+
+     Stanislaus River, 137
+
+     Stockton, 123
+
+     Suisun, 112, 119
+
+     Sur, 80, 83
+
+     _Sycamores, a Coast Range Cañon_, 59
+
+
+     Table Mountain, 138
+
+     _Tall Chaparral, Santa Cruz_, 62
+
+     Tamalpias, Mount, 109
+
+     _Tamalpias_, 110
+
+     Tasajara, 83
+
+     Tehachapi, 128, 150, 172
+
+     Tehipite Valley, 159
+
+     Tejon, 129
+
+     Tejon Pass, 89, 128, 132
+
+     Temblors, The, 128, 133
+
+     _"Three Brothers, The," Yosemite_--_Frontispiece_
+
+     Tiburon, 112, 116
+
+     Trinity River, 143
+
+     Truthful James, 138
+
+     Tulare, the, 120
+
+     Tule River, 129
+
+     Tuolumne River, 129
+
+     Turlock, 139
+
+     Twain, Mark, 138, 139, 165
+
+     "Twin Valleys, The," 127-146
+
+
+     _Valley of the Yosemite_, 163
+
+     Visalia, 129
+
+     Viscaino, Sebastian, 9, 63, 76, 108
+
+
+     _Waiting for Duck--Los Baños_, 120
+
+     Walker's Pass, 150
+
+     Warner's Ranch, 20
+
+
+     Yerba Buena, 108
+
+     _Yosemite Falls_, 152
+
+     Yosemite Valley, 135, 137, 157, 159
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+_Printed by_ R. & R. Clark, Limited, _Edinburgh_.
+
+  [Illustration: SKETCH MAP ACCOMPANYING "CALIFORNIA" BY SUTTON PALMER
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of California, by Mary Austin
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CALIFORNIA ***
+
+***** This file should be named 44764-0.txt or 44764-0.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/4/4/7/6/44764/
+
+Produced by Melissa McDaniel and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive)
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
+  www.gutenberg.org/license.
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at 809
+North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887.  Email
+contact links and up to date contact information can be found at the
+Foundation's web site and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit:  www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For forty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
diff --git a/old/44764-0.zip b/old/44764-0.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..43fc3d1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-0.zip
diff --git a/old/44764-8.txt b/old/44764-8.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3ac8834
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-8.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,4173 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of California, by Mary Austin
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: California
+       The Land of the Sun
+
+Author: Mary Austin
+
+Illustrator: Sutton Palmer
+
+Release Date: January 26, 2014 [EBook #44764]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CALIFORNIA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Melissa McDaniel and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+  Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have
+  been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
+
+  Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
+
+  On page 18, "arroya" should possibly be "arroyo."
+
+  On page 53, "gaumet" should possibly be "gamut."
+
+  On page 134, the text is "Noriegas'."  The Index shows "Noriega's."
+
+  "Tamalpias" should possibly be "Tamalpais."
+
+
+
+
+  [Illustration: THE THREE BROTHERS, YOSEMITE VALLEY]
+
+
+
+
+CALIFORNIA
+
+
+
+
+     _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
+
+     THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN
+     A WOMAN OF GENIUS
+     THE LOVELY LADY
+     ETC.
+
+
+     AGENTS
+
+     America           The Macmillan Company
+                         64 & 66 Fifth Avenue, New York
+
+     Australasia       The Oxford University Press
+                         205 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
+
+     Canada            The Macmillan Company of Canada, Ltd.
+                         St. Martin's House, 70 Bond Street,
+     Toronto
+
+     India             Macmillan & Company, Ltd.
+                         Macmillan Building, Bombay
+                         309 Bow Bazaar Street, Calcutta
+
+
+
+
+     CALIFORNIA
+
+     THE LAND OF THE SUN
+
+     PAINTED BY
+     SUTTON PALMER
+
+     DESCRIBED BY
+     MARY AUSTIN
+
+
+     ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
+     4, 5, & 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.
+
+
+
+
+     _Published Autumn 1914_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                            PAGE
+  I. The Sparrow Hawk's Own                                    1
+  II. Mothering Mountains                                     25
+  III. The Coasts of Adventure                                45
+  IV. The Port of Monterey                                    61
+  V. Old Spanish Gardens                                      85
+  VI. The Land of the Little Duck                            105
+  VII. The Twin Valleys                                      125
+  VIII. The High Sierras and the Sage-brush Country          147
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+  1. The Three Brothers, Yosemite Valley             _Frontispiece_
+                                                        FACING PAGE
+  2. San Diego, looking across the Bay toward Point Loma          9
+  3. Redlands, looking toward San Bernardino Range               16
+  4. A Eucalyptus Grove                                          33
+  5. Glendale, Valley of the San Gabriel                         40
+  6. A Ca�on in the Sierra Madre                                 49
+  7. The Cemetery, Santa Barbara Mission                         56
+  8. Sycamores, a Coast Range Ca�on                              59
+  9. Tall Chaparral, Santa Cruz                                  62
+  10. Looking down on Monterey and the Bay                       65
+  11. Pescadero, a Chinese Fishing Village, Monterey Bay         72
+  12. Cypress Point, near Carmel                                 75
+  13. Santa Cruz Mountains, the Coast Range                      78
+  14. The Patio, Old Spanish Residence                           88
+  15. The Golden Gate and Black Point, from Hyde Street,
+      San Francisco. (Site of the Panama Exposition,
+      1915)                                                     107
+  16. Tamalpias                                                 110
+  17. Mill Valley, and Backwater of San Francisco Bay           113
+  18. Waiting for Duck--Los Ba�os                               120
+  19. Mirror Lake, Yosemite                                     129
+  20. Among the Redwoods of the Great Twin Valleys              131
+  21. Clear Lake, Lake County                                   134
+  22. Castle Crag, Rattlesnake Ca�on                            136
+  23. McCloud River, Upper Sacramento Valley                    139
+  24. Donner Lake, on the old Emigrant Trail                    142
+  25. Laurel Lake, Upper Sacramento                             145
+  26. Yosemite Falls                                            152
+  27. Blue Lake, Lake County                                    155
+  28. Lake Tahoe, the High Sierras                              158
+  29. Mount Shasta--Sierra Glow                                 161
+  30. Valley of the Yosemite                                    163
+  31. The Half Dome, Yosemite                                   166
+  32. Shasta--Snow Clouds                                       168
+     _Sketch Map at end of Volume._
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE SPARROW-HAWK'S OWN
+
+
+For a graphic and memorable report of the contours of any country, see
+always the aboriginal account of its making. That will give you the lie
+of the land as no geographer could sketch it forth for you. California
+was made by Padahoon the Sparrow-Hawk and the Little Duck, who brooded
+on the face of the waters in the Beginning of Things.
+
+There is no knowing where the tale comes from, for Winnenap the
+Medicine-Man who told it to me, was eclectic in his faiths as in his
+practice. Winnenap was a Shoshone, one of the group who had been forced
+southward into Death Valley when the great Pah Ute nation had split
+their tribes like a wedge. In the last of their wars he had been taken
+as a hostage by the Paiutes and brought up by them. He might have
+remembered the story, or his wife might have told him. She was a tall
+brown woman out of Tejon, and _her_ mother was of that band of captives
+taken from San Gabriel by the Mojaves, Mission-bred. Wherever it came
+from, the tale has its roots deep in the land it explains.
+
+Padahoon, being wearied of going to and fro under the heavens, said
+to the Little Duck that it was time there should be mountains; so the
+Little Duck dived and brought up the primordial mud of which even the
+geographers are agreed mountains are made.
+
+As he brought it the Sparrow-Hawk built a round beautiful ring of
+mountains enclosing a quiet space of sea. Said the Little Duck, "I
+choose this side," coming up with his bill full of mud toward the west.
+Whereupon the Sparrow-Hawk built the other side higher. When it was all
+done and the Little Duck surveyed it, he observed, as people will to
+this day, the discrepancy between the low western hills and the high
+Sierras, and he thought the builder had not played him fair. "Very
+well, then," said the Sparrow-Hawk, "since you are resolved to be so
+greedy," and he bit out pieces of the Sierras with his bill, and threw
+them over his shoulder.
+
+You can see the bites still deep and sharp about Mt. Whitney.
+
+But the Little Duck would not be satisfied; he took hold by the great
+bulk of Shasta and began to pull, and Padahoon pulled on his side until
+the beautiful ring was pulled out in a long oval and began to break on
+the west where the bay of San Francisco comes in. So they were forced
+to divide the mountain range north and south and make what they could
+of it. But the Sparrow-Hawk, remembering the pieces he had thrown over
+his shoulder, chose the south, where you can still see him sailing any
+clear day about four in the afternoon, over all his stolen territory.
+
+There you have the bones of the land as neatly laid out for you as they
+could do it in Kensington Museum: the long oval, breaking seaward, the
+high, bitten, westward peaks, and the Sparrow-Hawk's Own, tailing south
+like the quirk of an attenuated Q.
+
+They serve, these fragmentary ranges, for the outposts of habitableness
+between the sea wind and the forces of pure desertness. Always there
+is skirmish and assault going on about them. Showers rush up the slope
+of San Jacinto, all their shining spears a-tilt. Great gusts of wind
+roar through the Pass of San Gorgiono, the old Puerto de San Carlos.
+Seasonally they are beleaguered by stealthy rushes of the fogs that
+from the Gulf hear the peaks about Whitney calling, or by the yellow
+murk of sand-storms on which the whole face of the desert is lifted up
+as it travels toward its destiny in orchard row and vineyard. Always
+the edge of the wind is against the stone. They shine, the frontlets of
+the sentinel saints, in that keen polish, as the faces of saints must
+with benignity.
+
+Just beyond the pil� of the broken mountains--the Pillars of Hercules
+of the West--the desert winds about the eastern bases of the range in
+deep indented bays, white-rimmed with the wave marks of its ancient
+sea. Out a very little way, where the shuddering heat-waves trick the
+imagination, it seems about to be retaken by the ghost of tumbling
+billows. Nothing else moves in it; nothing sounds. Plantations of
+growing things near the Pass lean all a little toward it, edging,
+peering--the wild, spiny, thorny things of the desert to enter the
+rain-fed paradise, the full-leafed offspring of the sea wind plotting
+to take the unfriended sandy spaces. They creep a little forward or
+back as the years run wet or dry. The green things stand up, they
+march along the cliffs, they balance on the edge of precipices, but
+desperation is in every contorted stem of _mesquite_ and _palo verde_.
+And with all this struggle, so still! East on the desert rim the
+Colorado ramps like a stallion between its walls, westward the Pacific
+rings the low foreshore with thunder; but the land never cries out,
+quartz mountains disintegrate but they do not murmur.
+
+It is odd here in a land rife with the naked struggle of great pagan
+forces, to find the promontories so lend themselves to the gentle
+names of saints. Perhaps the Padres were not so far from nature as one
+thinks; in the southerly range which, with San Bernardino on the north,
+sentinels the Pass by which the iron-rimmed Emigrant trail enters the
+coast valleys, they rendered for once the pagan touch. San Jacinto--St.
+Hyacinth--was he ever anything but a Christianised memory of a Grecian
+myth, or does it matter at all so long as there are men to see, in
+the deep purple light that dies along the heights, the colour of blood
+that is shed for love? Perhaps the best thing beauty can say to Greek
+or Christian is that there are still things worth dying for. No doubt
+the veins of Padre Jayme Bravo were as rich in martyr passion as the
+stained air of the mountain is in purples, paling to rose at morning,
+thinning at noon to pure aerial blues.
+
+Seen from the coast the range has a finny contour as of some huge
+creature risen from the sea, with low hills about it like dolphins
+playing; but the prevailing note of the landscape is always blue,
+repeating the tints of the wild brodi�a that may be found on the lomas
+early in April, sending up its clustered heads between two slender
+curving spears.
+
+Near at hand the masking growth is seen to be green, the dark
+olivaceous green of the chamisal. Nowhere does one get the force of
+the Spanish termination _al_--the place where--as in that word. The
+chamisal is the place of the chamise: miles and miles of it, with
+scarcely another shrub allowed, spread over the mesa and well up
+into laps and bays of the hills. It grows breast high, man high in
+the favoured regions; but even where under the influence of drouth
+and altitude it creeps to the knees, it abates nothing of its social
+character. Its ever-green foliage has a dull shining from the resinous
+coating which protects it from evaporation, and a slight sticky feel,
+characteristics that no doubt won it the name of "greasewood" from the
+emigrants who valued it chiefly because it could be burned green. The
+spring winds blowing up from the bay whip all its fretted surface to
+a froth of panicled white bloom, that, stirring a little as the wind
+shifts, full of bee-murmur, touches the imagination with the continual
+reminder of the sea. Higher up the thick lacy chaparral flecks and
+ripples, showing the light underside of leaves, and tosses up great
+fountain sprays of ceanothus, sea-blue and lilac-scented.
+
+  [Illustration: SAN DIEGO, LOOKING ACROSS THE BAY TOWARD POINT LOMA]
+
+All the human interest of this region centres about the city on the bay
+of San Diego, a low locked harbour with a long spit of sand breaking
+the mild Pacific swell, as it bides its time for the shipping of the
+south-western world. It has already waited longer than most people
+suppose. Just fifty years after the landing of Columbus on the Bahamas,
+Cabrillo discovered it; Sir Francis Drake, romping up that coast with
+his buccaneers, must have seen it though he left no note of any visit,
+and in 1602 Sebastian Viscaino anchored there and gave it its present
+name. Just about the time the mixed Dutch and English on the Atlantic
+coast were beginning to think of themselves as Americans and to act
+accordingly, the Franciscan _Frailes_ settled on San Diego bay. Nobody
+will know why it was reserved for the brown-skirted brothers of St.
+Francis to undertake the subjugation of Alta California, until it is
+known why the King of Spain quarrelled with the Jesuits. They were
+accused of plotting against His Majesty, but in those days it was
+possible to accuse the Jesuits of almost anything without going very
+far wrong in the popular estimate. I have my own opinion about it,
+which is that a great land, like a great lady, has her way with men.
+And no land has called its own as has California:--poet or painter
+or pioneer, the world's rim under. No better patron could be found
+for this blossoming West than Francis of Assisi, who preached to his
+little brothers of the air and would have made a convert of the coyote.
+Perhaps the first settlers of a country leave their stripe on all the
+land's later offspring: if it was a way the West took to breed fervour
+and faith and the spirit of prophecy in the young generation, who shall
+say she has not succeeded?
+
+In January of 1769 two expeditions by land and sea set forth in the
+name of God and the King of Spain, under the patronage of Se�or San
+Jose, indubitable patron of all journeys since the flight into Egypt.
+In April the ship _San Antonio_ anchored in the placid bay, there to
+await the live stock driven up from Velicat�. So the old world came to
+the new with a whole collocation of sainted personages flocking like
+doves to her banners.
+
+But it was not saints that the land wanted so much as the stuff that
+goes to make them. The expedition starved, sickened; their eyes were
+holden. Governor Portola, with the greater part of the expedition, made
+a long _pasear_ on foot to find the lost port of Monterey, and came
+back, with armour rust on his doublet sleeves and nothing much gained
+beside, to declare the expedition a failure. But Padre Serra--Junipero
+Serra, father president of Missions, juniper of God's own planting,
+sapling of that stock of which the founder of the order had wished
+for a whole forest full--Padre Serra claimed a churchman's privilege.
+He demanded time for a _novena_, a nine days' cycle of prayer to the
+patron who was so unaccountably hiding the relief ship in the fogs
+and indecisions of the uncharted coast. It is my belief that the Padre
+chose the _novena_ simply because it was the longest possible time he
+could hope to delay the return of the expedition. Nine days they drew
+in their belts and told their beads, and on the last hour of the last
+day, far on the sea rim, behold the white wings of succour!
+
+The Patron, who could never be at a loss for an expedient, contrived
+that the ship should lose an anchor which compelled it to put in at San
+Diego, where they had no expectation of finding any of the party. It
+was so that the land tried them out and approved, for from that day the
+founding went forward steadily.
+
+There is a fine growing city now on the site of the early landing,
+regularly stratified through all the architectural periods of
+California, from the low thick-walled adobe of the Spanish occupation
+to the newest shingle-stained bungalow of the latest one-lunged
+millionaire; but the land has not lost, in a century and a half, one
+mark by which the brown-skirted _Frailes_ found their way about in
+it. It has its distinctive mark, the Sparrow-Hawk's land, the seal of
+a private and peculiar affection. Here about the mouth of one of its
+swift seasonal rivers, and touching as with a finger-tip the opposing
+shore of the island of Santa Rosa, is the habitat of the Torrey pine.
+Japanesque, unrelated, drinking the sea air, never spreading inland,
+it hugs the sea-worn edges of La Jolla, as though, as some botanists
+believe, the species came to life there out of the jewel-tinted water
+and the spirit of the desert dust.
+
+It is also possible to think of it as a relict of the land of which
+the broken Channel Islands were made, but in any case it is a pity that
+science could not have retained for this lonely, restricted species the
+name the _Frailes_ gave to its fostering waters, Soledad--the solitary.
+Behind the town the mesa rises abruptly, knife-cut by the gullies of
+intermittent streams; and far back where the mountains break down into
+foothills, and these into the lomas--little low mounds of detritus--the
+sea air collects all the blue rays of the diffused light and holds
+them there all day in the hollows, in memory of the sea from which they
+rose.
+
+In April of the year of the Occupation the white panicles of the
+chamise would be tossing here and there, and the yellow violets run
+thin lines as of fire among the grasses. You would not believe there
+were so many yellow violets in the world as a day's riding will still
+show you. At this season, _islay_, the wild cherry, will be shaking out
+its fine white spray of bloom, the button willow begins, the sycamore,
+the buckthorn, _cascara sagrada_; the great berried manzanita, which
+shed its waxen bells as early as December, will be reddening its
+apples. Here also the chia, the true sage, the honey-maker, bread of
+the wild tribes, makes itself known by the penetrating pungent odour
+of its unfolding foliage. Binding all the leafy thickets, runs the
+succulent starry bloom of the megarrhiza that, from its hidden root,
+as large as a man's body, sends up smothering tendrils so sensitive
+to their opportunity that you have only to sit down beside them on
+one of these long growing afternoons, to find all their tips curling
+in your direction and the stems moving sensibly across the grass in
+the direction of support. As early as February the foot-long vines
+can be seen locating the nearest shrub or the ca�on wall, farther
+away than you could detect it by any tactile sense. And how quickly,
+once the objective is sensed, the questing Force is withdrawn from
+the unsuccessful members! Perhaps this one to the right may keep on
+in the direction in which it has caught the invisible communicating
+thread from the nearest buckthorn, but the other three or four green
+tentacles, finding no invitation from any quarter, not only stop
+growing but seem to shrink and dwindle in the interests of the climbing
+brother. Sometimes in a particularly lusty growth, all the young vines
+will be drawn toward some conspicuous support, so that by the third
+day those that lay out starlike, with inquiring tips raised a little,
+delicately feeling, will swing through all their points to the one
+hopeful direction. These warm sensuous days toward the end of April,
+just after rain, when the very earth is full of a subtle intoxication,
+one has but to thrust a finger among the bourgeoning tips and tendrils
+of the megarrhiza to see them stir with live response. One must
+suppose, since the megarrhiza is of no discoverable use to anybody,
+that the Force uses it to its own ends, an ascending, uprearing Force,
+rehearsing itself for a more serviceable instrument.--This, however,
+is a digression; probably the Padres found no time for philosophising
+about anything, much less so useless a specimen as the wild cucumber.
+
+What the Franciscans saw first in Alta California was what all pioneers
+look for in new lands--the witness of their faith. They saw the
+waxberry bush from which they were to gather the thin coating of the
+berries into candles for their improvised altars, saw the crepitant,
+aromatic _yerba buena_, and the shrubby, glutinous-leaved herb of the
+Saints, given to them for healing.
+
+More than all else they must have seen in the month of the Virgin
+Mother, high on the altar slopes of San Jacinto and San Bernardino, the
+white thyrses of the yucca, called The Candles of Our Lord. Back where
+the green exclusiveness of the chamise gives place to the chaparral,
+the tall shafts arise. They grow in blossoming, the bells climbing
+with the aspiring stalk until as many as six thousand of them may hang
+pure and stiff along the lance-like stem between the bayonet-bristling
+leaves. Long after the white flame has burnt out, the stalks remain,
+rank on rank, as though battalions of Spanish spearmen had fallen
+there, holding each his spear aloft in his dead hand.
+
+It is only back there where the yuccas begin, that the small, swift
+life of the mesa goes on, very much as it did in the days of the
+Spanish _Frailes_. The doves begin it, voicing the mesa dawn in notes
+of a cool blueness; then the sleek and stately quail, moving down in
+twittering droves to the infrequent water-holes. The rhythm of a flock
+in motion is like the ripple of muscles in the sides of a great snake.
+After them the road runner, _corredor del camino_, the cock of the
+chaparral, crest down, rudder aslant, swifter than a horse, incarnate
+spirit of the hopeful dust through which he flirts and flits. Then
+the blueness is folded up, it lies packed in the ca�ons, the mountains
+flatten; high in his airy haunts the Sparrow-Hawk sails, and the furry,
+frisk-tailed folk begin the day's affairs.
+
+  [Illustration: REDLANDS, LOOKING TOWARD SAN BERNARDINO RANGE]
+
+The secret of learning the mesa life is to sit still, to sit still and
+to keep on sitting still. The only other secret is to be learned in the
+wattled huts stuck like the heaps of the house-building rats in the
+dry washes, inwoven with the boughs of buckthorn and _islay_, except
+for size scarcely distinguishable from them. For the Indian has gone
+through all that green woof with the thread of kinship and found it an
+ordered world. He is choke-full as is the chamisal of wild life, of
+the tag ends of instincts and understandings left over from the days
+when he was brother to the beast--those sleek-bellied rats, stealing to
+lay another foot-long, dried stick to the characterless heap of their
+dwelling,--bad Indians to him, trying to remember their ways when they
+were men; that brown feathered bunch, in and out of the chia bush,--she
+was present at the making of man. Your aboriginal has the true sense of
+proportion: not size but vitality. You can cover the sage wren with the
+hollow of your hand, but you cannot hop so far for your size nor be so
+brave about it.
+
+Very different from the spring flutter and fullness, must have been the
+look of the land in the year of the martyrdom of Padre Jayme Bravo,
+which was the year of Bunker Hill and the Republic. The green of the
+chamisal was overlaid then by the brown tones of its seeding. _Islay_
+had shed its crimson drupes; the cactus fires had died down to the dull
+purples of the fruiting prickly pear; the sycamores by the dwindling
+waters of the arroya had scarcely a palsied leaf to wag. The Mission
+had been moved, for what reasons must be guessed by whoever has had
+occasion to observe the effect of a standing army on the subjugated
+peoples, back from the sea marsh to a little valley of what is known
+now as Mission River. Sixty converts had come down out of the hills
+to receive the Medicine of the Soft-Hearted God. That is the way they
+must have looked at it--rood and cup and sprinkling water, and the
+bells louder than the medicine drums. Back in the dry gullies the
+drums would have been going night and day where the _tingaivashes_, the
+Medicine-Men, lashed themselves into a fury over this apostasy. Certain
+of the renegades heard them between their orisons; they fled back to
+the muttering roll and the pound of the dancing feet. In the night
+after that, eight hundred of the Dieguenos, clothed in frantic fervour
+and very little else, came down to make an end of the "long gowns." How
+the soul of Padre Jayme must have leaped up as he heard them yelling
+outside his unguarded hut: the appetite for martyrdom is deeper than
+all our dreaming. He ran toward them with arms extended. "Love God, my
+children!" he cried, and received their arrows. When it was reported
+to the Padre President at Monterey, "Thank God," he said; "now the
+soil is watered." It did indeed repay them such a crop of souls as any
+watering produces in that soil; but at San Juan Capistrano, where a new
+foundation was in progress, they buried the bells and returned to the
+presidio.
+
+Few people understand why Californians so love their Missions, the
+meagre ruins of them, scant as a last year's nest. But two priests, a
+corporal, and three men in the unmapped land with eight hundred angry
+savages--it is the mark of the Western breed to love odds such as that!
+It is not to the campanile at Pala nor the ruined arches of San Luis
+Rey that men made pilgrimages but to the spirit of enterprise that
+built the West.
+
+All about the upper mesa there are traces, scarcely more evident to the
+eye than the Missions, that the inhabitants of it have been dreamers,
+dreaming greatly. I do not now refer to the court of San Luis Rey,
+from the roofs of which a joyous populace once cheered a governor
+of California in the part of toreador, in a neighbourhood where
+Raphael-eyed muchachitos who have never heard of the Five Little Pigs
+that Went to Market can still repeat you the rhyme that begins
+
+     Up in Heaven there is a bull fight,
+     The bull has horns of silver and a tail of gold.
+
+Heaven enough under those conditions to the children of the Occupation!
+Nor am I thinking of a road on which, when there is a light wind
+moving from the sea, you can still hear at midnight the pounding feet
+of the Indian riders galloping down to the bay, only to see their
+beloved Padre blessing them from the ship's side in departing. I do
+not think even--because I make a practice of thinking as little as
+possible of a matter so discreditable to us as our Indian policy--of
+the procession of the evicted _Palatingwas_, even though the whole
+region of Warner's ranch is still full of the shame of it and the
+rending cry. The struggle of men with men is at best a sick and squalid
+affair for one of the parties; but men contriving against the gods
+for possession of the earth is your true epic. The brave little towns
+which start up there with their too early florescence of avenue and
+public square, the courageous acres which the vineyardist clears in the
+chamisal and the chamise takes again! All along the upper mesa, Pan
+and the homesteader keep up the ancient fight. And with what unequal
+weapons! The wild gourd, the bindweed, the megarrhiza, at the mere
+rumour of a cleared space, come beckoning and joining hands. Though
+he goes gunning all day without finding one young rabbit for his pot,
+the bark of the homesteader's orchard trees will be gnawed by them at
+the precise sappy moment. At dawn the quail may be heard with soft
+contented noises between the rows of bearing vines, plunging their
+beaks in the ripest berries. Then the mule-deer will spend the night
+in the carefully fenced enclosure, ruining the largest bunches with
+selective bites; after which the homesteader, if he is wise, will know
+that he is beaten. The mule-deer can go over any fence, though usually
+he prefers to go between the wires, which he can do without altering
+his stride. Detected, even at its most leafless, the antlered chaparral
+makes cover for him until, after hours of following, he is glimpsed
+at last, scaling at his stiff bounding gait some inaccessible rocky
+stair from which nothing comes back but the bullet's deflected whine.
+Now and then some pot-hunter who remembers when the mule-deer could be
+heard barking to the does in any deep gully, when the moon rose hot on
+the flushed trail of the October day, will tell you that there are no
+more of his kind on San Jacinto. But so long as there are homesteaders
+to be fended from the hill borders, the mule-deer will come back. And
+when the mule-deer is gone there will still be drouth. Let the coast
+currents swing out a few degrees, or the Gulf winds blow contrarily for
+consecutive seasons, and the stoutest homesteader fails. After a few
+years you can guess where he has been by finding the chamise growing
+taller in the ploughed places.
+
+Incurable wild hills and wild sufficing sea, and the little strip
+between which they give to one another--Indian giving!--conceded by the
+years of rain and demanded back by drouth; shoals that the tide piles
+and the sea eats again! It lies like a many-coloured dancer's scarf,
+and hearts are still caught in its folds as in the days of the Spanish
+Occupation.
+
+There's a stripe of aquamarine turning to chrysoprase, that's for
+the sea; amber then for the hollow cliffs of La Jolla and San Juan,
+smugglers' cliffs eaten well under the shore; a stripe of scarlet,
+spangled with viscid diamond dew, that's for the mesembryanthemums
+crowding the foreshore; pale green of the lupins with a white thread
+through it of the highway, green again for the chamisal, and blue of
+the mountains' unassailable sea thought.
+
+Nature is a great symbolist; what she makes out of her own materials is
+but the shadow of what man in any country will make finally of his. San
+Diego by the sea dreams of a great sea empery. What by all the signs
+she is bound to produce, is a poet. There in the scarf-coloured, low
+shore is the vocal forecast of him in the night-singing mocking-bird.
+Especially in the fringing island of Coronado out of the waxberry bush
+he can be heard gurgling like a full fountain with jets and rushes
+of pure crystal sound. From moonrise on until dawn he scatters from a
+tireless throat, music like light and laughter. It is as impossible to
+close the eyes under it as in the glare of the sun. And if the moon,
+the measurer, be gone on a journey to the other side of the world,
+still he sings, all his notes muffled by the dark; he sways and sings,
+dozes and sings, dreaming and wakes to sing. So it should be with poets
+whether anybody wishes them to or not. "The lands of the sun expand the
+soul," says the proverb.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+MOTHERING MOUNTAINS
+
+
+It is all part of that subtle relation between the observer and the
+landscape of the west, which goes by the name of "atmosphere," that
+one returns again and again to the reality of Christian feeling in the
+Franciscan Pioneers, as witnessed by the names they left us--one of the
+most charming proofs, if proof were wanted, of the power of religion
+to illuminate the mind to a degree often denied to generations of art
+and culture. How many book-fed tourists rounding the blue ranks of San
+Jacinto to face the noble front of the Coast Range as it swings back
+from the San Gabriel valley, would have found for it a name at once so
+absolute, so understanding as Sierra Madre, Mother Mountain?
+
+There you have it all in one comprehensive sweep: the brooding,
+snow-touched, virginal peaks, visited and encompassed by the sacred
+spirit of the sea, and below it the fertile valley, the little
+huddling, skirting hills fed from her breast. The very lights that
+die along the heights, the airs that play there, the swelling fecund
+slopes, have in them something so richly maternal; the virtue of
+the land is the virtue that we love most in the mothers of men. And
+if you want facts under the poetry, see how the Sierra receives the
+rain and sends it down laden with the rich substance of her granite
+bosses, making herself lean to fatten the valleys. The great gorges
+and swift angles of the hills which fade and show in the evening
+glow, are wrought there by the ceaseless contribution of the mountain
+to the tillable land. And what a land it has become! There have been
+notable kingdoms of the past of fewer and less productive acres. Yet
+even in the great avenues of palms that flick the light a thousand
+ways from their wind-stirred, serrate edges, is a reminder of the
+host of bristling, spiny growth the land once entertained. It is as if
+the sinister forces of the desert lurked somewhere not far under the
+surface, ready at any moment to retake all this wonder of fertility,
+should the beneficence of the Mother Mountain fail. The Padre pioneers
+must have felt these two contending forces many a time when they lay
+down at night under the majestic Sierra, for they named the first
+spot where they made an abiding place, in honour of the protecting
+influence, _Nuestro Se�ora, Reina de Los Angeles_, Our Lady the Queen
+of the Angels. There she hovered, snow-whitened amid tall candles of
+the stars, while south and west the coyote barked the menace of the
+unwatered lands. Now this is remarkable, and one of the things that go
+to show we are vastly more susceptible to influences of nature than
+some hard-headed members of society suppose, that in this group of
+low hills and shallow valleys between the Sierra Madre and the sea,
+the most conspicuous human achievement has been a new form of domestic
+architecture.
+
+This is the thing that most strikes the attention of the traveller:
+not the orchards and the gardens, which are not appreciably different
+in kind from those of the Riviera and some favoured parts of Italy,
+but the homes, the number of them, their extraordinary adaptability to
+the purposes of gracious living. The Angelenos call them bungalows,
+in respect to the type from which the later form developed, but they
+deserve a name as distinctive as they have in character become. These
+little thin-walled dwellings, all of desert-tinted native woods and
+stones, are as indigenous to the soil as if they had grown up out of
+it, as charming in line and the perfection of utility as some of those
+wild growths which show a delicate airy florescence above ground, but
+under it have deep, man-shaped, resistant roots. With their low and
+flat-pitched roofs they present a certain likeness to the aboriginal
+dwellings which the Franciscans found scattered like wasps' nests among
+the chaparral along the river,--which is only another way of saying
+that the spirit of the land shapes the art that is produced there.
+
+One must pause a little by the dry wash of this river, so long ago
+turned into an irrigating ditch that it is only in seasons of unusual
+flood it remembers its ancient banks, and finds them, in spite of
+all that real estate agencies have done to obliterate such natural
+boundaries. This river of Los Angeles betrays the streak of original
+desertness in the country by flowing bottom-side up, for which it
+receives the name of _arroya_, and even _arroya seca_ as against the
+_rio_ of the full-flowing Sacramento and San Juan. A _rio_ is chiefly
+water, but an _arroya_, and especially that one which travels farthest
+from the Mothering Mountains toward the sea, is at most seasons of
+the year a small trickle of water among stones in a wide, deep wash,
+overgrown with button willow and sycamores that click their gossiping
+leaves in every breath of wind or in no wind at all. Tiny gold and
+silver backed ferns climb down the banks to drink, and as soon as the
+spring freshet has gone by, brodi�as and blazing stars come up between
+the boulders worn as smooth as if by hand.
+
+Farther up, where the stream narrows, it is overgrown by willows,
+alders, and rock maples, and leaps white-footed into brown pools for
+trout. Deer drink at the shallows, and it is not so long ago that
+cinnamon bear and grizzlies tracked the wet clay of its borders. This
+is the guarantee that this woman-country is in no danger of too much
+mothering. No climate which is acceptable to trout and grizzlies is in
+the least likely to prove enervating; men and beasts, they run pretty
+much to the same vital, sporting qualities.
+
+All that country which extends from the foot of the Sierra Madre to the
+sea, is so cunningly patterned off with ranks of low hills and lomas
+that its vastness is disguised, or rather revealed by subtle change and
+swift surprises as a discreet woman reveals her charms. This renders it
+one of the most delightful of motoring countries. The car swings over a
+perfect road into snug little orchard nooks as safe and secret seeming
+as a nest, climbs a round-breasted hill to greet the wide horizon of
+the sea, or a mesa stretching away into blue and amber desertness,
+which when adventured upon, discloses in unsuspected hollows white,
+peaceful towns girt by great acres of orange groves, or the orderly
+array of vines trimmed low and balancing like small, wide-skirted
+figures in a minuet. And then the ground opens suddenly to deep, dry
+gullies where little handfuls of the grey soil gather themselves up and
+scuttle mysteriously under the cactus bushes, and dried seeds of the
+megarrhiza rattle with a muffled sound as the pods blow about. Here one
+meets occasionally the last survivors of the old way of life before men
+found it: _neotoma_, the house-building rat, with his conical heap of
+rubbish; or a road runner, tilting his tail and practising his short,
+sharp runs in the powdery sand under the rabbit brush; here, too, the
+lurking desert shows its spiny tips like a creature half-buried in the
+sand, not dead, but drowsing.
+
+  [Illustration: A EUCALYPTUS GROVE]
+
+As artists know colour, and poets know it, this is the most colourful
+corner of the world. The blue and silver tones of the Sparrow-Hawk's
+land give place to airy violets, fawns, and rich ambers. It is curious,
+that obstinate preference which a locality has for colour schemes
+of its own adoption; man can break up and re-form them, but he can
+never quite overcome the original key. Here the bright, instant note
+of the geraniums that shore up the bungalows, even the insult of the
+magenta-coloured Bougainvillea is subdued by the aerial softness
+that lies along the hills like the bloom on fruit. The sheets of
+Eschscholtzia gold that once spread over miles of the San Gabriel
+valley, and still linger in torn fragments about Altadena, have been
+sheared by the plough, to vanish and reappear again in the solid globes
+of orange, distilled from the saps and juices of the soil.
+
+One of the most interesting of the instruments by which the cultivated
+landscape has gathered up and fixed the evanescent greens that spread
+thinly yet over the uncropped hills in spring, is the eucalyptus.
+All the tints are there, from the olive greens of the chaparral to
+the sombre darkness of the evergreen oak; young shoots of it have the
+silvery finish of the artemisia which once gave the note of the mesas
+about Riverside and San Bernardino. No other imported tree has quite
+to such a degree the air of the _habitu�_; one wonders indeed if it
+could have been half so much at home in Australia, from whence it has
+returned like some wandering heir to the ancestral acre.
+
+It proves its blood royal by its facile adaptiveness to the prevailing
+lines of the landscape, taking the rounded, leaning outline of the live
+oaks on the wind-driven hills, or in sheltered ravines springing upward
+straight as the silver firs. Perhaps its most charming possibilities
+are revealed in the middle distance where, lifted high on columnar
+stems, its leaf crowns take on the blunt, flowing contours of the
+hills. At all times it has a beautiful resilience to the wind, bowing
+with a certain courtliness without compulsion, and recovering as if
+by conscious harmonious movement. The pepper tree, however, most
+magnificent specimens of which may be found lining the avenues of
+Pasadena, or in some unexpected corner of the hills marking the site of
+some old Spanish hacienda, is always an alien. It is like the Spaniards
+who brought it, perhaps, in its drooping grace, in the careless
+prodigality with which it sheds its fragile crimson fruits. Something
+of old-worldliness persists in its spicy odours, and in the stir of its
+lacy shadows; when the moon comes over the mountain wall and the wind
+is moving, there is the touch of mystery one associates with lovely
+se�oritas leaning out of balconies. One fancies that the pepper tree
+will last so long as the dying race of Dons and Do�as, and with them
+will cease to be a feature of local interest.
+
+There is hardly more than a trace in the modern city of Los Angeles of
+_Nuestra Se�ora, Reina de los Angeles_. The last time I passed through
+the old plaza, the streets of offence encroached upon it from the east,
+and a corner of the sacred precinct had been sacrificed to the trolley.
+The Church of Our Lady, over whose door may still be traced the fading
+inscription from which the city takes its name, was never a mission,
+but one of the six chapels or _asistencias_ centred about the Mission
+San Gabriel. It was here the first expedition passed northward looking
+for the port of Monterey, on the day of the feast of Our Lady in the
+year when the Atlantic Colonies were making up their minds to fight the
+English. It was close to this spot and along Downey Street were enacted
+the most pitiful of all the tragic incidents which marked the recession
+of the aboriginal races. Bereft of their lands and the protection of
+their Church, they became a prey to the greed of the dominant peoples,
+and used regularly to be incited to drunkenness upon their wages on
+Sunday, arrested while in that condition, and sold each Monday morning
+for the amount of their fines to the neighbouring ranchers. Things
+like this lurking under the surface of commercial enterprise, as the
+desert lies in wait in sandy stretches, advise us that much of our
+insistence on democracy grows out of our inability to trust ourselves
+to deal equitably with our fellows under any other conditions. We can
+keep to the rules of the game we have set up more easily than to the
+unfenced humanities. Here in the old plaza full of sleepy light, which
+still retains the indefinable stamp of the people to whom to-morrow was
+always a better day for doing things, one sighs for the short-sighted
+self-interest which so wasted the native children of the soil.
+
+But after all the land couldn't have loved them as it does the race
+for which it brings forth its miraculous harvests. Not that there
+weren't miracles in those days; in fact they began here, or rather at
+San Gabriel, six miles or so beyond the river which in those days was
+called Porcincula, a name that linked the old world with the new by
+way of the little chapel in Italy in which the beloved Francis received
+such heavenly favours. The miracle of San Gabriel relates to a display
+of a canvas presentiment of Our Lady, at the mere sight of which the
+wild tribes experienced exceeding grace. Looking up suddenly at the
+Mother Mountain brooding above the plain, it is easy to understand
+how the symbol of aloof but solicitous care came home to the primitive
+mind, always peculiarly open to suggestions of humaneness in nature.
+
+The heads of the Sierra Madre are rounded, the contours of great
+dignity. The appeal it makes to the eye is of mass and line. Its
+charms, and it has many, of forested slope, leaping waters, and lilied
+meadows, do not offer themselves to the casual glance, but must be
+sought after with great pains. The bulk of the range is of warm,
+grey granite, clothed with atmospheric colour as with a garment. It
+borrows more from the sky than the sea, taking on at times an aerial
+transparency, the soul of the mountain about to pass trembling into
+light. Pinkish tones are discoverable in even the bluest shadows,
+and at times the peaks are touched with the rich, roseate orange of
+the Alpine-glow. But the variations of temperature and atmospheric
+conditions are not sufficiently pronounced to present themselves to
+the sense as the source of its aspects of tenderness, of majesty,
+of virginal aloofness. Rather such changes seem to be occasioned by
+palpitations of the Mountain Spirit, remote in sacred meditation,
+glowing, dimming, defining itself from within.
+
+It may be that the immense vitality of the land, its abundance, the
+bursting orchards, the rich variety of native growth, somehow dwarfs
+the earliest impression of the Sierra Madre, since few, if any, gather
+at first an adequate idea of the actual mass and height it represents.
+It is only after appreciation of the really amazing activities of the
+Angelenos is a little dulled by familiarity, at early morning when
+the groves are sleeping and the bright plantations of the gardens lack
+the sun to flash their brilliance on the sight, or at evening when a
+sea mist covers the teeming land, one is prepared to hear that many of
+these peaks are higher than the Simplon, and that it would be possible
+to wander for months in the intricacies of its ca�ons without having
+time to grow familiar with a single one of them.
+
+Sometimes the mere mechanics of the land, the pull of the wind up the
+narrow gorges as you pass, advises the open mind of power and immensity
+residing in the thinly forested bulks. Passing what appears a mere
+shadowy gulf in the mountain wall, you are aware of a murmurous sound
+as of the sea in a shell, and feel suddenly the push of the draught
+on your windshield like a great steady hand. In places above San
+Bernardino, the steady pouring of invisible wind rivers has swept the
+soil for miles and defied three generations of artificial plantations.
+And sometimes the mountain speaks directly to the soul. I recall such
+an occasion one late spring. We had been skirting the range toward
+Riverside all afternoon, having the fall of the land seaward always
+in view, noting how, in spite of the absurd predilection of men for
+square fields and gridiron arrangements, the main lines of cultivation
+were being pulled into beauty by the sheer necessity of humouring
+the harvest. It was that lagging hour between the noon splendour and
+the gathering of the light for its dramatic passage into night. The
+orange orchards lay dead green in the hollows, unplanted ridges showed
+scarcely a trace of atmospheric blueness; unlaced, unbuskined, the
+land rested. And all in the falling of a leaf, in the scuttle of a
+horned toad in the dust of the roadway, it lifted into eerie life. It
+bared its teeth; the veil of the mountain was rent. Nothing changed,
+nothing stirred or glimmered, but the land had spoken. As if it had
+taken a step forward, as if a hand were raised, the mountain stood
+over us. And then it sank again. While the chill was still on us, the
+grip of terror, there lay the easy land, the comfortable crops, the red
+geraniums about the bungalows. But never again for me would the Sierra
+Madre be a mere geographical item, a feature of the landscape; it was
+Power, immanent and inescapable. Shall not the mother of the land do
+what she will with it?
+
+Entering the ca�ons of the San Gabriel, one is struck with the
+endearing quality of their charm. In a country which disdains every
+sort of prettiness, and dares even to use monotony as an element of
+beauty, as California does, it is surprising to find, cut in the solid
+granite wall, little dells all laced with fern and saxifrage, and
+wind swung, frail, flowery bells. Little streams come dashing down the
+runways with an elfin movement, with here and there a miniature fall
+"singing like a bird," as Muir described it, between moss-encrusted
+banks.
+
+  [Illustration: GLENDALE, VALLEY OF THE SAN GABRIEL]
+
+Into the open mouths of such ca�ons have retreated the hosts of
+wildflowers that once in the wet seasons overran all that country from
+San Bernardino to the sea,--the white sage, most honeyful of all the
+sages, the poppies, gilias, cream cups, nemophilias which twenty-five
+years ago were as common as meadow grass, as thick as the planted
+fields of alfalfa which have usurped them. Settlers who came into
+this country when the trail over the San Gorgiono had not yet hardened
+between iron rails, tell of riding belly deep for miles in wild oats
+and waving bloom, and where the trail goes out over the San Fernando,
+toward Camulas, the yellow mustard reached its scriptural height, and
+the birds of the air built their nests in it. Now and then in very
+wet years a faint yellow tinge, high up under the bases of the hills,
+is all that is left of the seed which, by report, the Padres sowed
+along the coastwise trails, to mark where they trod the circuit of the
+Missions.
+
+Everywhere within the ca�ons, honeyful flowers abound, and up from the
+rocky floors the slopes are stiff with chaparral. This characteristic
+growth, which, seen from the open valley flooded by dry sun, appears as
+a mere scurf, a roughened lichen on the mountain wall, is in reality a
+riot of manzanita, mahogany, ceanothus, cherry and black sage, from ten
+to fifteen feet high, all but impassable. Elsewhere in the ranges to
+the north, the chaparral is loose enough to admit fern and herbaceous
+plants, carpeting the earth, but here the rigid, spiny stems contend
+for three or four feet, thick as the carving in old cathedral choirs,
+before they attain light and air enough to put forth leaf or twig. On
+the seaward side of the mountains, miles and miles of this dense growth
+flow over the ranges, parted here and there by knife-edge ridges, or
+by huge bosses of country rock, affording a great sweep to the eye,
+reaching far to seaward. From here the lower country shrinks to its
+proper proportion--a toy landscape planted with Noah's Ark trees--and
+the noise of men is overlaid by the great swells of the Pacific which
+come thundering in, lifting far and faint reverberations along the
+ranges.
+
+On either side of these vast conning towers it is still possible to
+trace the indefinite tracks which wild creatures make, running clear
+and well defined for short distances and then melting unaccountably
+into the scrub again. Occasionally still they discover traces of the
+wild life in which the Sierra Madre once abounded. Deer are known to
+take advantage of such natural outlooks in protecting themselves from
+their natural enemies, and from the evidence of frequent visits here,
+bears and foxes and bobcats must have made much the same use of them.
+From such high escarpments the Indians would have seen Cabrillo's
+winged boats go by, and from them, all up the coast, ascended the
+pillars of smoke that attended the galleon of Francis Drake.
+
+Once within the portals of the range, the granite walls sheer away
+from sequestered parks of oak, madro�o, and Douglas spruce. The trees
+are not thickly set here as in the north, but admit of sunny space
+and murmurous bee pasture between their gracefully contrasting boles,
+and to a thousand bright-feathered and scaled things unknown to the
+all-pine or all-redwood forests. Such parks or basins vary from a few
+yards to an acre or two in extent, threaded like beads upon a single
+stream. One thinks indeed of the old-fashioned "charm string" in which
+each meadow space has its peculiar virtue:--open sunny shallows, arrowy
+cascades, troops of lilies standing high as a man's head, forested
+fern, columbine, delphinum, and scarlet mimulus along the water
+borders.
+
+They grow slighter as the trail ascends--it is possible now to make
+nearly the whole distance in gravity cars for that purpose provided,
+but I recommend a sure-footed mule for the true mountain-lover--until
+above the source of the streams, from dips and saddles of the range,
+above the summer-shrunken glaciers, where the trees are bowed and the
+chaparral creeps as if awed and dizzy, it is possible to have a glimpse
+of the still unconquered and unconquerable "sage brush county." All
+along the back of the Sierra Madre wall the desert laps like a slow
+tide, rolling up and receding with the drouths and rains. The eye takes
+it in no less slowly than the imagination. It stretches, in fact, to
+the Colorado, but a haze of heat obscures its eastern border; long
+whitened lines of alkali, like wave marks, set the seasonal limit of
+its encroachments. Here and there shows the dark checkering of fertile
+patches, spilled over from the rich west-lying valleys; trending east
+by south lies the Sierra Madre like an arm, guarding the favoured
+region.
+
+And yet in her very favour the Mother Mountain is impartial, for
+equally as she saves the south from desertness, she has denied to us
+the one instrument by which the desert could be mastered. Mighty as
+man is in transforming the face of the earth, he is nothing without the
+Rains.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE COASTS OF ADVENTURE
+
+
+Old trails, older than the memory of man, go out from the southern
+country by way of Cahuenga, by Eagle Rock, toward that part of the
+shelving coast where the Padre's mustard gold lingered longest, as if
+to mark the locality where the gold they missed was first uncovered.
+But suppose, on that day of the year '41, Francisco Lopez, _major-domo_
+of the Mission San Fernando, had not had an appetite for onions? Who
+knows how history would have made itself?
+
+The speculation is idle; anybody named Lopez has always a
+taste for onions because they are the nearest thing to garlic.
+Se�or Francisco,--I suppose one may grant him the title at this
+distance--rested under an oak and dug up the wild root with his
+knife, and the tide of the world's emigration set toward the Coasts
+of Adventure. I have, holding my papers as I write, an Indian basket
+reputed to be one of those in which, in those days, placer gold was
+washed out of the sandy loam; it was given me by one who had it from
+Don Antonio Coronel, and has a pattern about it of the low serried
+hills of the coast district. Where it breaks, as all patterns of Indian
+baskets do, to give egress to the spirit resident in things dedicated
+to human use, there are two figures of men with arms outstretched, but
+divided as the pioneers who carried the cross into that country were
+from those who followed the lure of gold. The basket wears with time,
+but the pattern holds, inwoven with its texture as Romance is woven
+with the history of all that region lying between San Francisco on the
+north and Cahuenga where, after a bloodless battle, was consummated the
+cession of California from Mexico.
+
+  [Illustration: A CA�ON IN THE SIERRA MADRES]
+
+From the white landmark of San Juan Capistrano to a point opposite
+Santa Inez, saints thick as sea-birds, standing seaward, break the
+long Pacific swell: San Clemente, Santa Catalina, Santa Rosa--their
+deep-scored cliffs searched by the light, revealing their kinship
+with the parallel mainland ranges. But there are hints here, in the
+plant and animal life and in the climate, milder even than that of
+the opposing channel ports, hints which not even the Driest-Dustiness
+dare despise, of those mellower times than ours from which all fables
+of Blessed Islands are sprung. Islands "very near the terrestrial
+paradise" the old Spanish romancer described them. Often as not the
+imagination sees more truly than the eye. I myself am ready to affirm
+that something of man's early Eden drifted thither on the Kuro-Siwa,
+that warm current deflected to our coast, which, for all we know of it,
+might well be one of the four great rivers that went about the Garden
+and watered it. Great golden sun-fish doze upon the island tides,
+flying-fish go by in purple and silver streaks, and under the flat
+bays, which take at times colour that rivals the lagoons of Venice,
+forests of kelp, a-crawl with rainbow-coloured life, sleep and sway
+upon tides unfelt of men. There are days at Catalina so steeped with
+harmonies of sea and sun that the singing of the birds excites the
+soothed sense no more than if the lucent air had that moment dripped in
+sound. These are the days when the accounts that Cabrillo left of his
+findings there, of a civil and religious development superior to the
+tribes of the mainland, beguile the imagination.
+
+One thinks of the watery highway between the west coast and the
+channel islands as another _Camino Real_ of the sea, where in place
+of mule trains and pacing Padres, went balsas, skin canoes, galleons,
+far-blown Chinese junks, Russian traders, slipping under the cliffs
+of San Juan for untaxed hides and tallow, Atlantic whalers, packets
+rounding the Horn, sunk past the load line with Argonauts of '49,
+opium smugglers dropping a contraband cask or an equally prohibited
+coolie under the very wing of San Clemente. So many things could have
+happened--Odysseys, �neids--that it is with a sigh one resigns the
+peaks of the submerged range, paling and purpling on the west, to the
+student of sea-birds and sea-nourished plants.
+
+Looking from the islands landward, the locked shores have still for
+long stretches the aspect of undiscovered country. Hills break abruptly
+in the surf or run into narrow moon-shaped belts of sand where a
+mountain arm curves out or the sea eats inward. And yet for nearly four
+centuries the secret of the land was blazoned to all the ships that
+passed, in the great fields of poppy gold that every wet season flamed
+fifty miles or more to seaward.
+
+One must have seen the Eschscholtzia so, smouldering under the mists
+of spring, to understand the thrill that comes of finding them later
+scattered as they are, throughout the gardens of the world. I recall
+how at Rome, coming up suddenly out of the catacombs--we had gone down
+by another entrance and had been wandering for hours in the mortuary
+gloom--memory leaped up to find a great bed of golden poppies tended
+by brown, bearded Franciscans. They couldn't say--Fray Filippo, whom I
+questioned, had no notion--whence the sun-bright cups had come, except
+that they were common in the gardens of his order. It seemed a natural
+sort of thing for some Mission Padre, seeking a memento of himself to
+send back to his Brothers of St. Francis half a world away, to have
+chosen these shining offsprings of the sun. There was confirmation in
+the fact that Fray Filippo knew them not by the unspellable botanical
+name, but by the endearing Castilian "dormidera," sleepy-eyed, in
+reference to their habit of unfolding only to the light; but the
+connecting thread was lost. Channel fishermen still, in spite of the
+obliterating crops, can trace the blue lines of lupins between faint
+streaks of poppy fires, and catch above the reek of their boats, when
+the land wind begins, blown scents of _islay_ and ceanothus.
+
+No rivers of water of notable size pour down this west coast, but
+rivers of green flood the shallow ca�ons. Here and there from the crest
+of the range one catches an arrowy glimpse of a seasonal stream, but
+from the sea-view the furred chaparral is unbroken except for bare
+ridges, wind-swept even of the round-headed oaks. This coast country is
+a favourite browsing place for deer; they can be seen there still in
+early summer, feeding on the acorns of the scrub oaks, and especially
+on the tender twigs of wind-fallen trees, or herding at noon in the
+deep fern which closes like cleft waters over their heads. Until
+within a few years it was no unlikely thing to hear little black bears
+snorting and snuffing under the manzanita, of the berries of which
+they are inordinately fond. This lovely shrub with its twisty, satiny
+stems of wine-red, suffusing brown, its pale conventionalised leaves
+and flat little umbels of berries, suggests somehow the carving on old
+Gothic choirs, as though it borrowed its characteristic touch from an
+external shaping hand; as if with its predetermined habit of growth it
+had a secret affinity for man, and waited but to be transplanted into
+gardens. It needs, however, no garden facilities, but shapes itself
+to the most inhospitable conditions. About the time it begins to put
+forth its thousand waxy bells, in December or January, the toyon, the
+native holly, is at its handsomest. This is a late summer flowering
+shrub that in mid-winter loses a little of its glossy green, and above
+its yellowing foliage bears berries in great scarlet clusters. Between
+these two overlapping ends, the gaumet of the chaparral is run in blues
+of wild lilac, reds and purples of rhus and buckthorn and the wide,
+white umbels of the alder, which here becomes a tree fifty to sixty
+feet in height. It is the only one of the tall chaparral which has
+edible fruit, for though bears and Indians make a meal of manzanita,
+it does not commend itself to cultivated taste. More humble species,
+huckleberry, thimble, and blackberry, crowd the open spaces under the
+oak-madro�o forests, or, as if they knew their particular usefulness
+to man, come hurrying to clearings of the axe, and may be seen holding
+hands as they climb to cover the track of careless fires. In June whole
+hill-slopes, under the pine and madro�os, burn crimson with sweet, wild
+strawberries. The wild currant and the fuchsia-flowered gooseberry are
+not edible, but they are under no such obligation; they "make good"
+with long wands of jewel-red, drooping blossoms, and in the case of
+the currant, with delicate pink racemes, thrown out almost before
+the leaves while the earth still smells of winter dampness. Though
+nobody seems to know how it travelled so far, the "incense shrub" is
+a favourite of English gardens where, before the primroses begin, it
+serves the same purpose as in the west coast ca�ons, quickening the
+sense into anticipations of beauty on every side.
+
+Inland the close, round-backed hills draw into ranks and ranges, making
+way for chains of fertile valleys which also fill out the Californian's
+calendar of saints. But, in fact, your true Californian prays to his
+land as much as ever the early Roman did, and pours on it libations
+of water and continuous incense of praise. Every one of these longish,
+north-trending basins is superlatively good for something,--olives or
+wheat, perhaps; Pajaro produces apples and Santa Clara has become the
+patroness of prunes.
+
+Nothing could be more ethereally lovely than the spring aspect of the
+orchard country. It begins with the yellowing of the meadow lark's
+breast, and then of early mornings, with the appearance, as if flecks
+of the sky had fallen, of great flocks of bluebirds that blow about
+in the ploughed lands and are dissolved in rain. Then the poppies
+spring up like torchmen in the winter wheat, and along the tips of
+the apricots, petals begin to show, crumpled as the pink lips of
+children shut upon mischievous secrets; a day or two of this and then
+the blossoms swarm as bees, white fire breaks out among the prunes,
+it scatters along the foothills like the surf. Toward the end of the
+blooming season all the country roads are defined by thin lines of
+petal drift, and any wind that blows is alive with whiteness. After
+which, thick leafage covers the ripening fruit and the valley dozes
+through the summer heat with the farms outlined in firm green, like a
+patchwork quilt drawn up across the mountains' knees.
+
+The tree that gives the memorable touch to the landscape of the coast
+valleys is the oak, both the roble and encinas varieties. There are
+others with greater claims to distinction, the sequoia, the "big
+tree," lurking in the Santa Cruz mountains, the madro�o, red-breeched,
+green-coated, a very Robin Hood of trees, sequestered in cool ca�ons,
+and the redwood, the _palo colorado_, discovered by the first Governor,
+Don Gaspar de Portola, on his search for the lost port of Monte Rey.
+All these keep well back from the main lines of travel. The most that
+the rail tourist sees of them is a line of redwoods, perhaps, climbing
+up from the sea-fronting ca�ons to peer and whisper on the ridges above
+the fruiting orchards. But the oaks go on, keeping well in the laps
+of the hills, avoiding the wind rivers, marching steadily across the
+alluvial basins on into the hot interior. They are more susceptible to
+wind influence than almost any other, and mark the prevailing direction
+of the seasonal air currents with their three-hundred-year-old trunks
+as readily as reeds under a freshet. You can see them hugging the
+lee side of any ca�on, leaning as far as they may out of the sea-born
+draughts, but standing apart, true aristocrats among trees, disdaining
+alike one another and the whole race of orchard inmates. When in full
+leaf, for the _roble_ is deciduous, they are both of them distinctly
+paintable, particularly when in summer the trunks, grey and aslant,
+upbearing cloud-shaped masses of dark green, make an agreeable
+note against the fawn-coloured hills. The _roble_ is a noble tree,
+high-crowned, with a great sweep of branches, but seen in winter
+stripped of its thick, small leafage, it loses interest. Its method of
+branching is fussy, too finely divided, and without grace.
+
+  [Illustration: THE CEMETERY, SANTA BARBARA MISSION]
+
+Around Santa Margarita and Paso Robles filmy moss spreads a veil over
+the _robles_ as of Druid meditation; one fancies them aloof from the
+stir of present-day life as they were from the bears that used to
+feed on the mast under them. A hundred years or so ago the Franciscans
+drove out the bears by an incantation--I mean by the exorcism of the
+Church enforced with holy water and a procession with banners around
+the Mission precinct: "I adjure you, O Bears, by the true God, by the
+Holy God ... to leave the fields to our flocks, not to molest them nor
+come near them." But bears or _homo sapiens_, it is all one to the oaks
+of San Antonio; indeed, if legend is to be credited, the four-footed
+brothers would have been equally as acceptable to the patron of the
+Mission where this interesting ceremony took place. I can testify,
+however, that after all this lapse of time the exorcism is still in
+force, for though I have been up and down that country many times I
+have seen no bears in it.
+
+Things more pestiferous than bears are driven out, humours of the
+blood, stiffness of the joints, by the medicinal waters that bubble
+and seep along certain ancient fissures of the country rock. This has
+always seemed to me the very insolence of superfluity. Who wishes, when
+all the air is censed with the fragrance of wild vines, to have his
+nose assaulted with fumes of sulphur, even though it is known to be
+good for a number of things? But there are some people who could never
+be got to observe the noble proportions of five-hundred-year-old oaks
+with the wild grapes going from tree to tree like a tent, except as a
+by-process incident to the drinking of nasty waters. So the land has
+its way even with our weaknesses.
+
+  [Illustration: SYCAMORES, A COAST RANGE CA�ON]
+
+Besides these excursions inland, which bring us in almost every case to
+one of the ancient Franciscan foundations, there are two or three ports
+of call on the sea front worth lingering at for more things than the
+pleasant air and the radiant wild bloom. One of these is Santa Barbara
+which Santa Inez holds in its lap, curving like a scimitar opposite
+the most northerly of the channel islands. Understand, however, that
+no good comes of thinking of Santa Barbara as a place on the map. It
+is a Sargossa of Romance, a haven of last things, the last Mission in
+the hands of the Franciscans, the last splendour of the Occupation, the
+last place where mantillas were worn and they danced the _fandango_ and
+_la jota_; an eddy into which have drifted remnants of every delightful
+thing that has passed on the highways of land and sea, which here hail
+one another across the curving moon-white beach. Summer has settled
+there, California summer which never swelters, never scorches. Frost
+descends at times from Santa Inez to the roofs, but lays no finger on
+the fuchsias, poinsettias, and the heliotropes climbing to second-story
+windows. The wild thickets which connect the territory with the town,
+are vocal with night-singing mocking-birds; along the foreshore white
+pelicans divide the mountain-shadowed waters. The waters, taking all
+the sky's changes, race to the fairy islands, the chaparral runs back
+to the flanks of Santa Inez showing yellowly through the distant blue
+of pines; overhead a sky clouded with light. This is not a paradox but
+an attempt to express the misty luminosity of a heaven filled with
+refractions of the summer-tinted slope, the glaucous leafage of the
+chaparral, the white sand and sapphire-glinting water. The sky _beyond_
+the enclosing mountains has the cambric blueness of the superheated
+interior, but directly overhead it has depth and immensity of colour
+unequalled except along the Mediterranean.
+
+Santa Barbara is a port of distinguished visitors; more, and more
+varieties, of sea-birds put in there on the long flight from the Arctic
+to the Isthmus than is easily believable. In the Estero--_esteril_,
+sterile--an ill-smelling tide pool lying behind the town, may be found
+at one season or another, all the western species that delight the
+ornithologist. The black brant, going by night, and wild swans, as
+many as a score of them together, have been noted in its backwaters,
+and scarcely any stroll along the receding surf but is enlivened by
+the resonant, sweet whistle of the plover. In hollows of the sands
+thousands of beach-haunting birds may be seen camping for the night,
+looking like some sea-coloured, strange vegetation, and early mornings
+when the channel racing by, leaves the bay placid, tens of thousands
+of shearwaters sleep in shouldering ranks that sway with the incoming
+swell as the kelp sways, without being scattered by it. One can see
+the same sight, augmented as to numbers, around Monterey, a long day's
+journey to the north as the car goes, long enough and lovely enough to
+deserve another chapter.
+
+
+
+
+  [Illustration: TALL CHAPARRAL, SANTA CRUZ]
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE PORT OF MONTEREY
+
+
+Without doubt history is made quite as much by the mistakes of men
+as by their utmost certainties. The persistent belief of the ancient
+geographers in the existence of the Straits of Anian, the traditional
+North-West Passage, led to some romancing, and to the exploration of
+the California coast a century or so before it was of any particular
+use to anybody. It led also to the bluest bay. Viscaino took possession
+of it for Philip of Spain as early as 1602, nearly two hundred years
+before the Franciscans planted a cross there under Viscaino's very
+tree. During all that time the same oaks staggered up the slope
+away from the wind, and the scimitar curve of the beach kept back
+the brilliant waters. There is a figure of immensity in this more
+terrifying than the mere lapse of years. Not how many times but with
+what sureness for every day the sapphire deep shudders into chrysoprase
+along the white line of the breakers. We struggle so to achieve a
+little brief moment of beauty, but every hour at Monterey it is given
+away.
+
+The bay lies squarely fronting the Pacific swell, about a hundred
+miles south of the Golden Gate, between the horns of two of the little
+tumbled coast ranges, cutting back to receive the waters of the Pajaro
+and the Salinas. From the south the hill juts out sharply, taking
+the town and the harbour between its knees, but the north shore is
+blunted by the mountains of Santa Cruz. The beach is narrow, and all
+along its inner curve blown up into dunes contested every season by
+the wind and by the quick, bright growth of sand verbena, lupins, and
+mesembryanthemums. The waters of the rivers are set back by the tides,
+they are choked with bars and sluiced out by winter floods. For miles
+back into the valleys of Pajaro and Salinas, blue and yellow lupins
+continue the colour of the sand and the pools of tide water. They climb
+up the landward slope of the high dunes and set the shore a little
+seaward against the diminished surf. Then the equinoctial tide rises
+against the land that the lupins have taken and smooths out their
+lovely gardens with a swift, white hand, to leave the beach smooth
+again for the building of pale, wind-pointed cones.
+
+  [Illustration: LOOKING DOWN ON MONTEREY AND THE BAY]
+
+The valley of the Salinas, which has its only natural outlet on the
+bay, is of the type of coast valleys, long, narrow and shallow, given
+over to farming and to memories of Our Lady of Solitude lying now as
+a heap of ruins in a barley field. It is a place set apart, where any
+morning you might wake to find the sea has entered between the little,
+brooding hills to rest.
+
+Gulls follow the plough there, and pines avoid the river basin as
+though each of them knew very well their respective rights in it. One
+has, however, to make a point of such discoveries, for the entrance to
+the valley is obscured by its very candour, lying all open as it does
+to drifting dune and variable sea marshes.
+
+It is even more worth while to follow the flat-bordered Pajaro into the
+shut valley where dozes the little town of San Juan Bautista, taking
+on its well-sunned mesa, those placid lapses of self-forgetfulness
+which are to the aged as a foretaste of the long sleep. Here it was
+that the magic muse of Music came into the country. It came in a
+little tin-piped, wooden hand-organ, built by one Benjamin Dobson of
+22 Swan Street, London, in the year 1735, but of all its history until
+it was unpacked from mule-back by Padre Lausan in 1797, there is not
+a word current. Our acquaintance with it begins on the day that the
+Padre set it up in the hills and played, "The Siren's Waltz," "Lady
+Campbell's Reel," and all its repertoire of favourite London airs, of
+which the least appropriate to its present mission must have been the
+one called "Go to the Devil." Which only goes to prove that the spirit
+of the Franciscans was often superior to their means, for what the
+simple savages did do as soon as they had overcome their superstitious
+fear of the noise box, was to come to Mass to hear it as often as
+possible. There remain three old volumes of music written later for
+the Mission which came true to its founding and excelled in all sweet
+sounds, but none, it is said, pleased the Indians so much or so raised
+their spirits as "The Siren's Waltz." No doubt its inspiriting strains
+added something to the warlike spirit which led here to the only
+local resistance opposed to the American invasion, for it was on the
+Gavilan heights above the little town that Fr�mont, on the tallest
+tree that he could find, raised the Stars and Stripes, gallantly if
+somewhat prematurely. It was from San Juan that Castro's men marched
+to the final capitulation of Cahuenga, and finally from here the last
+remnant of the old life drains away. One hears the echo of it faint as
+the sea sounds that on rare days come trembling up the valley on the
+translucent air.
+
+Returning to the bay, one finds all interest centering about the Point
+of Pines, a very ancient, rocky termination of the most westerly of
+the coast barriers. The Point, which is really a peninsula, is one
+of the most notable landmarks between Point Conception on the south
+and Fort Point at San Francisco. Its lighthouse stands well out on a
+rocky finger, ringed with incessant, clanging buoys; between it and
+Santa Cruz light is a roadstead for an empire. A windy bay at best,
+deep tides, and squally surfaces, the waters of Monterey have other
+values than the colourist finds in them. Sardines, salmon, cod, tuna,
+yellow tail run with its tides. At most seasons of the year whales
+may be seen spouting there, or are cast upon its shoals. At one time
+the port enjoyed a certain prosperity as a whaling station, of which
+small trace remains beside the bleaching vertebr� that border certain
+of the old gardens and the persistent whalebone souvenirs of the curio
+dealer. Lateen-rigged fisher fleets flock in and out of the harbour,
+butterfly winged; and all about the rock beaches creep the square-toed
+boats of the Japanese and Chinese abalone gatherers. Thousands of
+purple sea-urchins, squid, hundred-fingered star-fish, and all manner
+of slimy sea delicacies, these slant-eyed Orientals draw up out of
+the rainbow rock pools and the deeps below the receding surf. They go
+creeping and peering about the ebb, their guttural hunting cries borne
+inshore on the quiet air, seeming as much a native sea speech as the
+gabble of the gulls. So in their skin canoes and balsas the Indians
+must have crept about the inlets for as long as it requires to lay a
+yard or two of mould over the ancient middens of the tribe, as long as
+it takes to build a barrier of silver dunes half a mile seaward. Even
+at that distance the plough turns up the soil evenly sprinkled with
+crumbling shell which holds to the last a shred of its old iridescence.
+Far inland, past the Sierra Wall even to the country of Lost Borders,
+I have found amulets of this loveliest of the pearl shells, traded for
+and treasured by a people to whom the "Big Water" is a half-credited
+traveller's tale.
+
+About five hundred yards outside the surf, from Laboratory Point,
+circling the peninsula to Mission Point on the south, the submerged
+rocky ridge has grown a great, tawny mane of kelp. Every year it is
+combed and cut by the equinoctial tides, and cast ashore in brown,
+sea-smelling wind-rows, and every year it grows again to be the
+feeding-ground of a million water-haunting birds. Here the Ancient
+Murrelet fattens for the long flight to the Alaskan breeding-grounds,
+and in the wildest gales the little nocturnal auklets may be heard
+calling to one another above the warring thunder of the surf, or
+when the nights are clear and the mists all banded low beneath the
+moon, they startle the beach wanderer with their high keen notes and
+beetle whirring wings. Long triangular flights of curlew drop down
+these beaches against the westering sun, with wings extended straight
+above their heads, furling like the little lateen sails come home from
+fishing. Sandpipers, sanderlings, all the ripple runners, the skimmers
+of the receding foam, all the scavengers of the tide, the gulls,
+glaucous-winged, ringbilled, and the species that take their name from
+the locality, may be found here following the plough as robins do in
+the spring. When the herring school in the bay nothing could exceed the
+multitude and clamour of the herring gulls. They stretch out in close
+order, wing beating against wing, actually over square miles of the
+ruffling water between Point Pinos and the anchorage. But any attempt
+to render an account of the wild, winged life that flashes about the
+bays of Carmel and Monterey would read like an ornithologist's record.
+
+After storms that divide the waters outside the bay into great toppling
+mountains, in the quiet strip between the kelp and the beaches,
+thousands of shearwaters may be seen sleeping in long, swaying,
+feathered pontoons, shoulder to shoulder. The island rocks standing
+within the surf, from the Point of Pines all down the coast to Point
+Sur, are famous rookeries of cormorant. Watchful and black against the
+guano-whitened rocks, they guard their ancestral nests, redecorated
+each season with gay weed, pulled from the painted gardens of the deep;
+turning their long necks this way and that like revolving turret-tops,
+they beat off the gluttonous gulls with a devotion which would seem to
+demand some better excuse than the naked, greasy, wide-mouthed young.
+Warm mornings these can be seen stretching black-stemmed, gaping bills
+from the nesting hollows, waving this way and that like the tips of
+voracious sea anemones. Other rocks, white with salty rime, are given
+by mutual consent to rookeries of the yelping seals, the "sea lions" of
+this coast. Moonlight nights they can be seen playing there, with the
+weird half-human suggestion as of some mythical sea creatures.
+
+Other and less fortunate adventurers on the waters of Monterey have
+left strange traces on that coast; one stumbles on a signboard set up
+among the rocks to mark where such and such a vessel went to pieces in
+a night of storm. Buried deep in the beach beyond the anchorage is the
+ancient teakwood hull of the _Natala_, the ship that carried Napoleon
+to Elba. It brought secularisation to the Missions also, after which
+unfriendly service the wind woke in the night and broke it against the
+shore. Just off Point Lobos, the Japanese divers after abalones report
+a strange, uncharted, sunken craft, a Chinese junk blown out of her
+course perhaps, or one of those unreported galleons that followed a
+phantom trail of gold all up the west coast of the New World. Strange
+mosses come ashore here, tide by tide, all lacy and scarf-coloured, and
+once we found on the tiny strand below Pescadero, a log of sandal-wood
+with faint waterworn traces of tool marks still upon it.
+
+Most mysterious of all the hints held by the farthest west--for
+behold, when you have come to land again, sailing from this port, it is
+east!--of a time before our time, is the Monterey cypress.
+
+Across the neck of the peninsula, a matter of six or eight miles,
+cuts in the little bay of Carmel, a blue jewel set in silver sand.
+Two points divide it from the racing Pacific, the southern limb of
+Punta Pinos, and the deeply divided rocky ledge of Lobos--Lobos,
+the wolf, with thin, raking, granite jaws. Now on these two points,
+and nowhere else in the world, are found natural plantations of the
+trees that might have grown in Dante's Purgatorio, or in the imagined
+forests where walked the rapt, tormented soul of Blake. Blake, indeed,
+might have had a hint of these from some transplanted seedling on an
+English terrace, for the Monterey cypress is quick-growing for the
+first century or so and one of the most widely diffused of trees; but
+only here on the Point and south to Pescadero ranch do they grow of
+God's planting. With writhen trunks and stiff contorted limbs they
+take the storm and flying scud as poppies take the sun. Incredibly
+old, even to the eye, they have no soil, nor seek none other than
+the thousand-year litter of their scaly needles, the husk of their
+nut-shaped, woody cones--the Spirit of the Ancient Rocks come to life
+in a tree. Grown under friendly conditions the young trees spire as do
+other conifers, but here they take on strange enchanted shapes. Their
+flat, wind-depressed tops are resilient as springs; one may lie full
+length along them, scarcely sunk in the minutely-feathered twigs, and
+watch the coasting steamers trail by on seas polished by the heat, or
+the winter surf bursting high in air. Or one could steal through their
+thick plantations unsuspected, from twisty trunk to trunk in the black
+shade, feeling the old earth-mood and man's primeval fear, the pricks
+and warnings of a world half made. The oldest of the cypresses are
+attacked by a red fungus rust, the colour of corroding time. It creeps
+along the under side of boughs and eats away the green, but even then
+the twisted heart wood will outlast most human things.
+
+  [Illustration: PESCADERO, A CHINESE FISHING VILLAGE, MONTEREY BAY]
+
+The pines of Monterey, though characteristic enough of the locality
+to take on its identifying name, are thoroughly plebeian: prolific,
+quick-growing, branching like candelabra when young; but in a hundred
+years or so their wide limbs, studded with persistent cones, take on
+something of the picturesque eccentricity that may be noticed among
+the old in rural neighbourhoods. They grow freely back into the hills
+till they are warned away from the ca�ons by the more sequestered _palo
+colorado_. The Monterey pine is one of the long-needled varieties, but
+of a too open growth perhaps, or too flexile to have any voice but a
+faint rustling echo of the ocean. The hill above Monterey, crowned with
+them, is impressive enough; they look lofty and aloof and dark against
+the sky, but growing in a wood they are seen to be too spindling and
+sparse-limbed to be interesting. The oaks do better by the landscape,
+all of the _encinas_ variety, bearing stiff clouds of evergreen foliage
+in lines simple enough to compose beautifully with the slow scimitar
+sweep of the bay and the round cloud-masses that, gathering from the
+sea, hang faintly pearled above the horizon. There are no redwoods
+on the peninsula; straggling lines of them look down from Palo Corona
+on Carmel Bay, walking one after another, with their odd tent-shaped
+tops and long branches all on the windward side, like a procession of
+friars walking against the wind. On the Santa Cruz coast, and in small
+groups near Carmel, grows the tan bark oak, not a true oak, but of the
+genus _Pasania_, whose nearest surviving congeners are no nearer than
+Siam. How it came here, survivor of an earlier world, or drifting in on
+the changing Japanese current, no one knows. Apparently no one cares,
+for the only use the Santa Crucians have found for it is to tan shoe
+leather.
+
+  [Illustration: CYPRESS POINT, NEAR CARMEL]
+
+Three little towns have taken root on the Peninsula: two on the bay
+side, the old pueblo of Monterey with its white-washed adobes still
+contriving to give character to the one wide street; Pacific Grove,
+utterly modern, on the surf side of Punta de Pinos, a town which
+began, I believe, as a resort for the churchly minded--a very clean
+and well-kept and proper town, absolutely exempt, as the deeds are
+drawn to assure us, "from anything having a tendency to lower the moral
+atmosphere," a town where the lovely natural woods have given place to
+houses every fifty feet or so, all nicely soldered together with lines
+of bright scarlet and clashing magentas and rosy pinks of geraniums and
+pelargoniums in a kind of predetermined cheerfulness; in short, a town
+where nobody would think of living who wanted anything interesting to
+happen to him. Above it on the hill, the Presidio commands the naked
+slope, fronting toward Santa Cruz, raking the open roadstead with its
+guns. It was under this hill on the harbour side, where a little creek
+still runs a rill in the rainy season, that Viscaino heard the first
+mass in California, and nearly two hundred years later, Padre Serra set
+up the cross.
+
+On June 30, 1770, that being the Holy Day of Pentecost, was founded
+here the Mission of San Carlos Borromeo, afterward transplanted for
+sufficient reasons, over the hill six miles away, on Carmel River. The
+town is full of reminders of the days of the Spanish Occupation, when
+it was the capital of Alta California. Old gardens here have still the
+high adobe walls, old houses the long galleries and little wrought-iron
+balconies; times yet the tide rises in the streets of the town, and
+still the speech is soft.
+
+It is also possible to buy _tomales_ there and _enchiladas_ and _chile
+concarne_ which will for the moment restore your faith in certain
+conceptions of a hereafter that of late have lost popularity.
+
+Half a mile back from the beach, and divided from the town by the old
+cemetery, in a deep alluvial flat grown to great oaks and creeping
+sycamores, is situated one of the famous winter resorts of the world,
+H�tel Del Monte. I can recommend it with great freedom to those
+curiously constituted people who have to have an excuse for being out
+of doors. The Del Monte drives and golf links are said by those who
+have used them, to provide such excuse in its most compelling form.
+Those who suffer under no such necessity will do well to take the white
+road climbing the hill out of old Monterey, and drop down the other
+side of it into Carmel.
+
+From the top of this hill the lovely curve of the bay, disappearing far
+to the north under a violet mist, is pure Greek in its power to affect
+the imagination. Its blueness is the colour that lies upon the Gulf of
+Dreams; the ivory rim of the dunes, the shadowed blue of the terraces
+set on a sudden all the tides of recollection back on Salonica,
+Lepanto, the hill of Athens. You are reconciled for a moment to the
+chance of history which whelmed the colourful days of the Spanish
+Occupation. They could never have lived up to it.
+
+But once on the Carmel side of the peninsula, regret comes back very
+poignantly. The bay is a miniature of the other, intensified, the
+connoisseur's collection,--blue like the eye of a peacock's feather,
+fewer dunes but whiter, a more delicate tracery on them of the beach
+verbena, hills of softer contours, tawny, rippled like the coat of a
+great cat sleeping in the sun. Carmel Valley breaks upon the bay by
+way of the river which chokes and bars, runs dry in summer or carries
+the yellow of its sands miles out in winter a winding track across the
+purple inlet. It is a little valley and devious, reaching far inland.
+Above its source the peaks of Santa Lucia stand up; for its southern
+bulwark, Palo Corona. Willows, sycamores, elder, wild honeysuckle, and
+great heaps of blackberry vines hedge the path of its waters.
+
+  [Illustration: SANTA CRUZ MOUNTAINS, THE COAST RANGE]
+
+Where the valley widens behind the low barrier that shuts out the sea,
+sits the Mission of San Carlos Borromeo, once the spiritual capital
+of Alta California. Here Junipero Serra, and after him the other Padre
+Presidentes, held the administration of Mission affairs, and from here
+he wandered forth on foot, up and down this whole coast from San Diego
+to Solano, with pacification and the seeds of civilisation. Here on the
+walls, faintly to be traced beneath the scorn of time, he blazoned with
+his own hands the Burning Heart, the symbol of his own inward flame.
+Here, in his seventy-first year, he died and was buried on the gospel
+side of the altar. It is reported that his last act was to walk to the
+doorway to look once, a long look, on the hills turning amber under
+the August sun, on the heaven-blue water and the white hands of the
+surf beating against the cliffs of Lobos; looked on the fields and the
+orchard planted by his own hand, on the wattled huts of the neophytes
+redeemed, as he believed them, to all eternity, after which he lay down
+and slept. It is further reported in the annals of the Mission that
+it was necessary to place a guard about the wasted body in its shabby
+brown gown, to defend it from the crowding mourners craving each a
+relic of the blessed remains. Had I lived at that time I should have
+been among them, for he was a great soul, and have I not felt even at
+this distance of the years the touch of his high fervours! San Carlos
+is one of the best-conditioned of these abandoned fortresses of the
+faith: the ancient pear trees are still in bearing, the wild mustard
+yellows in the fields, its architecture still betrays the uncertain
+hand of the savage; back in unsearchable recesses of the hills linger
+still some Indians whose garbled greeting is a memory of the _Ama Dios_
+which the padres taught them. Until a few years ago the prayer-post,
+a rude slab with the triple-knotted cord of the Franciscans carved
+around it, still stood on the hill at the end of the path their devout
+feet made, resorting to it for courage and consolation. These mementos
+fade, but year by year the impress of the great spirit of Serra grows
+plainer, like one of those trodden paths of long ago which show not at
+all if you seek them in the grass or near at hand, but from the vantage
+of Palo Corona are traceable far across the landscape.
+
+The modern Carmel is a place of resort for painter and poet folk.
+Beauty is cheap there; it may be had in superlative quality for the
+mere labour of looking out of the window. It is the absolute setting
+for romance. No shipping ever puts in at the singing beaches. The
+freighting teams from the Sur with their bells a-jangle, go by on the
+country road, but great dreams have visited the inhabitants thereof.
+Spring visits it also with yellow violets all up the wooded hills,
+and great fountain sprays of sea-blue ceanothus. Summer reddens the
+berries of the manzanita and mellows the poppy-blazoned slopes to tawny
+saffron. Strong tides arrive unheralded from some far-off deep-sea
+disturbance and shake the beaches. Suddenly, on the quietest days, some
+flying squadron of the deep breaks high over Lobos and neighs in her
+narrow caverns. Blown foam, whipped all across the Pacific, is cast
+up like weed along the sand and skims the wave-marks with a winged
+motion. Whole flocks of these foam-birds may be seen scudding toward
+the rock-corners of Mission Point after the equinoctial winds. Other
+tides the sea slips far out on new-made level reaches, and leaves the
+wet sand shining after the sun goes down like the rosy inside pearl of
+the abalone.
+
+The forests of Point Pinos are sanctuary. It is still possible to hear
+there at long intervals the demoniac howl of the little grey dog of
+the wilderness, "Brother Coyote," the butt, the cat's-paw, the Jack
+Dullard of Indian folklore, and sometimes in the open country below
+Point Lobos to see one curious and agaze from brown, naked bosses of
+the hills. Any warm afternoon, by lying very still a long time in the
+_encinal_, one may observe the country-coloured bobcat, tawny as the
+grass in summer, slipping from shade to shade. Sometimes if startled
+he will turn and face you with his blinking, yellow, half-hypnotic
+stare before he returns to his unguessed errand. Any morning you may
+find about your bungalow innumerable prints as of baby palms pressed
+downward in the dust, the tracks of the friendly little racoons who
+may be heard bubbling in the shallow ca�ons any moonlight night. Often
+I have left a cut melon under my window for the sake of seeing, an
+hour after moonrise, two or three of them scooping out the pink heart,
+spatting one another for helpings out of turn, keeping, in spite
+of the little gluttons you know them to be, a great affectation of
+daintiness. The night-cry of these little creatures is difficult to
+distinguish from the love-call of the horned owl, who on the undark
+nights of summer skims the low foreshore for the sake of the field-mice
+and gophers that feed on the seeds of the beach grasses. Every sort of
+migratory bird that passes up and down this coast lingers a while in
+the neighbourhood of Monterey, and some species, like the Point Pinos
+juncos, take from it their distinctive name. But if, when you walk
+in the woods, the Stellar jay has first sight of you, you will find
+them singularly empty, for these blue-jacketed policemen of the pines
+permit nothing to pass them unannounced. Of all the wood-folk, the wise
+quail alone ignores their strident warnings. The quail have learned not
+only the certainty of safety but its absolute limit. I have seen whole
+flocks of them, scared by the gun, whirring out of the public lands to
+a point not out of gunshot but within the forbidden ground, from which
+they send back soft twitterings of defiance. It is not, however, their
+habit to flush except in great danger, but to run to cover, moving with
+a peculiar elusive rhythm, like the rippling of a snake. This plump
+little partridge, for it is only in the common speech that he becomes
+a quail, is the apt spirit of the chaparral--cheerful, social, strong
+in the domestic virtues; his crest not floating backward in warrior
+fashion, but cocked forward over an eye, he has all the air of the
+militant bourgeois, who could fight of course, but finds that running
+matches better with his inclinations. Just at the end of rains, before
+mating begins, hundreds of them may be seen feeding in the flock on
+open hillsides, and the thickets of buckthorn and ceanothus ring with
+their soft Spanish _Cuidado!_--Have a care!
+
+Three roads go up out of the peninsula to entice the imagination--that
+which we have already taken to the hills of Salinas and the little
+town of San Juan, the road to Carmel Valley, and the adventurous
+trail which leads all down the well-bitten coast past Sur and Pieoras
+Blancos. The Valley road turns off at the top of the divide between
+Carmel and Monterey; it passes on the landward side of the Mission
+into the river-bottom and skirts the narrow chain of farms, rising
+with the rise of the thinly-forested hills toward Tasajara, the Place
+of Springs. Here it is lost in the intricacies of the "back country."
+Deer-hunters go that way in the season, and those whose delight it is
+to lose themselves in the wilderness, to taste wild fruit and know no
+roof but the windy tent of stars. Years since there used to come out
+of that country shy-spoken, bearded men with bear-meat to sell and wild
+honey in the honeycomb, rifled from hiving rocks and hollow trees; but
+I fancy they are all dead now, or translated into the tall moss-bearded
+pines.
+
+The coast road, after it leaves Point Lobos behind, goes south and
+south, between high trackless hills and the lineless Pacific floor.
+From the Point you can see it rise over bare, sea-breasting hills, and
+disappear in narrow ca�ons down which, it is reported, immeasurable
+redwoods follow the white-footed creeks almost to the surf. Dim,
+violet-tinted islands rise offshore to break the sea's assault. Now
+and then one ventures in that direction as far as Arbolado, to return
+prophesying. But the most of us are wiser, understanding that the best
+service the road can render us is to remain a dramatic and unlimned
+possibility.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+OLD SPANISH GARDENS
+
+
+Dona Ina Manuelita Echivarra had come to the time of life when waists
+were not to be mentioned. It took all the evidence of her name to
+convince you that her cheek had once known tints of the olive and
+apricot. Tio Juan, who sunned himself daily in her patio, had achieved
+the richness of weathered teak; his moustachios were whitened as with
+the rime that collects on old adobes sometimes near the sea-shore.
+But Dona Ina, who missed by a score of years his mark of the days of
+_ma�ana por la ma�ana_, was muddily dark, and her moustache--but one
+does not suggest such things of a lady, and that Dona Ina was a lady
+could be proved by a foot so delicately arched and pointed, an ankle so
+neat that there was not another like it in your acquaintance save the
+mate to it.
+
+Once you had seen it peeping forth from under the black skirt--have
+not Castilian ladies worn black immemorially?--you did not require
+the assurance of Tio Juan that there was no one in her day could have
+danced _la jota_ with Dona Ina Manuelita.
+
+She would clack the castanets for you occasionally still, just to
+show how it was done, or with the guitar resting on the arm of her
+chair--laps were no more to be thought of than waists were--she would
+quaver a song, _La Golindrina_ for choice, or _La Noche esta Serena_.
+But unquestionably Dona Ina's time had gone by for shining at anything
+but conversation. She could talk, and never so fruitfully as when the
+subject was her garden.
+
+A Spanish garden is a very intimate affair. It is the innermost
+under-garment of the family life. Dona Ina's was walled away from the
+world by six feet of adobe, around the top of which still lingered the
+curved red tiles of Mission manufacture. It was not spoken of as the
+garden at all, it was the patio, an integral part of the dwelling.
+There was, in fact, a raw hide cot on the long gallery which gave
+access to it, and Dona Ina's drawn-work chemises bleaching in the
+sun. The patio is a gift to us from Andalusia; it is more Greek than
+Oriental, and the English porch has about as much relation to it as
+the buttons on the back of a man's coat to the sword-belt they were
+once supposed to accommodate. The patio is the original mud-walled
+enclosure of a people who preferred living in the open but were driven
+to protection; the rooms about three sides of it were an afterthought.
+
+  [Illustration: THE PATIO, OLD SPANISH RESIDENCE]
+
+The Echivarra patio did not lack the indispensable features of the
+early California establishment, the raised grill or cooking platform,
+and the ramada, the long vine-covered trellis where one took wine
+with one's friends, or the ladies of the family sat sewing at their
+interminable drawn work, _enramada_. The single vine which covered the
+twenty-foot trellis was of Mission stock, and had been planted by Dona
+Ina's father in the year the Pathfinder came over Tejon Pass into the
+great twin valleys. In Dona Ina's childhood a wine-press had stood in
+the corner of the patio where now there was a row of artichokes, which
+had been allowed to seed in order that their stiff silken tassels,
+dyed blue and crimson, might adorn the pair of china vases on either
+side the high altar. Dona Ina was nothing if not religious. In the
+corner of the patio farthest from the gallery, a fig-tree--this also
+is indispensable--hung over the tiled wall like a cloud. There was a
+weeping willow in the midst of the garden, and just outside, on either
+side the door, two great pepper trees of the very stock of the parent
+of all pepper trees in Alta California, which a sea captain from South
+America gave to the Padre at San Luis Rey. Along the east wall there
+were pomegranates.
+
+A pomegranate is the one thing that makes me understand what a pretty
+woman is to some men--the kind of prettiness that was Dona Ina's in the
+days when she danced _la jota_. The flower of the pomegranate has the
+crumpled scarlet of lips that find their excuse in simply being scarlet
+and folded like the petals of a flower; and then the fruit, warm from
+the sunny wall, faintly odorous, dusky flushed! It is so tempting when
+broken open--that sort opens of its own accord if you leave it long
+enough on the bush--the rich heart colour, and the pleasant uncloying,
+sweet, sub-acid taste. One tastes and tastes--but when all is said and
+done there is nothing to a pomegranate except colour and flavour, and
+at least if it does not nourish neither does it give you indigestion.
+That is what suggests the comparison; there are so many people who
+would like to find a pretty woman in the same category. Always when
+we sat together nibbling the rosy seeds, I could believe, even without
+the evidence of the ankles, that Dona Ina had had her pomegranate days.
+Only, of course, she would not have smelled so of musk and--there is
+no denying it--of garlic. Thick-walled old adobes of the period of the
+Spanish Occupation give off a faint reek of this compelling condiment
+at every pore, and as for the musk, it was always about the gallery in
+saucers and broken flower-pots.
+
+And yet Dona Ina was sensitive to odours: she told me that she had had
+the datura moved from the place where her mother had planted it, to the
+far end of the patio, where after nightfall its heavy, slightly fetid
+perfume, unnoticeable by day, scented all the air. She added that she
+felt convicted by this aversion of a want of sentiment toward a plant
+whose wide, papery-white bells went by the name of "Angels' trumpets."
+
+On the day that she told me about the datura, which I had only
+recognised by its resemblance to its offensive wayside congener, the
+"jimson weed," the Se�ora Echivarra had been washing her hair with a
+tonic made of oil expressed from the seeds of the megharizza after a
+recipe which her mother had had from _her_ mother, who had it from an
+Indian who used to peddle vegetables from the Mission, driving in every
+Saturday in an ancient caretta. I was interested to know if it were
+any more efficacious than the young shoots of the golden poppy fried
+in olive oil, which I had already tried. So we fell to talking of the
+virtues of plants and their application.
+
+We began with the blessed "herb of the saints," dried bunches of which
+hung up under the rafters of the gallery as an unfailing resort in
+affections of the respiratory tract, and _yerba buena_, in which she
+was careful to distinguish between the creeping, aromatic _del campo_
+of the woodlands and the _yerba buena del poso_, "herb of the well,"
+the common mint of damp places. When she added that the buckskin bag on
+the wall contained shavings of _cascara sagrada_, the sacred bark of
+the native buckthorn, indispensable to all nurseries, I knew that she
+had named two of the three most important contributions of the west to
+the modern pharmacopoeia. This particular bag of bark had been sent from
+Sonoma County, for south of Monterey it grows too thin to be worth the
+gathering. The Grindelia, she told me, had come from the salt marshes
+about the mouth of the Pajaro, where Don Gaspar de Portola must have
+crossed going northward.
+
+"And were you then at such pains to secure them?"
+
+"In the old days, yes," she assured me. In her mother's time there
+was a regular traffic carried on by means of roving Indians in healing
+herbs and simples; things you could get now by no means whatever.
+
+"As for instance----?" I was curious.
+
+Well, there was creosote gum, which came from the desert beyond the
+Sierra Wall, valuable for sores and for rheumatism. It took me a moment
+or two, however, to recognise in her appellation of it (_hideondo_,
+stinking) the shiny, shellac-covered _larrea_ of the arid regions.
+There were roots also of the holly-leaved barberry, which came from wet
+mountains northward, and of the "skunk cabbage," which were to be found
+only in soggy mountain meadows, where any early spring, almost before
+the frost was out of the ground, bears could be seen rooting it from
+the sod, fairly burying themselves in the black, peaty loam.
+
+But when it came to _yerba mansa_, Dona Ina averred, her mother would
+trust nobody for its gathering. She would take an Indian or two and
+as many of her ten children as could not be trusted to be left at
+home, and make long _pasears_ into the coast ranges for this succulent
+cure-all. I knew it well for one of the loveliest of meadow-haunting
+plants; wherever springs babbled, wherever a mountain stream lost
+itself under the roble oaks, the _yerba mansa_ lifted above its
+heart-shaped leaves of pale green, quaint, winged cones on pink,
+pellucid stems. But I had never heard one half of the curative wonders
+which Dona Ina related of it. Efficacious in rheumatism, invaluable in
+pulmonary complaints, its bruised leaves reduced swellings, the roots
+were tonic and alterative.
+
+I spare you the whole list, for Dona Ina was directly of the line of
+that lovely Se�orita who had disdainfully described the English as the
+race who "pay for everything," and to her mind it took a whole category
+of virtues to induce so much effort as a trip into the mountains
+which had not a _baile_ or a _fiesta_ at the end of it. Other things
+that were sought for by the housewives of the Spanish Occupation were
+_amole_, or soap-root, the bulbs of a delicate, orchid-like lily which
+comes up in the late summer among the stems of the chaparral, and the
+roots of the wild gourd, the _chili-cojote_, a powerful purgative.
+Green fruit of this most common pest, said Dona Ina, pounded to a pulp,
+did wonders in the way of removing stains from clothing.
+
+Then there was artemisia, romero, azalea, the blue-eyed grass of our
+meadows, upon an infusion of which fever patients can subsist for days,
+and elder, potent against spells, and there was Virgin's bower, which
+brought us back to the patio, for a great heap of it lay on the roof
+of the gallery, contesting the space there with the yellow banksia
+roses. I had supposed, until the Se�ora Echivarra mentioned it, that
+its purpose was purely ornamental, but I was to learn that it had come
+into the garden as _yerba de chivato_ about the time the barbed-wire
+fences of the gringo began to make a remedy for cuts indispensable to
+the ranchero who valued the appearance of his live stock. When the eye,
+travelling along its twisty stems and twining leaf-stalks, came to a
+clump of yarrow growing at the root of it I began at once to suspect
+the whole garden. Was not the virtue of yarrow known even to the
+Greeks?
+
+There was thyme flowering in the damp corner beyond the dripping
+faucet, and pot-marigold, lavender, rosemary, and lemon verbena, all
+plants that grow deep into the use and remembrance of man.
+
+No friend of our race, not even the dog, has been more faithful. The
+stock of these had come overseas from Spain--were not the Phoenicians
+credited with introducing the pomegranate into Hispaniola?--and thence
+by way of the Missions.
+
+All the borders of Dona Ina's garden were edged with rosy thrift, a
+European variety; and out on the headlands, a mile away, a paler,
+native cousin of it bloomed gaily with beach asters and yellow
+sand verbenas, but there was no one who knew by what winds, what
+communicating rootlets, they had exchanged greetings.
+
+Observation, travelling by way of the borders, came to the datura,
+which was to set the conversation off again, this time not of plants
+curative, but hurtful. We knew of the stupefying effects of the bruised
+pods and roots of this species, and--this was my contribution--how
+the Paiute Indians used to administer the commoner variety, called
+_main-oph-weep_, to their warriors to produce the proper battle frenzy,
+and especially to young women about to undergo the annual ordeal of the
+"Dance of Marriageable Maidens."
+
+Every year, at the spring gathering of the tribes, the maidens piled
+their dowries in a heap, and for three days, fasting, danced about it.
+If they fell or fainted, it was a sure sign they were not yet equal to
+the duties of housekeeping and childbearing; but I had had Paiute women
+tell me that they would never have endured the trial without a mild
+decoction of _main-oph-weep_.
+
+"It was different with us," insisted Dona Ina; "many a time we have
+danced the sun up over the mountain, and been ready to begin again the
+next evening...." But I wished to talk of the properties of plants, not
+of young ladies.
+
+The mystery of poison plants oppressed me. One may understand how a
+scorpion stings in self-protection, but what profit has the "poison
+oak" of its virulence? It is not oak at all, but _Rhus trilobata_, and
+in the spring whole hillsides are enlivened by the shining bronze of
+its young foliage, or made crimson in September. But the pollen that
+floats from it in May in clouds, the sticky sap, or even the acrid
+smoke from the clearing where it is being exterminated, is an active
+poison to the human skin, though I had not heard that any animal
+suffered similarly. Dona Ina opined that there was never an evil plant
+let loose in the gardens of the Lord but the remedy was set to grow
+beside it. A wash of manzanita tea, Grindelia, or even buckthorn, she
+insisted, was excellent for poison oak. Best of all was a paste of
+pounded "soap root." She knew a plant, too, which was corrective of
+the form of madness induced by the "loco" weed, whose pale foliage and
+delicately tinted, bladdery pods may be found always about the borders
+of the chaparral. For the convulsions caused by wild parsnip there was
+the wonder-working _yerba del pasmo_. This she knew also as a specific
+for snake-bite and tetanus. So greatly was it valued by mothers of
+families in the time of the Spanish Occupation, that when a clearing
+was made for a house and patio, in any country where it grew, a plant
+or two was always left standing. But it was not until I had looked for
+it, where she said I would find it between the oleander and the lemon
+verbena, that I recognised the common "grease-wood," the chamise of the
+mesa country.
+
+"But were there no plants, Dona Ina, which had another meaning, flowers
+of affection, corrective to the spirit?"
+
+"Angelica," she considered doubtfully. Young maids, on occasions of
+indecision, would pin a sprig of it across their bosoms, she said,
+and after they had been to church would find their doubts resolved;
+and there was yarrow, which kept your lover true, particularly if you
+plucked it with the proper ceremony from a young man's grave.
+
+Dona Ina remembered a fascinating volume of her mother's time, the
+_Album Mexicana_, in which the sentimental properties of all flowers
+were set forth. "There was the camelia, a beautiful woman without
+virtue, and the pomegranate----"
+
+"But the flowers of New Spain, Dona Ina, was there nothing of these?"
+I insisted.
+
+"Of a truth, yes, there was the cactus flower, not the opunta, the
+broad-leaved spiny sort, of which hedges were built in the old days,
+but the low, flamy-blossomed, prickly variety of hot sandy places. If
+a young man wore such a one pinned upon his velvet jacket it signified,
+'I burn for you.'"
+
+"And if he wore no flower at all, how then?"
+
+Dona Ina laughed, "_Si me quieros, no me quieros_"; she referred to the
+common yellow composite which goes by the name of "sunshine," or in the
+San Joaquin, where miles of it mixed with blue phacelias brighten with
+the spring, as "fly-flower." "In the old Spanish playing-cards," said
+Dona Ina, "the Jack of spades had such a one in his hand, but when I
+was a girl no caballero would have been caught saying, 'Love me, love
+me not!' They left all that to the se�oritas."
+
+There was a Castilian rose growing beside me. Now a Castilian rose
+is not in the least what you expect it to be. It is a thick, cabbagy
+florescence, the petals short and not recurved, the pink hardly deeper
+than that of the common wild rose, the leafage uninteresting. One has
+to remember that it distinguished itself long before the time of the
+tea and garden hybrids, and, I suspect, borrowed half its charm from
+the faces it set off. For there was never but one way in the world for
+a rose to be worn, and that is the way Castilian beauties discovered so
+long ago that centuries have not made any improvement in it. Set just
+behind the ear and discreetly veiled by the mantilla, it suggests the
+effulgent charm of Spain, tempered by mystery. The Se�ora Echivarra had
+followed my glance, and nodded acquiescence to my thought. "In dressing
+for a _baile_, one would have as soon left off the rose as one's fan.
+One wore it even when the dress was wreathed with other flowers."
+
+"And did you, then, go wreathed in flowers?"
+
+"Assuredly; from the garden if we had them, or from the field.
+I remember once I was all blue larkspurs, here and here ..." she
+illustrated on her person, "and long flat festoons of the _yerba buena_
+holding them together."
+
+"It would have taken hoop skirts for that?" I opined.
+
+"That also. It was the time that the waltz had been learned from the
+officers of the American ships, and we were quite wild about it. The
+good Padre had threatened to excommunicate us all if we danced it
+... but we danced ... we danced...." Dona Ina's pretty feet twitched
+reminiscently. The conversation wandered a long time in the past before
+it came back to the patio lying so still, divided from the street by
+the high wall, the clouding fig, and the gnarly pear tree. Beyond the
+artichokes a low partition wall shut off the vegetable plot; strings
+of chili reddened against it. There was not a blade of grass in
+sight, only the flat, black adobe paths worn smooth by generations of
+treading, house and enclosing walls all of one earth.
+
+"But if so much came into the garden from the field, Se�ora, did
+nothing ever go out?"
+
+Ah, yes, yes--the land is gracious; there was mustard of course, and
+pepper grass and horehound, blessed herb, which spread all over the
+west with healing. The pimpernel, too, crept out of the enclosing
+wall, and the tree mallow which came from the Channel Islands by way
+of the gardens and has become a common hedge plant on the sandy lands
+about the bay of San Francisco. Along streams which ran down from
+the unfenced gardens of the _Americanos_, callas had domesticated
+themselves and lifted their pure white spathes serenely amid a tangle
+of mint and wild blackberries and painted cup. The almond, the rude
+stock on which the tender sorts were grafted, if allowed to bear
+its worthless bitter nuts would take to hillsides naturally. It is
+not, after all, walls which hold gardens but water. This is all that
+constrains the commingling of wild and cultivated species; they care
+little for man, their benefactor. Give them water, said Dona Ina,
+and they come to your door like a fed dog, or if you like the figure
+better, like grateful children. They repay you with sweetness and
+healing.
+
+A swift darted among the fig, marigolds, and portulacca of the
+inevitable rock-work which was the pride of the old Spanish gardens.
+Great rockets of tritoma flamed against the wall, on the other side of
+which traffic went unnoted and unsuspecting.
+
+"But we, Dona Ina, we Americans, when we make a garden, make it in the
+sight of all so that all may have pleasure in it."
+
+"Eh, the _Americanos_ ..." she shrugged; she moved to give a drink
+to the spotted musk, flowering in a chipped saucer; the subject did
+not interest her; her thought, like her flowers, had grown up in an
+enclosure.
+
+
+
+
+ [Illustration: THE GOLDEN GATE AND BLACK POINT, FROM HYDE STREET, SAN
+  FRANCISCO. (SITE OF THE PANAMA EXPOSITION, 1915)]
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE LAND OF THE LITTLE DUCK
+
+
+Where the twin rivers set back the tides from the bay, the Land of the
+Little Duck begins. The tides come head-on past the Golden Gate and the
+river answers to their tremendous compulsion far inland, past the point
+where the Sacramento and San Joaquin flow together. On the lee side
+of the headland which makes the southern pilaster of the Gate, sits
+San Francisco, making of the name she borrowed from the bay a new and
+distinguished thing, as some women do with their husbands' titles. A
+better location for a city is Carquinez Strait; the Mexican comandante
+resident at Sonoma would have had it there, bearing the name of his
+wife, Francesca. Said he to the newly arrived American authorities,
+"Do so, and I will furnish you the finest site in the world, with State
+house and Residence complete." But it appears the land has chosen its
+own name.
+
+All the years after the Pope had divided the New World between Spain
+and the Portuguese, the harbour lay hidden. Cabrillo, Drake, Maldonado,
+Juan de Fuca, Viscaino passed it in the night or veiled in obscuring
+fogs. And then Saint Francis showed it clear and lovely to Don Gaspar
+Portola, having for that revelation led him with holden eyes past his
+journey's objective. Likewise, when the time was ripe, he put it into
+the mind of the Yankee alcalde at Yerba Buena, a trading-post in the
+neighbourhood of Mission Dolores, that if the hamlet should be called
+San Francisco it might catch by implication the vessels clearing all
+ports of the world for San Francisco bay.
+
+O Chance, Chance! says the historian and turns another page. But it
+is my opinion that among the birds to which Saint Francis preached was
+included the Little Duck.
+
+The piers of the city front east, they face the Berkeley Hills,
+the Oaklands, the lands of the Sycamore, or, as the first settlers
+named them, the Alamedas. From thence vast settlements take their
+name, feeding the city as sea-birds do, from their own breasts.
+Back and forth between them the shuttling ferries weave thin webs of
+glistening wakes, duck-bodied tugs chugg and scuttle, busy still at
+world-building. From the promontory which makes the northern barrier of
+the Gate, Tamalpias swims out of atmospheric blueness. On its seaward
+slope, hardly out of reach of the siren's bellowing note, Muir Park
+preserves the ancient forest, rooted in the litter of a thousand years.
+And round about the foot of city and mountain the waters of the bay
+are blue, the hills are bluer. The hills melt down to greenness in the
+spring, the water runs to liquid emerald, flashing amber; the hills are
+tawny after rains, the waters tone to the turbid, clayey river-floods;
+land and sea they pursue one another as lovers through changing moods
+of colour; they have mists for mystery between revealing suns. Unless
+these things count for something, San Francisco is the very worst
+site in the world for a city. You take your heart in your mouth every
+time you go out to afternoon tea in the tram-cars that dip and swing
+like cockles at sea. They cut across streets so steep that grass grows
+between the cobbles where no traffic ever passes, to plunge down lanes
+of dwellings perched precariously as sea-birds' nests on the bare bones
+of hills that for true hilliness shame Rome's imperial seven. The bay
+side of the peninsula is mud, the Pacific side is sand. There great
+wasteful dunes blow up, they shift and pile, they take the contours of
+the wind-lashed waters--the very worst site in the world for a great
+city's pleasure-ground, and yet somehow it is there.
+
+For this city is one of those which have souls; it is a spirit sitting
+on a height, taking to itself form and the offices of civilisation.
+This is a thing that we know, because we have seen the land shake it
+as a terrier shakes a rat, until the form of the city was broken; it
+dissolved in smoke and flame. And then as a polyp of the sea draws out
+of the fluent water form and perpetuity for itself, we saw our city
+draw back its shapes of wood and stone, and statelier, more befitting
+a spirit that has endured so much. Nobody knows really what a city is
+except that it is something more than a collocation of houses. From
+Telegraph Hill, where the old semaphore stood, which signalled the
+far-between arrivals of ships around the Horn, you can see the trade
+of the world pass and repass the pillars of the Gate, the wall-sided
+warships. But none of these things really explain how San Francisco
+came to be clinging there to the leeward of a windy spit of land, like
+a great, grey sea-bird with palpitating wings.
+
+  [Illustration: TAMALPIAS]
+
+True to her situation, San Francisco is nothing if not dramatic. One
+recalls that the earliest foundation was dedicated to Our Lady of
+Dolors, _Nuestro Se�ora de Dolores_; the Indians fought here as they
+did nowhere else against Christian dominion. There were more burials
+than baptisms, and in the old cemetery of Yerba Buena the dead were
+so abandoned of all grace that the sand refused to hold them. One who
+spent his boyhood in the shifting purlieus of the old Laguna told me
+how in the hollows where the scrub oaks shrugged off the wind and the
+sand waved like water, the nameless coffins were covered and uncovered
+between a night and day. But if the dead could not hold their tenancy,
+the living succeeded. They did it by the very force of that dramatic
+instinct awakened by the plot and counterplot of natural forces.
+
+No Greek tragedy moved to more relentless measures than the moral
+upheaval of '56, when the whole city, in solemn funeral train behind
+the victim of one of those wild outbursts of lawlessness peculiar to
+the "gold rush," saw the lifeless bodies of the perpetrators hanging
+from the upper windows of the Vigilance Committee. Fifty years later
+came a wilder rout, down streets searched out by fire, snatching
+at humour as they ran, as so many points of contact for the city's
+rebuilding.
+
+The very worst location in the world, as I have remarked, is this windy
+promontory past which the grey tides race, but so long as a city can
+dramatise itself, one situation will do as well as another in which to
+render itself immortal.
+
+The bay of San Francisco with its contingencies is one of the most
+interesting of inland yachting waters, full of adventurous weather. It
+is possible to sail in one general direction from Alviso to the city of
+Sacramento, a hundred and fifty miles, and that without attempting the
+thousand miles of estuary and slough through which the waters slink and
+wind.
+
+At this season of the year the river is pushed backward by the tide a
+matter of ten miles or more above Sacramento City: on the San Joaquin
+it is felt as far as Crow's Landing. At Antioch it begins to be
+saltish, and down through Suisun and Carquinez the river-water fights
+its way as far as San Pablo before its identity is wholly lost. At
+flood-times it may be traced, a yellowish, turgid streak, as far as
+Alcatraz. This is the islet of the albatross which lies south of the
+tide race, as Tiburon is on the north, fragments all of them of that
+salt-rimed ledge outside the gate where hoarse sea-lions play, and
+brother to the castellated cloud far along on the sea's horizon, the
+very capital of the kingdom of the Little Duck.
+
+  [Illustration: MILL VALLEY, AND BACKWATER OF SAN FRANCISCO BAY]
+
+The Faralone Light is the last dropped astern by the Island steamships
+sagging south to the equator; it is also the sea-birds' city of
+refuge. This is the great murre rookery of the west coast, and formerly
+thousands of dozens of eggs were regularly taken from the Faralones
+to the San Francisco market; but since the islands became a Government
+station the murres have no enemy but the pirates of the air. In clefts
+and ledges close against the wall-sided cliffs they defend their
+shallow nests against the sheering gulls, or, hard beset, will push
+their single, new-hatched nestling into the friendlier sea, darting to
+break its fall with incredible swiftness, for a swimming gait is one
+of the things that come out of the shell with the native-born at the
+Faralones. On the same shelving rocks puffins rear their ratty young in
+burrows or under sheltering boulders, and the ashy petrel, the "little
+Peter" of the sea, walking by night before the storm, comes ashore here
+to hide his seldom nest. On the south Faralone the fierce cormorant
+builds her house of painted weed, which often the gulls steal from her
+as fast as she brings it ashore, for the gulls are the grafters of the
+sea-birds' city. This particular variety, known as the western gull,
+neither fishes for himself nor forages for building material. He feeds
+on the eggs and nestlings of his neighbours, or waits to snatch the
+day's catch from the beak that brought it up from the sea. He has the
+virtue of all predatory classes, an exemplary domesticity. His nest is
+soft and clean, his nestlings handsome. The western gull is often found
+marauding far up the estuary of Sacramento, but it is his congener,
+the herring gull, who follows the long white wake the ferries make
+ploughing the windy bay; or, distinguished among the silent shore birds
+for multitude and clamour, scavenges its reedy borders.
+
+Except for the promontories north and south, and the bold front of the
+Berkeley Hills opposing the Gate, the inland borders of the bay are
+flat tide-lands and sea-smelling lagunas. Stilts, avocets, herons,
+all the waders that haunt this coast or visit it in their seasonal
+flights, may be seen stalking the shallows for minnows, or where the
+marsh grass reddens, poised like some strange tide-land blossom, lifted
+on two slender stems. Low over them any clear day may be seen the grey
+old marsh hawk sailing, or the "duck hawk," the peregrine of falconry,
+following fiercely in the wake of the migrating hordes of water-fowl.
+All about Alviso the guttural cry of the black-crowned night-heron
+sounds eerily above the marshes, along with the peculiar "pumping"
+love-song of the bittern.
+
+For some reason the air of the marshes is friendly to the mistletoe
+infesting the oaks and sycamores which stand back from the tide-line;
+but the marshes themselves are treeless. They have their own sorts
+of growth, cane and cat-tails and tule, goosefoot, samphire, and the
+tasselled sedges. This samphire of Shakespeare, _l'herbe de Saint
+Pierre_ of the Normandy Marshes, is the glory of the Franciscan
+tide-lands; miles of it, barely above the level of the slow-moving
+water, spread a magic carpet of blending crimsons, purples, and
+bronzes. Under the creeping mists and subject to the changes of the
+water, beaten to gold and copper under the sun, it redeems the flat
+lines of the landscape with a touch of Oriental splendour.
+
+For it is a flat kingdom, that of the Little Duck--the hills hanging
+remotely on the horizon, the few trees and scattered hugging the low
+shore of the sloughs as the shipwrecked cling to their rafts, desperate
+of rescue. The rich web of the samphire, the shifting colour of the
+water, faintly reminiscent of Venice, borrow another foreign touch
+from the names under which the borders recommended themselves to
+attention:--Sausalito, "little willows," Tiburon, Corta Madero, San
+Quentin, San Raphael. Approached from the water, these names, with
+the exception of San Quentin, do no more than stir the imagination.
+San Quentin, on one of those courtesy islands newly rescued from the
+primordial mud, shows itself uncompromisingly for what it is, one of
+those places for the sequestration of public offenders, which is itself
+such an offence to our common humanity--to say nothing of our common
+sense. Free tides, free sails go by, and long, untrammelled lines of
+birds; south above the blue bay and bluer shore, the ethereal blue
+dome of Diablo lifts into the free air. Across the upper end of San
+Pablo Bay, which is really the north arm of the bay of San Francisco
+extending inland, Mare Island lies so low on the water that if it had
+not been made a naval reserve station it is difficult to know to what
+other use it could be put. One expects to have the land dip and swing
+from under like the ship's deck. It is in line with the guns which lie
+beside the Gate like watchful, muzzle-pointed dogs, and commands the
+whole upper bay and the opposing bluffs of Contra Costa in a manner
+highly commendable to those curious persons whose chief excitement
+lies in anticipating an Asiatic invasion. Nevertheless, along with
+the bastions of San Quentin it strikes, somehow, the note of human
+distrust amid all this charm of light and line and elusive colour,
+as if suddenly one should discover the tip of a barbed tail under the
+skirt of some seductive stranger.
+
+Between San Quentin and the Straits, all about the curve of the bay,
+winding, wide-mouthed sloughs give access to a land as fertile as
+Egypt. A slough is a mere wallow of unprofitable waters, waters unused
+by men and still reluctant of the sea. Pushed aside by the compelling
+tides, too undisciplined to make proper banks for themselves, they are
+neglected by all but a few fringing willows and shapeless sycamores in
+which the herons nest.
+
+Often at evening the white-faced ibis can be seen flying in long,
+voiceless lines, just clearing the twilight-tinted water, to their
+accustomed night perches in the wind-beaten willows. They return there,
+if undisturbed, year after year, accompanied in few and far-between
+seasons by the egret and the snowy heron, grown man-shy, or if they
+but knew the purpose for which their nuptial plumage is sacrificed,
+woman-shy, and seldom seen even by the most wishful eyes.
+
+At Napa a few bull-headed oaks come down almost to the tide-line, and
+in Sonoma a clump of alien blue gums huddles aloof and unregarded,
+but from the water little is visible beside the stilted cabins of some
+gun club or the ramshackle resorts of the flat-nosed, slow craft that
+wind on mysterious errands between the sunken lands. Whole families
+of half-amphibious humans appear to live comfortably on these drifting
+scows, but one never by any chance catches them doing any distinctive
+thing.
+
+The waters of the sloughs come down from the little inland valleys,
+where summer nests and broods in a blue haze along the redwood-serried
+hills. Whether it is white with cherry bloom at Napa, or purple with
+winy clusters at Sonoma, there is always something interesting going
+on there of the large process by which granite mountains are made food
+for man. It is worth a visit if only to learn that a country which does
+that sort of thing supremely well, finds it also worth while to do it
+beautifully. Yachting off San Rafael, it is possible to catch at times
+the scent of roses on an off-shore wind above the salt smell of the
+marshes.
+
+The last rip of the tide is through the Straits of Carquinez into the
+back-water of Suisun. From here on, it is a rhythmic heaving to and fro
+as of well-matched wrestlers, the river-water is set back to Crow's
+Landing on the San Joaquin, and miles above Sacramento it returns
+again past Antioch and the Suisun islands. It is lost in a wilderness
+of tules, through which the sluggish currents blindly wind. Here we
+have nothing to do with men, our business is all with the tribe of the
+Little Duck: mallard, teal, tern, coot, heron, eared grebe, and awkward
+loon.
+
+The tule is a round leafless reed. It springs up along the tide-lands
+or in the stagnant back-water of the rivers, or by any least dribble
+of a desert spring. No condition daunts it but absolute dearth of
+water; far-called, it travels on the wind over mountain ranges, over
+great wastes of waterless plain to find the one absolute condition, a
+pool--white rimmed with alkali or poisonous green with arsenic. I have
+seen it flourish by springs so charged with mineral that each slender
+column is ringed with its stony deposit, but I do not recall any
+standing water where tules are not. The stems are filled with papery
+pith so light that the Indians of the San Joaquin made boats of bundles
+of them, faggoted together and tied upon a wooden frame.
+
+Year by year the tules reclaim the muddy confluence of the twin rivers.
+They make an annual growth, die palely, and are beaten down by the
+wind; between their matted stems the young green comes up again. In the
+Land of the Little Duck, miles upon miles of them, and not one other
+thing, stand up on either side the winding water-lanes, man-high and
+impenetrable.
+
+The Tulare--the place of the tule--is the haunt not only of water-birds
+but innumerable insect-catchers, and especially of the red-winged
+blackbirds. In the spring these betake themselves to the reed-fringed
+marshes in hundreds, building their nests in such neighbourly proximity
+that the young can hop from rim to rim of the tight-slung, grassy
+hammocks. Great clouds of the young birds can be seen, just before
+mating and after nesting in the fall, rising from the low islands
+of the river-junction. In the season also the male yellow-headed
+blackbird may be heard singing his sweet but noisy cheering-song to
+his sombre mate as she weaves marsh grass and wet pond-weed together
+as a foundation for her home, always prudently completed some weeks in
+advance of any need of it.
+
+  [Illustration: WAITING FOR DUCK--LOS BA�OS]
+
+Where the tules thin out along the moving currents, numerous woven
+balls of marsh vegetation hang like some strange fruit safely above the
+summer rise of the waters. These are the nests of the tule wren, built
+by the industrious male, with who knows what excess of parental care
+or what intention to deceive. All the while he is at work upon them,
+in one, the least conspicuous and apparently the least skilfully built,
+the mother bird nurses the brown nestlings with which, suddenly at the
+end of July, all the whispering galleries of the tulares are alive.
+
+One who has the courage to penetrate deeper within the tulares, past
+the crazy wooden landings of nameless ports at which the flat scows
+put in, past the broken willows where the herons nest and the weedy
+back-waters lie all smoothly green with the deceptive duck-weed, will
+see many wished-for sights. Just before dawn and after nightfall the
+inner marshes are vocal with the varied cries of coot and mallard
+and the complaining skirl of the mud-hen, the whistling redwing,
+the bittern booming from his dingy pool, and all the windy beat of
+wings. But by day a stillness falls through which the clicking whisper
+of the reeds and the croon of the great rivers cradling to the sea
+reaches the sense almost with sound. The air is all alive with the
+metallic glint of dragon-flies; now and then the plop of some shining
+turtle dropping into the smooth lagoon, or the frightened splash of a
+marsh-nesting bird, flecks the silence with a flash of sound. Here one
+might see all the duck kind leading forth their young broods, or the
+eared grebe swimming with her day-old nestlings on her back. If the
+day is dark--black clouds with lightnings playing under--one may hear
+the voice of the loon sliding through his sonorous scale to shaking,
+witless laughter. Or perhaps the day's sight might be a flock of
+pelicans on their way to their nesting-ground in Buena Vista, breasting
+the shallows, and with beating wings driving a school of minnows into
+some tiny inlet where they may be scooped up in the pouched bills, a
+dozen to a mouthful. Better still, some morning mist might rise for
+you suddenly on a strip of sandy shore the cranes had chosen for their
+wild dances, from which the stately measures of the Greek are said to
+be derived. Against the yellow sand, as on the background of a vase,
+the dipping figures and white outstretched wing draperies make the
+connection clear to you for the moment, along with some other things
+long overlaid in the racial memory.
+
+Always at evening in the tulares the air is winnowed by the clanging
+hordes of geese and ducks. Triangular flights of teal wing by you,
+whizzing like bullets, hazy with speed. Beach-nesting birds, paddlers
+in the foodful creeks, go seaward. Now and then some winged frigate of
+the open sea, an albatross perhaps blown inland on a storm, will climb
+the air to the sea-going wind. Low on the twilight-coloured waters the
+tule fog creeps in.
+
+You emerge properly from the vast intricacies of the tulares--if you
+emerge at all, and are not completely mazed and lost in them--at
+Sacramento, a city but barely rescued from the marsh, and still
+marsh-coloured with the damp-loving lichens. _La Dame aux Camelias_, to
+the eye, rich in that exotic blossom as no city in the world, but with
+a past, oh, unmistakably, and a touch of hectic disorder. The Russians
+possessed her, and then the breed of Jack Hamlin, and then--but it
+is unfair to list the lovers of a lady of so much charm and such
+indubitable capacity for reformation. Sacramento is the State capital,
+the geographical pivot of the great twin valleys; she divides with
+Stockton on the San Joaquin the tribute of their waters. It was here
+on her banks that the overland emigrant trains sat down to wait for
+the subsidence of waters in the new world of the West, from here they
+scattered to all its hopeful quarters.
+
+If the part the city has played in history has been that of a hostel, a
+distributing station, at least she has played it to some purpose. There
+are few empires richer than the land the twin rivers drain.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE TWIN VALLEYS
+
+
+It is geographical courtesy merely, to treat of intramontane California
+as a valley; it is in reality a vast, rolling plain. Several little
+kingdoms of Europe could be tucked away in it. North and south it has
+no natural line of demarcation other than the rivers meeting for their
+single assault upon the sea, but its diversity deserves the double
+name. They make, the Sacramento rushing from the wooded north and the
+sluggish San Joaquin, one of the most interesting waterways of the
+world. I should say they made, for of the San Joaquin one must be able
+to speak in the past also, to understand it. One must have seen it
+before man had tamed it and taught it, supine as a lioness in the sun.
+
+To arrive at a proper feeling for the continuity of the great central
+plain, it must be approached from the south, by way of the old Tejon
+Pass, up from San Fernando, or down the Tehachapi grade where the
+railroad loops and winds through the confluence of the Coast Range with
+the Sierra Nevada. Here the hills curve graciously about the vast oval
+of the lower San Joaquin. The downthrow of the mountain, stippled with
+sage-brush, gives way to tawny sand glistening here and there with
+white patches of alkali, mottled with dark blocks of irrigated land.
+Its immensity is obscured by the haze of heat.
+
+One is reduced to the figures of the real estate "booster" for terms of
+proportion. That modest checkering of green, hours away to the left,
+is a forty-mile field of alfalfa; beyond it lie the vineyards that in
+less than a quarter of a century relegated Spain to a second place in
+the raisin industry of the world. This is the San Joaquin of to-day
+and to-morrow. The white-tilted vans of the Argonauts saw it as one
+vast, overlapping field of radiant corollas, blue of lupins, phacelias,
+nemophilias, gold of a hundred packed species of composite. Wet years
+it is still possible for the settler in the unirrigated districts to
+wake some morning to blossomy lakes of sky-blueness in the hollows;
+from San Emigdio in the Temblors, I have seen, across the whole width of
+the valley, the smouldering poppy fires along the bluffs of Kern River.
+On the mesa below Tejon the moon-white gilia that the children call
+"evening snow" unfurls its musky-scented drifts mile after mile. But
+the prevailing note of the San Joaquin is tawny russet; gold it will
+be in the season, resplendent as those idols which the Incas overlaid
+yearly with fresh-beaten leaf, and in September the barrancas above
+Bakersfield and Visalia as yellow as brass, but all up and down the
+hill-rimmed hollow is every lion-coloured tint contending still with
+the thin belts of planted orchard.
+
+  [Illustration: MIRROR LAKE, YOSEMITE]
+
+Twenty-five years of cultivation have served to shift the lines of
+greenness but not greatly to modify the desert key. Once it was all
+massed in the tulares which fringed the series of lakes and connecting
+sloughs, continuing northward from the lowest point of the San Joaquin.
+Kern, Kings, Kaweah, Tule, Merced, and Tuolumne, mighty rivers, and a
+hundred lesser singing streams fed it. Elk by thousands ramped in its
+reedy borders. It was a haven of nesting water-birds. Whole islands
+were populated by pelicans, repairing there annually for the strange,
+sidling wing-dances that attend their mating. Blue herons nested in
+the tulares; they could be seen trailing their long dangly legs for
+hours above the shallows. Indians paddled in their frail balsas, built
+of papery, dry reeds, down intricate water-lanes in which white men
+venturing, lost themselves and were mazed to madness. Malaria of a
+surpassing virulence rode up and down that country on the "tule fogs."
+Even yet it is the dread of the cities of the plain to find themselves
+beleaguered by the thick, ghost-white mists that at long intervals roll
+along the ground, retaking the ancient marshes.
+
+Into this potential opulence the cattleman precipitated himself.
+He bought--it is more exact to say he acquired--vast acreage of
+Spanish grants; along the rim of the Coast Ranges, territory equal to
+principalities was given over to long-horned, lean herds. All about the
+old beach-line of the San Joaquin may still be seen the remnant of the
+cattle ranches, low formless houses with purlieus of pomegranate and
+pampas grass and black figs, and the high, stockaded, acrid-smelling
+corrals, to mark the receding waves of the cattle industry. On the
+Sierra side the guttered mesas, the hoof-worn foothills advertise
+the devastation of the wandering flocks. Early in the 'sixties these
+appeared, little, long-armed French and Basques, with hungry hordes
+of sheep at their heels, pasturing on the public lands. They ate into
+the roots of the lush grass and left the quick rains to cut the soil.
+The wool in the hand was always worth the next season's feed to the
+sheep-herder.
+
+  [Illustration: AMONG THE REDWOODS OF THE GREAT TWIN VALLEYS]
+
+Never was a land so planned for the uses of man, its shielding
+mountains, its deep alluvial terraces sloping gently to the sun. Men
+read it in the hieroglyphic the glistening waters spelled between the
+dark patches of the tulares, but it took some experimenting to read the
+message aright.
+
+After the cattle and the flocks came the wheat. Up from the meeting
+waters the land billowed with grain. Owners buckled the ploughs
+together and drove them with engines by tens and twenties across the
+thousand-acre fields. But men and engines, they were alike driven
+by the drouth. In wet years the wheat rancher rode to view his
+shoulder-high harvest, but when the rains, going high and wide over
+the valley to break along the saw-teeth of the Sierras, left the wheat
+unwatered, the same thing happened to the crops that had happened to
+the cattle and the sheep. And at last, amid the rotting carcases and
+the shrivelled acres, the message came clear--not the land, but the
+water. So they shut up the rivers in the ca�ons and the day of the
+orchardist began.
+
+Geographically it begins at Bakersfield, below the gap where the Kern
+comes down from the giant sequoias and is constrained to the wide,
+willow-planted canals, governed by head-gates and weirs. Such waters as
+find again their ancient levels, do so by way of the loose sandy soil
+through which they are filtered in vineyard and orchard. The tulares
+have been turned under; the elk are strictly preserved in the hope
+that enough of them will breed to serve the purposes of curiosity.
+The antelope bands that once flashed their white rumps from bench
+to bench of the tawny mesas were reduced, the last time I saw them,
+to a scant half-score roving the Tejon under the watchful eye of the
+superintendent. But with all this change, nowhere as at this diminished
+end, does one gather such an impression of the variety, the imperial
+extent of the San Joaquin. For at Bakersfield is one of the world's
+largest petroleum fields. The gaunt derricks rear along the unwatered
+hills like half-formed prehistoric creatures come up out of the ground
+to see what men are about. Reservoirs, fed with the stinking juices
+of a time decayed, squat along the barrancas, considering with a slow
+leech-like intelligence the tank cars in the form of a Gargantuan
+joint-worm of the same period that produced the derricks, as they clank
+between the oil-fields and the town. One of the largest oil-fields in
+the world--and yet the turn of the road drops it out of sight in the
+valley's immensity!
+
+Bakersfield is a heaven of roses. Doubtless there are other things by
+which the inhabitants would be glad to have it remembered, but this is
+the item that the traveller in the season carries away with him. Roses
+do not die there, they fall apart of their own sweetness, wafts of
+which envelop the town for miles out on the highway. After nightfall,
+when each particular attar distils upon the quiescent air, the
+townspeople walk abroad in the streets and the moon comes up full-orbed
+across the Temblors at about the level of the clock-tower. Overhead
+and beyond it the sky retains a deep velvety blueness until long past
+midnight. Traces of colour can be seen sometimes in the zenith when the
+glimmer along the knife-edge of the Sierras announces the dawn.
+
+North of Bakersfield, as the valley widens, the Coast Range fades
+to a mere shadow mountain, the peaks of Kaweah stand out above the
+banded haze, angel-white like the ranked Host. As the road swings in
+to the Sierra outposts, broad-headed oaks begin to appear; it skirts
+the foot of the great Sierra fault close enough for the landscape to
+borrow something from the dark, impending pines. But for the most part
+what the observer has to consider is soil and water and the miraculous
+product of these two. One must learn to think of the land in terms of
+human achievement.
+
+  [Illustration: CLEAR LAKE, LAKE COUNTY]
+
+North from the delta of Kern River lies a hundred miles of country
+scarcely disputed with the flocks, far-called and few, which still
+at the set time of the year forgather in green swales behind the
+town for the annual shearing, for the herders to play hand-ball at
+Noriegas', to grow riotously claret drunk and render an evanescent
+foreign touch to the brisk modern community. And every foot of that
+hundred miles is rife with the seeds of life, awaiting the touch of
+the impregnating water. One holds to that conviction as to a friendly
+assuring hand. In the presence of that vast plain, palpitating with
+the heat, the sluggish, untamed water lolling in the midst of it, the
+white-fanged Sierra combing the cloudless blue, beauty becomes a poor
+word: appreciation is shipwrecked and cast away. With relief one hails
+the beginning of a stripe, dark green like a scarf, scalloping the
+foothills--the citrus belt. From Portersville, Lindsay, Exeter it runs
+north past the meeting of the waters into the valley of the Sacramento,
+and for quality and early fruiting sets the figure of the world market.
+As if its waters had some special virtue, wherever a river is poured
+out upon the plain some particular crop is favoured. About Fresno
+it is raisins, at Madera port wine, sherry, and mild muscatel. The
+Merced, which takes its rise in the valley of Yosemite, is partial to
+melons and figs. But everywhere are prunes, peaches, apricots, almonds,
+sugar-beets, alfalfa, unmeasurable acreage of barley, beans, and
+asparagus. Anything is impressive if the scale be large enough, even a
+field of onions. Here the league-long rows are as terrible as an army.
+
+Up and down this empire belt proceed two great companies, the hordes
+of "fruit-hands" and the army of the bees, following its successive
+waves of fruit and bloom. Gangs of pruners, pickers, and packers
+are shifted and shunted as the crop demands. Interesting economic
+experiments transact themselves under the worried producer's eye; alien
+race contending with alien race. The jarring interests of men have by
+no means worked out the absolute solution, but the bees have long ago
+settled their business. They kill the drones and gather the honey for
+the gods who kindly provide them with hives--the more fortunate perhaps
+in knowing what their particular gods require.
+
+Wherever along the belt the rivers fail, the pumps take up the work;
+strenuous little Davids contending against the Goliaths of drouth. They
+can be heard chugging away like the active pulse of the vineyards,
+completing the ribbon of greenness that spans from ridge to ridge of
+the down-plunging hills.
+
+And then one must take account of the cities of the plain! Twenty-five
+years ago they fringed the Sierra base, mere feeders to the mines, the
+cattle ranches, the sheep country. They had the manners of the frontier
+and the decaying, tawdry vices that filtered down from San Francisco,
+sluiced out by intermittent spasms of reform. They were "wide open."
+Hairy little herders with jabbering tongues knifed one another in the
+shearing season, vaqueros "shot up the town" occasionally; it is still
+within memory that prominent citizen "packed a gun" for prominent
+citizen. Twenty years ago the last, most southerly, of the chain of
+settlements was a very cesspool of the iniquities driven to a last
+stand by the influx of home-seekers. I who went through the years of
+change with it could tell tales if I would--but, thank Heaven, nobody
+would believe them! Now in those old places of unsavoury renown rise
+handsome "business blocks," the true mark of cities. Homes heaped
+with roses spread on either side of miles of palm-fringed boulevard.
+Over it all flows the clear, inspiring current of Sierra-cooled air,
+sliding down from the ranked peaks that, whitened from flank to flank
+by perpetual snows, hover like phalanxes of protecting wings.
+
+  [Illustration: CASTLE CRAG, RATTLESNAKE CA�ON]
+
+Into the very thick of the cities drop down from the high Sierras
+trails to all its places of delight, the sequoia groves, King's River
+ca�on, and all the lordly peaks about Mt. Whitney and Yosemite; and
+setting hillward from San Francisco the old Stockton-Sonora road
+along which surged the undisciplined rout of the gold-seekers of
+'forty-nine. It leads, this earliest of valley highways, across the
+basin of the Stanislaus, past places made famous by the red-shirted,
+lusty miners, the sleek-coated gamblers of Bret Harte. It passes the
+twenty-eight Mile House where Jack Hamlin ran a poker game, and many a
+scene rendered memorable by the gay ladies of Poker Flat. It reaches,
+by way of a deep-rutted, ancient track, choked with the characteristic
+red dust of the country, Table Mountain, the home of Truthful James.
+Table Mountain, having consideration for the near-by Sierras, is a hill
+merely, with a flat deposit of _malpais_, the "black rock" of regions
+far north and east. Beyond Sonora lie the old placer "diggings," every
+foot of which has been combed and sifted for gold. The bones of the
+earth are laid bare; all the masking clay, tossed and tumbled, clogged
+with rusty pipes and decaying sluices, lies in heaps and depressions
+where the gold-seekers cast it. The sense of violation is heightened by
+the hue of the soil, redder than the hills of Devon, redder than a red
+heifer--but the river furnishes the more descriptive figure, the martyr
+hue of the Sacrament. In the flood season it carries the tint of its
+ensanguined clays far down into the bay's blueness.
+
+The remnant of that riotous life,--the abandoned cabins, the towns
+falling into dissolution,--like the remaining specimens of the fir and
+redwood forests cut off to timber the Mother Lode, is left standing by
+unfitness. The best of it is a little nugget of remembrance of Francis
+Bret Harte and Mark Twain.
+
+  [Illustration: McCLOUD RIVER, UPPER SACRAMENTO VALLEY]
+
+It was at Angels in the foothills of Calaveras that Twain, to his
+everlasting fame, was so impressed with the performance of the Jumping
+Frog. But life at Angels and all up and down that placer country is
+as heavy with desuetude as the frog was after the bar-keeper had fed
+him with buckshot. As well try to get a draught of that old time as a
+drink at any of the dismantled bars, high, ornate, black walnut affairs
+across which, in dust and nuggets, passed and repassed probably as much
+gold as would serve to buy the orange belt of the San Joaquin--and for
+a figure of magnificence you would find nothing more acceptable to its
+inhabitants.
+
+Much of the history of that country is written in the names. Here the
+soft Spanish locutions give place to harsher, but not less descriptive,
+Americanisms--Jimtown, Jackass Hill, Squaw Creek; the ca�ons become
+"gulches," the mesas "flats." Later both of these were overlaid by
+-villes and -tons, the plain rural names of Anglo-Saxon derivation,
+Coulterville, Farmington, Turlock. They smell of orchards. Prosperity
+is coming back on the surface of the fruitful waters, but the redwood
+forests have not come back. Centuries, nothing less, are required for
+the building of one of these towers of greenness, and it is barely
+forty years since all that district was one roaring blast of mining
+life, rioting, jostling, snatching each from each. In the language
+of the country, the Italian truck gardeners will "beat them to it."
+They have smoothed over the old "slickens" and comforted the land with
+crops.
+
+As one travels north, the bulk of the Sierra lessens, the pines climb
+higher, the oaks march well down into the middle valley to catch the
+wet coast winds, the character of the plantations change, there are
+more grain fields, more neat little farms. Finally the old Overland
+emigrant trail climbs down from Donner Lake and Emigrant Gap, and you
+find yourself deep in the Valley of the Sacramento.
+
+By an air-line from the meeting of the waters, its geographical
+frontier is passed in the neighbourhood of Sonora; perhaps the bridge
+over the Mokelumne is a better indicator, since that river joins the
+San Joaquin at the estuary, but it is not until the Overland road is
+crossed that the character of the country definitely betrays the upper
+valley.
+
+Ascending the river, the works of man are less and less, the forest
+and the mountains more. The rapid rise of the wooded slopes keeps
+the Sacramento troublous. Tributaries, not large but swift and of
+tremendous volume, pour into it. Occasionally from dark ca�ons is
+heard the steady pound of the quartz mill, working some ancient lead,
+or a smelter blocks out a whole forested slope with its poisonous
+exhalations; but for the most part the northern valley is given over to
+brooding quiet, to unending green, and streams as swift as adders.
+
+In Mendocino county, on the coast side, the Range begins to lift
+toward the snow-line; on the Sierra side the alpine crest shears away.
+From time to time the "logging" industry cuts a wide track down the
+redwood forest. One hears above the singing rivers, the clucking of
+the donkey-engine or the rip of a mill still going in the midst of its
+self-created, sawdust desert. The glutting of the lumber region has
+been accomplished as wastefully, as violently, as the search for gold.
+All up the valley tall prophets of the rain have been butchered to
+make a lumberman's fat purse. But, link by link, the forestry bureau
+is closing in the line of the reserves against the lumber "kings," the
+Ahabs of a grasping time.
+
+The hills fall into a certain order, serried rank on rank. Deciduous
+growth of the lower slopes gives way to redwoods and Shasta fir. Miles
+upon miles of them stand so thick that when one dies it does not fall
+but remains erect in the arms of its brothers. Great columnar boles
+rise out of the river-basins, soaring high over what, except for their
+dwarfing proportions, would be a considerable grove of graceful oak
+and bay and glistening, magnolia-leafed, crimson-shafted madro�o.
+Over these the redwoods rise, as over the heads of worshippers the
+clustered columns of Milan seek the dome. High up the tops are caught
+in a froth of pale-green foliage through which the sunlight filters
+blue. This characteristic refraction from their yellowish, inch-long
+needles dwells about the redwood as an aura, and far on the horizon
+distinguishes their ranks from the hill-slopes masked with pines. So,
+blue ridge on ridge, they advance on the imperious height of Shasta.
+
+  [Illustration: DONNER LAKE, ON THE OLD EMIGRANT TRAIL]
+
+Shasta is a brother of Fuji and Tacoma, one of those solitary crater
+peaks whose whiteness is the honourable age of fiery youth, a good
+mountain dead and gone to heaven. Do not go up on it; you will see
+a great deal more of what you have seen, wooded hills on hills and
+perhaps the sapphire belt of the sea, the glitter of lovely, sail-less
+lakes, but you will not understand it any better, for Shasta has no
+more to do with the abutting ranges than a great genius with the stock
+which produced him. This is a prophet among mountains, a vent from
+the burning heart of creation. One is not surprised to learn that the
+Indians hereabout count their descent from the Spirit of Shasta and
+the Grizzly Bear. That dark belt of forest circling the mountain's
+base looks to be the proper haunt for him, the lumbering, little-eyed
+embodiment of brute creation. It is well to think of those two things
+together, the rip of those mighty claws with a ton or two of brute bulk
+behind them, and the awful witness towering to the blue, and suffer the
+soul-satisfying fear that lies in wait for man in the great places of
+the earth. All our modern fears are mean, fears of the common opinion
+and the bill collector. Shasta will have done its best for you if it
+enables you to quake in the very marrow of consciousness.
+
+After this it is well to turn southward along the Coast Range, camping
+by the trout-abounding rivers, losing yourself in the stiff laurels and
+azaleas of Mendocino, fishing at the clear lakes cupped in the hollows.
+If the season is right there will be salmon running in Klamath and
+Trinity rivers or deer in the steep-sided ca�ons. And everywhere there
+will be the redwoods. It is not, however, in the crowds that the tree
+reveals itself. Far down the deforested hills of Sonoma, in isolated
+groves, in small groups or singles on the tops of bossy, brass-coloured
+hills, it takes on character and charm.
+
+A redwood grove is a three-story affair. On the ground floor, turned
+rusty brown, as though the sunlight filtering through had mellowed
+there a thousand years, creep the wild ginger, the rosy-flowered
+oxalis, trilliums, and violets. All these lower rooms are crowded with
+dogwood, with the great berried manzanitas, woodwardias, man-high,
+and glistening bays, silver-tipped with light. By one of those
+strange but charming affinities of wild life, the redwood grove is
+the peculiar haunt of lilies. Every variation of the soil--the peat
+bogs of the coast, the high sandy ridges, the damp meadows--has each
+its appropriate variety; and not merely lilies, but droves of them,
+hundreds of swaying stems, files of them up the line of seeping springs
+or round the bases of great boulders, lilies breast high, lilies
+overhead, ruby-spotted, golden-throated, shining white, dowered with
+the special genius of perfume. Along the chaparral-covered slope and
+deep within the ca�ons one tracks them by the subtle, intoxicating
+scent spreading, as I am persuaded no other perfume does, by a
+conscious distillation on the melting air.
+
+  [Illustration: LAUREL LAKE, UPPER SACRAMENTO]
+
+The second redwood story, that wondrous space of blue-diffusing sun,
+between the deciduous underforest and the fairy web of redwood green,
+is bird and squirrel haunted. Jays flash back and forth, bright
+flickers of the humming-bird go buzzing by. Woodpeckers may be heard
+calling the ever-missing "Jacob, Jacob!" who must in their opinion
+be concealing himself somewhere about the upper story. The wire-drawn
+warble of the brown creeper follows the singer up and down the deeply
+corrugated trunks. Wrens, sparrows, juncos, all manner of little
+feathered folk in whose coats the tones of brown predominate, frequent
+the pillared middle rooms. Once I heard what I thought to be a hermit
+thrush, singing out of the dusk of Muir Wood. But I have not the art
+of knowing birds by note. People who live much in the redwoods find
+them silent; I think it might more easily be that the great trunks
+and green-shot glooms have the same quality of dwarfing sound as size.
+Redwoods, as I know them, are really lighter and more alive than any
+other coniferous forests, but the _effect_ of umbrageous stillness is
+induced by vast proportions.
+
+As for what goes on in the upper rooms, who has been there? What birds
+arise to their three- or four-hundred-foot heights? The few and slight
+boughs, the feathery layers of foliage rounding in age to sloping
+crowns, who knows them but the wind and the snows that neither stir nor
+are stayed by them? There are some matters that the great Twin Valleys
+keep even from the men for whom they have borne an empire.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE HIGH SIERRAS AND THE SAGE-BRUSH COUNTRY
+
+
+The proper vehicle for mountain study is not yet available. A great
+mountain range is like a great public character, there is much more
+to it than is presented to the observation, and it is not open to
+familiarity. But if one could fly high and wide over its cloud-lifting
+summits, one might learn something of its private relations.
+
+From such a vantage it would instantly appear how distinct are the
+Nevadas (_nieve_, snowy) among the Sierras of California. A very
+Bonaparte of mountains, new-born and lording it over the ancient
+ranges, not content with its vast empery but swinging north into the
+unpre-empted icy regions. San Bernardino and San Jacinto are as far
+from it as the Faubourg St. Germain from an island in the sea. Sierra
+Madre is of the Coast Range; Shasta a fire-hole, a revolutionist; the
+true Sierra is the midriff of a continent. From its northern extremity
+one sees the sun in a circle and the Northern Lights; that portion of
+it we know as Sierra Nevada swings into the state above Honey Lake,
+and ends southward in a tumble of blunt peaks below Kern River. This
+is quite enough, however, for Californians to make free with, and more
+than they can appreciate.
+
+Geographically the range begins on the south at Tehachapi, but at
+Walker's Pass, a day's journey to the north, is the first appearance
+of its most salient characteristic, the great Sierra Fault. In its
+youth the range suffered incredible cataclysms. For two hundred
+miles the great eastern plain dropped; weighted as it was with its
+withered aristocracy of hills--how weazened and old you can see to
+this day--it tore sharply downward, and the depth of that fall from
+the heaven-affronting peak of Whitney to the desert valley of Inyo is
+a matter of two miles of sheer descent.
+
+The whole Sierra along the line of faultage has the contour of a
+wave about to break. It swings up in long water-shaped lines from
+the valley of the San Joaquin, and rears its jagged crest above the
+abrupt desert shore. Seen from close under, some of these two- and
+three-thousand-foot precipices have the pitch of toppling waters. As
+they rose new-riven from the earth their proportions must have been
+more than terrifying.
+
+Later the Ice Age bore downward from the north, and through
+immeasurable years carved the fractured granite into shapes of enduring
+beauty. It rounded the great jutting fronts, it insured them against
+the tooth of time with the keen icy polish with which they shine
+still against the morning. It gouged narrow wall-sided ca�ons, cut the
+course of rivers, and sinking like a graver's tool into the heart of
+the range, scooped out deep wells of pleasantness. Afterward, when the
+ice was old, it must have moved more slowly, for the lines it left,
+retreating northward, are more flowing, the hill-crowns rounder. And
+then the mountain was besieged with trees. They stormed it, scaled its
+free precipices; you can see by the thick mould of the valleys what
+ranks and ranks of them went down, and along the snow-line how by the
+persistence of assault they are bent and contorted.
+
+This is the whole effect of the sombre swathes of pine that mask the
+Sierra slopes. They march along the water-courses, they climb up sheer
+precipices in staggering files, trooping in the passes; across the
+smooth meadow spaces they lock arms, they await the word of command.
+By a very little observation they are seen to be ranged in orderly
+companies. Here a warm current of air travelling steadily from the
+superheated valleys carries the life zone higher, there a defiant
+bony ridge drops it a few thousand feet, but the relative arrangement
+of species does not greatly vary. The broad oaks, like reverend
+grandsires, from the foothills see the procession go by, they follow
+as far as the gates of the mountain, crutched and bowed. All the lower
+ca�ons are full of a rabble of deciduous trees, chinquapins, scrub oak,
+madro�o, full of gay camp-followers, lilac, dogwood, azaleas, strumpet
+penstemons, flaunting lupins, monk's-hood, columbine.
+
+  [Illustration: YOSEMITE FALLS]
+
+The grey nut pine, wide-branched, unwarlike but serviceable, opens
+the ranks of conifers. Then the long-leaved pines begin, _ponderoso_,
+_Coulteri_, and the slender, arrowy, fire-resisting _attenuata_. On the
+western slope, increasing as they go northward, the redwood holds all
+the open country, but it is no climber like _monticola_, the largest
+of all true pines, the captain of the Sierra forests. The firs usurp
+the water-borders and the low moraines; clannish, incommunicable, they
+seem not to find it worth while to grow unless they grow stately. Above
+all these range the thin-barked pines, the lodgepole, Douglas spruce,
+librocedrus, and hardy junipers in windy passes. About the meadows and
+lake-borders the quaking asps push like children between the knees
+along the line; and highest, most persistent, the creeping-limbed,
+wind-depressed white-barked pine, under whose matted boughs the wild
+sheep bed.
+
+The trees have each their own voice--a degree of flexibility or length
+of needles upon which the wind harps to produce its characteristic
+note. The traveller in the dark of mountain nights knows his way among
+them as by the street cries of his own city. The creaking of the firs,
+the sough of the long-leaved pines, the whispering whistle of the
+lodgepole pine, the delicate frou-frou of the redwoods in a wind, these
+come out for him in the darkness with the night scent of moth-haunted
+flowers. But there is one tree that for the footer of the mountain
+trails is voiceless; it speaks no doubt, but it speaks only to the
+austere mountain-heads, to the mindful winds and the watching stars.
+It speaks as men speak to one another and are not heard by the little
+ants crawling over their boots. This is the "big tree," the sequoia. In
+something less than a score of forest patches about the rim of the Twin
+Valleys, the sequoia abides, out of some possible preglacial period,
+out of some past of which nothing is left to us but the fading memory
+of the "giants in those days." The age of individual big trees can
+be computed in terms of human history. There are evidences written in
+the rings of these that they endured the drouth which made the famine
+in the days of Ahab the king, against which Elijah prayed. These are
+growing trees whose seeds are fertile.
+
+One might make a very dramatic collocation of the rise and fall of
+empires against the life period of a single sequoia, and that would
+be easier than to transcribe by mere phrases the impression of one
+of these green towers of silence on the sense. Single and deeply
+corrugated as a Corinthian column, with only a lightly-branched crown
+for a capital, they spire for five thousand years or so, and then the
+leaf-crown becomes rounded to a dome in which the winds breed. Warm
+days of Spring, their young nestling zephyrs come fluttering down the
+deep wells of shade to shake the saplings of a hundred years. In Summer
+the fine-leafed foliage catches the sun like spray, diffusing vaporous
+blueness; but the majesty of their gigantic trunks is incommunicable.
+After a while the stifling sense of awe breaks before it, and you go
+on with your small affairs as children will go on playing even in the
+royal presence.
+
+  [Illustration: BLUE LAKE, LAKE COUNTY]
+
+The name _Sequoia_ is one of the few cheering notes among our habitual
+botanical stupidities--an attempt to express quality as it is humanly
+measured in a name. There was once an American Cadmus, Sequoyah, a
+Cherokee who invented an Indian alphabet and taught his tribe to read.
+Seeing them outnumbered in their own territory, he started west with
+the idea of founding a great Indian empire. He was last seen trailing
+north across the desert and was heard of no more. Tradition has it that
+he reached the forest of the upper Kern River and gave the trees his
+name. At least no botanist with his nose in a book has usurped it.
+
+Forests are for cover. They mask not only the naked rock, but the paths
+of deer and bear and bighorn. Under the spire-pointed ranks of conifers
+that look so black from above, verging to blueness, a world of furtive
+folk goes on. A world of birds is in its branches, squirrels nimble
+as sparrows, but scarcely anything of this is visible to the watcher
+on the heights. Rabbits playing on your lawn would be more noticeable
+in proportion than the seldom-seen bighorn leading his light-footed
+young from ledge to rocky ledge. The jealous trees cover the trails and
+obscure the passes.
+
+As you come up through them you observe the flat, soddy spaces of
+old lake basins, green as jewels, and the hanging meadows gay with
+cascades of flowers, the stream tangles, the new-made moraines bright
+with bindweed and sulphur-flower. But from the heights all this lovely
+detail is hidden by the overlapping tents of boughs. Here and there a
+stream leaps forth at the falls like a sword from a green scabbard,
+or higher up, may be traced as the silver wire on which are strung
+unrippled lakes as blue as cobalt. Great chains of such lakes lead down
+from the snow-line to the foothill borders, encroached upon by the
+silent ranks of trees. As they go down they show soddy borders, they
+tend to fill and to grow meadows where presently deep-rooting trees
+assume their stations. This is the strategic rule for the taking of a
+granite mountain. First the grinding ice and the disintegrating water;
+what the streams wash down collects in the glacier-ploughed basins. It
+makes lake borders by which the grass comes in--the small grass that
+is mightier than mountains, that eats them for its food. Lakes at the
+lower levels become meadows, then trees arrive; they overrun the soddy
+ground, the snow-manured moraines. The trees themselves take centuries
+to fruition. At a later stage men dispossess the forest and build
+cities, but this has not yet come to the Sierras. There is something
+indomitable in the will of the trees to spread and climb. In the floor
+of Yosemite and Hetch Hetchy there are hundred-year-old oaks of full
+form and generous growth, and on the slopes above them the same oaks
+and of almost the same age are so dwarfed by drouth and altitude that
+they are not knee-high to a man, but they keep the due proportions of
+their type. A white bark pine will climb where the weight of the winter
+drifts is so heavy that it is never able to lift its decumbent trunk
+from the ground, clinging like ivy to the wall in which it roots.
+
+In the Spring the rich florescence of the conifers sheds pollen in
+drifts that, carried down the melting water, warn the sheep-herder and
+the orchardist a hundred miles away of the advancing season. A pine
+forest in flower is one of the things worth seeing which is most seldom
+seen, for at its best the high passes are still choked by snow, the
+lakes ice-locked, the trails dangerous. And then the blossoms, yellow
+and crimson tassels and rosy spathes, are carried on the leafy crowns
+high over the heads of the most adventurous foresters. What one finds,
+as late as the end of June when the trails are open, is a stain of
+pollen on the lingering snow, and great clouds of it flying wherever a
+bough is brushed by a light wing. In the autumn the whole wood is full
+of the click and glint of the winged seeds. Storms of them, like clouds
+of locusts, are carried past on the wind, to be dropped in the nearest
+clearing or to find a chance lodging in a moss-lined crevice of the
+weathered headlands.
+
+  [Illustration: LAKE TAHOE, THE HIGH SIERRAS]
+
+But from the heights, all feeling for the process of the forest is
+lost in the sense of its irresistible march--it creeps and winds, it
+waits darkly for the word. Above the tree-line no sound ascends but a
+faint vibration, the body of sound making itself felt in the silence.
+On windless days the forest lies black like weed at the bottom of a
+lake of air as clear as a vacuum. When the great wind rivers pour about
+the peaks, it can be seen lashing like weed in the currents, but still
+almost soundlessly--the roar of it passes down the ca�ons, and is heard
+in the cities of the plain. But if the peaks cannot hear what the trees
+are plotting about, it is not so with the voices of the water. These
+are sharper, more definitive; they rise re-echoing from the rocky walls
+and are recognisable each by its distinctive note at incredible heights
+of the sheer, glassy, granite frontlets.
+
+In the glacial valleys, such as Yosemite, Tehipite, and Hetch Hetchy,
+where young rivers drop from the headlands in long streaming falls,
+the noise of them contending with the wind makes mimic thunder. Immense
+curtains of falling water are tossed this way and that, they are caught
+up and suspended in mid-air, and let fall crashing to the lower levels.
+When the wind blows straight up the ca�on they will rear against it,
+and leap out a shining arc, shattering in mid-air like bursting bombs
+of spray. But later in the season, when the streams are heavy with the
+melting snows, the wind itself is shattered by the weight of falling
+water--it exhausts itself in obscuring clouds of silver dust. When from
+Whitney or Williamson or King's Mountain you can see half-a-hundred
+such young rivers roaring to the morning, it is as beautiful and as
+terrifying as the sight of youth to timorous age. They go leaping with
+their shining shields, and their shouting shakes the rocks. Neither
+you nor they believe that the most and the best they will come to is an
+irrigating canal between sober rows of prunes and barley.
+
+Higher than the forests, or the waters rising out of them, is the
+_Py-weack_, the Land of Shining Rocks. They shine with glacier polish;
+horses on the high trails sniff suspiciously at their glittering
+surfaces. Time can lay slight hold on them by thunder, by frost, and
+the little grey moss; it has not yet subdued the front of Oppapago.
+Here between snowless ribs and buttresses are the shrunken glaciers
+that feed the streams, little toy models of the ancient rivers of ice.
+The snowfields of the Sierras are not so inconsiderable as they seem:
+they are dwarfed by the precipices among which they hide. Inaccessible
+to ordinary mountain travel, they make their best showing from the
+surrounding plains, where, lifted in the middle air, they glow with
+ethereal whiteness. Close by they display a bewildering waste of broken
+ice, boulders, and crevasses, made bleaker by the cobalt shadows.
+
+  [Illustration: MOUNT SHASTA--SIERRA GLOW]
+
+North the line of peaks stretches, broken by the passes that give
+access to the west. Between them, above the source of streams, in the
+ice-gouged hollows, lie unfathomable waters that take all their life
+from the sky. Or perhaps they are reservoirs from which the sky is
+made, fluid jade and azulite and hyacinth and chrysoprase, as if the
+skies of many days had run their colours in those bleak bowls. For at
+this altitude the wave contour of the range comes out most sharply; the
+sky is strangely deep and darker, as if through its translucence one
+glimpsed the void of space. One sees the moon and the planets wandering
+there with pale lamps held aloft.
+
+No life of any sort is visible from here. Farther down toward the
+coast, over the forested moraines, the condor may be seen leaning
+against the wind at sunrise. On the edge of the abysmal ca�ons eagles
+make their nests and go dropping down the shadowy depths to seek their
+food from God, but they do not rise to these stark heights. Sometimes
+a clanging horde of water-fowl, beating up from the Gulf of California
+overland to the Canadian marshes, will grow bewildered in the face of
+the great wall-sided cliffs; circling they attempt the forward flight,
+only to circle and rise anew, until, wing-weary in that thin air, they
+sink exhausted to the margin of a mountain lake, satisfied at last to
+thread their way humbly along the creek-beds to open country.
+
+The live forces of the High Sierra are the forces of wind and light.
+One feels the push of tremendous currents flowing between the peaks
+as among rocky islands. Day by day they may be charted by the cloud
+fragments floating on them, by the banners of dry snow dust, streaming
+out like long grass from the island shores. Thundering fleets of cumuli
+drift up the wind rivers and assault the great domes of Whitney and
+Oppapago. The light breaks through all the varying cloud strata, and
+colours them with splendour; the glow of the clouds reflected on the
+snow is caught by the watchful mountain-lover far down the valleys of
+Inyo and San Joaquin. This painted hour of sunset is the apotheosis of
+mountains, but for me it has less of majesty than the morning after
+deep snows. These come usually early in the season. The air for days
+will be full of the formless stir, then the range withdraws itself
+behind a veil which closes from tented peak to peak, and includes
+sometimes the parallel desert ranges which lie along its eastern coast.
+Twenty feet will fall in a single session of the white gods behind the
+veil. Then comes a morning blue and sharp as a spear-thrust. Every tree
+is like an arrow feathered in green and white. Airy bridges built upon
+the bending stems shut in the water-courses; the moraines are smooth
+and soft as the backs of huddled sheep. By night the range shows from
+the valley as a procession of winged figures holding the snows upon
+their bosoms. And that, after all, is the business of mountains. The
+western front of the Sierra Nevada, which receives the full force of
+the Pacific storms, is rewarded with the stateliest forests. Before
+those extended snowy mountain arms lie the great Twin Valleys; behind
+them stretches the illimitable sage-brush country, the backyard of the
+Sierra.
+
+  [Illustration: VALLEY OF THE YOSEMITE]
+
+"Sage-brush country" is one of those local terms that stand for a type
+of landscape as distinctive as the moors of England and the campagna
+of Italy. It means first of all, open country, great space of sky,
+what the inhabitants of it call "eye-reach," treeless except for a few
+cotton-woods and willows along the sink of intermittent streams, and
+stippled with low shrubs of artemesia. This is the true "sage-brush,"
+though it is no sage, the sacred bush of Diana, _Artemisia tridentata_.
+It may grow in favoured districts man-high, but ordinarily not more
+than two or three feet in the arid regions which it haunts. Other
+social shrubs will be found pre-empting miles of the territory to
+which the artemesia gives its name, _coleogeny_, _pursia_, _dalia_,
+"creosote," but none other gives it the distinctive feature, the web of
+pale, silky sage-green against the sun-burned sand.
+
+Other items of the sage-brush landscape are so constant that they
+are immediately suggested by it: mountains hanging on the horizon in
+opalescent haze, low flowing lines of hills overlaid by old lava-flows,
+the "black rock" simulating cloud shadows on the distant ranges, dry
+red cones of ancient volcanic ash, and great flat table-topped "buttes"
+of the painted desert.
+
+White-crested ranges on the one hand and buttes on the other mark the
+limits of the sage; for where snow-caps are, there are trees, and where
+the buttes begin the cactus and the palo verde reign.
+
+A sage-brush country is a cattle country primarily; perhaps there may
+be mines; where there is water to be stored for irrigation there will
+be towns, but the virtue of the sage is that it grows in lands that
+man, at least, has found no other use for.
+
+It can thrive on an allowance of water that will support no larger
+thing than a chipmunk or a lizard, and, growing, feeds the cattle
+on a thousand hills. Therefore it is indispensable to any picture of
+the sage-brush country that there should be herds at large in it and
+vaqueros riding, or far down the bleached valley the dust of a rodeo
+rising. It is impossible to think of such a land and not think of these
+things, free life, and air as clear and vibrant with vitality as a
+bell. I can never think of it myself without seeing, in addition, the
+vultures making a merry-go-round over Panamint, and up from Coso the
+creaking line of a twenty-mule team.
+
+The sage-brush country of California begins properly at the foot of
+the Sierras where the state-line sheers east by south from Lake Tahoe.
+It covers the high valleys that divide the true Sierra from the older,
+lesser ranges that keep it company as far south as Olancha. Below
+Mono Lake, that part of the gold region made immortal by Mark Twain,
+it gives to the chrome- and ochre-tinted soil its distinguishing
+characteristic. From the long arm of Death Valley it begins to be
+encroached upon by the mesquite, and at Indian Wells it is driven close
+under the lee of the last Sierra. The range of which San Bernardino
+and San Jacinto are outposts carries the artemisia farther desertward,
+almost to the Colorado River in fact, and south again about the Salton
+Sea it holds its own with sahuro and palo verde. Its eastern border,
+like that of the wild tribes along the Mojave line, is lost in pure
+desertness. Formerly much of that country from San Bernardino to
+the sea was native to the sage, and all the southern end of the San
+Joaquin. But now all this is replaced with orchards, for the artemisia
+proves nothing so much of the soil on which it grows as that, given a
+due allowance of water, it is as desirable for other things.
+
+  [Illustration: THE HALF DOME, YOSEMITE]
+
+All this country which I have described to you has so recently been sea
+that the mark of its old beach-line is plainly to be traced along the
+east Sierra wall. Still the evaporating water leaves vast deposits of
+salt and alkali, blinking white in the sink of Death Valley. There are
+lakes there still where the salt crusts over hard and clear like ice,
+and deep thick puddles of bitter minerals, the lees of that ancient
+inland ocean. From the top of any of the denuded desert ranges it is
+possible to trace the winding bays and estuaries, and, with an eye for
+location, to choose the points at which one may fairly expect to find
+potsherds, amulets, fire-blackened hearthstones, and the middens of a
+nameless people who built their primitive towns along its beaches. It
+must have had much to recommend it in those days before the sage-brush
+took it, for this inland sea, rather than the more mountainous Pacific
+shore, was the route taken by the ancient migratory peoples who left
+their undecipherable signs scored into the rocks from the Aztec country
+to the Arctic. On isolated igneous rocks near their old encampments,
+and high on the walls of the box canons, such as might have been
+tide-rifts, high above any mechanical contrivance of the present-day
+Indians, the records resist equally the shifts of sea and sand and the
+efforts of modern science to read them.
+
+Whether the ghosts of the departed peoples ever revisit the ancient
+beaches, the ghosts of waters haunt there daily. Morning and
+mid-afternoon the rivers of mirage arise; they well out of the past
+and are poured trembling on the plain; phantom fogs blow across them,
+wraiths of trees grow up and are reflected in false streams. Often
+in very early light there are strange suggestions of----dunes and
+boulders perhaps? Only no boulders in that country are flat-topped like
+the houses built in lands of the sun, and no dunes are wall-sided.
+Mirage, we are told, is but a picture of distant things, mirrored on
+atmospheric planes, but then maybe a ghost is only a mirage deflected
+on our atmosphere from worlds outside our ken, and it is always easy
+in the desert to see things that you cannot possibly believe. Whatever
+they are, mirages are real to the eye. I mean that they are not to
+be winked away nor dissipated by contact. I have watched a vaquero
+ride into one of them and drown to all appearances, or seem to be
+swimming his horse across its billows, all of him below its surface as
+completely hidden as by rivers of water. Moreover, mirages tend always
+to occur under given conditions and in the same places. I recall one
+of the stations on the old Mojave stage road, which, approached from
+the north about an hour after sunrise, would instantly duplicate: two
+houses, two lines of poplars, two high corrals.
+
+  [Illustration: SHASTA--SNOW CLOUDS]
+
+Occasionally along the edge of the sage-brush country one may see that
+surpassing wonder, the moon mirage, poured like quicksilver along the
+narrow valleys, as if the thirsty land had dreamed of water.
+
+It is odd how this suggestion of sea and river clings to a country
+where there is nothing harder to come by than good water to drink.
+For any other purpose it is not to be thought of. After one of those
+terrible wind storms, the only really incommoding desert weather, it is
+possible to find great spaces all rippled and lined in water-markings
+like a sea that has suddenly undergone a magic transformation into
+sand. The contours of the desert ranges are billowy; they rise out
+of the plain like the grey-backed breakers of open sea. The valleys
+between are narrow and trough-like; the shores of them are lined with
+crawling dunes that, under the steady pressure of wind currents, are
+for ever sliding up their own peaks and down the other side, changing
+place without ever once losing the long slope to windward and the
+abrupt landward fall of waves.
+
+Another item which adds to the suggestion of the illimitable spread
+of sage-brush country, like the sea, is the way the sparse forests
+of the mountain-tops appear to be islanded by it. For the sage-brush
+extends on across the Great Basin, it stretches into Montana and
+south to Arizona and New Mexico, it works about the lower end of the
+Rocky Mountains and well into the great central plain. The ranges
+lie thick in it as ocean swells, as I have said, and stepping from
+crest to crest has come the fox-tail pine, _Pinus flexilis_, all the
+way from Humboldt Mountain to San Jacinto. A sinewy, thinly-branched
+species, as straight-backed as an Indian, it has little affinity for
+its noble congeners of the Sierra forests, but keeps to the dry and
+open ridges, nourished by clouds and by infrequent shallow snows. With
+it, but at lower levels to which the _flexilis_ will never come, is
+found frequently the one-leaved pi�on pine, the food-crop of the wild
+tribes. But the pi�on is a pushing sort, it establishes itself upon the
+slightest invitation.
+
+There is a story told in the desert of how this grey, round-headed tree
+was once a very great _capitan_, who, in order that his death might be
+as beneficent to his people as his life had been, was changed into the
+foodful pine. Whether the legend is true or not, certain it is that
+if you sit down by a pi�on, wherever found, and stay long enough, you
+will see Indians. They might come in the Spring looking for _taboose_,
+or later for willows and grasses for basketry, for seeds of sunflower
+and chia, to shoot doves by the water-holes or to hunt chuckwallas. A
+chuckwalla is a lizard, a kind of dragon in miniature, barred black and
+white, and as offensive to look at as he is harmless, in fact very good
+eating and not too plentiful. Mojaves, Shoshones, Paiutes, Pimas, all
+the tribes of the sage-brush country, have this in common, that they
+live very close to the earth; roots, seeds, reptiles, thick pads of
+the cholla cactus, even the grass of the field, serve them. They look,
+indeed, as though they had been made of the earth on the very spot that
+produced them, of the black rock, the brown sand, and the dark water
+that collects in polished basins of the wind-denuded ranges.
+
+Very little rain gets past the heaven-raking crest of the Sierra Nevada
+into the sage-brush country; the most that falls is blown up from the
+Gulf of California along the draw created by the close, parallel desert
+ranges. It is precipitated usually under atmospheric conditions that
+produce violent drops and changes. All that the traveller is likely to
+find of it is in these rock reservoirs under the run-off of some bare
+granite cliff, or in the rare, persistent "water-holes" hollowed out by
+beasts or men, marked in the landscape by one lone tree perhaps, or a
+clump of shrubby willows. Often there will be no mark at all except the
+frequency along the trail of skeleton cattle or wild sheep, pointing
+all in one direction, as they died on their way to the far-between
+drinking-places. There are districts in this back-door country where
+evaporation from the body is so rapid that death overtakes the chance
+prospector even with water in sight or in his canteen across his back.
+For years a notorious outlaw protected himself in the Death Valley
+region, by filling in all the springs in a circle about the territory
+to which he had retreated. Beyond that waterless rim even the law could
+not penetrate.
+
+And yet how the land repays the slightest moisture! Years when the
+Kuro-Siwa swings closer to our coast and the winds are friendly,
+I have seen all that country, from Tehachapi, outside the wall, to
+San Gorgiono, one sheet of blue and gold. Seeds of a hundred tender
+annuals lie in the loose sands for years between the shrubby sage,
+their vitality unimpaired by the delayed resurrection of a chance wet
+spring. Often I have sifted the sand in my fingers looking for a sign
+of the life-giving principle which bursts so suddenly into beauty,
+without finding it. Yet after years in which there is no alteration
+in the aspect of the country, except the insensible change of the sage
+tints from grey to green and grey again, the miracle takes place, the
+blossomy wonder is upon the world.
+
+As a matter of fact, the sage-brush country is by no means the desert
+that it looks to the casual eye. Besides the social shrubs which have
+each their own blossom and seed time, even the driest years will
+afford a few blooms of crimson mallow, and in the shelter of every
+considerable shrub some dwarfed and delicate phacelia or nemophilia.
+Even out of dunes which bury its hundred old trunks to the new season's
+twigs, the mesquite will bear its sweet foodful pods. If you know at
+what hours to look for it, wild life is never absent, but it is not
+ordinarily to be found by white men blundering about in broad noon.
+
+It is only when you meet, in the midst of great open valleys wherein
+there is nothing growing higher than the knees of your horse, and
+nothing moving bigger than the little horned toad under the cactus
+bush, bands of Indians well fed, cushiony with fat of mesquite meal and
+chia, that you understand how little you know of the land in which you
+move.
+
+There is a Paiute proverb to the effect that no man should attempt the
+country east of the Sierras until he has learned to sleep in the shade
+of his arrows. This is a picturesque way of saying that he must be able
+to reduce his wants to the limit of necessity. Those who have been able
+to do so, and have trusted the land to repay them, have discovered that
+the measure is over-full.
+
+A man may not find wealth there, nor too much of food even, but he
+often finds himself, which is much more important.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+_The illustrations are indexed in italics._
+
+
+     Alcatraz, 112
+
+     Alviso, 112
+
+     Angels, 138
+
+     Antioch, 112, 119
+
+     Arbolado, 84
+
+     "Arroya," definition of, 30
+
+
+     Bakersfield, 129, 132, 133
+
+     Berkeley Hills, 108, 114
+
+     _Blue Lake, Lake County_, 155
+
+     Buena Vista, 122
+
+
+     Cabrillo, 49, 108
+
+     Cahuenga, 47, 48, 67
+
+     Calaveras, 139
+
+     Camulas, 41
+
+     _Ca�on in the Sierra Madres_, 49
+
+     Carmel, 74, 77, 80, 83
+
+     Carmel River, 76
+
+     Carmel Valley, 78
+
+     Carquinez, 112
+
+     Carquinez Strait, 107, 119
+
+     _Castle Crag, Rattlesnake Ca�on_, 136
+
+     Castro, 66
+
+     Catalina, 49
+
+     _Cemetery, The, Santa Barbara Mission_, 56
+
+     Cession of California from Mexico, 48
+
+     _Clear Lake, Lake County_, 134
+
+     "Coasts of Adventure, The," 47-60
+
+     Colorado River, 166
+
+     Contra Costa, 117
+
+     Coronado, 23
+
+     Coronel, Don Antonio, 48
+
+     Corta Madero, 116
+
+     Coso, 165
+
+     Coulterville, 139
+
+     _Cypress Point, near Carmel_, 75
+
+
+     Death Valley, 166, 172
+
+     _Donner Lake_, 142
+
+     Donner Lake, 140
+
+     Drake, Sir Francis, 9, 43, 108
+
+
+     Eagle Rock, 47
+
+     Emigrant Gap, 140
+
+     _Eucalyptus Grove, A_, 33
+
+     Exeter, 135
+
+
+     Faralones, The, 113
+
+     Farmington, 139
+
+     Fort Point, 67
+
+     Francis of Assisi, 10, 108
+
+     Franciscan "Frailes," 9, 12
+
+     Fr�mont, 66
+
+     Fresno, 135
+
+     Fuca, Juan de, 108
+
+
+     _Glendale, Valley of the San Gabriel_, 40
+
+     Golden Gate, 107
+
+     _Golden Gate and Black Point_, 107
+
+     Gulf of California, 161, 171
+
+
+     _Half Dome, The, Yosemite_, 166
+
+     Hamlin, Jack, 137
+
+     Harte, Bret, 137, 138
+
+     Hetch Hetchy Valley, 159
+
+     "High Sierras and the Sage-Brush Country, The" 149-174
+
+     H�tel Del Monte, 76
+
+     Humboldt Mountain, 170
+
+
+     Indian Wells, 166
+
+     Inyo Valley, 162
+
+
+     Jackass Hill, 139
+
+     Jimtown, 139
+
+     Jumping Frog, the, 139
+
+
+     Kaweah Mountain, 133
+
+     Kaweah River, 129
+
+     Kern River, 129, 132, 134, 155
+
+     King's Mountain, 159
+
+     King's River, 129
+
+     King's River Ca�on, 137
+
+     Klamath River, 143
+
+     Kuro-Siwa Current, 49, 172
+
+
+     Laboratory Point, 68
+
+     Lake Mono, 165
+
+     Lake Tahoe, 165
+
+     _Lake Tahoe_, 158
+
+     "Land of the Little Duck, The," 107-124
+
+     _Laurel Lake, Upper Sacramento_, 145
+
+     Lindsay, 135
+
+     _Looking down on Monterey and the Bay_, 65
+
+     Lopez, Francisco, 47
+
+     Los Angeles, 29, 35
+
+     Los Angeles River, 30
+
+
+     _McCloud River_, 139
+
+     Madera, 135
+
+     Maldonado, 108
+
+     Mare Island, 116
+
+     Mendocino Country, 141
+
+     Merced River, 129, 135
+
+     _Mill Valley_, 113
+
+     _Mirror Lake, Yosemite_, 129
+
+     Mission Dolores, 108
+
+     Mission Point, 69, 81
+
+     Mission River, 17
+
+     Mission of San Carlos Borromeo, 76, 78
+
+     Mission San Fernando, 47
+
+     Missions, ruins of, 19
+
+     Mokelumne River, 140
+
+     Monterey, 11, 18, 35, 55, 60
+
+     "Monterey, the Port of," 63-84
+
+     Monterey Cypress, 72
+
+     "Mothering Mountains," 27-24
+
+     Mount Oppapago, 160, 162
+
+     Mount Shasta, 5, 143, 150
+
+     _Mount Shasta_, 161
+
+     Mount Whitney, 6, 137, 150, 159, 162
+
+     Mount Williamson, 159
+
+
+     Napa, 118
+
+     Noriega's, 134
+
+
+     Olancha, 165
+
+     "Old Spanish Gardens," 87-103
+
+
+     Pacific Grove, 75
+
+     Padre Jayme Bravo, 7, 17, 18
+
+     Padre Lausan, 66
+
+     Padre Serra (Junipero Serra), 11, 76, 78
+
+     Paiute Indians, 96
+
+     Pajaro, 54, 93
+
+     Pajaro river, 64
+
+     Pala, 19
+
+     "Palatingwas," 20
+
+     Palo Corona, 80
+
+     Panamint, 165
+
+     Pasadena, 34
+
+     Paso Robles, 56
+
+     _Patio, The, Old Spanish Residence_, 88
+
+     _Pescadero, Monterey Bay_, 72
+
+     Pieoras Blancos, 83
+
+     Point Conception, 67
+
+     Point Lobos, 71, 81, 84
+
+     Point of Pines, 67
+
+     Point Pinos, 70, 81
+
+     Point Sur, 70
+
+     Portersville, 135
+
+     Portola, Don Gaspar de, 11, 55, 93, 108
+
+
+     _Redlands_, 16
+
+     _Redwoods_, 131
+
+     "Rio," A, 30
+
+     Riverside, 33, 39
+
+
+     Sacramento, 112, 123
+
+     Sacramento River, 107, 127, 135, 140
+
+     "Sage-Brush country," meaning of term, 163
+
+     Salinas, 83
+
+     Salinas River, 64
+
+     Salton Sea, 166
+
+     Sausalito, 116
+
+     San Antonio, 57
+
+     "San Antonio," the, 10
+
+     San Bernardino, 7, 33, 39, 149, 166
+
+     San Carlos, 79
+
+     San Clemente, 48
+
+     San Diego, 22, 78
+
+     San Diego, Bay of, 9
+
+     _San Diego, looking towards Point Loma_, 9
+
+     San Emigdio, 128
+
+     San Fernando, 41, 128
+
+     San Francisco, 67, 107, 108, 110
+
+     San Francisco, Bay of, 112
+
+     San Gabriel, 36
+
+     San Gabriel Valley, 27, 33, 40
+
+     San Gorgiono, 41, 172
+
+     San Gorgiono, Pass of, 6
+
+     San Jacinto, 5, 27, 149, 166, 170
+
+     San Joaquin, 128, 132, 139, 166
+
+     San Joaquin River, 107, 112, 123, 127, 129, 130, 140, 150
+
+     San Joaquin Valley, 162
+
+     San Jose, Se�or, 10
+
+     San Juan, 83
+
+     San Juan Bautista, 65, 66
+
+     San Juan Capistrano, 18, 48, 50
+
+     San Luis Rey, 19
+
+     San Pablo, 112
+
+     San Pablo Bay, 116
+
+     San Quentin, 116
+
+     San Raphael, 116, 118
+
+     Santa Barbara, 58
+
+     Santa Catalina, 48
+
+     Santa Clara, 54
+
+     Santa Cruz Coast, 74
+
+     Santa Cruz Mountains, 55, 64
+
+     _Santa Cruz Mountains, the Coast Range_, 78
+
+     Santa Inez, 48, 58
+
+     Santa Margarita, 56
+
+     Santa Rosa, 48
+
+     Sequoia, origin of name, 155
+
+     _Shasta--Snow Clouds_, 168
+
+     Sierra Madre, 27, 28, 37, 40, 42, 44, 149
+
+     Sierra Nevada, 128, 163, 171
+
+     Sierra Nevada, origin of name, 149
+
+     Sierras, the, 4
+
+     Solano, 78
+
+     Sonoma, 107, 118, 144
+
+     Sonoma County, 92
+
+     Sonora, 138, 140
+
+     "Sparrow-Hawk's Own, The," 3-23
+
+     Squaw Creek, 139
+
+     Stanislaus River, 137
+
+     Stockton, 123
+
+     Suisun, 112, 119
+
+     Sur, 80, 83
+
+     _Sycamores, a Coast Range Ca�on_, 59
+
+
+     Table Mountain, 138
+
+     _Tall Chaparral, Santa Cruz_, 62
+
+     Tamalpias, Mount, 109
+
+     _Tamalpias_, 110
+
+     Tasajara, 83
+
+     Tehachapi, 128, 150, 172
+
+     Tehipite Valley, 159
+
+     Tejon, 129
+
+     Tejon Pass, 89, 128, 132
+
+     Temblors, The, 128, 133
+
+     _"Three Brothers, The," Yosemite_--_Frontispiece_
+
+     Tiburon, 112, 116
+
+     Trinity River, 143
+
+     Truthful James, 138
+
+     Tulare, the, 120
+
+     Tule River, 129
+
+     Tuolumne River, 129
+
+     Turlock, 139
+
+     Twain, Mark, 138, 139, 165
+
+     "Twin Valleys, The," 127-146
+
+
+     _Valley of the Yosemite_, 163
+
+     Visalia, 129
+
+     Viscaino, Sebastian, 9, 63, 76, 108
+
+
+     _Waiting for Duck--Los Ba�os_, 120
+
+     Walker's Pass, 150
+
+     Warner's Ranch, 20
+
+
+     Yerba Buena, 108
+
+     _Yosemite Falls_, 152
+
+     Yosemite Valley, 135, 137, 157, 159
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+_Printed by_ R. & R. Clark, Limited, _Edinburgh_.
+
+  [Illustration: SKETCH MAP ACCOMPANYING "CALIFORNIA" BY SUTTON PALMER
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of California, by Mary Austin
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CALIFORNIA ***
+
+***** This file should be named 44764-8.txt or 44764-8.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/4/4/7/6/44764/
+
+Produced by Melissa McDaniel and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive)
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
+  www.gutenberg.org/license.
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at 809
+North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887.  Email
+contact links and up to date contact information can be found at the
+Foundation's web site and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit:  www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For forty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
diff --git a/old/44764-8.zip b/old/44764-8.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f4c746a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-8.zip
diff --git a/old/44764-h.zip b/old/44764-h.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fae75fe
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h.zip
diff --git a/old/44764-h/44764-h.htm b/old/44764-h/44764-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fb6c9cb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/44764-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,6857 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of California, by Sutton Palmer and Mary Austin.
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+
+body {
+    margin-left: 10%;
+    margin-right: 10%;
+}
+
+h1{
+    text-align: center;
+    clear: both;
+    margin-top: 6em;
+}
+
+h2 {text-align: center;
+    clear: both;
+    margin-top: 4em;
+    margin-bottom: 1em;
+    font-size: 1.2em;
+}
+
+p {
+    margin-top: .75em;
+    text-align: left;
+    margin-bottom: .75em;
+}
+
+.pagenum {
+    position: absolute;
+    left: 92%;
+    font-size: smaller;
+    text-align: right;
+    font-style: normal;
+}
+hr {
+    width: 33%;
+    margin-top: 1em;
+    margin-bottom: 1em;
+    margin-left: 33%;
+    margin-right: auto;
+    clear: both;
+}
+
+hr.l15 { width: 15%;
+         margin-left: 42%; }
+
+.center { text-align: center; }
+
+.smcap { font-variant: small-caps; }
+
+.caption {
+	font-weight: bold;
+    margin-left: 15%;
+    margin-right: 15%;
+    text-align: center;
+    margin-bottom: 2em;
+}
+
+ul.none { list-style-type:none;
+         margin-left: 20%; }
+.alpha {margin-top: 1.5em;}
+
+.figcenter {
+    margin: auto;
+    text-align: center;
+}
+
+.poetry-container {  text-align: center; }
+
+.poem {
+    display: inline-block;
+	font-size: 95%;
+	margin-bottom: 1em;
+	text-align: left;
+}
+
+@media handheld {
+  .poem  {
+         display: block;
+         margin-left: 5%;
+         margin-right: 10%;
+   }
+}
+
+.poem .stanza {
+	margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;
+}
+
+.poem p {
+	margin: 0;
+	padding-left: 3em;
+	text-indent: -3em; }
+
+.p2   {margin-top: 2em;}
+.p4   {margin-top: 4em;}
+.p6   {margin-top: 6em;}
+
+.b20	{font-size:2.0em;}
+.b13	{font-size:1.3em;}
+.s08 	{font-size:.8em;}
+.s05 	{font-size:.5em;}
+
+table {
+	margin-left: auto;
+	margin-right: auto;
+	empty-cells: show;
+}
+
+td {padding-left: 1em;
+    padding-right: 1em;
+    padding-top: .3em;
+    padding-bottom: .3em;
+    vertical-align: top;
+}
+.tdr { text-align: right; }
+
+.tdh { text-indent: -1em;
+       margin-left: 1em;
+       padding-bottom: 1.25em;}
+
+.tnbox {
+	margin-left: auto;
+    margin-right: auto;
+    margin-bottom: 8em;
+    margin-top: auto;
+    text-align: center;
+    border: 1px solid;
+    padding: 1em;
+    color: black;
+    background-color: #f6f2f2;
+    width: 25em;
+}
+
+    </style>
+  </head>
+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of California, by Mary Austin
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: California
+       The Land of the Sun
+
+Author: Mary Austin
+
+Illustrator: Sutton Palmer
+
+Release Date: January 26, 2014 [EBook #44764]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CALIFORNIA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Melissa McDaniel and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="tnbox">
+<p class="center"><b>Transcriber's Note:</b></p>
+<p>Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
+Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation in the original
+document have been preserved.</p>
+<p>On page 18, "arroya" should possibly be "arroyo."</p>
+<p>On page 53, "gaumet" should possibly be "gamut."</p>
+<p>On page 134, the text is "Noriegas'."  The Index shows "Noriega's."</p>
+<p>"Tamalpias" should possibly be "Tamalpais."</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i001" id="i001"></a>
+<img src="images/i-001.jpg" width="404" height="550" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">THE THREE BROTHERS, YOSEMITE VALLEY
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<h1>
+CALIFORNIA
+</h1>
+
+<p class="center p6">
+<i>BY THE SAME AUTHOR</i>
+</p>
+
+<hr class="l15" />
+
+<p class="center">
+THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN<br />
+A WOMAN OF GENIUS<br />
+THE LOVELY LADY<br />
+ETC.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center p4">
+AGENTS
+</p>
+
+<table summary="Publishers">
+<tr>
+<td><span class='smcap'>America</span></td>
+<td class="tdh"><span class='smcap'>The Macmillan Company</span><br />
+                    <span class='smcap'>64 &amp; 66 Fifth Avenue, New York</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><span class='smcap'>Australasia</span></td>
+<td class="tdh"><span class='smcap'>The Oxford University Press</span><br />
+                    <span class='smcap'>205 Flinders Lane, Melbourne</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><span class='smcap'>Canada</span></td>
+<td class="tdh"><span class='smcap'>The Macmillan Company of Canada, Ltd.</span><br />
+                    <span class='smcap'>St. Martin's House, 70 Bond Street, Toronto</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><span class='smcap'>India</span></td>
+<td class="tdh"><span class='smcap'>Macmillan &amp; Company, Ltd.</span><br />
+                    <span class='smcap'>Macmillan Building, Bombay</span><br />
+                    <span class='smcap'>309 Bow Bazaar Street, Calcutta</span></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<div class="figcenter p6">
+<img src="images/i-006.jpg" width="324" height="550" alt="titlePage" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="center p6">
+<span class="b20">CALIFORNIA</span><br />
+<br />
+<span class="b13">THE LAND OF THE SUN</span></p>
+
+<p class="center p2">PAINTED BY<br />
+<br />
+<span class="b13">SUTTON PALMER</span><br />
+<br />
+DESCRIBED BY<br />
+<br />
+<span class="b13">MARY AUSTIN</span></p>
+
+<p class="center p4"><span class="b13">ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK</span><br />
+4, 5, &amp; 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.</p>
+
+<p class="center p6 s08">
+<i>Published Autumn 1914</i>
+</p>
+
+<h2>
+CONTENTS
+</h2>
+
+<table summary="Table of Contents">
+  <tr>
+    <td colspan="2">&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="tdr"><span class="s08">PAGE</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">I.</td>
+    <td><span class='smcap'>The Sparrow Hawk's Own</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">II.</td>
+    <td><span class='smcap'>Mothering Mountains</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_25">25</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">III.</td>
+    <td><span class='smcap'>The Coasts of Adventure</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_45">45</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">IV.</td>
+    <td><span class='smcap'>The Port of Monterey</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_61">61</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">V.</td>
+    <td><span class='smcap'>Old Spanish Gardens</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_85">85</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">VI.</td>
+    <td><span class='smcap'>The Land of the Little Duck</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_105">105</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">VII.</td>
+    <td><span class='smcap'>The Twin Valleys</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_125">125</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">VIII.</td>
+    <td><span class='smcap'>The High Sierras and the Sage-brush Country</span></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_147">147</a></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+<p>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_vii' name='Page_vii'>[vii]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<h2>
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+</h2>
+
+<table summary="List of Illustrations">
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">1.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i001">The Three Brothers, Yosemite Valley</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr"><i>Frontispiece</i></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td class="tdr"><span class="s05">FACING PAGE</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">2.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i021">San Diego, looking across the Bay toward Point Loma</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">9</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">3.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i034">Redlands, looking toward San Bernardino Range</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">16</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">4.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i053">A Eucalyptus Grove</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">33</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">5.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i066">Glendale, Valley of the San Gabriel</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">40</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">6.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i077">A Cañon in the Sierra Madre</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">49</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">7.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i090">The Cemetery, Santa Barbara Mission</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">56</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">8.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i095">Sycamores, a Coast Range Cañon</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">59</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">9.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i104">Tall Chaparral, Santa Cruz</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">62</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">10.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i109">Looking down on Monterey and the Bay</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">65</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">11.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i122">Pescadero, a Chinese Fishing Village, Monterey Bay</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">72</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">12.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i127">Cypress Point, near Carmel</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">75</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">13.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i136">Santa Cruz Mountains, the Coast Range</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">78</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">14.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i150">The Patio, Old Spanish Residence</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">88</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">15.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i171">The Golden Gate and Black Point, from Hyde Street, San Francisco. (Site of the Panama Exposition, 1915)</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">107</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">16.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i180">Tamalpias</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">110</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">17.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i185">Mill Valley, and Backwater of San Francisco Bay</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">113<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_viii' name='Page_viii'>[viii]</a></span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">18.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i198">Waiting for Duck&mdash;Los Baños</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">120</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">19.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i209">Mirror Lake, Yosemite</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">129</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">20.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i215">Among the Redwoods of the Great Twin Valleys</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">131</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">21.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i224">Clear Lake, Lake County</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">134</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">22.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i230">Castle Crag, Rattlesnake Cañon</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">136</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">23.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i235">McCloud River, Upper Sacramento Valley</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">139</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">24.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i244">Donner Lake, on the old Emigrant Trail</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">142</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">25.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i249">Laurel Lake, Upper Sacramento</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">145</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">26.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i262">Yosemite Falls</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">152</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">27.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i267">Blue Lake, Lake County</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">155</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">28.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i276">Lake Tahoe, the High Sierras</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">158</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">29.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i281">Mount Shasta&mdash;Sierra Glow</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">161</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">30.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i287">Valley of the Yosemite</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">163</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">31.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i296">The Half Dome, Yosemite</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">166</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">32.</td>
+    <td class="tdh"><a href="#i302">Shasta&mdash;Snow Clouds</a></td>
+    <td class="tdr">168</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i><a href="#i314">Sketch Map at end of Volume.</a></i></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_1' name='Page_1'></a></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_3' name='Page_3'></a></span></p>
+<h2>
+I
+<br /><br />
+<span class="s08">
+THE SPARROW-HAWK'S OWN
+
+</span></h2>
+
+<p>
+For a graphic and memorable report of the
+contours of any country, see always the aboriginal
+account of its making. That will give you the
+lie of the land as no geographer could sketch it
+forth for you. California was made by Padahoon
+the Sparrow-Hawk and the Little Duck, who
+brooded on the face of the waters in the Beginning
+of Things.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is no knowing where the tale comes
+from, for Winnenap the Medicine-Man who told it
+to me, was eclectic in his faiths as in his practice.
+Winnenap was a Shoshone, one of the group
+who had been forced southward into Death
+Valley when the great Pah Ute nation had split
+their tribes like a wedge. In the last of their
+wars he had been taken as a hostage by the Paiutes
+and brought up by them. He might have remembered
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_4' name='Page_4'>[4]</a></span>
+the story, or his wife might have
+told him. She was a tall brown woman out of
+Tejon, and <i>her</i> mother was of that band of captives
+taken from San Gabriel by the Mojaves, Mission-bred.
+Wherever it came from, the tale has its
+roots deep in the land it explains.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Padahoon, being wearied of going to and fro
+under the heavens, said to the Little Duck that
+it was time there should be mountains; so the
+Little Duck dived and brought up the primordial
+mud of which even the geographers are agreed
+mountains are made.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he brought it the Sparrow-Hawk built a
+round beautiful ring of mountains enclosing a quiet
+space of sea. Said the Little Duck, "I choose
+this side," coming up with his bill full of mud
+toward the west. Whereupon the Sparrow-Hawk
+built the other side higher. When it
+was all done and the Little Duck surveyed it,
+he observed, as people will to this day, the
+discrepancy between the low western hills and
+the high Sierras, and he thought the builder had
+not played him fair. "Very well, then," said
+the Sparrow-Hawk, "since you are resolved to
+be so greedy," and he bit out pieces of the Sierras
+with his bill, and threw them over his shoulder.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_5' name='Page_5'>[5]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You can see the bites still deep and sharp about
+Mt. Whitney.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the Little Duck would not be satisfied;
+he took hold by the great bulk of Shasta and
+began to pull, and Padahoon pulled on his side
+until the beautiful ring was pulled out in a long
+oval and began to break on the west where the
+bay of San Francisco comes in. So they were
+forced to divide the mountain range north and
+south and make what they could of it. But the
+Sparrow-Hawk, remembering the pieces he had
+thrown over his shoulder, chose the south, where
+you can still see him sailing any clear day about
+four in the afternoon, over all his stolen territory.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There you have the bones of the land as neatly
+laid out for you as they could do it in Kensington
+Museum: the long oval, breaking seaward, the
+high, bitten, westward peaks, and the Sparrow-Hawk's
+Own, tailing south like the quirk of an
+attenuated Q.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They serve, these fragmentary ranges, for the
+outposts of habitableness between the sea wind
+and the forces of pure desertness. Always there
+is skirmish and assault going on about them.
+Showers rush up the slope of San Jacinto, all
+their shining spears a-tilt. Great gusts of wind
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_6' name='Page_6'>[6]</a></span>
+roar through the Pass of San Gorgiono, the old
+Puerto de San Carlos. Seasonally they are
+beleaguered by stealthy rushes of the fogs that
+from the Gulf hear the peaks about Whitney
+calling, or by the yellow murk of sand-storms
+on which the whole face of the desert is lifted
+up as it travels toward its destiny in orchard row
+and vineyard. Always the edge of the wind is
+against the stone. They shine, the frontlets of
+the sentinel saints, in that keen polish, as the faces
+of saints must with benignity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Just beyond the pilæ of the broken mountains&mdash;the
+Pillars of Hercules of the West&mdash;the desert
+winds about the eastern bases of the range in deep
+indented bays, white-rimmed with the wave marks
+of its ancient sea. Out a very little way, where
+the shuddering heat-waves trick the imagination,
+it seems about to be retaken by the ghost of
+tumbling billows. Nothing else moves in it;
+nothing sounds. Plantations of growing things
+near the Pass lean all a little toward it, edging,
+peering&mdash;the wild, spiny, thorny things of the
+desert to enter the rain-fed paradise, the full-leafed
+offspring of the sea wind plotting to take the unfriended
+sandy spaces. They creep a little forward
+or back as the years run wet or dry. The green
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_7' name='Page_7'>[7]</a></span>
+things stand up, they march along the cliffs, they
+balance on the edge of precipices, but desperation
+is in every contorted stem of <i><span lang='es_ES'>mesquite</span></i> and <i><span lang='es_ES'>palo
+verde</span></i>. And with all this struggle, so still! East
+on the desert rim the Colorado ramps like a stallion
+between its walls, westward the Pacific rings the
+low foreshore with thunder; but the land never
+cries out, quartz mountains disintegrate but they
+do not murmur.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is odd here in a land rife with the naked
+struggle of great pagan forces, to find the
+promontories so lend themselves to the gentle
+names of saints. Perhaps the Padres were not so
+far from nature as one thinks; in the southerly
+range which, with San Bernardino on the north,
+sentinels the Pass by which the iron-rimmed
+Emigrant trail enters the coast valleys, they
+rendered for once the pagan touch. San Jacinto&mdash;St.
+Hyacinth&mdash;was he ever anything but a
+Christianised memory of a Grecian myth, or does
+it matter at all so long as there are men to see,
+in the deep purple light that dies along the heights,
+the colour of blood that is shed for love? Perhaps
+the best thing beauty can say to Greek or Christian
+is that there are still things worth dying for.
+No doubt the veins of Padre Jayme Bravo were
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_8' name='Page_8'>[8]</a></span>
+as rich in martyr passion as the stained air of
+the mountain is in purples, paling to rose at
+morning, thinning at noon to pure aerial blues.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Seen from the coast the range has a finny contour
+as of some huge creature risen from the sea,
+with low hills about it like dolphins playing; but
+the prevailing note of the landscape is always blue,
+repeating the tints of the wild brodiæa that may
+be found on the lomas early in April, sending up its
+clustered heads between two slender curving spears.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Near at hand the masking growth is seen to be
+green, the dark olivaceous green of the chamisal.
+Nowhere does one get the force of the Spanish
+termination <i><span lang='es_ES'>al</span></i>&mdash;the place where&mdash;as in that word.
+The chamisal is the place of the chamise: miles
+and miles of it, with scarcely another shrub allowed,
+spread over the mesa and well up into laps and
+bays of the hills. It grows breast high, man high
+in the favoured regions; but even where under the
+influence of drouth and altitude it creeps to the
+knees, it abates nothing of its social character.
+Its ever-green foliage has a dull shining from the
+resinous coating which protects it from evaporation,
+and a slight sticky feel, characteristics that no
+doubt won it the name of "greasewood" from
+the emigrants who valued it chiefly because it
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_9' name='Page_9'>[9]</a></span>
+could be burned green. The spring winds blowing
+up from the bay whip all its fretted surface to a
+froth of panicled white bloom, that, stirring a little
+as the wind shifts, full of bee-murmur, touches the
+imagination with the continual reminder of the
+sea. Higher up the thick lacy chaparral flecks
+and ripples, showing the light underside of leaves,
+and tosses up great fountain sprays of ceanothus,
+sea-blue and lilac-scented.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i021" id="i021"></a>
+<img src="images/i-021.jpg" width="550" height="328" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">SAN DIEGO, LOOKING ACROSS THE BAY TOWARD
+POINT LOMA
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+All the human interest of this region centres
+about the city on the bay of San Diego, a low
+locked harbour with a long spit of sand breaking
+the mild Pacific swell, as it bides its time for
+the shipping of the south-western world. It has
+already waited longer than most people suppose.
+Just fifty years after the landing of Columbus on
+the Bahamas, Cabrillo discovered it; Sir Francis
+Drake, romping up that coast with his buccaneers,
+must have seen it though he left no note of any
+visit, and in 1602 Sebastian Viscaino anchored
+there and gave it its present name. Just about
+the time the mixed Dutch and English on the
+Atlantic coast were beginning to think of themselves
+as Americans and to act accordingly, the
+Franciscan <i><span lang='es_ES'>Frailes</span></i> settled on San Diego bay.
+Nobody will know why it was reserved for the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_10' name='Page_10'>[10]</a></span>
+brown-skirted brothers of St. Francis to undertake
+the subjugation of Alta California, until it is
+known why the King of Spain quarrelled with the
+Jesuits. They were accused of plotting against
+His Majesty, but in those days it was possible to
+accuse the Jesuits of almost anything without
+going very far wrong in the popular estimate. I
+have my own opinion about it, which is that a
+great land, like a great lady, has her way with men.
+And no land has called its own as has California:&mdash;poet
+or painter or pioneer, the world's rim under.
+No better patron could be found for this blossoming
+West than Francis of Assisi, who preached to his
+little brothers of the air and would have made a convert
+of the coyote. Perhaps the first settlers of a
+country leave their stripe on all the land's later offspring:
+if it was a way the West took to breed fervour
+and faith and the spirit of prophecy in the young
+generation, who shall say she has not succeeded?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In January of 1769 two expeditions by land and
+sea set forth in the name of God and the King of
+Spain, under the patronage of Señor San Jose,
+indubitable patron of all journeys since the flight
+into Egypt. In April the ship <i>San Antonio</i>
+anchored in the placid bay, there to await the live
+stock driven up from Velicatá. So the old world
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_11' name='Page_11'>[11]</a></span>
+came to the new with a whole collocation of sainted
+personages flocking like doves to her banners.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it was not saints that the land wanted so
+much as the stuff that goes to make them. The
+expedition starved, sickened; their eyes were
+holden. Governor Portola, with the greater part
+of the expedition, made a long <i><span lang='es_ES'>pasear</span></i> on foot to
+find the lost port of Monterey, and came back,
+with armour rust on his doublet sleeves and
+nothing much gained beside, to declare the expedition
+a failure. But Padre Serra&mdash;Junipero
+Serra, father president of Missions, juniper of
+God's own planting, sapling of that stock of which
+the founder of the order had wished for a whole
+forest full&mdash;Padre Serra claimed a churchman's
+privilege. He demanded time for a <i><span lang='es_ES'>novena</span></i>, a
+nine days' cycle of prayer to the patron who was
+so unaccountably hiding the relief ship in the fogs
+and indecisions of the uncharted coast. It is my
+belief that the Padre chose the <i><span lang='es_ES'>novena</span></i> simply
+because it was the longest possible time he could
+hope to delay the return of the expedition. Nine
+days they drew in their belts and told their beads,
+and on the last hour of the last day, far on the sea
+rim, behold the white wings of succour!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Patron, who could never be at a loss for an
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_12' name='Page_12'>[12]</a></span>
+expedient, contrived that the ship should lose an
+anchor which compelled it to put in at San Diego,
+where they had no expectation of finding any of
+the party. It was so that the land tried them out
+and approved, for from that day the founding went
+forward steadily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is a fine growing city now on the site of
+the early landing, regularly stratified through all
+the architectural periods of California, from the
+low thick-walled adobe of the Spanish occupation
+to the newest shingle-stained bungalow of the
+latest one-lunged millionaire; but the land has not
+lost, in a century and a half, one mark by which
+the brown-skirted <i><span lang='es_ES'>Frailes</span></i> found their way about
+in it. It has its distinctive mark, the Sparrow-Hawk's
+land, the seal of a private and peculiar
+affection. Here about the mouth of one of its
+swift seasonal rivers, and touching as with a finger-tip
+the opposing shore of the island of Santa Rosa,
+is the habitat of the Torrey pine. Japanesque,
+unrelated, drinking the sea air, never spreading
+inland, it hugs the sea-worn edges of La Jolla, as
+though, as some botanists believe, the species
+came to life there out of the jewel-tinted water
+and the spirit of the desert dust.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is also possible to think of it as a relict of
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_13' name='Page_13'>[13]</a></span>
+the land of which the broken Channel Islands
+were made, but in any case it is a pity that science
+could not have retained for this lonely, restricted
+species the name the <i><span lang='es_ES'>Frailes</span></i> gave to its fostering
+waters, Soledad&mdash;the solitary. Behind the town
+the mesa rises abruptly, knife-cut by the gullies
+of intermittent streams; and far back where the
+mountains break down into foothills, and these
+into the lomas&mdash;little low mounds of detritus&mdash;the
+sea air collects all the blue rays of the diffused
+light and holds them there all day in the hollows,
+in memory of the sea from which they rose.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In April of the year of the Occupation the
+white panicles of the chamise would be tossing
+here and there, and the yellow violets run thin
+lines as of fire among the grasses. You would not
+believe there were so many yellow violets in the
+world as a day's riding will still show you. At
+this season, <i><span lang='es_ES'>islay</span></i>, the wild cherry, will be shaking
+out its fine white spray of bloom, the button
+willow begins, the sycamore, the buckthorn, <i><span lang='es_ES'>cascara
+sagrada</span></i>; the great berried manzanita, which shed
+its waxen bells as early as December, will be
+reddening its apples. Here also the chia, the true
+sage, the honey-maker, bread of the wild tribes,
+makes itself known by the penetrating pungent
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_14' name='Page_14'>[14]</a></span>
+odour of its unfolding foliage. Binding all the
+leafy thickets, runs the succulent starry bloom of
+the megarrhiza that, from its hidden root, as large
+as a man's body, sends up smothering tendrils so
+sensitive to their opportunity that you have only
+to sit down beside them on one of these long growing
+afternoons, to find all their tips curling in your
+direction and the stems moving sensibly across the
+grass in the direction of support. As early as
+February the foot-long vines can be seen locating
+the nearest shrub or the cañon wall, farther away
+than you could detect it by any tactile sense.
+And how quickly, once the objective is sensed, the
+questing Force is withdrawn from the unsuccessful
+members! Perhaps this one to the right may keep
+on in the direction in which it has caught the
+invisible communicating thread from the nearest
+buckthorn, but the other three or four green
+tentacles, finding no invitation from any quarter,
+not only stop growing but seem to shrink and
+dwindle in the interests of the climbing brother.
+Sometimes in a particularly lusty growth, all the
+young vines will be drawn toward some conspicuous
+support, so that by the third day those that lay out
+starlike, with inquiring tips raised a little, delicately
+feeling, will swing through all their points
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_15' name='Page_15'>[15]</a></span>
+to the one hopeful direction. These warm
+sensuous days toward the end of April, just after
+rain, when the very earth is full of a subtle intoxication,
+one has but to thrust a finger among the
+bourgeoning tips and tendrils of the megarrhiza to
+see them stir with live response. One must suppose,
+since the megarrhiza is of no discoverable use
+to anybody, that the Force uses it to its own ends,
+an ascending, uprearing Force, rehearsing itself for
+a more serviceable instrument.&mdash;This, however, is
+a digression; probably the Padres found no time
+for philosophising about anything, much less so
+useless a specimen as the wild cucumber.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What the Franciscans saw first in Alta
+California was what all pioneers look for in new
+lands&mdash;the witness of their faith. They saw the
+waxberry bush from which they were to gather
+the thin coating of the berries into candles for
+their improvised altars, saw the crepitant, aromatic
+<i><span lang='es_ES'>yerba buena</span></i>, and the shrubby, glutinous-leaved
+herb of the Saints, given to them for healing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+More than all else they must have seen in the
+month of the Virgin Mother, high on the altar
+slopes of San Jacinto and San Bernardino, the
+white thyrses of the yucca, called The Candles of
+Our Lord. Back where the green exclusiveness
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_16' name='Page_16'>[16]</a></span>
+of the chamise gives place to the chaparral, the
+tall shafts arise. They grow in blossoming, the
+bells climbing with the aspiring stalk until as
+many as six thousand of them may hang pure and
+stiff along the lance-like stem between the bayonet-bristling
+leaves. Long after the white flame has
+burnt out, the stalks remain, rank on rank, as
+though battalions of Spanish spearmen had fallen
+there, holding each his spear aloft in his dead hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is only back there where the yuccas begin,
+that the small, swift life of the mesa goes on,
+very much as it did in the days of the Spanish
+<i><span lang='es_ES'>Frailes</span></i>. The doves begin it, voicing the mesa
+dawn in notes of a cool blueness; then the sleek
+and stately quail, moving down in twittering
+droves to the infrequent water-holes. The rhythm
+of a flock in motion is like the ripple of muscles
+in the sides of a great snake. After them the
+road runner, <i><span lang='es_ES'>corredor del camino</span></i>, the cock of the
+chaparral, crest down, rudder aslant, swifter than
+a horse, incarnate spirit of the hopeful dust
+through which he flirts and flits. Then the blueness
+is folded up, it lies packed in the cañons,
+the mountains flatten; high in his airy haunts
+the Sparrow-Hawk sails, and the furry, frisk-tailed
+folk begin the day's affairs.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_17' name='Page_17'>[17]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i034" id="i034"></a>
+<img src="images/i-034.jpg" width="550" height="366" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">REDLANDS, LOOKING TOWARD SAN BERNARDINO RANGE
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+The secret of learning the mesa life is to sit
+still, to sit still and to keep on sitting still. The
+only other secret is to be learned in the wattled
+huts stuck like the heaps of the house-building
+rats in the dry washes, inwoven with the boughs
+of buckthorn and <i><span lang='es_ES'>islay</span></i>, except for size scarcely
+distinguishable from them. For the Indian has
+gone through all that green woof with the thread
+of kinship and found it an ordered world. He is
+choke-full as is the chamisal of wild life, of the
+tag ends of instincts and understandings left over
+from the days when he was brother to the beast&mdash;those
+sleek-bellied rats, stealing to lay another
+foot-long, dried stick to the characterless heap of
+their dwelling,&mdash;bad Indians to him, trying to
+remember their ways when they were men;
+that brown feathered bunch, in and out of the
+chia bush,&mdash;she was present at the making of man.
+Your aboriginal has the true sense of proportion:
+not size but vitality. You can cover the sage wren
+with the hollow of your hand, but you cannot hop
+so far for your size nor be so brave about it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Very different from the spring flutter and fullness,
+must have been the look of the land in the
+year of the martyrdom of Padre Jayme Bravo,
+which was the year of Bunker Hill and the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_18' name='Page_18'>[18]</a></span>
+Republic. The green of the chamisal was overlaid
+then by the brown tones of its seeding. <i><span lang='es_ES'>Islay</span></i> had
+shed its crimson drupes; the cactus fires had died
+down to the dull purples of the fruiting prickly
+pear; the sycamores by the dwindling waters of
+the arroya had scarcely a palsied leaf to wag. The
+Mission had been moved, for what reasons must be
+guessed by whoever has had occasion to observe
+the effect of a standing army on the subjugated
+peoples, back from the sea marsh to a little valley
+of what is known now as Mission River. Sixty
+converts had come down out of the hills to receive
+the Medicine of the Soft-Hearted God. That is
+the way they must have looked at it&mdash;rood and cup
+and sprinkling water, and the bells louder than the
+medicine drums. Back in the dry gullies the
+drums would have been going night and day where
+the <i>tingaivashes</i>, the Medicine-Men, lashed themselves
+into a fury over this apostasy. Certain of
+the renegades heard them between their orisons;
+they fled back to the muttering roll and the
+pound of the dancing feet. In the night after
+that, eight hundred of the Dieguenos, clothed in
+frantic fervour and very little else, came down to
+make an end of the "long gowns." How the soul
+of Padre Jayme must have leaped up as he heard
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_19' name='Page_19'>[19]</a></span>
+them yelling outside his unguarded hut: the
+appetite for martyrdom is deeper than all our
+dreaming. He ran toward them with arms extended.
+"Love God, my children!" he cried, and
+received their arrows. When it was reported to
+the Padre President at Monterey, "Thank God,"
+he said; "now the soil is watered." It did indeed
+repay them such a crop of souls as any watering
+produces in that soil; but at San Juan Capistrano,
+where a new foundation was in progress, they
+buried the bells and returned to the presidio.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Few people understand why Californians so
+love their Missions, the meagre ruins of them,
+scant as a last year's nest. But two priests, a
+corporal, and three men in the unmapped land with
+eight hundred angry savages&mdash;it is the mark of the
+Western breed to love odds such as that! It is not
+to the campanile at Pala nor the ruined arches of
+San Luis Rey that men made pilgrimages but to
+the spirit of enterprise that built the West.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All about the upper mesa there are traces,
+scarcely more evident to the eye than the Missions,
+that the inhabitants of it have been dreamers,
+dreaming greatly. I do not now refer to the court
+of San Luis Rey, from the roofs of which a joyous
+populace once cheered a governor of California in
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_20' name='Page_20'>[20]</a></span>
+the part of toreador, in a neighbourhood where
+Raphael-eyed muchachitos who have never heard of
+the Five Little Pigs that Went to Market can still
+repeat you the rhyme that begins
+</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<p>
+Up in Heaven there is a bull fight,</p>
+<p>
+The bull has horns of silver and a tail of gold.</p>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p>
+Heaven enough under those conditions to the
+children of the Occupation! Nor am I thinking
+of a road on which, when there is a light wind
+moving from the sea, you can still hear at midnight
+the pounding feet of the Indian riders
+galloping down to the bay, only to see their
+beloved Padre blessing them from the ship's side
+in departing. I do not think even&mdash;because I
+make a practice of thinking as little as possible
+of a matter so discreditable to us as our Indian
+policy&mdash;of the procession of the evicted <i>Palatingwas</i>,
+even though the whole region of Warner's
+ranch is still full of the shame of it and the
+rending cry. The struggle of men with men is
+at best a sick and squalid affair for one of the
+parties; but men contriving against the gods for
+possession of the earth is your true epic. The
+brave little towns which start up there with their
+too early florescence of avenue and public square,
+the courageous acres which the vineyardist clears
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_21' name='Page_21'>[21]</a></span>
+in the chamisal and the chamise takes again!
+All along the upper mesa, Pan and the homesteader
+keep up the ancient fight. And with
+what unequal weapons! The wild gourd, the
+bindweed, the megarrhiza, at the mere rumour
+of a cleared space, come beckoning and joining
+hands. Though he goes gunning all day without
+finding one young rabbit for his pot, the bark of
+the homesteader's orchard trees will be gnawed
+by them at the precise sappy moment. At dawn
+the quail may be heard with soft contented
+noises between the rows of bearing vines, plunging
+their beaks in the ripest berries. Then the mule-deer
+will spend the night in the carefully fenced
+enclosure, ruining the largest bunches with
+selective bites; after which the homesteader,
+if he is wise, will know that he is beaten. The
+mule-deer can go over any fence, though usually
+he prefers to go between the wires, which he
+can do without altering his stride. Detected,
+even at its most leafless, the antlered chaparral
+makes cover for him until, after hours of following,
+he is glimpsed at last, scaling at his stiff
+bounding gait some inaccessible rocky stair from
+which nothing comes back but the bullet's deflected
+whine. Now and then some pot-hunter
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_22' name='Page_22'>[22]</a></span>
+who remembers when the mule-deer could be
+heard barking to the does in any deep gully,
+when the moon rose hot on the flushed trail
+of the October day, will tell you that there
+are no more of his kind on San Jacinto. But
+so long as there are homesteaders to be fended
+from the hill borders, the mule-deer will come
+back. And when the mule-deer is gone there
+will still be drouth. Let the coast currents swing
+out a few degrees, or the Gulf winds blow contrarily
+for consecutive seasons, and the stoutest
+homesteader fails. After a few years you can
+guess where he has been by finding the chamise
+growing taller in the ploughed places.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Incurable wild hills and wild sufficing sea, and
+the little strip between which they give to one
+another&mdash;Indian giving!&mdash;conceded by the years of
+rain and demanded back by drouth; shoals that the
+tide piles and the sea eats again! It lies like a many-coloured
+dancer's scarf, and hearts are still caught
+in its folds as in the days of the Spanish Occupation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There's a stripe of aquamarine turning to chrysoprase,
+that's for the sea; amber then for the
+hollow cliffs of La Jolla and San Juan, smugglers'
+cliffs eaten well under the shore; a stripe of scarlet,
+spangled with viscid diamond dew, that's for the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_23' name='Page_23'>[23]</a></span>
+mesembryanthemums crowding the foreshore; pale
+green of the lupins with a white thread through it
+of the highway, green again for the chamisal, and
+blue of the mountains' unassailable sea thought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nature is a great symbolist; what she makes
+out of her own materials is but the shadow of
+what man in any country will make finally of
+his. San Diego by the sea dreams of a great
+sea empery. What by all the signs she is bound
+to produce, is a poet. There in the scarf-coloured,
+low shore is the vocal forecast of him in the night-singing
+mocking-bird. Especially in the fringing
+island of Coronado out of the waxberry bush
+he can be heard gurgling like a full fountain
+with jets and rushes of pure crystal sound. From
+moonrise on until dawn he scatters from a tireless
+throat, music like light and laughter. It is
+as impossible to close the eyes under it as in
+the glare of the sun. And if the moon, the
+measurer, be gone on a journey to the other
+side of the world, still he sings, all his notes
+muffled by the dark; he sways and sings, dozes
+and sings, dreaming and wakes to sing. So it
+should be with poets whether anybody wishes
+them to or not. "The lands of the sun expand
+the soul," says the proverb.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_25' name='Page_25'>[25]</a></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_24' name='Page_24'></a></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_27' name='Page_27'></a></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_26' name='Page_26'></a></span>
+</p>
+
+<h2>
+II
+<br /><br />
+<span class="s08">
+MOTHERING MOUNTAINS
+
+</span></h2>
+
+<p>
+It is all part of that subtle relation between the
+observer and the landscape of the west, which
+goes by the name of "atmosphere," that one
+returns again and again to the reality of Christian
+feeling in the Franciscan Pioneers, as witnessed
+by the names they left us&mdash;one of the most
+charming proofs, if proof were wanted, of the
+power of religion to illuminate the mind to a
+degree often denied to generations of art and
+culture. How many book-fed tourists rounding
+the blue ranks of San Jacinto to face the noble
+front of the Coast Range as it swings back from
+the San Gabriel valley, would have found for it
+a name at once so absolute, so understanding as
+Sierra Madre, Mother Mountain?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There you have it all in one comprehensive
+sweep: the brooding, snow-touched, virginal peaks,
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_28' name='Page_28'>[28]</a></span>
+visited and encompassed by the sacred spirit of
+the sea, and below it the fertile valley, the little
+huddling, skirting hills fed from her breast. The
+very lights that die along the heights, the airs that
+play there, the swelling fecund slopes, have in
+them something so richly maternal; the virtue of
+the land is the virtue that we love most in the
+mothers of men. And if you want facts under
+the poetry, see how the Sierra receives the rain
+and sends it down laden with the rich substance
+of her granite bosses, making herself lean to fatten
+the valleys. The great gorges and swift angles of
+the hills which fade and show in the evening glow,
+are wrought there by the ceaseless contribution of
+the mountain to the tillable land. And what a
+land it has become! There have been notable
+kingdoms of the past of fewer and less productive
+acres. Yet even in the great avenues of palms
+that flick the light a thousand ways from their wind-stirred,
+serrate edges, is a reminder of the host of
+bristling, spiny growth the land once entertained.
+It is as if the sinister forces of the desert lurked
+somewhere not far under the surface, ready at
+any moment to retake all this wonder of fertility,
+should the beneficence of the Mother Mountain
+fail. The Padre pioneers must have felt these
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_29' name='Page_29'>[29]</a></span>
+two contending forces many a time when they
+lay down at night under the majestic Sierra, for
+they named the first spot where they made an
+abiding place, in honour of the protecting influence,
+<i><span lang='es_ES'>Nuestro Señora, Reina de Los Angeles</span></i>, Our Lady
+the Queen of the Angels. There she hovered,
+snow-whitened amid tall candles of the stars, while
+south and west the coyote barked the menace of
+the unwatered lands. Now this is remarkable, and
+one of the things that go to show we are vastly
+more susceptible to influences of nature than some
+hard-headed members of society suppose, that in
+this group of low hills and shallow valleys between
+the Sierra Madre and the sea, the most conspicuous
+human achievement has been a new form of domestic
+architecture.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This is the thing that most strikes the attention
+of the traveller: not the orchards and the gardens,
+which are not appreciably different in kind from
+those of the Riviera and some favoured parts
+of Italy, but the homes, the number of them,
+their extraordinary adaptability to the purposes
+of gracious living. The Angelenos call them
+bungalows, in respect to the type from which
+the later form developed, but they deserve a
+name as distinctive as they have in character
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_30' name='Page_30'>[30]</a></span>
+become. These little thin-walled dwellings, all
+of desert-tinted native woods and stones, are as
+indigenous to the soil as if they had grown up
+out of it, as charming in line and the perfection of
+utility as some of those wild growths which show
+a delicate airy florescence above ground, but under
+it have deep, man-shaped, resistant roots. With
+their low and flat-pitched roofs they present a
+certain likeness to the aboriginal dwellings which
+the Franciscans found scattered like wasps' nests
+among the chaparral along the river,&mdash;which is only
+another way of saying that the spirit of the land
+shapes the art that is produced there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One must pause a little by the dry wash of this
+river, so long ago turned into an irrigating ditch that
+it is only in seasons of unusual flood it remembers
+its ancient banks, and finds them, in spite of all that
+real estate agencies have done to obliterate such
+natural boundaries. This river of Los Angeles betrays
+the streak of original desertness in the country
+by flowing bottom-side up, for which it receives
+the name of <i><span lang='es_ES'>arroya</span></i>, and even <i><span lang='es_ES'>arroya seca</span></i> as against
+the <i><span lang='es_ES'>rio</span></i> of the full-flowing Sacramento and San
+Juan. A <i><span lang='es_ES'>rio</span></i> is chiefly water, but an <i><span lang='es_ES'>arroya</span></i>, and
+especially that one which travels farthest from the
+Mothering Mountains toward the sea, is at most
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_31' name='Page_31'>[31]</a></span>
+seasons of the year a small trickle of water among
+stones in a wide, deep wash, overgrown with button
+willow and sycamores that click their gossiping
+leaves in every breath of wind or in no wind at
+all. Tiny gold and silver backed ferns climb down
+the banks to drink, and as soon as the spring
+freshet has gone by, brodiæas and blazing stars
+come up between the boulders worn as smooth
+as if by hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Farther up, where the stream narrows, it is
+overgrown by willows, alders, and rock maples,
+and leaps white-footed into brown pools for trout.
+Deer drink at the shallows, and it is not so long
+ago that cinnamon bear and grizzlies tracked the
+wet clay of its borders. This is the guarantee
+that this woman-country is in no danger of too
+much mothering. No climate which is acceptable
+to trout and grizzlies is in the least likely to prove
+enervating; men and beasts, they run pretty much
+to the same vital, sporting qualities.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All that country which extends from the foot
+of the Sierra Madre to the sea, is so cunningly
+patterned off with ranks of low hills and lomas
+that its vastness is disguised, or rather revealed
+by subtle change and swift surprises as a discreet
+woman reveals her charms. This renders it one of
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_32' name='Page_32'>[32]</a></span>
+the most delightful of motoring countries. The
+car swings over a perfect road into snug little
+orchard nooks as safe and secret seeming as a
+nest, climbs a round-breasted hill to greet the
+wide horizon of the sea, or a mesa stretching
+away into blue and amber desertness, which when
+adventured upon, discloses in unsuspected hollows
+white, peaceful towns girt by great acres of orange
+groves, or the orderly array of vines trimmed low
+and balancing like small, wide-skirted figures in a
+minuet. And then the ground opens suddenly
+to deep, dry gullies where little handfuls of the grey
+soil gather themselves up and scuttle mysteriously
+under the cactus bushes, and dried seeds of the
+megarrhiza rattle with a muffled sound as the pods
+blow about. Here one meets occasionally the last
+survivors of the old way of life before men found it:
+<i><span lang='es_ES'>neotoma</span></i>, the house-building rat, with his conical
+heap of rubbish; or a road runner, tilting his tail
+and practising his short, sharp runs in the powdery
+sand under the rabbit brush; here, too, the lurking
+desert shows its spiny tips like a creature half-buried
+in the sand, not dead, but drowsing.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i053" id="i053"></a>
+<img src="images/i-053.jpg" width="398" height="550" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">A EUCALYPTUS GROVE
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+As artists know colour, and poets know it, this is
+the most colourful corner of the world. The blue
+and silver tones of the Sparrow-Hawk's land give
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_33' name='Page_33'>[33]</a></span>
+place to airy violets, fawns, and rich ambers. It is
+curious, that obstinate preference which a locality
+has for colour schemes of its own adoption; man
+can break up and re-form them, but he can never
+quite overcome the original key. Here the bright,
+instant note of the geraniums that shore up the
+bungalows, even the insult of the magenta-coloured
+Bougainvillea is subdued by the aerial softness that
+lies along the hills like the bloom on fruit. The
+sheets of Eschscholtzia gold that once spread over
+miles of the San Gabriel valley, and still linger in
+torn fragments about Altadena, have been sheared
+by the plough, to vanish and reappear again in the
+solid globes of orange, distilled from the saps and
+juices of the soil.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One of the most interesting of the instruments
+by which the cultivated landscape has gathered
+up and fixed the evanescent greens that spread
+thinly yet over the uncropped hills in spring,
+is the eucalyptus. All the tints are there, from
+the olive greens of the chaparral to the sombre
+darkness of the evergreen oak; young shoots of
+it have the silvery finish of the artemisia which
+once gave the note of the mesas about Riverside
+and San Bernardino. No other imported tree has
+quite to such a degree the air of the <i>habitué</i>; one
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_34' name='Page_34'>[34]</a></span>
+wonders indeed if it could have been half so much
+at home in Australia, from whence it has returned
+like some wandering heir to the ancestral acre.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It proves its blood royal by its facile adaptiveness
+to the prevailing lines of the landscape, taking the
+rounded, leaning outline of the live oaks on the
+wind-driven hills, or in sheltered ravines springing
+upward straight as the silver firs. Perhaps its most
+charming possibilities are revealed in the middle
+distance where, lifted high on columnar stems, its
+leaf crowns take on the blunt, flowing contours of
+the hills. At all times it has a beautiful resilience
+to the wind, bowing with a certain courtliness without
+compulsion, and recovering as if by conscious
+harmonious movement. The pepper tree, however,
+most magnificent specimens of which may be
+found lining the avenues of Pasadena, or in some
+unexpected corner of the hills marking the site of
+some old Spanish hacienda, is always an alien.
+It is like the Spaniards who brought it, perhaps,
+in its drooping grace, in the careless prodigality
+with which it sheds its fragile crimson fruits.
+Something of old-worldliness persists in its spicy
+odours, and in the stir of its lacy shadows; when
+the moon comes over the mountain wall and the
+wind is moving, there is the touch of mystery one
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_35' name='Page_35'>[35]</a></span>
+associates with lovely señoritas leaning out of
+balconies. One fancies that the pepper tree will last
+so long as the dying race of Dons and Doñas, and
+with them will cease to be a feature of local interest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is hardly more than a trace in the modern
+city of Los Angeles of <span lang='es_ES'><i><span lang='es_ES'>Nuestra Señora, Reina de
+los Angeles</span></i></span>. The last time I passed through the
+old plaza, the streets of offence encroached upon
+it from the east, and a corner of the sacred precinct
+had been sacrificed to the trolley. The Church of
+Our Lady, over whose door may still be traced the
+fading inscription from which the city takes its
+name, was never a mission, but one of the six
+chapels or <i><span lang='es_ES'>asistencias</span></i> centred about the Mission
+San Gabriel. It was here the first expedition
+passed northward looking for the port of Monterey,
+on the day of the feast of Our Lady in the year
+when the Atlantic Colonies were making up their
+minds to fight the English. It was close to this
+spot and along Downey Street were enacted the
+most pitiful of all the tragic incidents which
+marked the recession of the aboriginal races.
+Bereft of their lands and the protection of their
+Church, they became a prey to the greed of the
+dominant peoples, and used regularly to be incited to
+drunkenness upon their wages on Sunday, arrested
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_36' name='Page_36'>[36]</a></span>
+while in that condition, and sold each Monday
+morning for the amount of their fines to the
+neighbouring ranchers. Things like this lurking
+under the surface of commercial enterprise, as the
+desert lies in wait in sandy stretches, advise us
+that much of our insistence on democracy grows
+out of our inability to trust ourselves to deal equitably
+with our fellows under any other conditions.
+We can keep to the rules of the game we have set
+up more easily than to the unfenced humanities.
+Here in the old plaza full of sleepy light, which
+still retains the indefinable stamp of the people
+to whom to-morrow was always a better day for
+doing things, one sighs for the short-sighted self-interest
+which so wasted the native children of
+the soil.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But after all the land couldn't have loved them
+as it does the race for which it brings forth
+its miraculous harvests. Not that there weren't
+miracles in those days; in fact they began here,
+or rather at San Gabriel, six miles or so beyond
+the river which in those days was called Porcincula,
+a name that linked the old world with the new by
+way of the little chapel in Italy in which the
+beloved Francis received such heavenly favours.
+The miracle of San Gabriel relates to a display
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_37' name='Page_37'>[37]</a></span>
+of a canvas presentiment of Our Lady, at the
+mere sight of which the wild tribes experienced
+exceeding grace. Looking up suddenly at the
+Mother Mountain brooding above the plain, it
+is easy to understand how the symbol of aloof
+but solicitous care came home to the primitive
+mind, always peculiarly open to suggestions of
+humaneness in nature.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The heads of the Sierra Madre are rounded, the
+contours of great dignity. The appeal it makes to
+the eye is of mass and line. Its charms, and it has
+many, of forested slope, leaping waters, and lilied
+meadows, do not offer themselves to the casual
+glance, but must be sought after with great pains.
+The bulk of the range is of warm, grey granite,
+clothed with atmospheric colour as with a garment.
+It borrows more from the sky than the sea, taking
+on at times an aerial transparency, the soul of the
+mountain about to pass trembling into light.
+Pinkish tones are discoverable in even the bluest
+shadows, and at times the peaks are touched with
+the rich, roseate orange of the Alpine-glow. But
+the variations of temperature and atmospheric
+conditions are not sufficiently pronounced to
+present themselves to the sense as the source of
+its aspects of tenderness, of majesty, of virginal
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_38' name='Page_38'>[38]</a></span>
+aloofness. Rather such changes seem to be
+occasioned by palpitations of the Mountain Spirit,
+remote in sacred meditation, glowing, dimming,
+defining itself from within.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It may be that the immense vitality of the land,
+its abundance, the bursting orchards, the rich
+variety of native growth, somehow dwarfs the
+earliest impression of the Sierra Madre, since few,
+if any, gather at first an adequate idea of the
+actual mass and height it represents. It is only
+after appreciation of the really amazing activities
+of the Angelenos is a little dulled by familiarity, at
+early morning when the groves are sleeping and
+the bright plantations of the gardens lack the sun
+to flash their brilliance on the sight, or at evening
+when a sea mist covers the teeming land, one is
+prepared to hear that many of these peaks are
+higher than the Simplon, and that it would be
+possible to wander for months in the intricacies
+of its cañons without having time to grow familiar
+with a single one of them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sometimes the mere mechanics of the land, the
+pull of the wind up the narrow gorges as you pass,
+advises the open mind of power and immensity
+residing in the thinly forested bulks. Passing
+what appears a mere shadowy gulf in the mountain
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_39' name='Page_39'>[39]</a></span>
+wall, you are aware of a murmurous sound as of
+the sea in a shell, and feel suddenly the push of
+the draught on your windshield like a great steady
+hand. In places above San Bernardino, the steady
+pouring of invisible wind rivers has swept the soil
+for miles and defied three generations of artificial
+plantations. And sometimes the mountain speaks
+directly to the soul. I recall such an occasion one
+late spring. We had been skirting the range
+toward Riverside all afternoon, having the fall of
+the land seaward always in view, noting how, in spite
+of the absurd predilection of men for square fields
+and gridiron arrangements, the main lines of
+cultivation were being pulled into beauty by the
+sheer necessity of humouring the harvest. It was
+that lagging hour between the noon splendour and
+the gathering of the light for its dramatic passage
+into night. The orange orchards lay dead green
+in the hollows, unplanted ridges showed scarcely a
+trace of atmospheric blueness; unlaced, unbuskined,
+the land rested. And all in the falling of a leaf,
+in the scuttle of a horned toad in the dust of the
+roadway, it lifted into eerie life. It bared its teeth;
+the veil of the mountain was rent. Nothing
+changed, nothing stirred or glimmered, but the
+land had spoken. As if it had taken a step
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_40' name='Page_40'>[40]</a></span>
+forward, as if a hand were raised, the mountain
+stood over us. And then it sank again. While
+the chill was still on us, the grip of terror, there
+lay the easy land, the comfortable crops, the red
+geraniums about the bungalows. But never again
+for me would the Sierra Madre be a mere geographical
+item, a feature of the landscape; it was
+Power, immanent and inescapable. Shall not the
+mother of the land do what she will with it?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Entering the cañons of the San Gabriel, one is
+struck with the endearing quality of their charm.
+In a country which disdains every sort of prettiness,
+and dares even to use monotony as an element of
+beauty, as California does, it is surprising to find,
+cut in the solid granite wall, little dells all laced
+with fern and saxifrage, and wind swung, frail,
+flowery bells. Little streams come dashing down
+the runways with an elfin movement, with here and
+there a miniature fall "singing like a bird," as
+Muir described it, between moss-encrusted banks.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i066" id="i066"></a>
+<img src="images/i-066.jpg" width="550" height="371" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">GLENDALE, VALLEY OF THE SAN GABRIEL
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Into the open mouths of such cañons have
+retreated the hosts of wildflowers that once in the
+wet seasons overran all that country from San
+Bernardino to the sea,&mdash;the white sage, most
+honeyful of all the sages, the poppies, gilias,
+cream cups, nemophilias which twenty-five years
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_41' name='Page_41'>[41]</a></span>
+ago were as common as meadow grass, as thick as
+the planted fields of alfalfa which have usurped
+them. Settlers who came into this country when
+the trail over the San Gorgiono had not yet
+hardened between iron rails, tell of riding belly
+deep for miles in wild oats and waving bloom,
+and where the trail goes out over the San
+Fernando, toward Camulas, the yellow mustard
+reached its scriptural height, and the birds of the air
+built their nests in it. Now and then in very wet
+years a faint yellow tinge, high up under the bases
+of the hills, is all that is left of the seed which,
+by report, the Padres sowed along the coastwise
+trails, to mark where they trod the circuit of the
+Missions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Everywhere within the cañons, honeyful flowers
+abound, and up from the rocky floors the slopes
+are stiff with chaparral. This characteristic growth,
+which, seen from the open valley flooded by dry
+sun, appears as a mere scurf, a roughened lichen
+on the mountain wall, is in reality a riot of
+manzanita, mahogany, ceanothus, cherry and black
+sage, from ten to fifteen feet high, all but impassable.
+Elsewhere in the ranges to the north, the
+chaparral is loose enough to admit fern and herbaceous
+plants, carpeting the earth, but here the rigid,
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_42' name='Page_42'>[42]</a></span>
+spiny stems contend for three or four feet, thick as
+the carving in old cathedral choirs, before they
+attain light and air enough to put forth leaf or
+twig. On the seaward side of the mountains, miles
+and miles of this dense growth flow over the
+ranges, parted here and there by knife-edge ridges,
+or by huge bosses of country rock, affording a
+great sweep to the eye, reaching far to seaward.
+From here the lower country shrinks to its proper
+proportion&mdash;a toy landscape planted with Noah's
+Ark trees&mdash;and the noise of men is overlaid by the
+great swells of the Pacific which come thundering
+in, lifting far and faint reverberations along the
+ranges.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On either side of these vast conning towers
+it is still possible to trace the indefinite tracks
+which wild creatures make, running clear and
+well defined for short distances and then melting
+unaccountably into the scrub again. Occasionally
+still they discover traces of the wild life in which
+the Sierra Madre once abounded. Deer are known
+to take advantage of such natural outlooks in
+protecting themselves from their natural enemies,
+and from the evidence of frequent visits here, bears
+and foxes and bobcats must have made much the
+same use of them. From such high escarpments
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_43' name='Page_43'>[43]</a></span>
+the Indians would have seen Cabrillo's winged
+boats go by, and from them, all up the coast,
+ascended the pillars of smoke that attended the
+galleon of Francis Drake.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once within the portals of the range, the granite
+walls sheer away from sequestered parks of oak,
+madroño, and Douglas spruce. The trees are not
+thickly set here as in the north, but admit of sunny
+space and murmurous bee pasture between their
+gracefully contrasting boles, and to a thousand
+bright-feathered and scaled things unknown to
+the all-pine or all-redwood forests. Such parks
+or basins vary from a few yards to an acre or
+two in extent, threaded like beads upon a single
+stream. One thinks indeed of the old-fashioned
+"charm string" in which each meadow space has
+its peculiar virtue:&mdash;open sunny shallows, arrowy
+cascades, troops of lilies standing high as a man's
+head, forested fern, columbine, delphinum, and
+scarlet mimulus along the water borders.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They grow slighter as the trail ascends&mdash;it is
+possible now to make nearly the whole distance
+in gravity cars for that purpose provided, but I
+recommend a sure-footed mule for the true
+mountain-lover&mdash;until above the source of the
+streams, from dips and saddles of the range, above
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_44' name='Page_44'>[44]</a></span>
+the summer-shrunken glaciers, where the trees
+are bowed and the chaparral creeps as if awed
+and dizzy, it is possible to have a glimpse of the
+still unconquered and unconquerable "sage brush
+county." All along the back of the Sierra Madre
+wall the desert laps like a slow tide, rolling up and
+receding with the drouths and rains. The eye
+takes it in no less slowly than the imagination.
+It stretches, in fact, to the Colorado, but a haze
+of heat obscures its eastern border; long whitened
+lines of alkali, like wave marks, set the seasonal
+limit of its encroachments. Here and there shows
+the dark checkering of fertile patches, spilled over
+from the rich west-lying valleys; trending east by
+south lies the Sierra Madre like an arm, guarding
+the favoured region.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet in her very favour the Mother Mountain
+is impartial, for equally as she saves the south from
+desertness, she has denied to us the one instrument
+by which the desert could be mastered. Mighty
+as man is in transforming the face of the earth, he
+is nothing without the Rains.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_45' name='Page_45'>[45]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_47' name='Page_47'></a></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_46' name='Page_46'></a></span>
+</p>
+
+<h2>
+III
+<br /><br />
+<span class="s08">
+THE COASTS OF ADVENTURE
+
+</span></h2>
+
+<p>
+Old trails, older than the memory of man, go out
+from the southern country by way of Cahuenga,
+by Eagle Rock, toward that part of the shelving
+coast where the Padre's mustard gold lingered
+longest, as if to mark the locality where the gold
+they missed was first uncovered. But suppose,
+on that day of the year '41, Francisco Lopez,
+<i>major-domo</i> of the Mission San Fernando, had not
+had an appetite for onions? Who knows how
+history would have made itself?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The speculation is idle; anybody named Lopez
+has always a taste for onions because they are
+the nearest thing to garlic. Señor Francisco,&mdash;I
+suppose one may grant him the title at this
+distance&mdash;rested under an oak and dug up the wild
+root with his knife, and the tide of the world's
+emigration set toward the Coasts of Adventure.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_48' name='Page_48'>[48]</a></span>
+I have, holding my papers as I write, an Indian
+basket reputed to be one of those in which, in
+those days, placer gold was washed out of the
+sandy loam; it was given me by one who had it
+from Don Antonio Coronel, and has a pattern
+about it of the low serried hills of the coast district.
+Where it breaks, as all patterns of Indian baskets
+do, to give egress to the spirit resident in things
+dedicated to human use, there are two figures of
+men with arms outstretched, but divided as the
+pioneers who carried the cross into that country
+were from those who followed the lure of gold.
+The basket wears with time, but the pattern holds,
+inwoven with its texture as Romance is woven
+with the history of all that region lying between
+San Francisco on the north and Cahuenga where,
+after a bloodless battle, was consummated the
+cession of California from Mexico.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i077" id="i077"></a>
+<img src="images/i-077.jpg" width="550" height="416" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">A CAÑON IN THE SIERRA MADRES
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+From the white landmark of San Juan Capistrano
+to a point opposite Santa Inez, saints thick
+as sea-birds, standing seaward, break the long
+Pacific swell: San Clemente, Santa Catalina,
+Santa Rosa&mdash;their deep-scored cliffs searched by
+the light, revealing their kinship with the parallel
+mainland ranges. But there are hints here, in the
+plant and animal life and in the climate, milder
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_49' name='Page_49'>[49]</a></span>
+even than that of the opposing channel ports, hints
+which not even the Driest-Dustiness dare despise,
+of those mellower times than ours from which
+all fables of Blessed Islands are sprung. Islands
+"very near the terrestrial paradise" the old Spanish
+romancer described them. Often as not the imagination
+sees more truly than the eye. I myself am
+ready to affirm that something of man's early Eden
+drifted thither on the Kuro-Siwa, that warm
+current deflected to our coast, which, for all we
+know of it, might well be one of the four great
+rivers that went about the Garden and watered it.
+Great golden sun-fish doze upon the island tides,
+flying-fish go by in purple and silver streaks, and
+under the flat bays, which take at times colour that
+rivals the lagoons of Venice, forests of kelp, a-crawl
+with rainbow-coloured life, sleep and sway upon
+tides unfelt of men. There are days at Catalina
+so steeped with harmonies of sea and sun that the
+singing of the birds excites the soothed sense no
+more than if the lucent air had that moment
+dripped in sound. These are the days when the
+accounts that Cabrillo left of his findings there, of
+a civil and religious development superior to the
+tribes of the mainland, beguile the imagination.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One thinks of the watery highway between the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_50' name='Page_50'>[50]</a></span>
+west coast and the channel islands as another
+<i><span lang='es_ES'>Camino Real</span></i> of the sea, where in place of mule
+trains and pacing Padres, went balsas, skin canoes,
+galleons, far-blown Chinese junks, Russian traders,
+slipping under the cliffs of San Juan for untaxed
+hides and tallow, Atlantic whalers, packets rounding
+the Horn, sunk past the load line with
+Argonauts of '49, opium smugglers dropping a
+contraband cask or an equally prohibited coolie
+under the very wing of San Clemente. So many
+things could have happened&mdash;Odysseys, Æneids&mdash;that
+it is with a sigh one resigns the peaks of the
+submerged range, paling and purpling on the west,
+to the student of sea-birds and sea-nourished
+plants.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Looking from the islands landward, the locked
+shores have still for long stretches the aspect of
+undiscovered country. Hills break abruptly in
+the surf or run into narrow moon-shaped belts of
+sand where a mountain arm curves out or the sea
+eats inward. And yet for nearly four centuries
+the secret of the land was blazoned to all the ships
+that passed, in the great fields of poppy gold that
+every wet season flamed fifty miles or more to
+seaward.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One must have seen the Eschscholtzia so, smouldering
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_51' name='Page_51'>[51]</a></span>
+under the mists of spring, to understand the
+thrill that comes of finding them later scattered as
+they are, throughout the gardens of the world. I
+recall how at Rome, coming up suddenly out of
+the catacombs&mdash;we had gone down by another
+entrance and had been wandering for hours in the
+mortuary gloom&mdash;memory leaped up to find a
+great bed of golden poppies tended by brown,
+bearded Franciscans. They couldn't say&mdash;Fray
+Filippo, whom I questioned, had no notion&mdash;whence
+the sun-bright cups had come, except that they
+were common in the gardens of his order. It
+seemed a natural sort of thing for some Mission
+Padre, seeking a memento of himself to send back
+to his Brothers of St. Francis half a world away,
+to have chosen these shining offsprings of the sun.
+There was confirmation in the fact that Fray
+Filippo knew them not by the unspellable botanical
+name, but by the endearing Castilian "dormidera,"
+sleepy-eyed, in reference to their habit of unfolding
+only to the light; but the connecting thread was
+lost. Channel fishermen still, in spite of the
+obliterating crops, can trace the blue lines of lupins
+between faint streaks of poppy fires, and catch
+above the reek of their boats, when the land wind
+begins, blown scents of <i><span lang='es_ES'>islay</span></i> and ceanothus.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_52' name='Page_52'>[52]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No rivers of water of notable size pour down
+this west coast, but rivers of green flood the shallow
+cañons. Here and there from the crest of the
+range one catches an arrowy glimpse of a seasonal
+stream, but from the sea-view the furred chaparral
+is unbroken except for bare ridges, wind-swept even
+of the round-headed oaks. This coast country is a
+favourite browsing place for deer; they can be
+seen there still in early summer, feeding on the
+acorns of the scrub oaks, and especially on the
+tender twigs of wind-fallen trees, or herding at
+noon in the deep fern which closes like cleft waters
+over their heads. Until within a few years it was
+no unlikely thing to hear little black bears snorting
+and snuffing under the manzanita, of the
+berries of which they are inordinately fond. This
+lovely shrub with its twisty, satiny stems of wine-red,
+suffusing brown, its pale conventionalised
+leaves and flat little umbels of berries, suggests
+somehow the carving on old Gothic choirs, as
+though it borrowed its characteristic touch from an
+external shaping hand; as if with its predetermined
+habit of growth it had a secret affinity for man, and
+waited but to be transplanted into gardens. It
+needs, however, no garden facilities, but shapes
+itself to the most inhospitable conditions. About
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_53' name='Page_53'>[53]</a></span>
+the time it begins to put forth its thousand waxy
+bells, in December or January, the toyon, the
+native holly, is at its handsomest. This is a late
+summer flowering shrub that in mid-winter loses
+a little of its glossy green, and above its yellowing
+foliage bears berries in great scarlet clusters.
+Between these two overlapping ends, the gaumet
+of the chaparral is run in blues of wild lilac, reds
+and purples of rhus and buckthorn and the wide,
+white umbels of the alder, which here becomes a
+tree fifty to sixty feet in height. It is the only one
+of the tall chaparral which has edible fruit, for
+though bears and Indians make a meal of manzanita,
+it does not commend itself to cultivated
+taste. More humble species, huckleberry, thimble,
+and blackberry, crowd the open spaces under the
+oak-madroño forests, or, as if they knew their
+particular usefulness to man, come hurrying to
+clearings of the axe, and may be seen holding hands
+as they climb to cover the track of careless fires.
+In June whole hill-slopes, under the pine and madroños,
+burn crimson with sweet, wild strawberries.
+The wild currant and the fuchsia-flowered gooseberry
+are not edible, but they are under no such
+obligation; they "make good" with long wands of
+jewel-red, drooping blossoms, and in the case of the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_54' name='Page_54'>[54]</a></span>
+currant, with delicate pink racemes, thrown out
+almost before the leaves while the earth still smells
+of winter dampness. Though nobody seems to
+know how it travelled so far, the "incense shrub"
+is a favourite of English gardens where, before the
+primroses begin, it serves the same purpose as in
+the west coast cañons, quickening the sense into
+anticipations of beauty on every side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Inland the close, round-backed hills draw into
+ranks and ranges, making way for chains of fertile
+valleys which also fill out the Californian's calendar
+of saints. But, in fact, your true Californian prays
+to his land as much as ever the early Roman did,
+and pours on it libations of water and continuous
+incense of praise. Every one of these longish,
+north-trending basins is superlatively good for
+something,&mdash;olives or wheat, perhaps; Pajaro
+produces apples and Santa Clara has become the
+patroness of prunes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nothing could be more ethereally lovely than
+the spring aspect of the orchard country. It begins
+with the yellowing of the meadow lark's breast,
+and then of early mornings, with the appearance,
+as if flecks of the sky had fallen, of great flocks
+of bluebirds that blow about in the ploughed lands
+and are dissolved in rain. Then the poppies spring
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_55' name='Page_55'>[55]</a></span>
+up like torchmen in the winter wheat, and along
+the tips of the apricots, petals begin to show,
+crumpled as the pink lips of children shut upon
+mischievous secrets; a day or two of this and then
+the blossoms swarm as bees, white fire breaks
+out among the prunes, it scatters along the foothills
+like the surf. Toward the end of the blooming
+season all the country roads are defined by thin
+lines of petal drift, and any wind that blows is
+alive with whiteness. After which, thick leafage
+covers the ripening fruit and the valley dozes
+through the summer heat with the farms outlined
+in firm green, like a patchwork quilt drawn up
+across the mountains' knees.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The tree that gives the memorable touch to the
+landscape of the coast valleys is the oak, both the
+roble and encinas varieties. There are others with
+greater claims to distinction, the sequoia, the "big
+tree," lurking in the Santa Cruz mountains, the
+madroño, red-breeched, green-coated, a very Robin
+Hood of trees, sequestered in cool cañons, and the
+redwood, the <i><span lang='es_ES'>palo colorado</span></i>, discovered by the first
+Governor, Don Gaspar de Portola, on his search
+for the lost port of Monte Rey. All these keep
+well back from the main lines of travel. The most
+that the rail tourist sees of them is a line of redwoods,
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_56' name='Page_56'>[56]</a></span>
+perhaps, climbing up from the sea-fronting
+cañons to peer and whisper on the ridges above the
+fruiting orchards. But the oaks go on, keeping
+well in the laps of the hills, avoiding the wind
+rivers, marching steadily across the alluvial basins
+on into the hot interior. They are more susceptible
+to wind influence than almost any other, and mark
+the prevailing direction of the seasonal air currents
+with their three-hundred-year-old trunks as readily
+as reeds under a freshet. You can see them hugging
+the lee side of any cañon, leaning as far as they
+may out of the sea-born draughts, but standing
+apart, true aristocrats among trees, disdaining alike
+one another and the whole race of orchard inmates.
+When in full leaf, for the <i><span lang='es_ES'>roble</span></i> is deciduous, they
+are both of them distinctly paintable, particularly
+when in summer the trunks, grey and aslant,
+upbearing cloud-shaped masses of dark green,
+make an agreeable note against the fawn-coloured
+hills. The <i><span lang='es_ES'>roble</span></i> is a noble tree, high-crowned,
+with a great sweep of branches, but seen in winter
+stripped of its thick, small leafage, it loses interest.
+Its method of branching is fussy, too finely divided,
+and without grace.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i090" id="i090"></a>
+<img src="images/i-090.jpg" width="550" height="371" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">THE CEMETERY, SANTA BARBARA MISSION
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Around Santa Margarita and Paso Robles filmy
+moss spreads a veil over the <i><span lang='es_ES'>robles</span></i> as of Druid
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_57' name='Page_57'>[57]</a></span>
+meditation; one fancies them aloof from the stir
+of present-day life as they were from the bears
+that used to feed on the mast under them. A
+hundred years or so ago the Franciscans drove
+out the bears by an incantation&mdash;I mean by the
+exorcism of the Church enforced with holy water
+and a procession with banners around the Mission
+precinct: "I adjure you, O Bears, by the true God,
+by the Holy God ... to leave the fields to our
+flocks, not to molest them nor come near them."
+But bears or <i>homo sapiens</i>, it is all one to the oaks
+of San Antonio; indeed, if legend is to be credited,
+the four-footed brothers would have been equally
+as acceptable to the patron of the Mission where
+this interesting ceremony took place. I can testify,
+however, that after all this lapse of time the exorcism
+is still in force, for though I have been up and
+down that country many times I have seen no bears
+in it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Things more pestiferous than bears are driven
+out, humours of the blood, stiffness of the joints,
+by the medicinal waters that bubble and seep along
+certain ancient fissures of the country rock. This
+has always seemed to me the very insolence of
+superfluity. Who wishes, when all the air is censed
+with the fragrance of wild vines, to have his nose
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_58' name='Page_58'>[58]</a></span>
+assaulted with fumes of sulphur, even though it is
+known to be good for a number of things? But
+there are some people who could never be got to
+observe the noble proportions of five-hundred-year-old
+oaks with the wild grapes going from tree
+to tree like a tent, except as a by-process incident
+to the drinking of nasty waters. So the land has
+its way even with our weaknesses.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i095" id="i095"></a>
+<img src="images/i-095.jpg" width="550" height="370" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">SYCAMORES, A COAST RANGE CAÑON
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Besides these excursions inland, which bring us in
+almost every case to one of the ancient Franciscan
+foundations, there are two or three ports of call on
+the sea front worth lingering at for more things
+than the pleasant air and the radiant wild bloom.
+One of these is Santa Barbara which Santa Inez
+holds in its lap, curving like a scimitar opposite the
+most northerly of the channel islands. Understand,
+however, that no good comes of thinking
+of Santa Barbara as a place on the map. It is a
+Sargossa of Romance, a haven of last things, the
+last Mission in the hands of the Franciscans, the
+last splendour of the Occupation, the last place
+where mantillas were worn and they danced the
+<i><span lang='es_ES'>fandango</span></i> and <i><span lang='es_ES'>la jota</span></i>; an eddy into which have
+drifted remnants of every delightful thing that
+has passed on the highways of land and sea, which
+here hail one another across the curving moon-white
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_59' name='Page_59'>[59]</a></span>
+beach. Summer has settled there, California
+summer which never swelters, never scorches.
+Frost descends at times from Santa Inez to the
+roofs, but lays no finger on the fuchsias, poinsettias,
+and the heliotropes climbing to second-story
+windows. The wild thickets which connect the
+territory with the town, are vocal with night-singing
+mocking-birds; along the foreshore white
+pelicans divide the mountain-shadowed waters.
+The waters, taking all the sky's changes, race to
+the fairy islands, the chaparral runs back to the
+flanks of Santa Inez showing yellowly through
+the distant blue of pines; overhead a sky clouded
+with light. This is not a paradox but an attempt
+to express the misty luminosity of a heaven filled
+with refractions of the summer-tinted slope, the
+glaucous leafage of the chaparral, the white sand
+and sapphire-glinting water. The sky <i>beyond</i> the
+enclosing mountains has the cambric blueness of
+the superheated interior, but directly overhead it
+has depth and immensity of colour unequalled
+except along the Mediterranean.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Santa Barbara is a port of distinguished visitors;
+more, and more varieties, of sea-birds put in there
+on the long flight from the Arctic to the Isthmus
+than is easily believable. In the Estero&mdash;<i><span lang='es_ES'>esteril</span></i>,
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_60' name='Page_60'>[60]</a></span>
+sterile&mdash;an ill-smelling tide pool lying behind the
+town, may be found at one season or another, all
+the western species that delight the ornithologist.
+The black brant, going by night, and wild swans,
+as many as a score of them together, have been
+noted in its backwaters, and scarcely any stroll
+along the receding surf but is enlivened by the
+resonant, sweet whistle of the plover. In hollows
+of the sands thousands of beach-haunting birds
+may be seen camping for the night, looking like
+some sea-coloured, strange vegetation, and early
+mornings when the channel racing by, leaves the
+bay placid, tens of thousands of shearwaters sleep
+in shouldering ranks that sway with the incoming
+swell as the kelp sways, without being scattered
+by it. One can see the same sight, augmented as
+to numbers, around Monterey, a long day's journey
+to the north as the car goes, long enough and
+lovely enough to deserve another chapter.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_61' name='Page_61'>[61]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_63' name='Page_63'></a></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_62' name='Page_62'></a></span>
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i104" id="i104"></a>
+<img src="images/i-104.jpg" width="550" height="407" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">TALL CHAPARRAL, SANTA CRUZ
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<h2>
+IV
+<br /><br />
+<span class="s08">
+THE PORT OF MONTEREY
+
+</span></h2>
+
+<p>
+Without doubt history is made quite as much by
+the mistakes of men as by their utmost certainties.
+The persistent belief of the ancient geographers in
+the existence of the Straits of Anian, the traditional
+North-West Passage, led to some romancing,
+and to the exploration of the California coast a
+century or so before it was of any particular use to
+anybody. It led also to the bluest bay. Viscaino
+took possession of it for Philip of Spain as early
+as 1602, nearly two hundred years before the
+Franciscans planted a cross there under Viscaino's
+very tree. During all that time the same oaks
+staggered up the slope away from the wind, and
+the scimitar curve of the beach kept back the
+brilliant waters. There is a figure of immensity in
+this more terrifying than the mere lapse of years.
+Not how many times but with what sureness for
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_64' name='Page_64'>[64]</a></span>
+every day the sapphire deep shudders into chrysoprase
+along the white line of the breakers. We
+struggle so to achieve a little brief moment of
+beauty, but every hour at Monterey it is given
+away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The bay lies squarely fronting the Pacific swell,
+about a hundred miles south of the Golden Gate,
+between the horns of two of the little tumbled
+coast ranges, cutting back to receive the waters of
+the Pajaro and the Salinas. From the south the
+hill juts out sharply, taking the town and the
+harbour between its knees, but the north shore is
+blunted by the mountains of Santa Cruz. The
+beach is narrow, and all along its inner curve
+blown up into dunes contested every season by the
+wind and by the quick, bright growth of sand
+verbena, lupins, and mesembryanthemums. The
+waters of the rivers are set back by the tides, they
+are choked with bars and sluiced out by winter
+floods. For miles back into the valleys of Pajaro
+and Salinas, blue and yellow lupins continue the
+colour of the sand and the pools of tide water.
+They climb up the landward slope of the high
+dunes and set the shore a little seaward against
+the diminished surf. Then the equinoctial tide
+rises against the land that the lupins have taken
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_65' name='Page_65'>[65]</a></span>
+and smooths out their lovely gardens with a swift,
+white hand, to leave the beach smooth again for
+the building of pale, wind-pointed cones.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i109" id="i109"></a>
+<img src="images/i-109.jpg" width="550" height="368" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">LOOKING DOWN ON MONTEREY AND THE BAY
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+The valley of the Salinas, which has its only
+natural outlet on the bay, is of the type of coast
+valleys, long, narrow and shallow, given over to
+farming and to memories of Our Lady of Solitude
+lying now as a heap of ruins in a barley field. It
+is a place set apart, where any morning you might
+wake to find the sea has entered between the little,
+brooding hills to rest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Gulls follow the plough there, and pines avoid
+the river basin as though each of them knew very
+well their respective rights in it. One has, however,
+to make a point of such discoveries, for the entrance
+to the valley is obscured by its very candour, lying
+all open as it does to drifting dune and variable sea
+marshes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is even more worth while to follow the flat-bordered
+Pajaro into the shut valley where dozes
+the little town of San Juan Bautista, taking on its
+well-sunned mesa, those placid lapses of self-forgetfulness
+which are to the aged as a foretaste
+of the long sleep. Here it was that the magic muse
+of Music came into the country. It came in a
+little tin-piped, wooden hand-organ, built by one
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_66' name='Page_66'>[66]</a></span>
+Benjamin Dobson of 22 Swan Street, London, in
+the year 1735, but of all its history until it was
+unpacked from mule-back by Padre Lausan in
+1797, there is not a word current. Our acquaintance
+with it begins on the day that the Padre set it up
+in the hills and played, "The Siren's Waltz," "Lady
+Campbell's Reel," and all its repertoire of favourite
+London airs, of which the least appropriate to its
+present mission must have been the one called
+"Go to the Devil." Which only goes to prove
+that the spirit of the Franciscans was often superior
+to their means, for what the simple savages did do
+as soon as they had overcome their superstitious fear
+of the noise box, was to come to Mass to hear it as
+often as possible. There remain three old volumes
+of music written later for the Mission which came
+true to its founding and excelled in all sweet sounds,
+but none, it is said, pleased the Indians so much
+or so raised their spirits as "The Siren's Waltz."
+No doubt its inspiriting strains added something to
+the warlike spirit which led here to the only local
+resistance opposed to the American invasion, for it
+was on the Gavilan heights above the little town
+that Frémont, on the tallest tree that he could find,
+raised the Stars and Stripes, gallantly if somewhat
+prematurely. It was from San Juan that Castro's
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_67' name='Page_67'>[67]</a></span>
+men marched to the final capitulation of Cahuenga,
+and finally from here the last remnant of the old
+life drains away. One hears the echo of it faint
+as the sea sounds that on rare days come trembling
+up the valley on the translucent air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Returning to the bay, one finds all interest
+centering about the Point of Pines, a very ancient,
+rocky termination of the most westerly of the
+coast barriers. The Point, which is really a
+peninsula, is one of the most notable landmarks
+between Point Conception on the south and Fort
+Point at San Francisco. Its lighthouse stands well
+out on a rocky finger, ringed with incessant,
+clanging buoys; between it and Santa Cruz light
+is a roadstead for an empire. A windy bay at best,
+deep tides, and squally surfaces, the waters of
+Monterey have other values than the colourist
+finds in them. Sardines, salmon, cod, tuna, yellow
+tail run with its tides. At most seasons of the
+year whales may be seen spouting there, or are
+cast upon its shoals. At one time the port
+enjoyed a certain prosperity as a whaling station,
+of which small trace remains beside the bleaching
+vertebræ that border certain of the old gardens and
+the persistent whalebone souvenirs of the curio
+dealer. Lateen-rigged fisher fleets flock in and
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_68' name='Page_68'>[68]</a></span>
+out of the harbour, butterfly winged; and all about
+the rock beaches creep the square-toed boats of
+the Japanese and Chinese abalone gatherers.
+Thousands of purple sea-urchins, squid, hundred-fingered
+star-fish, and all manner of slimy sea
+delicacies, these slant-eyed Orientals draw up
+out of the rainbow rock pools and the deeps below
+the receding surf. They go creeping and peering
+about the ebb, their guttural hunting cries borne
+inshore on the quiet air, seeming as much a native
+sea speech as the gabble of the gulls. So in their
+skin canoes and balsas the Indians must have crept
+about the inlets for as long as it requires to lay a
+yard or two of mould over the ancient middens of
+the tribe, as long as it takes to build a barrier of
+silver dunes half a mile seaward. Even at that
+distance the plough turns up the soil evenly
+sprinkled with crumbling shell which holds to the
+last a shred of its old iridescence. Far inland, past
+the Sierra Wall even to the country of Lost
+Borders, I have found amulets of this loveliest of
+the pearl shells, traded for and treasured by a
+people to whom the "Big Water" is a half-credited
+traveller's tale.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+About five hundred yards outside the surf, from
+Laboratory Point, circling the peninsula to Mission
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_69' name='Page_69'>[69]</a></span>
+Point on the south, the submerged rocky ridge
+has grown a great, tawny mane of kelp. Every
+year it is combed and cut by the equinoctial tides,
+and cast ashore in brown, sea-smelling wind-rows,
+and every year it grows again to be the feeding-ground
+of a million water-haunting birds. Here
+the Ancient Murrelet fattens for the long flight to
+the Alaskan breeding-grounds, and in the wildest
+gales the little nocturnal auklets may be heard
+calling to one another above the warring thunder
+of the surf, or when the nights are clear and the
+mists all banded low beneath the moon, they
+startle the beach wanderer with their high keen
+notes and beetle whirring wings. Long triangular
+flights of curlew drop down these beaches against
+the westering sun, with wings extended straight
+above their heads, furling like the little lateen sails
+come home from fishing. Sandpipers, sanderlings,
+all the ripple runners, the skimmers of the receding
+foam, all the scavengers of the tide, the gulls,
+glaucous-winged, ringbilled, and the species
+that take their name from the locality, may
+be found here following the plough as robins do in
+the spring. When the herring school in the bay
+nothing could exceed the multitude and clamour
+of the herring gulls. They stretch out in close
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_70' name='Page_70'>[70]</a></span>
+order, wing beating against wing, actually over
+square miles of the ruffling water between Point
+Pinos and the anchorage. But any attempt to
+render an account of the wild, winged life that
+flashes about the bays of Carmel and Monterey
+would read like an ornithologist's record.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After storms that divide the waters outside the
+bay into great toppling mountains, in the quiet
+strip between the kelp and the beaches, thousands
+of shearwaters may be seen sleeping in long,
+swaying, feathered pontoons, shoulder to shoulder.
+The island rocks standing within the surf, from
+the Point of Pines all down the coast to Point Sur,
+are famous rookeries of cormorant. Watchful and
+black against the guano-whitened rocks, they guard
+their ancestral nests, redecorated each season with
+gay weed, pulled from the painted gardens of the
+deep; turning their long necks this way and that
+like revolving turret-tops, they beat off the
+gluttonous gulls with a devotion which would
+seem to demand some better excuse than the
+naked, greasy, wide-mouthed young. Warm
+mornings these can be seen stretching black-stemmed,
+gaping bills from the nesting hollows,
+waving this way and that like the tips of voracious
+sea anemones. Other rocks, white with salty
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_71' name='Page_71'>[71]</a></span>
+rime, are given by mutual consent to rookeries of
+the yelping seals, the "sea lions" of this coast.
+Moonlight nights they can be seen playing there,
+with the weird half-human suggestion as of some
+mythical sea creatures.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Other and less fortunate adventurers on the
+waters of Monterey have left strange traces on
+that coast; one stumbles on a signboard set up
+among the rocks to mark where such and such a
+vessel went to pieces in a night of storm. Buried
+deep in the beach beyond the anchorage is the
+ancient teakwood hull of the <i>Natala</i>, the ship that
+carried Napoleon to Elba. It brought secularisation
+to the Missions also, after which unfriendly
+service the wind woke in the night and broke it
+against the shore. Just off Point Lobos, the
+Japanese divers after abalones report a strange,
+uncharted, sunken craft, a Chinese junk blown out
+of her course perhaps, or one of those unreported
+galleons that followed a phantom trail of gold all
+up the west coast of the New World. Strange
+mosses come ashore here, tide by tide, all lacy and
+scarf-coloured, and once we found on the tiny strand
+below Pescadero, a log of sandal-wood with faint
+waterworn traces of tool marks still upon it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Most mysterious of all the hints held by the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_72' name='Page_72'>[72]</a></span>
+farthest west&mdash;for behold, when you have come to
+land again, sailing from this port, it is east!&mdash;of a
+time before our time, is the Monterey cypress.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Across the neck of the peninsula, a matter of
+six or eight miles, cuts in the little bay of Carmel,
+a blue jewel set in silver sand. Two points divide
+it from the racing Pacific, the southern limb of
+Punta Pinos, and the deeply divided rocky ledge
+of Lobos&mdash;Lobos, the wolf, with thin, raking,
+granite jaws. Now on these two points, and
+nowhere else in the world, are found natural
+plantations of the trees that might have grown
+in Dante's Purgatorio, or in the imagined forests
+where walked the rapt, tormented soul of Blake.
+Blake, indeed, might have had a hint of these from
+some transplanted seedling on an English terrace,
+for the Monterey cypress is quick-growing for the
+first century or so and one of the most widely
+diffused of trees; but only here on the Point and
+south to Pescadero ranch do they grow of God's
+planting. With writhen trunks and stiff contorted
+limbs they take the storm and flying scud as
+poppies take the sun. Incredibly old, even to the
+eye, they have no soil, nor seek none other than
+the thousand-year litter of their scaly needles, the
+husk of their nut-shaped, woody cones&mdash;the Spirit
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_73' name='Page_73'>[73]</a></span>
+of the Ancient Rocks come to life in a tree.
+Grown under friendly conditions the young trees
+spire as do other conifers, but here they take
+on strange enchanted shapes. Their flat, wind-depressed
+tops are resilient as springs; one may
+lie full length along them, scarcely sunk in the
+minutely-feathered twigs, and watch the coasting
+steamers trail by on seas polished by the heat, or
+the winter surf bursting high in air. Or one
+could steal through their thick plantations unsuspected,
+from twisty trunk to trunk in the black
+shade, feeling the old earth-mood and man's
+primeval fear, the pricks and warnings of a world
+half made. The oldest of the cypresses are attacked
+by a red fungus rust, the colour of corroding
+time. It creeps along the under side of boughs
+and eats away the green, but even then the twisted
+heart wood will outlast most human things.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i122" id="i122"></a>
+<img src="images/i-122.jpg" width="550" height="398" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">PESCADERO, A CHINESE FISHING VILLAGE,
+MONTEREY BAY
+</p>
+
+</div>
+<p>
+The pines of Monterey, though characteristic
+enough of the locality to take on its identifying
+name, are thoroughly plebeian: prolific, quick-growing,
+branching like candelabra when young;
+but in a hundred years or so their wide limbs,
+studded with persistent cones, take on something
+of the picturesque eccentricity that may be noticed
+among the old in rural neighbourhoods. They
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_74' name='Page_74'>[74]</a></span>
+grow freely back into the hills till they are warned
+away from the cañons by the more sequestered
+<i><span lang='es_ES'>palo colorado</span></i>. The Monterey pine is one of the
+long-needled varieties, but of a too open growth
+perhaps, or too flexile to have any voice but a
+faint rustling echo of the ocean. The hill above
+Monterey, crowned with them, is impressive
+enough; they look lofty and aloof and dark against
+the sky, but growing in a wood they are seen to be
+too spindling and sparse-limbed to be interesting.
+The oaks do better by the landscape, all of the
+<i><span lang='es_ES'>encinas</span></i> variety, bearing stiff clouds of evergreen
+foliage in lines simple enough to compose beautifully
+with the slow scimitar sweep of the bay and
+the round cloud-masses that, gathering from the sea,
+hang faintly pearled above the horizon. There
+are no redwoods on the peninsula; straggling lines
+of them look down from Palo Corona on Carmel
+Bay, walking one after another, with their odd
+tent-shaped tops and long branches all on the
+windward side, like a procession of friars walking
+against the wind. On the Santa Cruz coast, and
+in small groups near Carmel, grows the tan bark
+oak, not a true oak, but of the genus <i>Pasania</i>,
+whose nearest surviving congeners are no nearer
+than Siam. How it came here, survivor of an
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_75' name='Page_75'>[75]</a></span>
+earlier world, or drifting in on the changing
+Japanese current, no one knows. Apparently no
+one cares, for the only use the Santa Crucians have
+found for it is to tan shoe leather.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i127" id="i127"></a>
+<img src="images/i-127.jpg" width="550" height="371" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">CYPRESS POINT, NEAR CARMEL
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Three little towns have taken root on the
+Peninsula: two on the bay side, the old pueblo
+of Monterey with its white-washed adobes still
+contriving to give character to the one wide
+street; Pacific Grove, utterly modern, on the surf
+side of Punta de Pinos, a town which began, I
+believe, as a resort for the churchly minded&mdash;a
+very clean and well-kept and proper town, absolutely
+exempt, as the deeds are drawn to assure
+us, "from anything having a tendency to lower
+the moral atmosphere," a town where the lovely
+natural woods have given place to houses every
+fifty feet or so, all nicely soldered together with
+lines of bright scarlet and clashing magentas and
+rosy pinks of geraniums and pelargoniums in a
+kind of predetermined cheerfulness; in short, a
+town where nobody would think of living who
+wanted anything interesting to happen to him.
+Above it on the hill, the Presidio commands
+the naked slope, fronting toward Santa Cruz,
+raking the open roadstead with its guns. It was
+under this hill on the harbour side, where a little
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_76' name='Page_76'>[76]</a></span>
+creek still runs a rill in the rainy season, that
+Viscaino heard the first mass in California, and
+nearly two hundred years later, Padre Serra set up
+the cross.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On June 30, 1770, that being the Holy Day
+of Pentecost, was founded here the Mission of
+San Carlos Borromeo, afterward transplanted for
+sufficient reasons, over the hill six miles away, on
+Carmel River. The town is full of reminders of
+the days of the Spanish Occupation, when it was
+the capital of Alta California. Old gardens here
+have still the high adobe walls, old houses the long
+galleries and little wrought-iron balconies; times
+yet the tide rises in the streets of the town, and
+still the speech is soft.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is also possible to buy <i><span lang='es_ES'>tomales</span></i> there and
+<i><span lang='es_ES'>enchiladas</span></i> and <i><span lang='es_ES'>chile concarne</span></i> which will for the
+moment restore your faith in certain conceptions
+of a hereafter that of late have lost popularity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Half a mile back from the beach, and divided
+from the town by the old cemetery, in a deep
+alluvial flat grown to great oaks and creeping
+sycamores, is situated one of the famous winter
+resorts of the world, Hôtel Del Monte. I can
+recommend it with great freedom to those curiously
+constituted people who have to have an excuse for
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_77' name='Page_77'>[77]</a></span>
+being out of doors. The Del Monte drives and
+golf links are said by those who have used them,
+to provide such excuse in its most compelling
+form. Those who suffer under no such necessity
+will do well to take the white road climbing the
+hill out of old Monterey, and drop down the other
+side of it into Carmel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the top of this hill the lovely curve of the
+bay, disappearing far to the north under a violet
+mist, is pure Greek in its power to affect the
+imagination. Its blueness is the colour that lies
+upon the Gulf of Dreams; the ivory rim of the
+dunes, the shadowed blue of the terraces set on
+a sudden all the tides of recollection back on
+Salonica, Lepanto, the hill of Athens. You are
+reconciled for a moment to the chance of history
+which whelmed the colourful days of the Spanish
+Occupation. They could never have lived up
+to it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But once on the Carmel side of the peninsula,
+regret comes back very poignantly. The bay is a
+miniature of the other, intensified, the connoisseur's
+collection,&mdash;blue like the eye of a peacock's feather,
+fewer dunes but whiter, a more delicate tracery on
+them of the beach verbena, hills of softer contours,
+tawny, rippled like the coat of a great cat sleeping
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_78' name='Page_78'>[78]</a></span>
+in the sun. Carmel Valley breaks upon the bay
+by way of the river which chokes and bars, runs
+dry in summer or carries the yellow of its sands
+miles out in winter a winding track across the
+purple inlet. It is a little valley and devious,
+reaching far inland. Above its source the peaks
+of Santa Lucia stand up; for its southern bulwark,
+Palo Corona. Willows, sycamores, elder, wild
+honeysuckle, and great heaps of blackberry vines
+hedge the path of its waters.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i136" id="i136"></a>
+<img src="images/i-136.jpg" width="415" height="550" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">SANTA CRUZ MOUNTAINS, THE COAST RANGE
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Where the valley widens behind the low barrier
+that shuts out the sea, sits the Mission of San
+Carlos Borromeo, once the spiritual capital of Alta
+California. Here Junipero Serra, and after him
+the other Padre Presidentes, held the administration
+of Mission affairs, and from here he wandered forth
+on foot, up and down this whole coast from San
+Diego to Solano, with pacification and the seeds of
+civilisation. Here on the walls, faintly to be traced
+beneath the scorn of time, he blazoned with his
+own hands the Burning Heart, the symbol of his
+own inward flame. Here, in his seventy-first year,
+he died and was buried on the gospel side of the
+altar. It is reported that his last act was to walk
+to the doorway to look once, a long look, on the
+hills turning amber under the August sun, on the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_79' name='Page_79'>[79]</a></span>
+heaven-blue water and the white hands of the surf
+beating against the cliffs of Lobos; looked on the
+fields and the orchard planted by his own hand, on
+the wattled huts of the neophytes redeemed, as he
+believed them, to all eternity, after which he lay
+down and slept. It is further reported in the
+annals of the Mission that it was necessary to
+place a guard about the wasted body in its shabby
+brown gown, to defend it from the crowding
+mourners craving each a relic of the blessed
+remains. Had I lived at that time I should have
+been among them, for he was a great soul, and
+have I not felt even at this distance of the years
+the touch of his high fervours! San Carlos is one
+of the best-conditioned of these abandoned fortresses
+of the faith: the ancient pear trees are still in
+bearing, the wild mustard yellows in the fields, its
+architecture still betrays the uncertain hand of the
+savage; back in unsearchable recesses of the hills
+linger still some Indians whose garbled greeting is
+a memory of the <i><span lang='es_ES'>Ama Dios</span></i> which the padres
+taught them. Until a few years ago the prayer-post,
+a rude slab with the triple-knotted cord of
+the Franciscans carved around it, still stood on the
+hill at the end of the path their devout feet made,
+resorting to it for courage and consolation. These
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_80' name='Page_80'>[80]</a></span>
+mementos fade, but year by year the impress of
+the great spirit of Serra grows plainer, like one of
+those trodden paths of long ago which show not
+at all if you seek them in the grass or near at
+hand, but from the vantage of Palo Corona are
+traceable far across the landscape.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The modern Carmel is a place of resort for
+painter and poet folk. Beauty is cheap there; it
+may be had in superlative quality for the mere
+labour of looking out of the window. It is the
+absolute setting for romance. No shipping ever
+puts in at the singing beaches. The freighting
+teams from the Sur with their bells a-jangle, go by
+on the country road, but great dreams have visited
+the inhabitants thereof. Spring visits it also with
+yellow violets all up the wooded hills, and great
+fountain sprays of sea-blue ceanothus. Summer
+reddens the berries of the manzanita and mellows
+the poppy-blazoned slopes to tawny saffron.
+Strong tides arrive unheralded from some far-off
+deep-sea disturbance and shake the beaches.
+Suddenly, on the quietest days, some flying
+squadron of the deep breaks high over Lobos and
+neighs in her narrow caverns. Blown foam,
+whipped all across the Pacific, is cast up like weed
+along the sand and skims the wave-marks with a
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_81' name='Page_81'>[81]</a></span>
+winged motion. Whole flocks of these foam-birds
+may be seen scudding toward the rock-corners of
+Mission Point after the equinoctial winds. Other
+tides the sea slips far out on new-made level
+reaches, and leaves the wet sand shining after the
+sun goes down like the rosy inside pearl of the
+abalone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The forests of Point Pinos are sanctuary. It is
+still possible to hear there at long intervals the
+demoniac howl of the little grey dog of the wilderness,
+"Brother Coyote," the butt, the cat's-paw, the
+Jack Dullard of Indian folklore, and sometimes in
+the open country below Point Lobos to see one
+curious and agaze from brown, naked bosses of the
+hills. Any warm afternoon, by lying very still a
+long time in the <i><span lang='es_ES'>encinal</span></i>, one may observe the
+country-coloured bobcat, tawny as the grass in
+summer, slipping from shade to shade. Sometimes
+if startled he will turn and face you with his blinking,
+yellow, half-hypnotic stare before he returns
+to his unguessed errand. Any morning you may
+find about your bungalow innumerable prints as of
+baby palms pressed downward in the dust, the
+tracks of the friendly little racoons who may be
+heard bubbling in the shallow cañons any moonlight
+night. Often I have left a cut melon under
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_82' name='Page_82'>[82]</a></span>
+my window for the sake of seeing, an hour after
+moonrise, two or three of them scooping out the
+pink heart, spatting one another for helpings out
+of turn, keeping, in spite of the little gluttons you
+know them to be, a great affectation of daintiness.
+The night-cry of these little creatures is difficult
+to distinguish from the love-call of the horned owl,
+who on the undark nights of summer skims the
+low foreshore for the sake of the field-mice and
+gophers that feed on the seeds of the beach grasses.
+Every sort of migratory bird that passes up and
+down this coast lingers a while in the neighbourhood
+of Monterey, and some species, like the Point
+Pinos juncos, take from it their distinctive name.
+But if, when you walk in the woods, the Stellar
+jay has first sight of you, you will find them
+singularly empty, for these blue-jacketed policemen
+of the pines permit nothing to pass them unannounced.
+Of all the wood-folk, the wise quail
+alone ignores their strident warnings. The quail
+have learned not only the certainty of safety but
+its absolute limit. I have seen whole flocks of
+them, scared by the gun, whirring out of the public
+lands to a point not out of gunshot but within the
+forbidden ground, from which they send back soft
+twitterings of defiance. It is not, however, their
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_83' name='Page_83'>[83]</a></span>
+habit to flush except in great danger, but to run to
+cover, moving with a peculiar elusive rhythm, like
+the rippling of a snake. This plump little partridge,
+for it is only in the common speech that he becomes
+a quail, is the apt spirit of the chaparral&mdash;cheerful,
+social, strong in the domestic virtues; his crest not
+floating backward in warrior fashion, but cocked
+forward over an eye, he has all the air of the
+militant bourgeois, who could fight of course, but
+finds that running matches better with his inclinations.
+Just at the end of rains, before mating begins,
+hundreds of them may be seen feeding in the flock
+on open hillsides, and the thickets of buckthorn
+and ceanothus ring with their soft Spanish
+<i><span lang='es_ES'>Cuidado!</span></i>&mdash;Have a care!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Three roads go up out of the peninsula to
+entice the imagination&mdash;that which we have
+already taken to the hills of Salinas and the little
+town of San Juan, the road to Carmel Valley, and
+the adventurous trail which leads all down the well-bitten
+coast past Sur and Pieoras Blancos. The
+Valley road turns off at the top of the divide
+between Carmel and Monterey; it passes on the
+landward side of the Mission into the river-bottom
+and skirts the narrow chain of farms, rising with
+the rise of the thinly-forested hills toward Tasajara,
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_84' name='Page_84'>[84]</a></span>
+the Place of Springs. Here it is lost in the
+intricacies of the "back country." Deer-hunters
+go that way in the season, and those whose delight
+it is to lose themselves in the wilderness, to taste
+wild fruit and know no roof but the windy tent of
+stars. Years since there used to come out of that
+country shy-spoken, bearded men with bear-meat
+to sell and wild honey in the honeycomb, rifled
+from hiving rocks and hollow trees; but I fancy
+they are all dead now, or translated into the tall
+moss-bearded pines.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The coast road, after it leaves Point Lobos
+behind, goes south and south, between high trackless
+hills and the lineless Pacific floor. From the
+Point you can see it rise over bare, sea-breasting
+hills, and disappear in narrow cañons down which,
+it is reported, immeasurable redwoods follow the
+white-footed creeks almost to the surf. Dim,
+violet-tinted islands rise offshore to break the sea's
+assault. Now and then one ventures in that direction
+as far as Arbolado, to return prophesying.
+But the most of us are wiser, understanding that
+the best service the road can render us is to remain
+a dramatic and unlimned possibility.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_85' name='Page_85'>[85]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_87' name='Page_87'></a></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_86' name='Page_86'></a></span>
+</p>
+
+<h2>
+V
+<br /><br />
+<span class="s08">
+OLD SPANISH GARDENS
+
+</span></h2>
+
+<p>
+Dona Ina Manuelita Echivarra had come
+to the time of life when waists were not to be
+mentioned. It took all the evidence of her name
+to convince you that her cheek had once known
+tints of the olive and apricot. Tio Juan, who
+sunned himself daily in her patio, had achieved
+the richness of weathered teak; his moustachios
+were whitened as with the rime that collects on
+old adobes sometimes near the sea-shore. But
+Dona Ina, who missed by a score of years his mark
+of the days of <i><span lang='es_ES'>mañana por la mañana</span></i>, was muddily
+dark, and her moustache&mdash;but one does not suggest
+such things of a lady, and that Dona Ina was a
+lady could be proved by a foot so delicately arched
+and pointed, an ankle so neat that there was not
+another like it in your acquaintance save the mate
+to it.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_88' name='Page_88'>[88]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once you had seen it peeping forth from under
+the black skirt&mdash;have not Castilian ladies worn
+black immemorially?&mdash;you did not require the
+assurance of Tio Juan that there was no one in
+her day could have danced <i><span lang='es_ES'>la jota</span></i> with Dona Ina
+Manuelita.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She would clack the castanets for you occasionally
+still, just to show how it was done, or with
+the guitar resting on the arm of her chair&mdash;laps
+were no more to be thought of than waists were&mdash;she
+would quaver a song, <i><span lang='es_ES'>La Golindrina</span></i> for choice,
+or <i><span lang='es_ES'>La Noche esta Serena</span></i>. But unquestionably
+Dona Ina's time had gone by for shining at anything
+but conversation. She could talk, and never
+so fruitfully as when the subject was her garden.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A Spanish garden is a very intimate affair. It
+is the innermost under-garment of the family life.
+Dona Ina's was walled away from the world by
+six feet of adobe, around the top of which still
+lingered the curved red tiles of Mission manufacture.
+It was not spoken of as the garden at
+all, it was the patio, an integral part of the
+dwelling. There was, in fact, a raw hide cot on
+the long gallery which gave access to it, and
+Dona Ina's drawn-work chemises bleaching in
+the sun. The patio is a gift to us from Andalusia;
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_89' name='Page_89'>[89]</a></span>
+it is more Greek than Oriental, and the English
+porch has about as much relation to it as the
+buttons on the back of a man's coat to the sword-belt
+they were once supposed to accommodate.
+The patio is the original mud-walled enclosure of
+a people who preferred living in the open but were
+driven to protection; the rooms about three sides
+of it were an afterthought.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i150" id="i150"></a>
+<img src="images/i-150.jpg" width="550" height="438" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">THE PATIO, OLD SPANISH RESIDENCE
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+The Echivarra patio did not lack the indispensable
+features of the early California establishment,
+the raised grill or cooking platform, and the ramada,
+the long vine-covered trellis where one took wine
+with one's friends, or the ladies of the family sat
+sewing at their interminable drawn work, <i><span lang='es_ES'>enramada</span></i>.
+The single vine which covered the twenty-foot
+trellis was of Mission stock, and had been planted
+by Dona Ina's father in the year the Pathfinder
+came over Tejon Pass into the great twin valleys.
+In Dona Ina's childhood a wine-press had stood in
+the corner of the patio where now there was a
+row of artichokes, which had been allowed to seed
+in order that their stiff silken tassels, dyed blue
+and crimson, might adorn the pair of china vases
+on either side the high altar. Dona Ina was
+nothing if not religious. In the corner of the
+patio farthest from the gallery, a fig-tree&mdash;this
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_90' name='Page_90'>[90]</a></span>
+also is indispensable&mdash;hung over the tiled wall like
+a cloud. There was a weeping willow in the midst
+of the garden, and just outside, on either side the
+door, two great pepper trees of the very stock of
+the parent of all pepper trees in Alta California,
+which a sea captain from South America gave to
+the Padre at San Luis Rey. Along the east wall
+there were pomegranates.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A pomegranate is the one thing that makes me
+understand what a pretty woman is to some men&mdash;the
+kind of prettiness that was Dona Ina's in the
+days when she danced <i><span lang='es_ES'>la jota</span></i>. The flower of the
+pomegranate has the crumpled scarlet of lips that
+find their excuse in simply being scarlet and folded
+like the petals of a flower; and then the fruit, warm
+from the sunny wall, faintly odorous, dusky flushed!
+It is so tempting when broken open&mdash;that sort
+opens of its own accord if you leave it long enough
+on the bush&mdash;the rich heart colour, and the pleasant
+uncloying, sweet, sub-acid taste. One tastes and
+tastes&mdash;but when all is said and done there is
+nothing to a pomegranate except colour and
+flavour, and at least if it does not nourish neither
+does it give you indigestion. That is what
+suggests the comparison; there are so many
+people who would like to find a pretty woman
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_91' name='Page_91'>[91]</a></span>
+in the same category. Always when we sat
+together nibbling the rosy seeds, I could believe,
+even without the evidence of the ankles, that
+Dona Ina had had her pomegranate days. Only,
+of course, she would not have smelled so of musk
+and&mdash;there is no denying it&mdash;of garlic. Thick-walled
+old adobes of the period of the Spanish
+Occupation give off a faint reek of this compelling
+condiment at every pore, and as for the musk,
+it was always about the gallery in saucers and
+broken flower-pots.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet Dona Ina was sensitive to odours: she
+told me that she had had the datura moved from
+the place where her mother had planted it, to
+the far end of the patio, where after nightfall its
+heavy, slightly fetid perfume, unnoticeable by day,
+scented all the air. She added that she felt
+convicted by this aversion of a want of sentiment
+toward a plant whose wide, papery-white bells
+went by the name of "Angels' trumpets."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the day that she told me about the datura,
+which I had only recognised by its resemblance
+to its offensive wayside congener, the "jimson
+weed," the Señora Echivarra had been washing
+her hair with a tonic made of oil expressed from
+the seeds of the megharizza after a recipe which
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_92' name='Page_92'>[92]</a></span>
+her mother had had from <i>her</i> mother, who had
+it from an Indian who used to peddle vegetables
+from the Mission, driving in every Saturday in
+an ancient caretta. I was interested to know if
+it were any more efficacious than the young shoots
+of the golden poppy fried in olive oil, which I had
+already tried. So we fell to talking of the virtues
+of plants and their application.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We began with the blessed "herb of the saints,"
+dried bunches of which hung up under the rafters
+of the gallery as an unfailing resort in affections of
+the respiratory tract, and <i><span lang='es_ES'>yerba buena</span></i>, in which she
+was careful to distinguish between the creeping,
+aromatic <i><span lang='es_ES'>del campo</span></i> of the woodlands and the <i><span lang='es_ES'>yerba
+buena del poso</span></i>, "herb of the well," the common
+mint of damp places. When she added that the
+buckskin bag on the wall contained shavings of
+<i><span lang='es_ES'>cascara sagrada</span></i>, the sacred bark of the native
+buckthorn, indispensable to all nurseries, I knew
+that she had named two of the three most
+important contributions of the west to the modern
+pharmacopœia. This particular bag of bark had
+been sent from Sonoma County, for south of
+Monterey it grows too thin to be worth the
+gathering. The Grindelia, she told me, had come
+from the salt marshes about the mouth of the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_93' name='Page_93'>[93]</a></span>
+Pajaro, where Don Gaspar de Portola must have
+crossed going northward.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And were you then at such pains to secure
+them?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"In the old days, yes," she assured me. In
+her mother's time there was a regular traffic carried
+on by means of roving Indians in healing herbs
+and simples; things you could get now by no
+means whatever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"As for instance&mdash;&mdash;?" I was curious.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Well, there was creosote gum, which came from
+the desert beyond the Sierra Wall, valuable for
+sores and for rheumatism. It took me a moment
+or two, however, to recognise in her appellation
+of it (<i><span lang='es_ES'>hideondo</span></i>, stinking) the shiny, shellac-covered
+<i><span lang='es_ES'>larrea</span></i> of the arid regions. There were roots also
+of the holly-leaved barberry, which came from wet
+mountains northward, and of the "skunk cabbage,"
+which were to be found only in soggy mountain
+meadows, where any early spring, almost before
+the frost was out of the ground, bears could be seen
+rooting it from the sod, fairly burying themselves in
+the black, peaty loam.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But when it came to <i><span lang='es_ES'>yerba mansa</span></i>, Dona Ina
+averred, her mother would trust nobody for its
+gathering. She would take an Indian or two and
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_94' name='Page_94'>[94]</a></span>
+as many of her ten children as could not be trusted
+to be left at home, and make long <i><span lang='es_ES'>pasears</span></i> into the
+coast ranges for this succulent cure-all. I knew it
+well for one of the loveliest of meadow-haunting
+plants; wherever springs babbled, wherever a
+mountain stream lost itself under the roble oaks,
+the <i><span lang='es_ES'>yerba mansa</span></i> lifted above its heart-shaped
+leaves of pale green, quaint, winged cones on
+pink, pellucid stems. But I had never heard
+one half of the curative wonders which Dona
+Ina related of it. Efficacious in rheumatism,
+invaluable in pulmonary complaints, its bruised
+leaves reduced swellings, the roots were tonic and
+alterative.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I spare you the whole list, for Dona Ina was
+directly of the line of that lovely Señorita who
+had disdainfully described the English as the race
+who "pay for everything," and to her mind it took
+a whole category of virtues to induce so much
+effort as a trip into the mountains which had
+not a <i><span lang='es_ES'>baile</span></i> or a <i><span lang='es_ES'>fiesta</span></i> at the end of it. Other
+things that were sought for by the housewives
+of the Spanish Occupation were <i><span lang='es_ES'>amole</span></i>, or soap-root,
+the bulbs of a delicate, orchid-like lily which
+comes up in the late summer among the stems
+of the chaparral, and the roots of the wild gourd,
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_95' name='Page_95'>[95]</a></span>
+the <i><span lang='es_ES'>chili-cojote</span></i>, a powerful purgative. Green fruit
+of this most common pest, said Dona Ina, pounded
+to a pulp, did wonders in the way of removing
+stains from clothing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then there was artemisia, romero, azalea, the
+blue-eyed grass of our meadows, upon an infusion
+of which fever patients can subsist for days, and
+elder, potent against spells, and there was Virgin's
+bower, which brought us back to the patio, for a
+great heap of it lay on the roof of the gallery,
+contesting the space there with the yellow banksia
+roses. I had supposed, until the Señora Echivarra
+mentioned it, that its purpose was purely ornamental,
+but I was to learn that it had come into
+the garden as <i><span lang='es_ES'>yerba de chivato</span></i> about the time the
+barbed-wire fences of the gringo began to make
+a remedy for cuts indispensable to the ranchero who
+valued the appearance of his live stock. When the
+eye, travelling along its twisty stems and twining
+leaf-stalks, came to a clump of yarrow growing
+at the root of it I began at once to suspect the
+whole garden. Was not the virtue of yarrow
+known even to the Greeks?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was thyme flowering in the damp corner
+beyond the dripping faucet, and pot-marigold,
+lavender, rosemary, and lemon verbena, all plants
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_96' name='Page_96'>[96]</a></span>
+that grow deep into the use and remembrance
+of man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No friend of our race, not even the dog, has
+been more faithful. The stock of these had come
+overseas from Spain&mdash;were not the Phœnicians
+credited with introducing the pomegranate into
+Hispaniola?&mdash;and thence by way of the Missions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All the borders of Dona Ina's garden were
+edged with rosy thrift, a European variety; and
+out on the headlands, a mile away, a paler, native
+cousin of it bloomed gaily with beach asters and
+yellow sand verbenas, but there was no one who
+knew by what winds, what communicating rootlets,
+they had exchanged greetings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Observation, travelling by way of the borders,
+came to the datura, which was to set the conversation
+off again, this time not of plants curative,
+but hurtful. We knew of the stupefying effects
+of the bruised pods and roots of this species, and&mdash;this
+was my contribution&mdash;how the Paiute Indians
+used to administer the commoner variety, called
+<i>main-oph-weep</i>, to their warriors to produce the
+proper battle frenzy, and especially to young
+women about to undergo the annual ordeal of
+the "Dance of Marriageable Maidens."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Every year, at the spring gathering of the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_97' name='Page_97'>[97]</a></span>
+tribes, the maidens piled their dowries in a heap,
+and for three days, fasting, danced about it. If
+they fell or fainted, it was a sure sign they were
+not yet equal to the duties of housekeeping and
+childbearing; but I had had Paiute women tell
+me that they would never have endured the trial
+without a mild decoction of <i>main-oph-weep</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It was different with us," insisted Dona Ina;
+"many a time we have danced the sun up over
+the mountain, and been ready to begin again the
+next evening...." But I wished to talk of the
+properties of plants, not of young ladies.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The mystery of poison plants oppressed me.
+One may understand how a scorpion stings in
+self-protection, but what profit has the "poison
+oak" of its virulence? It is not oak at all, but
+<i>Rhus trilobata</i>, and in the spring whole hillsides
+are enlivened by the shining bronze of its young
+foliage, or made crimson in September. But the
+pollen that floats from it in May in clouds, the
+sticky sap, or even the acrid smoke from the
+clearing where it is being exterminated, is an active
+poison to the human skin, though I had not heard
+that any animal suffered similarly. Dona Ina
+opined that there was never an evil plant let loose
+in the gardens of the Lord but the remedy was
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_98' name='Page_98'>[98]</a></span>
+set to grow beside it. A wash of manzanita tea,
+Grindelia, or even buckthorn, she insisted, was
+excellent for poison oak. Best of all was a paste
+of pounded "soap root." She knew a plant, too,
+which was corrective of the form of madness induced
+by the "loco" weed, whose pale foliage and
+delicately tinted, bladdery pods may be found
+always about the borders of the chaparral. For
+the convulsions caused by wild parsnip there was
+the wonder-working <i><span lang='es_ES'>yerba del pasmo</span></i>. This she
+knew also as a specific for snake-bite and tetanus.
+So greatly was it valued by mothers of families
+in the time of the Spanish Occupation, that when
+a clearing was made for a house and patio, in any
+country where it grew, a plant or two was always
+left standing. But it was not until I had looked
+for it, where she said I would find it between the
+oleander and the lemon verbena, that I recognised
+the common "grease-wood," the chamise of the
+mesa country.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But were there no plants, Dona Ina, which
+had another meaning, flowers of affection, corrective
+to the spirit?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Angelica," she considered doubtfully. Young
+maids, on occasions of indecision, would pin a sprig
+of it across their bosoms, she said, and after they
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_99' name='Page_99'>[99]</a></span>
+had been to church would find their doubts resolved;
+and there was yarrow, which kept your
+lover true, particularly if you plucked it with the
+proper ceremony from a young man's grave.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dona Ina remembered a fascinating volume of
+her mother's time, the <i>Album Mexicana</i>, in which
+the sentimental properties of all flowers were set
+forth. "There was the camelia, a beautiful woman
+without virtue, and the pomegranate&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But the flowers of New Spain, Dona Ina, was
+there nothing of these?" I insisted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Of a truth, yes, there was the cactus flower, not
+the opunta, the broad-leaved spiny sort, of which
+hedges were built in the old days, but the low,
+flamy-blossomed, prickly variety of hot sandy
+places. If a young man wore such a one pinned
+upon his velvet jacket it signified, 'I burn for
+you.'"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And if he wore no flower at all, how then?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dona Ina laughed, "<span lang='es_ES'><i><span lang='es_ES'>Si me quieros, no me
+quieros</span></i></span>"; she referred to the common yellow composite
+which goes by the name of "sunshine," or in
+the San Joaquin, where miles of it mixed with
+blue phacelias brighten with the spring, as "fly-flower."
+"In the old Spanish playing-cards," said
+Dona Ina, "the Jack of spades had such a one
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_100' name='Page_100'>[100]</a></span>
+in his hand, but when I was a girl no caballero
+would have been caught saying, 'Love me, love me
+not!' They left all that to the señoritas."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a Castilian rose growing beside me.
+Now a Castilian rose is not in the least what you
+expect it to be. It is a thick, cabbagy florescence,
+the petals short and not recurved, the pink hardly
+deeper than that of the common wild rose, the
+leafage uninteresting. One has to remember that
+it distinguished itself long before the time of the
+tea and garden hybrids, and, I suspect, borrowed
+half its charm from the faces it set off. For there
+was never but one way in the world for a rose
+to be worn, and that is the way Castilian beauties
+discovered so long ago that centuries have not
+made any improvement in it. Set just behind the
+ear and discreetly veiled by the mantilla, it suggests
+the effulgent charm of Spain, tempered by mystery.
+The Señora Echivarra had followed my glance,
+and nodded acquiescence to my thought. "In
+dressing for a <i><span lang='es_ES'>baile</span></i>, one would have as soon left
+off the rose as one's fan. One wore it even when
+the dress was wreathed with other flowers."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And did you, then, go wreathed in flowers?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Assuredly; from the garden if we had them,
+or from the field. I remember once I was all blue
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_101' name='Page_101'>[101]</a></span>
+larkspurs, here and here ..." she illustrated on
+her person, "and long flat festoons of the <i><span lang='es_ES'>yerba
+buena</span></i> holding them together."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It would have taken hoop skirts for that?" I
+opined.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"That also. It was the time that the waltz
+had been learned from the officers of the American
+ships, and we were quite wild about it. The good
+Padre had threatened to excommunicate us all
+if we danced it ... but we danced ... we
+danced...." Dona Ina's pretty feet twitched
+reminiscently. The conversation wandered a long
+time in the past before it came back to the patio
+lying so still, divided from the street by the high
+wall, the clouding fig, and the gnarly pear tree.
+Beyond the artichokes a low partition wall shut off
+the vegetable plot; strings of chili reddened against
+it. There was not a blade of grass in sight, only
+the flat, black adobe paths worn smooth by generations
+of treading, house and enclosing walls all of
+one earth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But if so much came into the garden from the
+field, Señora, did nothing ever go out?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ah, yes, yes&mdash;the land is gracious; there was
+mustard of course, and pepper grass and horehound,
+blessed herb, which spread all over the west
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_102' name='Page_102'>[102]</a></span>
+with healing. The pimpernel, too, crept out of the
+enclosing wall, and the tree mallow which came
+from the Channel Islands by way of the gardens
+and has become a common hedge plant on the
+sandy lands about the bay of San Francisco.
+Along streams which ran down from the unfenced
+gardens of the <i><span lang='es_ES'>Americanos</span></i>, callas had domesticated
+themselves and lifted their pure white spathes
+serenely amid a tangle of mint and wild blackberries
+and painted cup. The almond, the rude
+stock on which the tender sorts were grafted, if
+allowed to bear its worthless bitter nuts would
+take to hillsides naturally. It is not, after all,
+walls which hold gardens but water. This is all
+that constrains the commingling of wild and
+cultivated species; they care little for man, their
+benefactor. Give them water, said Dona Ina, and
+they come to your door like a fed dog, or if you
+like the figure better, like grateful children. They
+repay you with sweetness and healing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A swift darted among the fig, marigolds, and
+portulacca of the inevitable rock-work which was
+the pride of the old Spanish gardens. Great
+rockets of tritoma flamed against the wall, on the
+other side of which traffic went unnoted and
+unsuspecting.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_103' name='Page_103'>[103]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But we, Dona Ina, we Americans, when we
+make a garden, make it in the sight of all so that
+all may have pleasure in it."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Eh, the <i><span lang='es_ES'>Americanos</span></i> ..." she shrugged; she
+moved to give a drink to the spotted musk, flowering
+in a chipped saucer; the subject did not interest
+her; her thought, like her flowers, had grown up in
+an enclosure.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_105' name='Page_105'>[105]</a></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_104' name='Page_104'></a></span>
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i171" id="i171"></a>
+<img src="images/i-171.jpg" width="550" height="334" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">THE GOLDEN GATE AND BLACK POINT, FROM HYDE
+STREET, SAN FRANCISCO. (SITE OF THE PANAMA
+EXPOSITION, 1915)</p>
+</div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_107' name='Page_107'>[107]</a></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_106' name='Page_106'></a></span>
+</p>
+
+<h2>
+VI
+<br /><br />
+<span class="s08">
+THE LAND OF THE LITTLE DUCK
+
+</span></h2>
+
+<p>
+Where the twin rivers set back the tides from
+the bay, the Land of the Little Duck begins. The
+tides come head-on past the Golden Gate and the
+river answers to their tremendous compulsion far
+inland, past the point where the Sacramento and
+San Joaquin flow together. On the lee side of the
+headland which makes the southern pilaster of the
+Gate, sits San Francisco, making of the name she
+borrowed from the bay a new and distinguished
+thing, as some women do with their husbands'
+titles. A better location for a city is Carquinez
+Strait; the Mexican comandante resident at Sonoma
+would have had it there, bearing the name of his
+wife, Francesca. Said he to the newly arrived
+American authorities, "Do so, and I will furnish
+you the finest site in the world, with State house
+and Residence complete." But it appears the land
+has chosen its own name.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_108' name='Page_108'>[108]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All the years after the Pope had divided the
+New World between Spain and the Portuguese, the
+harbour lay hidden. Cabrillo, Drake, Maldonado,
+Juan de Fuca, Viscaino passed it in the night or
+veiled in obscuring fogs. And then Saint Francis
+showed it clear and lovely to Don Gaspar Portola,
+having for that revelation led him with holden
+eyes past his journey's objective. Likewise, when
+the time was ripe, he put it into the mind of the
+Yankee alcalde at Yerba Buena, a trading-post in
+the neighbourhood of Mission Dolores, that if the
+hamlet should be called San Francisco it might
+catch by implication the vessels clearing all ports
+of the world for San Francisco bay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+O Chance, Chance! says the historian and turns
+another page. But it is my opinion that among
+the birds to which Saint Francis preached was
+included the Little Duck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The piers of the city front east, they face the
+Berkeley Hills, the Oaklands, the lands of the
+Sycamore, or, as the first settlers named them, the
+Alamedas. From thence vast settlements take
+their name, feeding the city as sea-birds do, from
+their own breasts. Back and forth between them
+the shuttling ferries weave thin webs of glistening
+wakes, duck-bodied tugs chugg and scuttle, busy
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_109' name='Page_109'>[109]</a></span>
+still at world-building. From the promontory
+which makes the northern barrier of the Gate,
+Tamalpias swims out of atmospheric blueness. On
+its seaward slope, hardly out of reach of the siren's
+bellowing note, Muir Park preserves the ancient
+forest, rooted in the litter of a thousand years.
+And round about the foot of city and mountain
+the waters of the bay are blue, the hills are bluer.
+The hills melt down to greenness in the spring,
+the water runs to liquid emerald, flashing amber;
+the hills are tawny after rains, the waters tone to
+the turbid, clayey river-floods; land and sea they
+pursue one another as lovers through changing
+moods of colour; they have mists for mystery
+between revealing suns. Unless these things count
+for something, San Francisco is the very worst
+site in the world for a city. You take your heart
+in your mouth every time you go out to afternoon
+tea in the tram-cars that dip and swing like cockles
+at sea. They cut across streets so steep that grass
+grows between the cobbles where no traffic ever
+passes, to plunge down lanes of dwellings perched
+precariously as sea-birds' nests on the bare bones of
+hills that for true hilliness shame Rome's imperial
+seven. The bay side of the peninsula is mud, the
+Pacific side is sand. There great wasteful dunes
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_110' name='Page_110'>[110]</a></span>
+blow up, they shift and pile, they take the contours
+of the wind-lashed waters&mdash;the very worst site in
+the world for a great city's pleasure-ground, and
+yet somehow it is there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For this city is one of those which have souls;
+it is a spirit sitting on a height, taking to itself
+form and the offices of civilisation. This is a thing
+that we know, because we have seen the land
+shake it as a terrier shakes a rat, until the form of
+the city was broken; it dissolved in smoke and
+flame. And then as a polyp of the sea draws out
+of the fluent water form and perpetuity for itself,
+we saw our city draw back its shapes of wood and
+stone, and statelier, more befitting a spirit that has
+endured so much. Nobody knows really what a
+city is except that it is something more than a
+collocation of houses. From Telegraph Hill, where
+the old semaphore stood, which signalled the far-between
+arrivals of ships around the Horn, you
+can see the trade of the world pass and repass the
+pillars of the Gate, the wall-sided warships. But
+none of these things really explain how San
+Francisco came to be clinging there to the leeward
+of a windy spit of land, like a great, grey sea-bird
+with palpitating wings.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i180" id="i180"></a>
+<img src="images/i-180.jpg" width="550" height="374" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">TAMALPIAS
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+True to her situation, San Francisco is nothing
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_111' name='Page_111'>[111]</a></span>
+if not dramatic. One recalls that the earliest
+foundation was dedicated to Our Lady of Dolors,
+<i><span lang='es_ES'>Nuestro Señora de Dolores</span></i>; the Indians fought here
+as they did nowhere else against Christian dominion.
+There were more burials than baptisms, and in the
+old cemetery of Yerba Buena the dead were so
+abandoned of all grace that the sand refused to hold
+them. One who spent his boyhood in the shifting
+purlieus of the old Laguna told me how in the
+hollows where the scrub oaks shrugged off the wind
+and the sand waved like water, the nameless coffins
+were covered and uncovered between a night and
+day. But if the dead could not hold their tenancy,
+the living succeeded. They did it by the very
+force of that dramatic instinct awakened by the
+plot and counterplot of natural forces.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No Greek tragedy moved to more relentless
+measures than the moral upheaval of '56, when
+the whole city, in solemn funeral train behind
+the victim of one of those wild outbursts of lawlessness
+peculiar to the "gold rush," saw the lifeless
+bodies of the perpetrators hanging from the upper
+windows of the Vigilance Committee. Fifty years
+later came a wilder rout, down streets searched
+out by fire, snatching at humour as they ran, as so
+many points of contact for the city's rebuilding.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_112' name='Page_112'>[112]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The very worst location in the world, as I have
+remarked, is this windy promontory past which the
+grey tides race, but so long as a city can dramatise
+itself, one situation will do as well as another in
+which to render itself immortal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The bay of San Francisco with its contingencies
+is one of the most interesting of inland yachting
+waters, full of adventurous weather. It is possible
+to sail in one general direction from Alviso to the
+city of Sacramento, a hundred and fifty miles, and
+that without attempting the thousand miles of
+estuary and slough through which the waters slink
+and wind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this season of the year the river is pushed
+backward by the tide a matter of ten miles or
+more above Sacramento City: on the San Joaquin
+it is felt as far as Crow's Landing. At Antioch it
+begins to be saltish, and down through Suisun and
+Carquinez the river-water fights its way as far as
+San Pablo before its identity is wholly lost. At
+flood-times it may be traced, a yellowish, turgid
+streak, as far as Alcatraz. This is the islet of the
+albatross which lies south of the tide race, as
+Tiburon is on the north, fragments all of them of
+that salt-rimed ledge outside the gate where hoarse
+sea-lions play, and brother to the castellated cloud
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_113' name='Page_113'>[113]</a></span>
+far along on the sea's horizon, the very capital of
+the kingdom of the Little Duck.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i185" id="i185"></a>
+<img src="images/i-185.jpg" width="550" height="357" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">MILL VALLEY, AND BACKWATER OF SAN FRANCISCO BAY
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+The Faralone Light is the last dropped astern
+by the Island steamships sagging south to the
+equator; it is also the sea-birds' city of refuge.
+This is the great murre rookery of the west coast,
+and formerly thousands of dozens of eggs were
+regularly taken from the Faralones to the San
+Francisco market; but since the islands became a
+Government station the murres have no enemy
+but the pirates of the air. In clefts and ledges
+close against the wall-sided cliffs they defend their
+shallow nests against the sheering gulls, or, hard
+beset, will push their single, new-hatched nestling
+into the friendlier sea, darting to break its fall with
+incredible swiftness, for a swimming gait is one of
+the things that come out of the shell with the
+native-born at the Faralones. On the same
+shelving rocks puffins rear their ratty young in
+burrows or under sheltering boulders, and the ashy
+petrel, the "little Peter" of the sea, walking by
+night before the storm, comes ashore here to hide
+his seldom nest. On the south Faralone the
+fierce cormorant builds her house of painted weed,
+which often the gulls steal from her as fast as she
+brings it ashore, for the gulls are the grafters of
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_114' name='Page_114'>[114]</a></span>
+the sea-birds' city. This particular variety, known
+as the western gull, neither fishes for himself nor
+forages for building material. He feeds on the eggs
+and nestlings of his neighbours, or waits to snatch
+the day's catch from the beak that brought it up
+from the sea. He has the virtue of all predatory
+classes, an exemplary domesticity. His nest is soft
+and clean, his nestlings handsome. The western
+gull is often found marauding far up the estuary of
+Sacramento, but it is his congener, the herring gull,
+who follows the long white wake the ferries make
+ploughing the windy bay; or, distinguished among
+the silent shore birds for multitude and clamour,
+scavenges its reedy borders.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Except for the promontories north and south,
+and the bold front of the Berkeley Hills opposing
+the Gate, the inland borders of the bay are flat
+tide-lands and sea-smelling lagunas. Stilts, avocets,
+herons, all the waders that haunt this coast or visit
+it in their seasonal flights, may be seen stalking the
+shallows for minnows, or where the marsh grass
+reddens, poised like some strange tide-land blossom,
+lifted on two slender stems. Low over them any
+clear day may be seen the grey old marsh hawk
+sailing, or the "duck hawk," the peregrine of
+falconry, following fiercely in the wake of the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_115' name='Page_115'>[115]</a></span>
+migrating hordes of water-fowl. All about Alviso
+the guttural cry of the black-crowned night-heron
+sounds eerily above the marshes, along with the
+peculiar "pumping" love-song of the bittern.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For some reason the air of the marshes is
+friendly to the mistletoe infesting the oaks and
+sycamores which stand back from the tide-line;
+but the marshes themselves are treeless. They
+have their own sorts of growth, cane and cat-tails
+and tule, goosefoot, samphire, and the tasselled
+sedges. This samphire of Shakespeare, <i><span lang='es_ES'>l'herbe de
+Saint Pierre</span></i> of the Normandy Marshes, is the glory
+of the Franciscan tide-lands; miles of it, barely
+above the level of the slow-moving water, spread
+a magic carpet of blending crimsons, purples, and
+bronzes. Under the creeping mists and subject
+to the changes of the water, beaten to gold and
+copper under the sun, it redeems the flat lines
+of the landscape with a touch of Oriental
+splendour.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For it is a flat kingdom, that of the Little
+Duck&mdash;the hills hanging remotely on the horizon,
+the few trees and scattered hugging the low shore
+of the sloughs as the shipwrecked cling to their
+rafts, desperate of rescue. The rich web of the
+samphire, the shifting colour of the water, faintly
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_116' name='Page_116'>[116]</a></span>
+reminiscent of Venice, borrow another foreign touch
+from the names under which the borders recommended
+themselves to attention:&mdash;Sausalito, "little
+willows," Tiburon, Corta Madero, San Quentin,
+San Raphael. Approached from the water, these
+names, with the exception of San Quentin, do no
+more than stir the imagination. San Quentin, on
+one of those courtesy islands newly rescued from
+the primordial mud, shows itself uncompromisingly
+for what it is, one of those places for the sequestration
+of public offenders, which is itself such an
+offence to our common humanity&mdash;to say nothing
+of our common sense. Free tides, free sails go by,
+and long, untrammelled lines of birds; south above
+the blue bay and bluer shore, the ethereal blue
+dome of Diablo lifts into the free air. Across
+the upper end of San Pablo Bay, which is really
+the north arm of the bay of San Francisco
+extending inland, Mare Island lies so low on the
+water that if it had not been made a naval
+reserve station it is difficult to know to what
+other use it could be put. One expects to have
+the land dip and swing from under like the ship's
+deck. It is in line with the guns which lie beside
+the Gate like watchful, muzzle-pointed dogs, and
+commands the whole upper bay and the opposing
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_117' name='Page_117'>[117]</a></span>
+bluffs of Contra Costa in a manner highly commendable
+to those curious persons whose chief
+excitement lies in anticipating an Asiatic invasion.
+Nevertheless, along with the bastions of San
+Quentin it strikes, somehow, the note of human
+distrust amid all this charm of light and line and
+elusive colour, as if suddenly one should discover
+the tip of a barbed tail under the skirt of some
+seductive stranger.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Between San Quentin and the Straits, all
+about the curve of the bay, winding, wide-mouthed
+sloughs give access to a land as fertile
+as Egypt. A slough is a mere wallow of unprofitable
+waters, waters unused by men and still
+reluctant of the sea. Pushed aside by the compelling
+tides, too undisciplined to make proper
+banks for themselves, they are neglected by all
+but a few fringing willows and shapeless sycamores
+in which the herons nest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Often at evening the white-faced ibis can be
+seen flying in long, voiceless lines, just clearing the
+twilight-tinted water, to their accustomed night
+perches in the wind-beaten willows. They return
+there, if undisturbed, year after year, accompanied
+in few and far-between seasons by the egret and the
+snowy heron, grown man-shy, or if they but knew
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_118' name='Page_118'>[118]</a></span>
+the purpose for which their nuptial plumage is
+sacrificed, woman-shy, and seldom seen even by the
+most wishful eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At Napa a few bull-headed oaks come down
+almost to the tide-line, and in Sonoma a clump
+of alien blue gums huddles aloof and unregarded,
+but from the water little is visible beside the stilted
+cabins of some gun club or the ramshackle resorts
+of the flat-nosed, slow craft that wind on mysterious
+errands between the sunken lands. Whole families
+of half-amphibious humans appear to live comfortably
+on these drifting scows, but one never by any
+chance catches them doing any distinctive thing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The waters of the sloughs come down from the
+little inland valleys, where summer nests and broods
+in a blue haze along the redwood-serried hills.
+Whether it is white with cherry bloom at Napa,
+or purple with winy clusters at Sonoma, there is
+always something interesting going on there of the
+large process by which granite mountains are made
+food for man. It is worth a visit if only to learn
+that a country which does that sort of thing
+supremely well, finds it also worth while to do
+it beautifully. Yachting off San Rafael, it is
+possible to catch at times the scent of roses on an
+off-shore wind above the salt smell of the marshes.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_119' name='Page_119'>[119]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The last rip of the tide is through the Straits
+of Carquinez into the back-water of Suisun. From
+here on, it is a rhythmic heaving to and fro as of
+well-matched wrestlers, the river-water is set back
+to Crow's Landing on the San Joaquin, and miles
+above Sacramento it returns again past Antioch
+and the Suisun islands. It is lost in a wilderness
+of tules, through which the sluggish currents blindly
+wind. Here we have nothing to do with men, our
+business is all with the tribe of the Little Duck:
+mallard, teal, tern, coot, heron, eared grebe, and
+awkward loon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The tule is a round leafless reed. It springs up
+along the tide-lands or in the stagnant back-water
+of the rivers, or by any least dribble of a desert
+spring. No condition daunts it but absolute dearth
+of water; far-called, it travels on the wind over
+mountain ranges, over great wastes of waterless
+plain to find the one absolute condition, a pool&mdash;white
+rimmed with alkali or poisonous green with
+arsenic. I have seen it flourish by springs so
+charged with mineral that each slender column is
+ringed with its stony deposit, but I do not recall
+any standing water where tules are not. The
+stems are filled with papery pith so light that the
+Indians of the San Joaquin made boats of bundles
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_120' name='Page_120'>[120]</a></span>
+of them, faggoted together and tied upon a
+wooden frame.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Year by year the tules reclaim the muddy
+confluence of the twin rivers. They make an
+annual growth, die palely, and are beaten down by
+the wind; between their matted stems the young
+green comes up again. In the Land of the Little
+Duck, miles upon miles of them, and not one other
+thing, stand up on either side the winding water-lanes,
+man-high and impenetrable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Tulare&mdash;the place of the tule&mdash;is the haunt
+not only of water-birds but innumerable insect-catchers,
+and especially of the red-winged blackbirds.
+In the spring these betake themselves to
+the reed-fringed marshes in hundreds, building their
+nests in such neighbourly proximity that the young
+can hop from rim to rim of the tight-slung, grassy
+hammocks. Great clouds of the young birds can
+be seen, just before mating and after nesting in the
+fall, rising from the low islands of the river-junction.
+In the season also the male yellow-headed blackbird
+may be heard singing his sweet but noisy
+cheering-song to his sombre mate as she weaves
+marsh grass and wet pond-weed together as a
+foundation for her home, always prudently completed
+some weeks in advance of any need of it.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_121' name='Page_121'>[121]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i198" id="i198"></a>
+<img src="images/i-198.jpg" width="550" height="371" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">WAITING FOR DUCK&mdash;LOS BAÑOS
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Where the tules thin out along the moving currents,
+numerous woven balls of marsh vegetation hang
+like some strange fruit safely above the summer rise
+of the waters. These are the nests of the tule wren,
+built by the industrious male, with who knows
+what excess of parental care or what intention to
+deceive. All the while he is at work upon them, in
+one, the least conspicuous and apparently the least
+skilfully built, the mother bird nurses the brown
+nestlings with which, suddenly at the end of July,
+all the whispering galleries of the tulares are alive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One who has the courage to penetrate deeper
+within the tulares, past the crazy wooden landings
+of nameless ports at which the flat scows put in,
+past the broken willows where the herons nest and
+the weedy back-waters lie all smoothly green with
+the deceptive duck-weed, will see many wished-for
+sights. Just before dawn and after nightfall the
+inner marshes are vocal with the varied cries of
+coot and mallard and the complaining skirl of the
+mud-hen, the whistling redwing, the bittern booming
+from his dingy pool, and all the windy beat of
+wings. But by day a stillness falls through which
+the clicking whisper of the reeds and the croon
+of the great rivers cradling to the sea reaches the
+sense almost with sound. The air is all alive with
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_122' name='Page_122'>[122]</a></span>
+the metallic glint of dragon-flies; now and then
+the plop of some shining turtle dropping into the
+smooth lagoon, or the frightened splash of a
+marsh-nesting bird, flecks the silence with a flash
+of sound. Here one might see all the duck kind
+leading forth their young broods, or the eared
+grebe swimming with her day-old nestlings on her
+back. If the day is dark&mdash;black clouds with
+lightnings playing under&mdash;one may hear the voice
+of the loon sliding through his sonorous scale to
+shaking, witless laughter. Or perhaps the day's
+sight might be a flock of pelicans on their way to
+their nesting-ground in Buena Vista, breasting the
+shallows, and with beating wings driving a school
+of minnows into some tiny inlet where they may
+be scooped up in the pouched bills, a dozen to a
+mouthful. Better still, some morning mist might
+rise for you suddenly on a strip of sandy shore the
+cranes had chosen for their wild dances, from which
+the stately measures of the Greek are said to be
+derived. Against the yellow sand, as on the background
+of a vase, the dipping figures and white outstretched
+wing draperies make the connection clear
+to you for the moment, along with some other
+things long overlaid in the racial memory.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Always at evening in the tulares the air is
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_123' name='Page_123'>[123]</a></span>
+winnowed by the clanging hordes of geese and
+ducks. Triangular flights of teal wing by you,
+whizzing like bullets, hazy with speed. Beach-nesting
+birds, paddlers in the foodful creeks, go
+seaward. Now and then some winged frigate of
+the open sea, an albatross perhaps blown inland on
+a storm, will climb the air to the sea-going wind.
+Low on the twilight-coloured waters the tule fog
+creeps in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You emerge properly from the vast intricacies
+of the tulares&mdash;if you emerge at all, and are not
+completely mazed and lost in them&mdash;at Sacramento,
+a city but barely rescued from the marsh, and still
+marsh-coloured with the damp-loving lichens.
+<i><span lang='fr_FR'>La Dame aux Camelias</span></i>, to the eye, rich in that
+exotic blossom as no city in the world, but with
+a past, oh, unmistakably, and a touch of hectic
+disorder. The Russians possessed her, and then
+the breed of Jack Hamlin, and then&mdash;but it is
+unfair to list the lovers of a lady of so much charm
+and such indubitable capacity for reformation.
+Sacramento is the State capital, the geographical
+pivot of the great twin valleys; she divides with
+Stockton on the San Joaquin the tribute of their
+waters. It was here on her banks that the overland
+emigrant trains sat down to wait for the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_124' name='Page_124'>[124]</a></span>
+subsidence of waters in the new world of the
+West, from here they scattered to all its hopeful
+quarters.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If the part the city has played in history has
+been that of a hostel, a distributing station, at least
+she has played it to some purpose. There are few
+empires richer than the land the twin rivers drain.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_125' name='Page_125'>[125]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_127' name='Page_127'></a></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_126' name='Page_126'></a></span>
+</p>
+
+<h2>
+VII
+<br /><br />
+<span class="s08">
+THE TWIN VALLEYS
+
+</span></h2>
+
+<p>
+It is geographical courtesy merely, to treat of intramontane
+California as a valley; it is in reality a
+vast, rolling plain. Several little kingdoms of
+Europe could be tucked away in it. North and
+south it has no natural line of demarcation other
+than the rivers meeting for their single assault
+upon the sea, but its diversity deserves the double
+name. They make, the Sacramento rushing from
+the wooded north and the sluggish San Joaquin,
+one of the most interesting waterways of the world.
+I should say they made, for of the San Joaquin one
+must be able to speak in the past also, to understand
+it. One must have seen it before man had
+tamed it and taught it, supine as a lioness in the
+sun.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To arrive at a proper feeling for the continuity
+of the great central plain, it must be approached
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_128' name='Page_128'>[128]</a></span>
+from the south, by way of the old Tejon Pass, up
+from San Fernando, or down the Tehachapi grade
+where the railroad loops and winds through the
+confluence of the Coast Range with the Sierra
+Nevada. Here the hills curve graciously about
+the vast oval of the lower San Joaquin. The
+downthrow of the mountain, stippled with sage-brush,
+gives way to tawny sand glistening here
+and there with white patches of alkali, mottled
+with dark blocks of irrigated land. Its immensity
+is obscured by the haze of heat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One is reduced to the figures of the real estate
+"booster" for terms of proportion. That modest
+checkering of green, hours away to the left, is a
+forty-mile field of alfalfa; beyond it lie the vineyards
+that in less than a quarter of a century
+relegated Spain to a second place in the raisin
+industry of the world. This is the San Joaquin
+of to-day and to-morrow. The white-tilted vans
+of the Argonauts saw it as one vast, overlapping
+field of radiant corollas, blue of lupins, phacelias,
+nemophilias, gold of a hundred packed species of
+composite. Wet years it is still possible for the
+settler in the unirrigated districts to wake some
+morning to blossomy lakes of sky-blueness in the
+hollows; from San Emigdio in the Temblors, I
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_129' name='Page_129'>[129]</a></span>
+have seen, across the whole width of the valley,
+the smouldering poppy fires along the bluffs of
+Kern River. On the mesa below Tejon the moon-white
+gilia that the children call "evening snow"
+unfurls its musky-scented drifts mile after mile.
+But the prevailing note of the San Joaquin is
+tawny russet; gold it will be in the season,
+resplendent as those idols which the Incas overlaid
+yearly with fresh-beaten leaf, and in September
+the barrancas above Bakersfield and Visalia as
+yellow as brass, but all up and down the hill-rimmed
+hollow is every lion-coloured tint contending
+still with the thin belts of planted orchard.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i209" id="i209"></a>
+<img src="images/i-209.jpg" width="391" height="550" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">MIRROR LAKE, YOSEMITE
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Twenty-five years of cultivation have served to
+shift the lines of greenness but not greatly to
+modify the desert key. Once it was all massed
+in the tulares which fringed the series of lakes
+and connecting sloughs, continuing northward from
+the lowest point of the San Joaquin. Kern, Kings,
+Kaweah, Tule, Merced, and Tuolumne, mighty
+rivers, and a hundred lesser singing streams fed it.
+Elk by thousands ramped in its reedy borders.
+It was a haven of nesting water-birds. Whole
+islands were populated by pelicans, repairing there
+annually for the strange, sidling wing-dances that
+attend their mating. Blue herons nested in the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_130' name='Page_130'>[130]</a></span>
+tulares; they could be seen trailing their long
+dangly legs for hours above the shallows. Indians
+paddled in their frail balsas, built of papery, dry
+reeds, down intricate water-lanes in which white
+men venturing, lost themselves and were mazed
+to madness. Malaria of a surpassing virulence
+rode up and down that country on the "tule fogs."
+Even yet it is the dread of the cities of the plain
+to find themselves beleaguered by the thick, ghost-white
+mists that at long intervals roll along the
+ground, retaking the ancient marshes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Into this potential opulence the cattleman precipitated
+himself. He bought&mdash;it is more exact to
+say he acquired&mdash;vast acreage of Spanish grants;
+along the rim of the Coast Ranges, territory equal
+to principalities was given over to long-horned,
+lean herds. All about the old beach-line of the
+San Joaquin may still be seen the remnant of the
+cattle ranches, low formless houses with purlieus
+of pomegranate and pampas grass and black figs,
+and the high, stockaded, acrid-smelling corrals,
+to mark the receding waves of the cattle industry.
+On the Sierra side the guttered mesas, the hoof-worn
+foothills advertise the devastation of the
+wandering flocks. Early in the 'sixties these
+appeared, little, long-armed French and Basques,
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_131' name='Page_131'>[131]</a></span>
+with hungry hordes of sheep at their heels, pasturing
+on the public lands. They ate into the roots
+of the lush grass and left the quick rains to cut
+the soil. The wool in the hand was always worth
+the next season's feed to the sheep-herder.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i215" id="i215"></a>
+<img src="images/i-215.jpg" width="550" height="373" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">AMONG THE REDWOODS OF THE GREAT TWIN VALLEYS
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Never was a land so planned for the uses of
+man, its shielding mountains, its deep alluvial
+terraces sloping gently to the sun. Men read it
+in the hieroglyphic the glistening waters spelled
+between the dark patches of the tulares, but it
+took some experimenting to read the message
+aright.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After the cattle and the flocks came the wheat.
+Up from the meeting waters the land billowed
+with grain. Owners buckled the ploughs together
+and drove them with engines by tens and twenties
+across the thousand-acre fields. But men and
+engines, they were alike driven by the drouth.
+In wet years the wheat rancher rode to view his
+shoulder-high harvest, but when the rains, going
+high and wide over the valley to break along the
+saw-teeth of the Sierras, left the wheat unwatered,
+the same thing happened to the crops that had
+happened to the cattle and the sheep. And at
+last, amid the rotting carcases and the shrivelled
+acres, the message came clear&mdash;not the land, but
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_132' name='Page_132'>[132]</a></span>
+the water. So they shut up the rivers in the
+cañons and the day of the orchardist began.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Geographically it begins at Bakersfield, below
+the gap where the Kern comes down from the
+giant sequoias and is constrained to the wide,
+willow-planted canals, governed by head-gates and
+weirs. Such waters as find again their ancient
+levels, do so by way of the loose sandy soil through
+which they are filtered in vineyard and orchard.
+The tulares have been turned under; the elk are
+strictly preserved in the hope that enough of them
+will breed to serve the purposes of curiosity. The
+antelope bands that once flashed their white rumps
+from bench to bench of the tawny mesas were
+reduced, the last time I saw them, to a scant half-score
+roving the Tejon under the watchful eye of
+the superintendent. But with all this change,
+nowhere as at this diminished end, does one gather
+such an impression of the variety, the imperial
+extent of the San Joaquin. For at Bakersfield is
+one of the world's largest petroleum fields. The
+gaunt derricks rear along the unwatered hills like
+half-formed prehistoric creatures come up out of
+the ground to see what men are about. Reservoirs,
+fed with the stinking juices of a time decayed,
+squat along the barrancas, considering with a slow
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_133' name='Page_133'>[133]</a></span>
+leech-like intelligence the tank cars in the form of
+a Gargantuan joint-worm of the same period that
+produced the derricks, as they clank between the
+oil-fields and the town. One of the largest oil-fields
+in the world&mdash;and yet the turn of the road
+drops it out of sight in the valley's immensity!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bakersfield is a heaven of roses. Doubtless
+there are other things by which the inhabitants
+would be glad to have it remembered, but this is
+the item that the traveller in the season carries
+away with him. Roses do not die there, they fall
+apart of their own sweetness, wafts of which
+envelop the town for miles out on the highway.
+After nightfall, when each particular attar distils
+upon the quiescent air, the townspeople walk
+abroad in the streets and the moon comes up full-orbed
+across the Temblors at about the level of the
+clock-tower. Overhead and beyond it the sky
+retains a deep velvety blueness until long past
+midnight. Traces of colour can be seen sometimes
+in the zenith when the glimmer along the knife-edge
+of the Sierras announces the dawn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+North of Bakersfield, as the valley widens, the
+Coast Range fades to a mere shadow mountain,
+the peaks of Kaweah stand out above the banded
+haze, angel-white like the ranked Host. As the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_134' name='Page_134'>[134]</a></span>
+road swings in to the Sierra outposts, broad-headed
+oaks begin to appear; it skirts the foot of the
+great Sierra fault close enough for the landscape
+to borrow something from the dark, impending
+pines. But for the most part what the observer
+has to consider is soil and water and the miraculous
+product of these two. One must learn to think of
+the land in terms of human achievement.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i224" id="i224"></a>
+<img src="images/i-224.jpg" width="550" height="371" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">CLEAR LAKE, LAKE COUNTY
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+North from the delta of Kern River lies a
+hundred miles of country scarcely disputed with
+the flocks, far-called and few, which still at the set
+time of the year forgather in green swales behind the
+town for the annual shearing, for the herders to play
+hand-ball at Noriegas', to grow riotously claret drunk
+and render an evanescent foreign touch to the brisk
+modern community. And every foot of that
+hundred miles is rife with the seeds of life, awaiting
+the touch of the impregnating water. One holds
+to that conviction as to a friendly assuring hand.
+In the presence of that vast plain, palpitating with
+the heat, the sluggish, untamed water lolling in the
+midst of it, the white-fanged Sierra combing the
+cloudless blue, beauty becomes a poor word:
+appreciation is shipwrecked and cast away. With
+relief one hails the beginning of a stripe, dark green
+like a scarf, scalloping the foothills&mdash;the citrus belt.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_135' name='Page_135'>[135]</a></span>
+From Portersville, Lindsay, Exeter it runs north
+past the meeting of the waters into the valley of the
+Sacramento, and for quality and early fruiting
+sets the figure of the world market. As if its
+waters had some special virtue, wherever a river is
+poured out upon the plain some particular crop is
+favoured. About Fresno it is raisins, at Madera
+port wine, sherry, and mild muscatel. The Merced,
+which takes its rise in the valley of Yosemite, is
+partial to melons and figs. But everywhere are
+prunes, peaches, apricots, almonds, sugar-beets,
+alfalfa, unmeasurable acreage of barley, beans, and
+asparagus. Anything is impressive if the scale be
+large enough, even a field of onions. Here the
+league-long rows are as terrible as an army.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Up and down this empire belt proceed two
+great companies, the hordes of "fruit-hands" and
+the army of the bees, following its successive
+waves of fruit and bloom. Gangs of pruners,
+pickers, and packers are shifted and shunted as the
+crop demands. Interesting economic experiments
+transact themselves under the worried producer's
+eye; alien race contending with alien race. The
+jarring interests of men have by no means worked
+out the absolute solution, but the bees have long
+ago settled their business. They kill the drones
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_136' name='Page_136'>[136]</a></span>
+and gather the honey for the gods who kindly
+provide them with hives&mdash;the more fortunate
+perhaps in knowing what their particular gods
+require.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wherever along the belt the rivers fail, the
+pumps take up the work; strenuous little Davids
+contending against the Goliaths of drouth. They
+can be heard chugging away like the active pulse
+of the vineyards, completing the ribbon of greenness
+that spans from ridge to ridge of the down-plunging
+hills.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then one must take account of the
+cities of the plain! Twenty-five years ago they
+fringed the Sierra base, mere feeders to the mines,
+the cattle ranches, the sheep country. They had
+the manners of the frontier and the decaying,
+tawdry vices that filtered down from San Francisco,
+sluiced out by intermittent spasms of reform.
+They were "wide open." Hairy little herders
+with jabbering tongues knifed one another in the
+shearing season, vaqueros "shot up the town"
+occasionally; it is still within memory that
+prominent citizen "packed a gun" for prominent
+citizen. Twenty years ago the last, most southerly,
+of the chain of settlements was a very cesspool of
+the iniquities driven to a last stand by the influx
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_137' name='Page_137'>[137]</a></span>
+of home-seekers. I who went through the years
+of change with it could tell tales if I would&mdash;but,
+thank Heaven, nobody would believe them! Now
+in those old places of unsavoury renown rise
+handsome "business blocks," the true mark of cities.
+Homes heaped with roses spread on either side of
+miles of palm-fringed boulevard. Over it all flows
+the clear, inspiring current of Sierra-cooled air,
+sliding down from the ranked peaks that, whitened
+from flank to flank by perpetual snows, hover like
+phalanxes of protecting wings.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i230" id="i230"></a>
+<img src="images/i-230.jpg" width="550" height="377" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">CASTLE CRAG, RATTLESNAKE CAÑON
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Into the very thick of the cities drop down
+from the high Sierras trails to all its places of
+delight, the sequoia groves, King's River cañon,
+and all the lordly peaks about Mt. Whitney
+and Yosemite; and setting hillward from San
+Francisco the old Stockton-Sonora road along
+which surged the undisciplined rout of the gold-seekers
+of 'forty-nine. It leads, this earliest of
+valley highways, across the basin of the Stanislaus,
+past places made famous by the red-shirted, lusty
+miners, the sleek-coated gamblers of Bret Harte.
+It passes the twenty-eight Mile House where Jack
+Hamlin ran a poker game, and many a scene
+rendered memorable by the gay ladies of Poker
+Flat. It reaches, by way of a deep-rutted, ancient
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_138' name='Page_138'>[138]</a></span>
+track, choked with the characteristic red dust of
+the country, Table Mountain, the home of Truthful
+James. Table Mountain, having consideration
+for the near-by Sierras, is a hill merely, with a flat
+deposit of <i><span lang='es_ES'>malpais</span></i>, the "black rock" of regions
+far north and east. Beyond Sonora lie the old
+placer "diggings," every foot of which has been
+combed and sifted for gold. The bones of the
+earth are laid bare; all the masking clay, tossed
+and tumbled, clogged with rusty pipes and decaying
+sluices, lies in heaps and depressions where the
+gold-seekers cast it. The sense of violation is
+heightened by the hue of the soil, redder than the
+hills of Devon, redder than a red heifer&mdash;but the
+river furnishes the more descriptive figure, the
+martyr hue of the Sacrament. In the flood season
+it carries the tint of its ensanguined clays far down
+into the bay's blueness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The remnant of that riotous life,&mdash;the abandoned
+cabins, the towns falling into dissolution,&mdash;like the
+remaining specimens of the fir and redwood forests
+cut off to timber the Mother Lode, is left standing
+by unfitness. The best of it is a little nugget of
+remembrance of Francis Bret Harte and Mark
+Twain.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i235" id="i235"></a>
+<img src="images/i-235.jpg" width="415" height="550" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">McCLOUD RIVER, UPPER SACRAMENTO VALLEY
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+It was at Angels in the foothills of Calaveras
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_139' name='Page_139'>[139]</a></span>
+that Twain, to his everlasting fame, was so
+impressed with the performance of the Jumping
+Frog. But life at Angels and all up and down
+that placer country is as heavy with desuetude as
+the frog was after the bar-keeper had fed him with
+buckshot. As well try to get a draught of that
+old time as a drink at any of the dismantled bars,
+high, ornate, black walnut affairs across which, in
+dust and nuggets, passed and repassed probably as
+much gold as would serve to buy the orange belt
+of the San Joaquin&mdash;and for a figure of magnificence
+you would find nothing more acceptable to
+its inhabitants.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Much of the history of that country is written
+in the names. Here the soft Spanish locutions
+give place to harsher, but not less descriptive,
+Americanisms&mdash;Jimtown, Jackass Hill, Squaw
+Creek; the cañons become "gulches," the mesas
+"flats." Later both of these were overlaid by
+-villes and -tons, the plain rural names of Anglo-Saxon
+derivation, Coulterville, Farmington, Turlock.
+They smell of orchards. Prosperity is
+coming back on the surface of the fruitful waters,
+but the redwood forests have not come back.
+Centuries, nothing less, are required for the building
+of one of these towers of greenness, and it is
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_140' name='Page_140'>[140]</a></span>
+barely forty years since all that district was one
+roaring blast of mining life, rioting, jostling,
+snatching each from each. In the language of the
+country, the Italian truck gardeners will "beat
+them to it." They have smoothed over the old
+"slickens" and comforted the land with crops.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As one travels north, the bulk of the Sierra
+lessens, the pines climb higher, the oaks march
+well down into the middle valley to catch the wet
+coast winds, the character of the plantations
+change, there are more grain fields, more neat
+little farms. Finally the old Overland emigrant
+trail climbs down from Donner Lake and Emigrant
+Gap, and you find yourself deep in the Valley of
+the Sacramento.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By an air-line from the meeting of the waters,
+its geographical frontier is passed in the neighbourhood
+of Sonora; perhaps the bridge over the
+Mokelumne is a better indicator, since that river
+joins the San Joaquin at the estuary, but it is not
+until the Overland road is crossed that the
+character of the country definitely betrays the
+upper valley.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ascending the river, the works of man are
+less and less, the forest and the mountains more.
+The rapid rise of the wooded slopes keeps the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_141' name='Page_141'>[141]</a></span>
+Sacramento troublous. Tributaries, not large
+but swift and of tremendous volume, pour into it.
+Occasionally from dark cañons is heard the steady
+pound of the quartz mill, working some ancient
+lead, or a smelter blocks out a whole forested slope
+with its poisonous exhalations; but for the most
+part the northern valley is given over to brooding
+quiet, to unending green, and streams as swift as
+adders.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In Mendocino county, on the coast side, the
+Range begins to lift toward the snow-line; on the
+Sierra side the alpine crest shears away. From
+time to time the "logging" industry cuts a wide
+track down the redwood forest. One hears above
+the singing rivers, the clucking of the donkey-engine
+or the rip of a mill still going in the midst
+of its self-created, sawdust desert. The glutting of
+the lumber region has been accomplished as wastefully,
+as violently, as the search for gold. All up
+the valley tall prophets of the rain have been
+butchered to make a lumberman's fat purse. But,
+link by link, the forestry bureau is closing in the
+line of the reserves against the lumber "kings,"
+the Ahabs of a grasping time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hills fall into a certain order, serried rank
+on rank. Deciduous growth of the lower slopes
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_142' name='Page_142'>[142]</a></span>
+gives way to redwoods and Shasta fir. Miles
+upon miles of them stand so thick that when one
+dies it does not fall but remains erect in the arms
+of its brothers. Great columnar boles rise out of
+the river-basins, soaring high over what, except for
+their dwarfing proportions, would be a considerable
+grove of graceful oak and bay and glistening,
+magnolia-leafed, crimson-shafted madroño. Over
+these the redwoods rise, as over the heads of
+worshippers the clustered columns of Milan seek
+the dome. High up the tops are caught in a froth
+of pale-green foliage through which the sunlight
+filters blue. This characteristic refraction from
+their yellowish, inch-long needles dwells about the
+redwood as an aura, and far on the horizon
+distinguishes their ranks from the hill-slopes
+masked with pines. So, blue ridge on ridge, they
+advance on the imperious height of Shasta.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i244" id="i244"></a>
+<img src="images/i-244.jpg" width="550" height="395" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">DONNER LAKE, ON THE OLD EMIGRANT TRAIL
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Shasta is a brother of Fuji and Tacoma, one of
+those solitary crater peaks whose whiteness is the
+honourable age of fiery youth, a good mountain
+dead and gone to heaven. Do not go up on it;
+you will see a great deal more of what you have
+seen, wooded hills on hills and perhaps the sapphire
+belt of the sea, the glitter of lovely, sail-less lakes,
+but you will not understand it any better, for
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_143' name='Page_143'>[143]</a></span>
+Shasta has no more to do with the abutting ranges
+than a great genius with the stock which produced
+him. This is a prophet among mountains, a vent
+from the burning heart of creation. One is not
+surprised to learn that the Indians hereabout
+count their descent from the Spirit of Shasta
+and the Grizzly Bear. That dark belt of forest
+circling the mountain's base looks to be the proper
+haunt for him, the lumbering, little-eyed embodiment
+of brute creation. It is well to think of
+those two things together, the rip of those mighty
+claws with a ton or two of brute bulk behind
+them, and the awful witness towering to the blue,
+and suffer the soul-satisfying fear that lies in wait
+for man in the great places of the earth. All our
+modern fears are mean, fears of the common
+opinion and the bill collector. Shasta will have
+done its best for you if it enables you to quake in
+the very marrow of consciousness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After this it is well to turn southward along the
+Coast Range, camping by the trout-abounding
+rivers, losing yourself in the stiff laurels and
+azaleas of Mendocino, fishing at the clear lakes
+cupped in the hollows. If the season is right
+there will be salmon running in Klamath and
+Trinity rivers or deer in the steep-sided cañons.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_144' name='Page_144'>[144]</a></span>
+And everywhere there will be the redwoods. It is
+not, however, in the crowds that the tree reveals
+itself. Far down the deforested hills of Sonoma,
+in isolated groves, in small groups or singles on the
+tops of bossy, brass-coloured hills, it takes on
+character and charm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A redwood grove is a three-story affair. On
+the ground floor, turned rusty brown, as though the
+sunlight filtering through had mellowed there a
+thousand years, creep the wild ginger, the rosy-flowered
+oxalis, trilliums, and violets. All these
+lower rooms are crowded with dogwood, with the
+great berried manzanitas, woodwardias, man-high,
+and glistening bays, silver-tipped with light. By
+one of those strange but charming affinities of wild
+life, the redwood grove is the peculiar haunt of
+lilies. Every variation of the soil&mdash;the peat bogs
+of the coast, the high sandy ridges, the damp
+meadows&mdash;has each its appropriate variety; and
+not merely lilies, but droves of them, hundreds of
+swaying stems, files of them up the line of seeping
+springs or round the bases of great boulders, lilies
+breast high, lilies overhead, ruby-spotted, golden-throated,
+shining white, dowered with the special
+genius of perfume. Along the chaparral-covered
+slope and deep within the cañons one tracks
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_145' name='Page_145'>[145]</a></span>
+them by the subtle, intoxicating scent spreading,
+as I am persuaded no other perfume does, by a
+conscious distillation on the melting air.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i249" id="i249"></a>
+<img src="images/i-249.jpg" width="381" height="550" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">LAUREL LAKE, UPPER SACRAMENTO
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+The second redwood story, that wondrous space
+of blue-diffusing sun, between the deciduous underforest
+and the fairy web of redwood green, is bird
+and squirrel haunted. Jays flash back and forth,
+bright flickers of the humming-bird go buzzing by.
+Woodpeckers may be heard calling the ever-missing
+"Jacob, Jacob!" who must in their opinion
+be concealing himself somewhere about the upper
+story. The wire-drawn warble of the brown creeper
+follows the singer up and down the deeply
+corrugated trunks. Wrens, sparrows, juncos, all
+manner of little feathered folk in whose coats the
+tones of brown predominate, frequent the pillared
+middle rooms. Once I heard what I thought to
+be a hermit thrush, singing out of the dusk of
+Muir Wood. But I have not the art of knowing
+birds by note. People who live much in the redwoods
+find them silent; I think it might more easily be
+that the great trunks and green-shot glooms have the
+same quality of dwarfing sound as size. Redwoods,
+as I know them, are really lighter and more alive
+than any other coniferous forests, but the <i>effect</i> of
+umbrageous stillness is induced by vast proportions.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_146' name='Page_146'>[146]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As for what goes on in the upper rooms, who
+has been there? What birds arise to their three- or
+four-hundred-foot heights? The few and slight
+boughs, the feathery layers of foliage rounding in
+age to sloping crowns, who knows them but the
+wind and the snows that neither stir nor are stayed
+by them? There are some matters that the great
+Twin Valleys keep even from the men for whom
+they have borne an empire.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_147' name='Page_147'>[147]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_149' name='Page_149'></a></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_148' name='Page_148'></a></span>
+</p>
+
+<h2>
+VIII
+<br /><br />
+<span class="s08">
+THE HIGH SIERRAS AND THE
+SAGE-BRUSH COUNTRY
+
+</span></h2>
+
+<p>
+The proper vehicle for mountain study is not yet
+available. A great mountain range is like a great
+public character, there is much more to it than is
+presented to the observation, and it is not open to
+familiarity. But if one could fly high and wide
+over its cloud-lifting summits, one might learn
+something of its private relations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From such a vantage it would instantly appear
+how distinct are the Nevadas (<i><span lang='es_ES'>nieve</span></i>, snowy) among
+the Sierras of California. A very Bonaparte of
+mountains, new-born and lording it over the
+ancient ranges, not content with its vast empery
+but swinging north into the unpre-empted icy
+regions. San Bernardino and San Jacinto are as
+far from it as the Faubourg St. Germain from an
+island in the sea. Sierra Madre is of the Coast
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_150' name='Page_150'>[150]</a></span>
+Range; Shasta a fire-hole, a revolutionist; the true
+Sierra is the midriff of a continent. From its
+northern extremity one sees the sun in a circle
+and the Northern Lights; that portion of it we
+know as Sierra Nevada swings into the state above
+Honey Lake, and ends southward in a tumble of
+blunt peaks below Kern River. This is quite
+enough, however, for Californians to make free
+with, and more than they can appreciate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Geographically the range begins on the south
+at Tehachapi, but at Walker's Pass, a day's
+journey to the north, is the first appearance of
+its most salient characteristic, the great Sierra
+Fault. In its youth the range suffered incredible
+cataclysms. For two hundred miles the great
+eastern plain dropped; weighted as it was with
+its withered aristocracy of hills&mdash;how weazened
+and old you can see to this day&mdash;it tore sharply
+downward, and the depth of that fall from the
+heaven-affronting peak of Whitney to the desert
+valley of Inyo is a matter of two miles of sheer
+descent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The whole Sierra along the line of faultage
+has the contour of a wave about to break. It
+swings up in long water-shaped lines from the
+valley of the San Joaquin, and rears its jagged
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_151' name='Page_151'>[151]</a></span>
+crest above the abrupt desert shore. Seen from
+close under, some of these two- and three-thousand-foot
+precipices have the pitch of toppling waters.
+As they rose new-riven from the earth their
+proportions must have been more than terrifying.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Later the Ice Age bore downward from the
+north, and through immeasurable years carved the
+fractured granite into shapes of enduring beauty.
+It rounded the great jutting fronts, it insured
+them against the tooth of time with the keen
+icy polish with which they shine still against the
+morning. It gouged narrow wall-sided cañons,
+cut the course of rivers, and sinking like a
+graver's tool into the heart of the range, scooped
+out deep wells of pleasantness. Afterward, when
+the ice was old, it must have moved more slowly,
+for the lines it left, retreating northward, are
+more flowing, the hill-crowns rounder. And then
+the mountain was besieged with trees. They
+stormed it, scaled its free precipices; you can
+see by the thick mould of the valleys what
+ranks and ranks of them went down, and along
+the snow-line how by the persistence of assault
+they are bent and contorted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This is the whole effect of the sombre swathes
+of pine that mask the Sierra slopes. They march
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_152' name='Page_152'>[152]</a></span>
+along the water-courses, they climb up sheer
+precipices in staggering files, trooping in the
+passes; across the smooth meadow spaces they
+lock arms, they await the word of command.
+By a very little observation they are seen to
+be ranged in orderly companies. Here a warm
+current of air travelling steadily from the superheated
+valleys carries the life zone higher, there
+a defiant bony ridge drops it a few thousand
+feet, but the relative arrangement of species does
+not greatly vary. The broad oaks, like reverend
+grandsires, from the foothills see the procession go
+by, they follow as far as the gates of the mountain,
+crutched and bowed. All the lower cañons are
+full of a rabble of deciduous trees, chinquapins,
+scrub oak, madroño, full of gay camp-followers,
+lilac, dogwood, azaleas, strumpet penstemons,
+flaunting lupins, monk's-hood, columbine.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i262" id="i262"></a>
+<img src="images/i-262.jpg" width="343" height="550" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">YOSEMITE FALLS
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+The grey nut pine, wide-branched, unwarlike
+but serviceable, opens the ranks of conifers. Then
+the long-leaved pines begin, <i><span lang='es_ES'>ponderoso</span></i>, <i>Coulteri</i>,
+and the slender, arrowy, fire-resisting <i>attenuata</i>.
+On the western slope, increasing as they go northward,
+the redwood holds all the open country, but
+it is no climber like <i><span lang='es_ES'>monticola</span></i>, the largest of all
+true pines, the captain of the Sierra forests. The
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_153' name='Page_153'>[153]</a></span>
+firs usurp the water-borders and the low moraines;
+clannish, incommunicable, they seem not to find
+it worth while to grow unless they grow stately.
+Above all these range the thin-barked pines, the
+lodgepole, Douglas spruce, librocedrus, and hardy
+junipers in windy passes. About the meadows
+and lake-borders the quaking asps push like
+children between the knees along the line; and
+highest, most persistent, the creeping-limbed,
+wind-depressed white-barked pine, under whose
+matted boughs the wild sheep bed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The trees have each their own voice&mdash;a degree
+of flexibility or length of needles upon which the
+wind harps to produce its characteristic note. The
+traveller in the dark of mountain nights knows his
+way among them as by the street cries of his own
+city. The creaking of the firs, the sough of the
+long-leaved pines, the whispering whistle of the
+lodgepole pine, the delicate frou-frou of the redwoods
+in a wind, these come out for him in the
+darkness with the night scent of moth-haunted
+flowers. But there is one tree that for the footer
+of the mountain trails is voiceless; it speaks no
+doubt, but it speaks only to the austere mountain-heads,
+to the mindful winds and the watching stars.
+It speaks as men speak to one another and are not
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_154' name='Page_154'>[154]</a></span>
+heard by the little ants crawling over their boots.
+This is the "big tree," the sequoia. In something
+less than a score of forest patches about the rim
+of the Twin Valleys, the sequoia abides, out of
+some possible preglacial period, out of some past
+of which nothing is left to us but the fading
+memory of the "giants in those days." The age
+of individual big trees can be computed in terms
+of human history. There are evidences written
+in the rings of these that they endured the
+drouth which made the famine in the days of
+Ahab the king, against which Elijah prayed.
+These are growing trees whose seeds are fertile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One might make a very dramatic collocation of
+the rise and fall of empires against the life period
+of a single sequoia, and that would be easier than
+to transcribe by mere phrases the impression of
+one of these green towers of silence on the sense.
+Single and deeply corrugated as a Corinthian
+column, with only a lightly-branched crown for a
+capital, they spire for five thousand years or so, and
+then the leaf-crown becomes rounded to a dome
+in which the winds breed. Warm days of Spring,
+their young nestling zephyrs come fluttering
+down the deep wells of shade to shake the saplings
+of a hundred years. In Summer the fine-leafed
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_155' name='Page_155'>[155]</a></span>
+foliage catches the sun like spray, diffusing
+vaporous blueness; but the majesty of their
+gigantic trunks is incommunicable. After a while
+the stifling sense of awe breaks before it, and
+you go on with your small affairs as children will
+go on playing even in the royal presence.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i267" id="i267"></a>
+<img src="images/i-267.jpg" width="550" height="378" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">BLUE LAKE, LAKE COUNTY
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+The name <i>Sequoia</i> is one of the few cheering
+notes among our habitual botanical stupidities&mdash;an
+attempt to express quality as it is humanly
+measured in a name. There was once an
+American Cadmus, Sequoyah, a Cherokee who
+invented an Indian alphabet and taught his tribe
+to read. Seeing them outnumbered in their own
+territory, he started west with the idea of founding
+a great Indian empire. He was last seen trailing
+north across the desert and was heard of no more.
+Tradition has it that he reached the forest of the
+upper Kern River and gave the trees his name.
+At least no botanist with his nose in a book has
+usurped it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Forests are for cover. They mask not only the
+naked rock, but the paths of deer and bear and
+bighorn. Under the spire-pointed ranks of conifers
+that look so black from above, verging to blueness,
+a world of furtive folk goes on. A world of
+birds is in its branches, squirrels nimble as
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_156' name='Page_156'>[156]</a></span>
+sparrows, but scarcely anything of this is visible
+to the watcher on the heights. Rabbits playing
+on your lawn would be more noticeable in
+proportion than the seldom-seen bighorn leading
+his light-footed young from ledge to rocky ledge.
+The jealous trees cover the trails and obscure the
+passes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As you come up through them you observe
+the flat, soddy spaces of old lake basins, green as
+jewels, and the hanging meadows gay with cascades
+of flowers, the stream tangles, the new-made
+moraines bright with bindweed and sulphur-flower.
+But from the heights all this lovely detail is
+hidden by the overlapping tents of boughs. Here
+and there a stream leaps forth at the falls like a
+sword from a green scabbard, or higher up, may be
+traced as the silver wire on which are strung
+unrippled lakes as blue as cobalt. Great chains of
+such lakes lead down from the snow-line to the
+foothill borders, encroached upon by the silent
+ranks of trees. As they go down they show
+soddy borders, they tend to fill and to grow
+meadows where presently deep-rooting trees
+assume their stations. This is the strategic rule
+for the taking of a granite mountain. First the
+grinding ice and the disintegrating water; what the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_157' name='Page_157'>[157]</a></span>
+streams wash down collects in the glacier-ploughed
+basins. It makes lake borders by which the
+grass comes in&mdash;the small grass that is mightier
+than mountains, that eats them for its food.
+Lakes at the lower levels become meadows, then
+trees arrive; they overrun the soddy ground, the
+snow-manured moraines. The trees themselves
+take centuries to fruition. At a later stage men
+dispossess the forest and build cities, but this has
+not yet come to the Sierras. There is something
+indomitable in the will of the trees to spread and
+climb. In the floor of Yosemite and Hetch
+Hetchy there are hundred-year-old oaks of full
+form and generous growth, and on the slopes
+above them the same oaks and of almost the same
+age are so dwarfed by drouth and altitude that
+they are not knee-high to a man, but they keep
+the due proportions of their type. A white bark
+pine will climb where the weight of the winter
+drifts is so heavy that it is never able to lift its
+decumbent trunk from the ground, clinging like
+ivy to the wall in which it roots.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the Spring the rich florescence of the conifers
+sheds pollen in drifts that, carried down the melting
+water, warn the sheep-herder and the orchardist
+a hundred miles away of the advancing season.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_158' name='Page_158'>[158]</a></span>
+A pine forest in flower is one of the things worth
+seeing which is most seldom seen, for at its best
+the high passes are still choked by snow, the lakes
+ice-locked, the trails dangerous. And then the
+blossoms, yellow and crimson tassels and rosy
+spathes, are carried on the leafy crowns high over
+the heads of the most adventurous foresters.
+What one finds, as late as the end of June when
+the trails are open, is a stain of pollen on the
+lingering snow, and great clouds of it flying wherever
+a bough is brushed by a light wing. In the
+autumn the whole wood is full of the click and
+glint of the winged seeds. Storms of them, like
+clouds of locusts, are carried past on the wind, to
+be dropped in the nearest clearing or to find a
+chance lodging in a moss-lined crevice of the
+weathered headlands.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i276" id="i276"></a>
+<img src="images/i-276.jpg" width="550" height="359" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">LAKE TAHOE, THE HIGH SIERRAS
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+But from the heights, all feeling for the process
+of the forest is lost in the sense of its irresistible
+march&mdash;it creeps and winds, it waits darkly for the
+word. Above the tree-line no sound ascends but
+a faint vibration, the body of sound making itself
+felt in the silence. On windless days the forest
+lies black like weed at the bottom of a lake of air
+as clear as a vacuum. When the great wind
+rivers pour about the peaks, it can be seen lashing
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_159' name='Page_159'>[159]</a></span>
+like weed in the currents, but still almost soundlessly&mdash;the
+roar of it passes down the cañons, and
+is heard in the cities of the plain. But if the peaks
+cannot hear what the trees are plotting about, it is
+not so with the voices of the water. These are
+sharper, more definitive; they rise re-echoing from
+the rocky walls and are recognisable each by its
+distinctive note at incredible heights of the sheer,
+glassy, granite frontlets.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the glacial valleys, such as Yosemite, Tehipite,
+and Hetch Hetchy, where young rivers drop
+from the headlands in long streaming falls, the
+noise of them contending with the wind makes
+mimic thunder. Immense curtains of falling
+water are tossed this way and that, they are
+caught up and suspended in mid-air, and let fall
+crashing to the lower levels. When the wind
+blows straight up the cañon they will rear
+against it, and leap out a shining arc, shattering
+in mid-air like bursting bombs of spray. But
+later in the season, when the streams are heavy
+with the melting snows, the wind itself is
+shattered by the weight of falling water&mdash;it
+exhausts itself in obscuring clouds of silver dust.
+When from Whitney or Williamson or King's
+Mountain you can see half-a-hundred such young
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_160' name='Page_160'>[160]</a></span>
+rivers roaring to the morning, it is as beautiful
+and as terrifying as the sight of youth to timorous
+age. They go leaping with their shining shields,
+and their shouting shakes the rocks. Neither you
+nor they believe that the most and the best they
+will come to is an irrigating canal between sober
+rows of prunes and barley.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Higher than the forests, or the waters rising
+out of them, is the <i>Py-weack</i>, the Land of Shining
+Rocks. They shine with glacier polish; horses on
+the high trails sniff suspiciously at their glittering
+surfaces. Time can lay slight hold on them by
+thunder, by frost, and the little grey moss; it has
+not yet subdued the front of Oppapago. Here
+between snowless ribs and buttresses are the
+shrunken glaciers that feed the streams, little toy
+models of the ancient rivers of ice. The snowfields
+of the Sierras are not so inconsiderable as
+they seem: they are dwarfed by the precipices
+among which they hide. Inaccessible to ordinary
+mountain travel, they make their best showing
+from the surrounding plains, where, lifted in the
+middle air, they glow with ethereal whiteness.
+Close by they display a bewildering waste of
+broken ice, boulders, and crevasses, made bleaker
+by the cobalt shadows.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_161' name='Page_161'>[161]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i281" id="i281"></a>
+<img src="images/i-281.jpg" width="550" height="373" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">MOUNT SHASTA&mdash;SIERRA GLOW
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+North the line of peaks stretches, broken by the
+passes that give access to the west. Between
+them, above the source of streams, in the ice-gouged
+hollows, lie unfathomable waters that take
+all their life from the sky. Or perhaps they are
+reservoirs from which the sky is made, fluid jade
+and azulite and hyacinth and chrysoprase, as if
+the skies of many days had run their colours in
+those bleak bowls. For at this altitude the wave
+contour of the range comes out most sharply; the
+sky is strangely deep and darker, as if through its
+translucence one glimpsed the void of space. One
+sees the moon and the planets wandering there with
+pale lamps held aloft.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No life of any sort is visible from here. Farther
+down toward the coast, over the forested moraines,
+the condor may be seen leaning against the wind at
+sunrise. On the edge of the abysmal cañons eagles
+make their nests and go dropping down the
+shadowy depths to seek their food from God, but
+they do not rise to these stark heights. Sometimes
+a clanging horde of water-fowl, beating up
+from the Gulf of California overland to the
+Canadian marshes, will grow bewildered in the
+face of the great wall-sided cliffs; circling they
+attempt the forward flight, only to circle and
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_162' name='Page_162'>[162]</a></span>
+rise anew, until, wing-weary in that thin air, they
+sink exhausted to the margin of a mountain lake,
+satisfied at last to thread their way humbly along
+the creek-beds to open country.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The live forces of the High Sierra are the
+forces of wind and light. One feels the push
+of tremendous currents flowing between the
+peaks as among rocky islands. Day by day
+they may be charted by the cloud fragments
+floating on them, by the banners of dry snow
+dust, streaming out like long grass from the
+island shores. Thundering fleets of cumuli drift
+up the wind rivers and assault the great domes
+of Whitney and Oppapago. The light breaks
+through all the varying cloud strata, and colours
+them with splendour; the glow of the clouds
+reflected on the snow is caught by the watchful
+mountain-lover far down the valleys of Inyo and
+San Joaquin. This painted hour of sunset is the
+apotheosis of mountains, but for me it has less
+of majesty than the morning after deep snows.
+These come usually early in the season. The
+air for days will be full of the formless stir, then
+the range withdraws itself behind a veil which
+closes from tented peak to peak, and includes
+sometimes the parallel desert ranges which lie
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_163' name='Page_163'>[163]</a></span>
+along its eastern coast. Twenty feet will fall in
+a single session of the white gods behind the veil.
+Then comes a morning blue and sharp as a
+spear-thrust. Every tree is like an arrow feathered
+in green and white. Airy bridges built upon the
+bending stems shut in the water-courses; the
+moraines are smooth and soft as the backs of
+huddled sheep. By night the range shows from
+the valley as a procession of winged figures holding
+the snows upon their bosoms. And that, after
+all, is the business of mountains. The western
+front of the Sierra Nevada, which receives the
+full force of the Pacific storms, is rewarded
+with the stateliest forests. Before those extended
+snowy mountain arms lie the great Twin
+Valleys; behind them stretches the illimitable sage-brush
+country, the backyard of the Sierra.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i287" id="i287"></a>
+<img src="images/i-287.jpg" width="550" height="365" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">VALLEY OF THE YOSEMITE
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+"Sage-brush country" is one of those local
+terms that stand for a type of landscape as
+distinctive as the moors of England and the
+campagna of Italy. It means first of all, open
+country, great space of sky, what the inhabitants
+of it call "eye-reach," treeless except for a few
+cotton-woods and willows along the sink of intermittent
+streams, and stippled with low shrubs of
+artemesia. This is the true "sage-brush," though
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_164' name='Page_164'>[164]</a></span>
+it is no sage, the sacred bush of Diana, <i>Artemisia
+tridentata</i>. It may grow in favoured districts
+man-high, but ordinarily not more than two or
+three feet in the arid regions which it haunts.
+Other social shrubs will be found pre-empting
+miles of the territory to which the artemesia
+gives its name, <i>coleogeny</i>, <i>pursia</i>, <i>dalia</i>, "creosote,"
+but none other gives it the distinctive feature, the
+web of pale, silky sage-green against the sun-burned
+sand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Other items of the sage-brush landscape are so
+constant that they are immediately suggested by it:
+mountains hanging on the horizon in opalescent
+haze, low flowing lines of hills overlaid by old
+lava-flows, the "black rock" simulating cloud
+shadows on the distant ranges, dry red cones of
+ancient volcanic ash, and great flat table-topped
+"buttes" of the painted desert.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+White-crested ranges on the one hand and
+buttes on the other mark the limits of the sage;
+for where snow-caps are, there are trees, and where
+the buttes begin the cactus and the palo verde
+reign.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A sage-brush country is a cattle country
+primarily; perhaps there may be mines; where
+there is water to be stored for irrigation there will
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_165' name='Page_165'>[165]</a></span>
+be towns, but the virtue of the sage is that it
+grows in lands that man, at least, has found no
+other use for.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It can thrive on an allowance of water that will
+support no larger thing than a chipmunk or a
+lizard, and, growing, feeds the cattle on a thousand
+hills. Therefore it is indispensable to any picture
+of the sage-brush country that there should be
+herds at large in it and vaqueros riding, or far
+down the bleached valley the dust of a rodeo rising.
+It is impossible to think of such a land and not
+think of these things, free life, and air as clear and
+vibrant with vitality as a bell. I can never think
+of it myself without seeing, in addition, the
+vultures making a merry-go-round over Panamint,
+and up from Coso the creaking line of a twenty-mule
+team.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sage-brush country of California begins
+properly at the foot of the Sierras where the state-line
+sheers east by south from Lake Tahoe. It
+covers the high valleys that divide the true Sierra
+from the older, lesser ranges that keep it company
+as far south as Olancha. Below Mono Lake, that
+part of the gold region made immortal by Mark
+Twain, it gives to the chrome- and ochre-tinted soil
+its distinguishing characteristic. From the long
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_166' name='Page_166'>[166]</a></span>
+arm of Death Valley it begins to be encroached
+upon by the mesquite, and at Indian Wells it is
+driven close under the lee of the last Sierra. The
+range of which San Bernardino and San Jacinto
+are outposts carries the artemisia farther desertward,
+almost to the Colorado River in fact, and
+south again about the Salton Sea it holds its own
+with sahuro and palo verde. Its eastern border,
+like that of the wild tribes along the Mojave line,
+is lost in pure desertness. Formerly much of that
+country from San Bernardino to the sea was native
+to the sage, and all the southern end of the San
+Joaquin. But now all this is replaced with
+orchards, for the artemisia proves nothing so much
+of the soil on which it grows as that, given a due
+allowance of water, it is as desirable for other
+things.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i296" id="i296"></a>
+<img src="images/i-296.jpg" width="550" height="409" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">THE HALF DOME, YOSEMITE
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+All this country which I have described to you
+has so recently been sea that the mark of its old
+beach-line is plainly to be traced along the east
+Sierra wall. Still the evaporating water leaves
+vast deposits of salt and alkali, blinking white in
+the sink of Death Valley. There are lakes there
+still where the salt crusts over hard and clear like
+ice, and deep thick puddles of bitter minerals, the
+lees of that ancient inland ocean. From the top
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_167' name='Page_167'>[167]</a></span>
+of any of the denuded desert ranges it is possible
+to trace the winding bays and estuaries, and, with
+an eye for location, to choose the points at which
+one may fairly expect to find potsherds, amulets,
+fire-blackened hearthstones, and the middens of a
+nameless people who built their primitive towns
+along its beaches. It must have had much to
+recommend it in those days before the sage-brush
+took it, for this inland sea, rather than the more
+mountainous Pacific shore, was the route taken by
+the ancient migratory peoples who left their
+undecipherable signs scored into the rocks from
+the Aztec country to the Arctic. On isolated
+igneous rocks near their old encampments, and high
+on the walls of the box canons, such as might have
+been tide-rifts, high above any mechanical contrivance
+of the present-day Indians, the records
+resist equally the shifts of sea and sand and the
+efforts of modern science to read them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Whether the ghosts of the departed peoples ever
+revisit the ancient beaches, the ghosts of waters
+haunt there daily. Morning and mid-afternoon the
+rivers of mirage arise; they well out of the past
+and are poured trembling on the plain; phantom
+fogs blow across them, wraiths of trees grow up
+and are reflected in false streams. Often in very
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_168' name='Page_168'>[168]</a></span>
+early light there are strange suggestions of&mdash;&mdash;dunes
+and boulders perhaps? Only no boulders
+in that country are flat-topped like the houses
+built in lands of the sun, and no dunes are wall-sided.
+Mirage, we are told, is but a picture of
+distant things, mirrored on atmospheric planes, but
+then maybe a ghost is only a mirage deflected on
+our atmosphere from worlds outside our ken, and
+it is always easy in the desert to see things that
+you cannot possibly believe. Whatever they are,
+mirages are real to the eye. I mean that they are
+not to be winked away nor dissipated by contact.
+I have watched a vaquero ride into one of them
+and drown to all appearances, or seem to be
+swimming his horse across its billows, all of him
+below its surface as completely hidden as by rivers
+of water. Moreover, mirages tend always to occur
+under given conditions and in the same places. I
+recall one of the stations on the old Mojave stage
+road, which, approached from the north about
+an hour after sunrise, would instantly duplicate:
+two houses, two lines of poplars, two high
+corrals.
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i302" id="i302"></a>
+<img src="images/i-302.jpg" width="550" height="391" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">SHASTA&mdash;SNOW CLOUDS
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Occasionally along the edge of the sage-brush
+country one may see that surpassing wonder, the
+moon mirage, poured like quicksilver along the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_169' name='Page_169'>[169]</a></span>
+narrow valleys, as if the thirsty land had dreamed
+of water.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is odd how this suggestion of sea and river
+clings to a country where there is nothing harder to
+come by than good water to drink. For any other
+purpose it is not to be thought of. After one of
+those terrible wind storms, the only really incommoding
+desert weather, it is possible to find great
+spaces all rippled and lined in water-markings like
+a sea that has suddenly undergone a magic transformation
+into sand. The contours of the desert
+ranges are billowy; they rise out of the plain like
+the grey-backed breakers of open sea. The valleys
+between are narrow and trough-like; the shores of
+them are lined with crawling dunes that, under
+the steady pressure of wind currents, are for ever
+sliding up their own peaks and down the other side,
+changing place without ever once losing the long
+slope to windward and the abrupt landward fall of
+waves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another item which adds to the suggestion of
+the illimitable spread of sage-brush country, like
+the sea, is the way the sparse forests of the
+mountain-tops appear to be islanded by it. For
+the sage-brush extends on across the Great Basin,
+it stretches into Montana and south to Arizona
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_170' name='Page_170'>[170]</a></span>
+and New Mexico, it works about the lower end
+of the Rocky Mountains and well into the great
+central plain. The ranges lie thick in it as ocean
+swells, as I have said, and stepping from crest to
+crest has come the fox-tail pine, <i>Pinus flexilis</i>, all
+the way from Humboldt Mountain to San Jacinto.
+A sinewy, thinly-branched species, as straight-backed
+as an Indian, it has little affinity for its
+noble congeners of the Sierra forests, but keeps to
+the dry and open ridges, nourished by clouds and
+by infrequent shallow snows. With it, but at
+lower levels to which the <i>flexilis</i> will never come,
+is found frequently the one-leaved piñon pine, the
+food-crop of the wild tribes. But the piñon is a
+pushing sort, it establishes itself upon the slightest
+invitation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is a story told in the desert of how this
+grey, round-headed tree was once a very great
+<i><span lang='es_ES'>capitan</span></i>, who, in order that his death might be as
+beneficent to his people as his life had been, was
+changed into the foodful pine. Whether the legend
+is true or not, certain it is that if you sit down by
+a piñon, wherever found, and stay long enough,
+you will see Indians. They might come in the
+Spring looking for <i>taboose</i>, or later for willows and
+grasses for basketry, for seeds of sunflower and chia,
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_171' name='Page_171'>[171]</a></span>
+to shoot doves by the water-holes or to hunt chuckwallas.
+A chuckwalla is a lizard, a kind of dragon in
+miniature, barred black and white, and as offensive
+to look at as he is harmless, in fact very good
+eating and not too plentiful. Mojaves, Shoshones,
+Paiutes, Pimas, all the tribes of the sage-brush
+country, have this in common, that they live very
+close to the earth; roots, seeds, reptiles, thick pads
+of the cholla cactus, even the grass of the field,
+serve them. They look, indeed, as though they
+had been made of the earth on the very spot that
+produced them, of the black rock, the brown sand,
+and the dark water that collects in polished basins
+of the wind-denuded ranges.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Very little rain gets past the heaven-raking
+crest of the Sierra Nevada into the sage-brush
+country; the most that falls is blown up from the
+Gulf of California along the draw created by the
+close, parallel desert ranges. It is precipitated
+usually under atmospheric conditions that produce
+violent drops and changes. All that the traveller
+is likely to find of it is in these rock reservoirs
+under the run-off of some bare granite cliff, or in
+the rare, persistent "water-holes" hollowed out by
+beasts or men, marked in the landscape by one
+lone tree perhaps, or a clump of shrubby willows.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_172' name='Page_172'>[172]</a></span>
+Often there will be no mark at all except the
+frequency along the trail of skeleton cattle or wild
+sheep, pointing all in one direction, as they died
+on their way to the far-between drinking-places.
+There are districts in this back-door country where
+evaporation from the body is so rapid that death
+overtakes the chance prospector even with water in
+sight or in his canteen across his back. For years
+a notorious outlaw protected himself in the Death
+Valley region, by filling in all the springs in a circle
+about the territory to which he had retreated.
+Beyond that waterless rim even the law could not
+penetrate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet how the land repays the slightest
+moisture! Years when the Kuro-Siwa swings
+closer to our coast and the winds are friendly, I
+have seen all that country, from Tehachapi, outside
+the wall, to San Gorgiono, one sheet of blue and
+gold. Seeds of a hundred tender annuals lie in the
+loose sands for years between the shrubby sage,
+their vitality unimpaired by the delayed resurrection
+of a chance wet spring. Often I have sifted the
+sand in my fingers looking for a sign of the life-giving
+principle which bursts so suddenly into
+beauty, without finding it. Yet after years in
+which there is no alteration in the aspect of the
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_173' name='Page_173'>[173]</a></span>
+country, except the insensible change of the sage
+tints from grey to green and grey again, the miracle
+takes place, the blossomy wonder is upon the
+world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As a matter of fact, the sage-brush country is by
+no means the desert that it looks to the casual eye.
+Besides the social shrubs which have each their own
+blossom and seed time, even the driest years will
+afford a few blooms of crimson mallow, and in the
+shelter of every considerable shrub some dwarfed
+and delicate phacelia or nemophilia. Even out of
+dunes which bury its hundred old trunks to the
+new season's twigs, the mesquite will bear its sweet
+foodful pods. If you know at what hours to look
+for it, wild life is never absent, but it is not ordinarily
+to be found by white men blundering about in
+broad noon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is only when you meet, in the midst of great
+open valleys wherein there is nothing growing
+higher than the knees of your horse, and nothing
+moving bigger than the little horned toad under
+the cactus bush, bands of Indians well fed, cushiony
+with fat of mesquite meal and chia, that you
+understand how little you know of the land in
+which you move.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is a Paiute proverb to the effect that no
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_174' name='Page_174'>[174]</a></span>
+man should attempt the country east of the Sierras
+until he has learned to sleep in the shade of his
+arrows. This is a picturesque way of saying that
+he must be able to reduce his wants to the limit of
+necessity. Those who have been able to do so, and
+have trusted the land to repay them, have discovered
+that the measure is over-full.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A man may not find wealth there, nor too much
+of food even, but he often finds himself, which is
+much more important.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_175' name='Page_175'>[175]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<h2>
+INDEX
+</h2>
+
+<p class="center">
+<i>The illustrations are indexed in italics.</i>
+</p>
+
+<ul class="none">
+<li class="alpha">
+Alcatraz, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Alviso, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Angels, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Antioch, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Arbolado, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+"Arroya," definition of, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+Bakersfield, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Berkeley Hills, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Blue Lake, Lake County</i>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Buena Vista, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+Cabrillo, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Cahuenga, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Calaveras, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Camulas, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Cañon in the Sierra Madres</i>, <a href="#i077">49</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Carmel, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Carmel River, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Carmel Valley, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Carquinez, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Carquinez Strait, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Castle Crag, Rattlesnake Cañon</i>, <a href="#Page_137">136</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Castro, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Catalina, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Cemetery, The, Santa Barbara Mission</i>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Cession of California from Mexico, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Clear Lake, Lake County</i>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+"Coasts of Adventure, The," <a href="#Page_47">47</a>-<a href="#Page_60">60</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Colorado River, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Contra Costa, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Coronado, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Coronel, Don Antonio, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Corta Madero, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Coso, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Coulterville, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Cypress Point, near Carmel</i>, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+Death Valley, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Donner Lake</i>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Donner Lake, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Drake, Sir Francis, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+Eagle Rock, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Emigrant Gap, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Eucalyptus Grove, A</i>, <a href="#i053">33</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Exeter, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+Faralones, The, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Farmington, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Fort Point, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Francis of Assisi, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Franciscan "Frailes," <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Frémont, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Fresno, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Fuca, Juan de, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+<i>Glendale, Valley of the San Gabriel</i>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Golden Gate, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Golden Gate and Black Point</i>, <a href="#i171">107</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Gulf of California, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_176' name='Page_176'>[176]</a></span>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+<i>Half Dome, The, Yosemite</i>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Hamlin, Jack, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Harte, Bret, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Hetch Hetchy Valley, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+"High Sierras and the Sage-Brush Country, The" <a href="#Page_149">149</a>-<a href="#Page_174">174</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Hôtel Del Monte, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Humboldt Mountain, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+Indian Wells, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Inyo Valley, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+Jackass Hill, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Jimtown, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Jumping Frog, the, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+Kaweah Mountain, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Kaweah River, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Kern River, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+King's Mountain, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+King's River, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+King's River Cañon, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Klamath River, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Kuro-Siwa Current, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+Laboratory Point, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Lake Mono, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Lake Tahoe, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Lake Tahoe</i>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+"Land of the Little Duck, The," <a href="#Page_107">107</a>-<a href="#Page_124">124</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Laurel Lake, Upper Sacramento</i>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Lindsay, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Looking down on Monterey and the Bay</i>, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Lopez, Francisco, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Los Angeles, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Los Angeles River, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+<i>McCloud River</i>, <a href="#i235">139</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Madera, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Maldonado, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Mare Island, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Mendocino Country, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Merced River, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Mill Valley</i>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Mirror Lake, Yosemite</i>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Mission Dolores, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Mission Point, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Mission River, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Mission of San Carlos Borromeo, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Mission San Fernando, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Missions, ruins of, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Mokelumne River, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Monterey, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+"Monterey, the Port of," <a href="#Page_63">63</a>-<a href="#Page_84">84</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Monterey Cypress, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+"Mothering Mountains," <a href="#Page_27">27</a>-<a href="#Page_24">24</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Mount Oppapago, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Mount Shasta, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Mount Shasta</i>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Mount Whitney, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Mount Williamson, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+Napa, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Noriega's, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+Olancha, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+"Old Spanish Gardens," <a href="#Page_87">87</a>-<a href="#Page_103">103</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+Pacific Grove, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Padre Jayme Bravo, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Padre Lausan, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Padre Serra (Junipero Serra), <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Paiute Indians, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Pajaro, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Pajaro river, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Pala, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+"Palatingwas," <a href="#Page_20">20</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Palo Corona, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Panamint, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Pasadena, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Paso Robles, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Patio, The, Old Spanish Residence</i>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Pescadero, Monterey Bay</i>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Pieoras Blancos, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Point Conception, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Point Lobos, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Point of Pines, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Point Pinos, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_177' name='Page_177'>[177]</a></span>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Point Sur, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Portersville, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Portola, Don Gaspar de, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+<i>Redlands</i>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Redwoods</i>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+"Rio," A, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Riverside, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+Sacramento, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Sacramento River, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+"Sage-Brush country," meaning of term, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Salinas, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Salinas River, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Salton Sea, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Sausalito, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Antonio, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+"San Antonio," the, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Bernardino, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Carlos, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Clemente, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Diego, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Diego, Bay of, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>San Diego, looking towards Point Loma</i>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Emigdio, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Fernando, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Francisco, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Francisco, Bay of, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Gabriel, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Gabriel Valley, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Gorgiono, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Gorgiono, Pass of, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Jacinto, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Joaquin, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Joaquin River, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Joaquin Valley, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Jose, Señor, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Juan, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Juan Bautista, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Juan Capistrano, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Luis Rey, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Pablo, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Pablo Bay, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Quentin, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+San Raphael, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Santa Barbara, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Santa Catalina, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Santa Clara, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Santa Cruz Coast, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Santa Cruz Mountains, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Santa Cruz Mountains, the Coast Range</i>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Santa Inez, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Santa Margarita, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Santa Rosa, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Sequoia, origin of name, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Shasta&mdash;Snow Clouds</i>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Sierra Madre, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Sierra Nevada, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Sierra Nevada, origin of name, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Sierras, the, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Solano, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Sonoma, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Sonoma County, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Sonora, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+"Sparrow-Hawk's Own, The," <a href="#Page_3">3</a>-<a href="#Page_23">23</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Squaw Creek, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Stanislaus River, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Stockton, <a href="#Page_123">123</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Suisun, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Sur, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Sycamores, a Coast Range Cañon</i>, <a href="#i095">59</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+Table Mountain, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Tall Chaparral, Santa Cruz</i>, <a href="#Page_62">62</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Tamalpias, Mount, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Tamalpias</i>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Tasajara, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Tehachapi, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Tehipite Valley, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Tejon, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Tejon Pass, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Temblors, The, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>"Three Brothers, The," Yosemite</i>&mdash;<i><a href="#i001">Frontispiece</a></i>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Tiburon, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_178' name='Page_178'>[178]</a></span>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Trinity River, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Truthful James, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Tulare, the, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Tule River, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Tuolumne River, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Turlock, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Twain, Mark, <a href="#Page_138">138</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+"Twin Valleys, The," <a href="#Page_127">127</a>-<a href="#Page_146">146</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+<i>Valley of the Yosemite</i>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Visalia, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Viscaino, Sebastian, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+<i>Waiting for Duck&mdash;Los Baños</i>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Walker's Pass, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Warner's Ranch, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>
+</li>
+
+<li class="alpha">
+Yerba Buena, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+<i>Yosemite Falls</i>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>
+</li>
+
+<li>
+Yosemite Valley, <a href="#Page_135">135</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>
+</li>
+</ul>
+
+<p class="center p4">
+THE END
+</p>
+
+<p class="center s08 p4">
+<i>Printed by</i> <span class='smcap'>R. &amp; R. Clark, Limited</span>, <i>Edinburgh</i>.
+<span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_179' name='Page_179'>[179]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="i314" id="i314"></a>
+<img src="images/i-314.jpg" width="481" height="550" alt="" />
+<p class="caption">SKETCH MAP ACCOMPANYING "CALIFORNIA" BY SUTTON PALMER AND MARY AUSTIN (A. AND C. BLACK, LONDON).
+</p>
+<p class="caption"><a href="images/i-314lg.jpg">View larger image</a></p>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a id='Page_180' name='Page_180'>[180]</a></span>
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of California, by Mary Austin
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CALIFORNIA ***
+
+***** This file should be named 44764-h.htm or 44764-h.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/4/4/7/6/44764/
+
+Produced by Melissa McDaniel and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive)
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
+  www.gutenberg.org/license.
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at 809
+North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887.  Email
+contact links and up to date contact information can be found at the
+Foundation's web site and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit:  www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For forty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+</body>
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-001.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-001.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0c32f42
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-001.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-006.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-006.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d1504c0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-006.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-021.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-021.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ab82a83
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-021.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-034.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-034.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1854b8c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-034.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-053.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-053.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..73de64b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-053.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-066.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-066.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ab26134
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-066.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-077.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-077.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f98fc1c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-077.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-090.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-090.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9406893
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-090.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-095.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-095.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2077ad0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-095.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-104.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-104.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..80340b0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-104.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-109.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-109.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cdcb3a4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-109.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-122.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-122.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e55f738
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-122.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-127.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-127.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ffdec59
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-127.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-136.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-136.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e7b442d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-136.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-150.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-150.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7548bf5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-150.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-171.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-171.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f392c75
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-171.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-180.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-180.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..37b4d82
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-180.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-185.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-185.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ca8e435
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-185.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-198.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-198.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3403a49
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-198.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-209.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-209.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8cdb304
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-209.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-215.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-215.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cf7fecb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-215.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-224.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-224.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..911aaa4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-224.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-230.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-230.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b4de08a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-230.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-235.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-235.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c7ab0eb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-235.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-244.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-244.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e5a1648
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-244.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-249.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-249.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0f4fb7a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-249.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-262.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-262.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..89b517a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-262.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-267.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-267.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c41e359
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-267.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-276.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-276.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7f2e9e1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-276.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-281.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-281.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f9836cd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-281.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-287.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-287.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8cc14b4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-287.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-296.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-296.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..847bc8d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-296.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-302.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-302.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..68a272e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-302.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-314.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-314.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2096240
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-314.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764-h/images/i-314lg.jpg b/old/44764-h/images/i-314lg.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..dfb8587
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764-h/images/i-314lg.jpg
diff --git a/old/44764.txt b/old/44764.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9d608cf
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,4173 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of California, by Mary Austin
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: California
+       The Land of the Sun
+
+Author: Mary Austin
+
+Illustrator: Sutton Palmer
+
+Release Date: January 26, 2014 [EBook #44764]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CALIFORNIA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Melissa McDaniel and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+  Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have
+  been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
+
+  Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
+
+  On page 18, "arroya" should possibly be "arroyo."
+
+  On page 53, "gaumet" should possibly be "gamut."
+
+  On page 134, the text is "Noriegas'."  The Index shows "Noriega's."
+
+  "Tamalpias" should possibly be "Tamalpais."
+
+
+
+
+  [Illustration: THE THREE BROTHERS, YOSEMITE VALLEY]
+
+
+
+
+CALIFORNIA
+
+
+
+
+     _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
+
+     THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN
+     A WOMAN OF GENIUS
+     THE LOVELY LADY
+     ETC.
+
+
+     AGENTS
+
+     America           The Macmillan Company
+                         64 & 66 Fifth Avenue, New York
+
+     Australasia       The Oxford University Press
+                         205 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
+
+     Canada            The Macmillan Company of Canada, Ltd.
+                         St. Martin's House, 70 Bond Street,
+     Toronto
+
+     India             Macmillan & Company, Ltd.
+                         Macmillan Building, Bombay
+                         309 Bow Bazaar Street, Calcutta
+
+
+
+
+     CALIFORNIA
+
+     THE LAND OF THE SUN
+
+     PAINTED BY
+     SUTTON PALMER
+
+     DESCRIBED BY
+     MARY AUSTIN
+
+
+     ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
+     4, 5, & 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.
+
+
+
+
+     _Published Autumn 1914_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                            PAGE
+  I. The Sparrow Hawk's Own                                    1
+  II. Mothering Mountains                                     25
+  III. The Coasts of Adventure                                45
+  IV. The Port of Monterey                                    61
+  V. Old Spanish Gardens                                      85
+  VI. The Land of the Little Duck                            105
+  VII. The Twin Valleys                                      125
+  VIII. The High Sierras and the Sage-brush Country          147
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+  1. The Three Brothers, Yosemite Valley             _Frontispiece_
+                                                        FACING PAGE
+  2. San Diego, looking across the Bay toward Point Loma          9
+  3. Redlands, looking toward San Bernardino Range               16
+  4. A Eucalyptus Grove                                          33
+  5. Glendale, Valley of the San Gabriel                         40
+  6. A Canon in the Sierra Madre                                 49
+  7. The Cemetery, Santa Barbara Mission                         56
+  8. Sycamores, a Coast Range Canon                              59
+  9. Tall Chaparral, Santa Cruz                                  62
+  10. Looking down on Monterey and the Bay                       65
+  11. Pescadero, a Chinese Fishing Village, Monterey Bay         72
+  12. Cypress Point, near Carmel                                 75
+  13. Santa Cruz Mountains, the Coast Range                      78
+  14. The Patio, Old Spanish Residence                           88
+  15. The Golden Gate and Black Point, from Hyde Street,
+      San Francisco. (Site of the Panama Exposition,
+      1915)                                                     107
+  16. Tamalpias                                                 110
+  17. Mill Valley, and Backwater of San Francisco Bay           113
+  18. Waiting for Duck--Los Banos                               120
+  19. Mirror Lake, Yosemite                                     129
+  20. Among the Redwoods of the Great Twin Valleys              131
+  21. Clear Lake, Lake County                                   134
+  22. Castle Crag, Rattlesnake Canon                            136
+  23. McCloud River, Upper Sacramento Valley                    139
+  24. Donner Lake, on the old Emigrant Trail                    142
+  25. Laurel Lake, Upper Sacramento                             145
+  26. Yosemite Falls                                            152
+  27. Blue Lake, Lake County                                    155
+  28. Lake Tahoe, the High Sierras                              158
+  29. Mount Shasta--Sierra Glow                                 161
+  30. Valley of the Yosemite                                    163
+  31. The Half Dome, Yosemite                                   166
+  32. Shasta--Snow Clouds                                       168
+     _Sketch Map at end of Volume._
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE SPARROW-HAWK'S OWN
+
+
+For a graphic and memorable report of the contours of any country, see
+always the aboriginal account of its making. That will give you the lie
+of the land as no geographer could sketch it forth for you. California
+was made by Padahoon the Sparrow-Hawk and the Little Duck, who brooded
+on the face of the waters in the Beginning of Things.
+
+There is no knowing where the tale comes from, for Winnenap the
+Medicine-Man who told it to me, was eclectic in his faiths as in his
+practice. Winnenap was a Shoshone, one of the group who had been forced
+southward into Death Valley when the great Pah Ute nation had split
+their tribes like a wedge. In the last of their wars he had been taken
+as a hostage by the Paiutes and brought up by them. He might have
+remembered the story, or his wife might have told him. She was a tall
+brown woman out of Tejon, and _her_ mother was of that band of captives
+taken from San Gabriel by the Mojaves, Mission-bred. Wherever it came
+from, the tale has its roots deep in the land it explains.
+
+Padahoon, being wearied of going to and fro under the heavens, said
+to the Little Duck that it was time there should be mountains; so the
+Little Duck dived and brought up the primordial mud of which even the
+geographers are agreed mountains are made.
+
+As he brought it the Sparrow-Hawk built a round beautiful ring of
+mountains enclosing a quiet space of sea. Said the Little Duck, "I
+choose this side," coming up with his bill full of mud toward the west.
+Whereupon the Sparrow-Hawk built the other side higher. When it was all
+done and the Little Duck surveyed it, he observed, as people will to
+this day, the discrepancy between the low western hills and the high
+Sierras, and he thought the builder had not played him fair. "Very
+well, then," said the Sparrow-Hawk, "since you are resolved to be so
+greedy," and he bit out pieces of the Sierras with his bill, and threw
+them over his shoulder.
+
+You can see the bites still deep and sharp about Mt. Whitney.
+
+But the Little Duck would not be satisfied; he took hold by the great
+bulk of Shasta and began to pull, and Padahoon pulled on his side until
+the beautiful ring was pulled out in a long oval and began to break on
+the west where the bay of San Francisco comes in. So they were forced
+to divide the mountain range north and south and make what they could
+of it. But the Sparrow-Hawk, remembering the pieces he had thrown over
+his shoulder, chose the south, where you can still see him sailing any
+clear day about four in the afternoon, over all his stolen territory.
+
+There you have the bones of the land as neatly laid out for you as they
+could do it in Kensington Museum: the long oval, breaking seaward, the
+high, bitten, westward peaks, and the Sparrow-Hawk's Own, tailing south
+like the quirk of an attenuated Q.
+
+They serve, these fragmentary ranges, for the outposts of habitableness
+between the sea wind and the forces of pure desertness. Always there
+is skirmish and assault going on about them. Showers rush up the slope
+of San Jacinto, all their shining spears a-tilt. Great gusts of wind
+roar through the Pass of San Gorgiono, the old Puerto de San Carlos.
+Seasonally they are beleaguered by stealthy rushes of the fogs that
+from the Gulf hear the peaks about Whitney calling, or by the yellow
+murk of sand-storms on which the whole face of the desert is lifted up
+as it travels toward its destiny in orchard row and vineyard. Always
+the edge of the wind is against the stone. They shine, the frontlets of
+the sentinel saints, in that keen polish, as the faces of saints must
+with benignity.
+
+Just beyond the pilae of the broken mountains--the Pillars of Hercules
+of the West--the desert winds about the eastern bases of the range in
+deep indented bays, white-rimmed with the wave marks of its ancient
+sea. Out a very little way, where the shuddering heat-waves trick the
+imagination, it seems about to be retaken by the ghost of tumbling
+billows. Nothing else moves in it; nothing sounds. Plantations of
+growing things near the Pass lean all a little toward it, edging,
+peering--the wild, spiny, thorny things of the desert to enter the
+rain-fed paradise, the full-leafed offspring of the sea wind plotting
+to take the unfriended sandy spaces. They creep a little forward or
+back as the years run wet or dry. The green things stand up, they
+march along the cliffs, they balance on the edge of precipices, but
+desperation is in every contorted stem of _mesquite_ and _palo verde_.
+And with all this struggle, so still! East on the desert rim the
+Colorado ramps like a stallion between its walls, westward the Pacific
+rings the low foreshore with thunder; but the land never cries out,
+quartz mountains disintegrate but they do not murmur.
+
+It is odd here in a land rife with the naked struggle of great pagan
+forces, to find the promontories so lend themselves to the gentle
+names of saints. Perhaps the Padres were not so far from nature as one
+thinks; in the southerly range which, with San Bernardino on the north,
+sentinels the Pass by which the iron-rimmed Emigrant trail enters the
+coast valleys, they rendered for once the pagan touch. San Jacinto--St.
+Hyacinth--was he ever anything but a Christianised memory of a Grecian
+myth, or does it matter at all so long as there are men to see, in
+the deep purple light that dies along the heights, the colour of blood
+that is shed for love? Perhaps the best thing beauty can say to Greek
+or Christian is that there are still things worth dying for. No doubt
+the veins of Padre Jayme Bravo were as rich in martyr passion as the
+stained air of the mountain is in purples, paling to rose at morning,
+thinning at noon to pure aerial blues.
+
+Seen from the coast the range has a finny contour as of some huge
+creature risen from the sea, with low hills about it like dolphins
+playing; but the prevailing note of the landscape is always blue,
+repeating the tints of the wild brodiaea that may be found on the lomas
+early in April, sending up its clustered heads between two slender
+curving spears.
+
+Near at hand the masking growth is seen to be green, the dark
+olivaceous green of the chamisal. Nowhere does one get the force of
+the Spanish termination _al_--the place where--as in that word. The
+chamisal is the place of the chamise: miles and miles of it, with
+scarcely another shrub allowed, spread over the mesa and well up
+into laps and bays of the hills. It grows breast high, man high in
+the favoured regions; but even where under the influence of drouth
+and altitude it creeps to the knees, it abates nothing of its social
+character. Its ever-green foliage has a dull shining from the resinous
+coating which protects it from evaporation, and a slight sticky feel,
+characteristics that no doubt won it the name of "greasewood" from the
+emigrants who valued it chiefly because it could be burned green. The
+spring winds blowing up from the bay whip all its fretted surface to
+a froth of panicled white bloom, that, stirring a little as the wind
+shifts, full of bee-murmur, touches the imagination with the continual
+reminder of the sea. Higher up the thick lacy chaparral flecks and
+ripples, showing the light underside of leaves, and tosses up great
+fountain sprays of ceanothus, sea-blue and lilac-scented.
+
+  [Illustration: SAN DIEGO, LOOKING ACROSS THE BAY TOWARD POINT LOMA]
+
+All the human interest of this region centres about the city on the bay
+of San Diego, a low locked harbour with a long spit of sand breaking
+the mild Pacific swell, as it bides its time for the shipping of the
+south-western world. It has already waited longer than most people
+suppose. Just fifty years after the landing of Columbus on the Bahamas,
+Cabrillo discovered it; Sir Francis Drake, romping up that coast with
+his buccaneers, must have seen it though he left no note of any visit,
+and in 1602 Sebastian Viscaino anchored there and gave it its present
+name. Just about the time the mixed Dutch and English on the Atlantic
+coast were beginning to think of themselves as Americans and to act
+accordingly, the Franciscan _Frailes_ settled on San Diego bay. Nobody
+will know why it was reserved for the brown-skirted brothers of St.
+Francis to undertake the subjugation of Alta California, until it is
+known why the King of Spain quarrelled with the Jesuits. They were
+accused of plotting against His Majesty, but in those days it was
+possible to accuse the Jesuits of almost anything without going very
+far wrong in the popular estimate. I have my own opinion about it,
+which is that a great land, like a great lady, has her way with men.
+And no land has called its own as has California:--poet or painter
+or pioneer, the world's rim under. No better patron could be found
+for this blossoming West than Francis of Assisi, who preached to his
+little brothers of the air and would have made a convert of the coyote.
+Perhaps the first settlers of a country leave their stripe on all the
+land's later offspring: if it was a way the West took to breed fervour
+and faith and the spirit of prophecy in the young generation, who shall
+say she has not succeeded?
+
+In January of 1769 two expeditions by land and sea set forth in the
+name of God and the King of Spain, under the patronage of Senor San
+Jose, indubitable patron of all journeys since the flight into Egypt.
+In April the ship _San Antonio_ anchored in the placid bay, there to
+await the live stock driven up from Velicata. So the old world came to
+the new with a whole collocation of sainted personages flocking like
+doves to her banners.
+
+But it was not saints that the land wanted so much as the stuff that
+goes to make them. The expedition starved, sickened; their eyes were
+holden. Governor Portola, with the greater part of the expedition, made
+a long _pasear_ on foot to find the lost port of Monterey, and came
+back, with armour rust on his doublet sleeves and nothing much gained
+beside, to declare the expedition a failure. But Padre Serra--Junipero
+Serra, father president of Missions, juniper of God's own planting,
+sapling of that stock of which the founder of the order had wished
+for a whole forest full--Padre Serra claimed a churchman's privilege.
+He demanded time for a _novena_, a nine days' cycle of prayer to the
+patron who was so unaccountably hiding the relief ship in the fogs
+and indecisions of the uncharted coast. It is my belief that the Padre
+chose the _novena_ simply because it was the longest possible time he
+could hope to delay the return of the expedition. Nine days they drew
+in their belts and told their beads, and on the last hour of the last
+day, far on the sea rim, behold the white wings of succour!
+
+The Patron, who could never be at a loss for an expedient, contrived
+that the ship should lose an anchor which compelled it to put in at San
+Diego, where they had no expectation of finding any of the party. It
+was so that the land tried them out and approved, for from that day the
+founding went forward steadily.
+
+There is a fine growing city now on the site of the early landing,
+regularly stratified through all the architectural periods of
+California, from the low thick-walled adobe of the Spanish occupation
+to the newest shingle-stained bungalow of the latest one-lunged
+millionaire; but the land has not lost, in a century and a half, one
+mark by which the brown-skirted _Frailes_ found their way about in
+it. It has its distinctive mark, the Sparrow-Hawk's land, the seal of
+a private and peculiar affection. Here about the mouth of one of its
+swift seasonal rivers, and touching as with a finger-tip the opposing
+shore of the island of Santa Rosa, is the habitat of the Torrey pine.
+Japanesque, unrelated, drinking the sea air, never spreading inland,
+it hugs the sea-worn edges of La Jolla, as though, as some botanists
+believe, the species came to life there out of the jewel-tinted water
+and the spirit of the desert dust.
+
+It is also possible to think of it as a relict of the land of which
+the broken Channel Islands were made, but in any case it is a pity that
+science could not have retained for this lonely, restricted species the
+name the _Frailes_ gave to its fostering waters, Soledad--the solitary.
+Behind the town the mesa rises abruptly, knife-cut by the gullies of
+intermittent streams; and far back where the mountains break down into
+foothills, and these into the lomas--little low mounds of detritus--the
+sea air collects all the blue rays of the diffused light and holds
+them there all day in the hollows, in memory of the sea from which they
+rose.
+
+In April of the year of the Occupation the white panicles of the
+chamise would be tossing here and there, and the yellow violets run
+thin lines as of fire among the grasses. You would not believe there
+were so many yellow violets in the world as a day's riding will still
+show you. At this season, _islay_, the wild cherry, will be shaking out
+its fine white spray of bloom, the button willow begins, the sycamore,
+the buckthorn, _cascara sagrada_; the great berried manzanita, which
+shed its waxen bells as early as December, will be reddening its
+apples. Here also the chia, the true sage, the honey-maker, bread of
+the wild tribes, makes itself known by the penetrating pungent odour
+of its unfolding foliage. Binding all the leafy thickets, runs the
+succulent starry bloom of the megarrhiza that, from its hidden root,
+as large as a man's body, sends up smothering tendrils so sensitive
+to their opportunity that you have only to sit down beside them on
+one of these long growing afternoons, to find all their tips curling
+in your direction and the stems moving sensibly across the grass in
+the direction of support. As early as February the foot-long vines
+can be seen locating the nearest shrub or the canyon wall, farther
+away than you could detect it by any tactile sense. And how quickly,
+once the objective is sensed, the questing Force is withdrawn from
+the unsuccessful members! Perhaps this one to the right may keep on
+in the direction in which it has caught the invisible communicating
+thread from the nearest buckthorn, but the other three or four green
+tentacles, finding no invitation from any quarter, not only stop
+growing but seem to shrink and dwindle in the interests of the climbing
+brother. Sometimes in a particularly lusty growth, all the young vines
+will be drawn toward some conspicuous support, so that by the third
+day those that lay out starlike, with inquiring tips raised a little,
+delicately feeling, will swing through all their points to the one
+hopeful direction. These warm sensuous days toward the end of April,
+just after rain, when the very earth is full of a subtle intoxication,
+one has but to thrust a finger among the bourgeoning tips and tendrils
+of the megarrhiza to see them stir with live response. One must
+suppose, since the megarrhiza is of no discoverable use to anybody,
+that the Force uses it to its own ends, an ascending, uprearing Force,
+rehearsing itself for a more serviceable instrument.--This, however,
+is a digression; probably the Padres found no time for philosophising
+about anything, much less so useless a specimen as the wild cucumber.
+
+What the Franciscans saw first in Alta California was what all pioneers
+look for in new lands--the witness of their faith. They saw the
+waxberry bush from which they were to gather the thin coating of the
+berries into candles for their improvised altars, saw the crepitant,
+aromatic _yerba buena_, and the shrubby, glutinous-leaved herb of the
+Saints, given to them for healing.
+
+More than all else they must have seen in the month of the Virgin
+Mother, high on the altar slopes of San Jacinto and San Bernardino, the
+white thyrses of the yucca, called The Candles of Our Lord. Back where
+the green exclusiveness of the chamise gives place to the chaparral,
+the tall shafts arise. They grow in blossoming, the bells climbing
+with the aspiring stalk until as many as six thousand of them may hang
+pure and stiff along the lance-like stem between the bayonet-bristling
+leaves. Long after the white flame has burnt out, the stalks remain,
+rank on rank, as though battalions of Spanish spearmen had fallen
+there, holding each his spear aloft in his dead hand.
+
+It is only back there where the yuccas begin, that the small, swift
+life of the mesa goes on, very much as it did in the days of the
+Spanish _Frailes_. The doves begin it, voicing the mesa dawn in notes
+of a cool blueness; then the sleek and stately quail, moving down in
+twittering droves to the infrequent water-holes. The rhythm of a flock
+in motion is like the ripple of muscles in the sides of a great snake.
+After them the road runner, _corredor del camino_, the cock of the
+chaparral, crest down, rudder aslant, swifter than a horse, incarnate
+spirit of the hopeful dust through which he flirts and flits. Then
+the blueness is folded up, it lies packed in the canyons, the mountains
+flatten; high in his airy haunts the Sparrow-Hawk sails, and the furry,
+frisk-tailed folk begin the day's affairs.
+
+  [Illustration: REDLANDS, LOOKING TOWARD SAN BERNARDINO RANGE]
+
+The secret of learning the mesa life is to sit still, to sit still and
+to keep on sitting still. The only other secret is to be learned in the
+wattled huts stuck like the heaps of the house-building rats in the
+dry washes, inwoven with the boughs of buckthorn and _islay_, except
+for size scarcely distinguishable from them. For the Indian has gone
+through all that green woof with the thread of kinship and found it an
+ordered world. He is choke-full as is the chamisal of wild life, of
+the tag ends of instincts and understandings left over from the days
+when he was brother to the beast--those sleek-bellied rats, stealing to
+lay another foot-long, dried stick to the characterless heap of their
+dwelling,--bad Indians to him, trying to remember their ways when they
+were men; that brown feathered bunch, in and out of the chia bush,--she
+was present at the making of man. Your aboriginal has the true sense of
+proportion: not size but vitality. You can cover the sage wren with the
+hollow of your hand, but you cannot hop so far for your size nor be so
+brave about it.
+
+Very different from the spring flutter and fullness, must have been the
+look of the land in the year of the martyrdom of Padre Jayme Bravo,
+which was the year of Bunker Hill and the Republic. The green of the
+chamisal was overlaid then by the brown tones of its seeding. _Islay_
+had shed its crimson drupes; the cactus fires had died down to the dull
+purples of the fruiting prickly pear; the sycamores by the dwindling
+waters of the arroya had scarcely a palsied leaf to wag. The Mission
+had been moved, for what reasons must be guessed by whoever has had
+occasion to observe the effect of a standing army on the subjugated
+peoples, back from the sea marsh to a little valley of what is known
+now as Mission River. Sixty converts had come down out of the hills
+to receive the Medicine of the Soft-Hearted God. That is the way they
+must have looked at it--rood and cup and sprinkling water, and the
+bells louder than the medicine drums. Back in the dry gullies the
+drums would have been going night and day where the _tingaivashes_, the
+Medicine-Men, lashed themselves into a fury over this apostasy. Certain
+of the renegades heard them between their orisons; they fled back to
+the muttering roll and the pound of the dancing feet. In the night
+after that, eight hundred of the Dieguenos, clothed in frantic fervour
+and very little else, came down to make an end of the "long gowns." How
+the soul of Padre Jayme must have leaped up as he heard them yelling
+outside his unguarded hut: the appetite for martyrdom is deeper than
+all our dreaming. He ran toward them with arms extended. "Love God, my
+children!" he cried, and received their arrows. When it was reported
+to the Padre President at Monterey, "Thank God," he said; "now the
+soil is watered." It did indeed repay them such a crop of souls as any
+watering produces in that soil; but at San Juan Capistrano, where a new
+foundation was in progress, they buried the bells and returned to the
+presidio.
+
+Few people understand why Californians so love their Missions, the
+meagre ruins of them, scant as a last year's nest. But two priests, a
+corporal, and three men in the unmapped land with eight hundred angry
+savages--it is the mark of the Western breed to love odds such as that!
+It is not to the campanile at Pala nor the ruined arches of San Luis
+Rey that men made pilgrimages but to the spirit of enterprise that
+built the West.
+
+All about the upper mesa there are traces, scarcely more evident to the
+eye than the Missions, that the inhabitants of it have been dreamers,
+dreaming greatly. I do not now refer to the court of San Luis Rey,
+from the roofs of which a joyous populace once cheered a governor
+of California in the part of toreador, in a neighbourhood where
+Raphael-eyed muchachitos who have never heard of the Five Little Pigs
+that Went to Market can still repeat you the rhyme that begins
+
+     Up in Heaven there is a bull fight,
+     The bull has horns of silver and a tail of gold.
+
+Heaven enough under those conditions to the children of the Occupation!
+Nor am I thinking of a road on which, when there is a light wind
+moving from the sea, you can still hear at midnight the pounding feet
+of the Indian riders galloping down to the bay, only to see their
+beloved Padre blessing them from the ship's side in departing. I do
+not think even--because I make a practice of thinking as little as
+possible of a matter so discreditable to us as our Indian policy--of
+the procession of the evicted _Palatingwas_, even though the whole
+region of Warner's ranch is still full of the shame of it and the
+rending cry. The struggle of men with men is at best a sick and squalid
+affair for one of the parties; but men contriving against the gods
+for possession of the earth is your true epic. The brave little towns
+which start up there with their too early florescence of avenue and
+public square, the courageous acres which the vineyardist clears in the
+chamisal and the chamise takes again! All along the upper mesa, Pan
+and the homesteader keep up the ancient fight. And with what unequal
+weapons! The wild gourd, the bindweed, the megarrhiza, at the mere
+rumour of a cleared space, come beckoning and joining hands. Though
+he goes gunning all day without finding one young rabbit for his pot,
+the bark of the homesteader's orchard trees will be gnawed by them at
+the precise sappy moment. At dawn the quail may be heard with soft
+contented noises between the rows of bearing vines, plunging their
+beaks in the ripest berries. Then the mule-deer will spend the night
+in the carefully fenced enclosure, ruining the largest bunches with
+selective bites; after which the homesteader, if he is wise, will know
+that he is beaten. The mule-deer can go over any fence, though usually
+he prefers to go between the wires, which he can do without altering
+his stride. Detected, even at its most leafless, the antlered chaparral
+makes cover for him until, after hours of following, he is glimpsed
+at last, scaling at his stiff bounding gait some inaccessible rocky
+stair from which nothing comes back but the bullet's deflected whine.
+Now and then some pot-hunter who remembers when the mule-deer could be
+heard barking to the does in any deep gully, when the moon rose hot on
+the flushed trail of the October day, will tell you that there are no
+more of his kind on San Jacinto. But so long as there are homesteaders
+to be fended from the hill borders, the mule-deer will come back. And
+when the mule-deer is gone there will still be drouth. Let the coast
+currents swing out a few degrees, or the Gulf winds blow contrarily for
+consecutive seasons, and the stoutest homesteader fails. After a few
+years you can guess where he has been by finding the chamise growing
+taller in the ploughed places.
+
+Incurable wild hills and wild sufficing sea, and the little strip
+between which they give to one another--Indian giving!--conceded by the
+years of rain and demanded back by drouth; shoals that the tide piles
+and the sea eats again! It lies like a many-coloured dancer's scarf,
+and hearts are still caught in its folds as in the days of the Spanish
+Occupation.
+
+There's a stripe of aquamarine turning to chrysoprase, that's for
+the sea; amber then for the hollow cliffs of La Jolla and San Juan,
+smugglers' cliffs eaten well under the shore; a stripe of scarlet,
+spangled with viscid diamond dew, that's for the mesembryanthemums
+crowding the foreshore; pale green of the lupins with a white thread
+through it of the highway, green again for the chamisal, and blue of
+the mountains' unassailable sea thought.
+
+Nature is a great symbolist; what she makes out of her own materials is
+but the shadow of what man in any country will make finally of his. San
+Diego by the sea dreams of a great sea empery. What by all the signs
+she is bound to produce, is a poet. There in the scarf-coloured, low
+shore is the vocal forecast of him in the night-singing mocking-bird.
+Especially in the fringing island of Coronado out of the waxberry bush
+he can be heard gurgling like a full fountain with jets and rushes
+of pure crystal sound. From moonrise on until dawn he scatters from a
+tireless throat, music like light and laughter. It is as impossible to
+close the eyes under it as in the glare of the sun. And if the moon,
+the measurer, be gone on a journey to the other side of the world,
+still he sings, all his notes muffled by the dark; he sways and sings,
+dozes and sings, dreaming and wakes to sing. So it should be with poets
+whether anybody wishes them to or not. "The lands of the sun expand the
+soul," says the proverb.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+MOTHERING MOUNTAINS
+
+
+It is all part of that subtle relation between the observer and the
+landscape of the west, which goes by the name of "atmosphere," that
+one returns again and again to the reality of Christian feeling in the
+Franciscan Pioneers, as witnessed by the names they left us--one of the
+most charming proofs, if proof were wanted, of the power of religion
+to illuminate the mind to a degree often denied to generations of art
+and culture. How many book-fed tourists rounding the blue ranks of San
+Jacinto to face the noble front of the Coast Range as it swings back
+from the San Gabriel valley, would have found for it a name at once so
+absolute, so understanding as Sierra Madre, Mother Mountain?
+
+There you have it all in one comprehensive sweep: the brooding,
+snow-touched, virginal peaks, visited and encompassed by the sacred
+spirit of the sea, and below it the fertile valley, the little
+huddling, skirting hills fed from her breast. The very lights that
+die along the heights, the airs that play there, the swelling fecund
+slopes, have in them something so richly maternal; the virtue of
+the land is the virtue that we love most in the mothers of men. And
+if you want facts under the poetry, see how the Sierra receives the
+rain and sends it down laden with the rich substance of her granite
+bosses, making herself lean to fatten the valleys. The great gorges
+and swift angles of the hills which fade and show in the evening
+glow, are wrought there by the ceaseless contribution of the mountain
+to the tillable land. And what a land it has become! There have been
+notable kingdoms of the past of fewer and less productive acres. Yet
+even in the great avenues of palms that flick the light a thousand
+ways from their wind-stirred, serrate edges, is a reminder of the
+host of bristling, spiny growth the land once entertained. It is as if
+the sinister forces of the desert lurked somewhere not far under the
+surface, ready at any moment to retake all this wonder of fertility,
+should the beneficence of the Mother Mountain fail. The Padre pioneers
+must have felt these two contending forces many a time when they lay
+down at night under the majestic Sierra, for they named the first
+spot where they made an abiding place, in honour of the protecting
+influence, _Nuestro Senora, Reina de Los Angeles_, Our Lady the Queen
+of the Angels. There she hovered, snow-whitened amid tall candles of
+the stars, while south and west the coyote barked the menace of the
+unwatered lands. Now this is remarkable, and one of the things that go
+to show we are vastly more susceptible to influences of nature than
+some hard-headed members of society suppose, that in this group of
+low hills and shallow valleys between the Sierra Madre and the sea,
+the most conspicuous human achievement has been a new form of domestic
+architecture.
+
+This is the thing that most strikes the attention of the traveller:
+not the orchards and the gardens, which are not appreciably different
+in kind from those of the Riviera and some favoured parts of Italy,
+but the homes, the number of them, their extraordinary adaptability to
+the purposes of gracious living. The Angelenos call them bungalows,
+in respect to the type from which the later form developed, but they
+deserve a name as distinctive as they have in character become. These
+little thin-walled dwellings, all of desert-tinted native woods and
+stones, are as indigenous to the soil as if they had grown up out of
+it, as charming in line and the perfection of utility as some of those
+wild growths which show a delicate airy florescence above ground, but
+under it have deep, man-shaped, resistant roots. With their low and
+flat-pitched roofs they present a certain likeness to the aboriginal
+dwellings which the Franciscans found scattered like wasps' nests among
+the chaparral along the river,--which is only another way of saying
+that the spirit of the land shapes the art that is produced there.
+
+One must pause a little by the dry wash of this river, so long ago
+turned into an irrigating ditch that it is only in seasons of unusual
+flood it remembers its ancient banks, and finds them, in spite of
+all that real estate agencies have done to obliterate such natural
+boundaries. This river of Los Angeles betrays the streak of original
+desertness in the country by flowing bottom-side up, for which it
+receives the name of _arroya_, and even _arroya seca_ as against the
+_rio_ of the full-flowing Sacramento and San Juan. A _rio_ is chiefly
+water, but an _arroya_, and especially that one which travels farthest
+from the Mothering Mountains toward the sea, is at most seasons of
+the year a small trickle of water among stones in a wide, deep wash,
+overgrown with button willow and sycamores that click their gossiping
+leaves in every breath of wind or in no wind at all. Tiny gold and
+silver backed ferns climb down the banks to drink, and as soon as the
+spring freshet has gone by, brodiaeas and blazing stars come up between
+the boulders worn as smooth as if by hand.
+
+Farther up, where the stream narrows, it is overgrown by willows,
+alders, and rock maples, and leaps white-footed into brown pools for
+trout. Deer drink at the shallows, and it is not so long ago that
+cinnamon bear and grizzlies tracked the wet clay of its borders. This
+is the guarantee that this woman-country is in no danger of too much
+mothering. No climate which is acceptable to trout and grizzlies is in
+the least likely to prove enervating; men and beasts, they run pretty
+much to the same vital, sporting qualities.
+
+All that country which extends from the foot of the Sierra Madre to the
+sea, is so cunningly patterned off with ranks of low hills and lomas
+that its vastness is disguised, or rather revealed by subtle change and
+swift surprises as a discreet woman reveals her charms. This renders it
+one of the most delightful of motoring countries. The car swings over a
+perfect road into snug little orchard nooks as safe and secret seeming
+as a nest, climbs a round-breasted hill to greet the wide horizon of
+the sea, or a mesa stretching away into blue and amber desertness,
+which when adventured upon, discloses in unsuspected hollows white,
+peaceful towns girt by great acres of orange groves, or the orderly
+array of vines trimmed low and balancing like small, wide-skirted
+figures in a minuet. And then the ground opens suddenly to deep, dry
+gullies where little handfuls of the grey soil gather themselves up and
+scuttle mysteriously under the cactus bushes, and dried seeds of the
+megarrhiza rattle with a muffled sound as the pods blow about. Here one
+meets occasionally the last survivors of the old way of life before men
+found it: _neotoma_, the house-building rat, with his conical heap of
+rubbish; or a road runner, tilting his tail and practising his short,
+sharp runs in the powdery sand under the rabbit brush; here, too, the
+lurking desert shows its spiny tips like a creature half-buried in the
+sand, not dead, but drowsing.
+
+  [Illustration: A EUCALYPTUS GROVE]
+
+As artists know colour, and poets know it, this is the most colourful
+corner of the world. The blue and silver tones of the Sparrow-Hawk's
+land give place to airy violets, fawns, and rich ambers. It is curious,
+that obstinate preference which a locality has for colour schemes
+of its own adoption; man can break up and re-form them, but he can
+never quite overcome the original key. Here the bright, instant note
+of the geraniums that shore up the bungalows, even the insult of the
+magenta-coloured Bougainvillea is subdued by the aerial softness
+that lies along the hills like the bloom on fruit. The sheets of
+Eschscholtzia gold that once spread over miles of the San Gabriel
+valley, and still linger in torn fragments about Altadena, have been
+sheared by the plough, to vanish and reappear again in the solid globes
+of orange, distilled from the saps and juices of the soil.
+
+One of the most interesting of the instruments by which the cultivated
+landscape has gathered up and fixed the evanescent greens that spread
+thinly yet over the uncropped hills in spring, is the eucalyptus.
+All the tints are there, from the olive greens of the chaparral to
+the sombre darkness of the evergreen oak; young shoots of it have the
+silvery finish of the artemisia which once gave the note of the mesas
+about Riverside and San Bernardino. No other imported tree has quite
+to such a degree the air of the _habitue_; one wonders indeed if it
+could have been half so much at home in Australia, from whence it has
+returned like some wandering heir to the ancestral acre.
+
+It proves its blood royal by its facile adaptiveness to the prevailing
+lines of the landscape, taking the rounded, leaning outline of the live
+oaks on the wind-driven hills, or in sheltered ravines springing upward
+straight as the silver firs. Perhaps its most charming possibilities
+are revealed in the middle distance where, lifted high on columnar
+stems, its leaf crowns take on the blunt, flowing contours of the
+hills. At all times it has a beautiful resilience to the wind, bowing
+with a certain courtliness without compulsion, and recovering as if
+by conscious harmonious movement. The pepper tree, however, most
+magnificent specimens of which may be found lining the avenues of
+Pasadena, or in some unexpected corner of the hills marking the site of
+some old Spanish hacienda, is always an alien. It is like the Spaniards
+who brought it, perhaps, in its drooping grace, in the careless
+prodigality with which it sheds its fragile crimson fruits. Something
+of old-worldliness persists in its spicy odours, and in the stir of its
+lacy shadows; when the moon comes over the mountain wall and the wind
+is moving, there is the touch of mystery one associates with lovely
+senoritas leaning out of balconies. One fancies that the pepper tree
+will last so long as the dying race of Dons and Donas, and with them
+will cease to be a feature of local interest.
+
+There is hardly more than a trace in the modern city of Los Angeles of
+_Nuestra Senora, Reina de los Angeles_. The last time I passed through
+the old plaza, the streets of offence encroached upon it from the east,
+and a corner of the sacred precinct had been sacrificed to the trolley.
+The Church of Our Lady, over whose door may still be traced the fading
+inscription from which the city takes its name, was never a mission,
+but one of the six chapels or _asistencias_ centred about the Mission
+San Gabriel. It was here the first expedition passed northward looking
+for the port of Monterey, on the day of the feast of Our Lady in the
+year when the Atlantic Colonies were making up their minds to fight the
+English. It was close to this spot and along Downey Street were enacted
+the most pitiful of all the tragic incidents which marked the recession
+of the aboriginal races. Bereft of their lands and the protection of
+their Church, they became a prey to the greed of the dominant peoples,
+and used regularly to be incited to drunkenness upon their wages on
+Sunday, arrested while in that condition, and sold each Monday morning
+for the amount of their fines to the neighbouring ranchers. Things
+like this lurking under the surface of commercial enterprise, as the
+desert lies in wait in sandy stretches, advise us that much of our
+insistence on democracy grows out of our inability to trust ourselves
+to deal equitably with our fellows under any other conditions. We can
+keep to the rules of the game we have set up more easily than to the
+unfenced humanities. Here in the old plaza full of sleepy light, which
+still retains the indefinable stamp of the people to whom to-morrow was
+always a better day for doing things, one sighs for the short-sighted
+self-interest which so wasted the native children of the soil.
+
+But after all the land couldn't have loved them as it does the race
+for which it brings forth its miraculous harvests. Not that there
+weren't miracles in those days; in fact they began here, or rather at
+San Gabriel, six miles or so beyond the river which in those days was
+called Porcincula, a name that linked the old world with the new by
+way of the little chapel in Italy in which the beloved Francis received
+such heavenly favours. The miracle of San Gabriel relates to a display
+of a canvas presentiment of Our Lady, at the mere sight of which the
+wild tribes experienced exceeding grace. Looking up suddenly at the
+Mother Mountain brooding above the plain, it is easy to understand
+how the symbol of aloof but solicitous care came home to the primitive
+mind, always peculiarly open to suggestions of humaneness in nature.
+
+The heads of the Sierra Madre are rounded, the contours of great
+dignity. The appeal it makes to the eye is of mass and line. Its
+charms, and it has many, of forested slope, leaping waters, and lilied
+meadows, do not offer themselves to the casual glance, but must be
+sought after with great pains. The bulk of the range is of warm,
+grey granite, clothed with atmospheric colour as with a garment. It
+borrows more from the sky than the sea, taking on at times an aerial
+transparency, the soul of the mountain about to pass trembling into
+light. Pinkish tones are discoverable in even the bluest shadows,
+and at times the peaks are touched with the rich, roseate orange of
+the Alpine-glow. But the variations of temperature and atmospheric
+conditions are not sufficiently pronounced to present themselves to
+the sense as the source of its aspects of tenderness, of majesty,
+of virginal aloofness. Rather such changes seem to be occasioned by
+palpitations of the Mountain Spirit, remote in sacred meditation,
+glowing, dimming, defining itself from within.
+
+It may be that the immense vitality of the land, its abundance, the
+bursting orchards, the rich variety of native growth, somehow dwarfs
+the earliest impression of the Sierra Madre, since few, if any, gather
+at first an adequate idea of the actual mass and height it represents.
+It is only after appreciation of the really amazing activities of the
+Angelenos is a little dulled by familiarity, at early morning when
+the groves are sleeping and the bright plantations of the gardens lack
+the sun to flash their brilliance on the sight, or at evening when a
+sea mist covers the teeming land, one is prepared to hear that many of
+these peaks are higher than the Simplon, and that it would be possible
+to wander for months in the intricacies of its canyons without having
+time to grow familiar with a single one of them.
+
+Sometimes the mere mechanics of the land, the pull of the wind up the
+narrow gorges as you pass, advises the open mind of power and immensity
+residing in the thinly forested bulks. Passing what appears a mere
+shadowy gulf in the mountain wall, you are aware of a murmurous sound
+as of the sea in a shell, and feel suddenly the push of the draught
+on your windshield like a great steady hand. In places above San
+Bernardino, the steady pouring of invisible wind rivers has swept the
+soil for miles and defied three generations of artificial plantations.
+And sometimes the mountain speaks directly to the soul. I recall such
+an occasion one late spring. We had been skirting the range toward
+Riverside all afternoon, having the fall of the land seaward always
+in view, noting how, in spite of the absurd predilection of men for
+square fields and gridiron arrangements, the main lines of cultivation
+were being pulled into beauty by the sheer necessity of humouring
+the harvest. It was that lagging hour between the noon splendour and
+the gathering of the light for its dramatic passage into night. The
+orange orchards lay dead green in the hollows, unplanted ridges showed
+scarcely a trace of atmospheric blueness; unlaced, unbuskined, the
+land rested. And all in the falling of a leaf, in the scuttle of a
+horned toad in the dust of the roadway, it lifted into eerie life. It
+bared its teeth; the veil of the mountain was rent. Nothing changed,
+nothing stirred or glimmered, but the land had spoken. As if it had
+taken a step forward, as if a hand were raised, the mountain stood
+over us. And then it sank again. While the chill was still on us, the
+grip of terror, there lay the easy land, the comfortable crops, the red
+geraniums about the bungalows. But never again for me would the Sierra
+Madre be a mere geographical item, a feature of the landscape; it was
+Power, immanent and inescapable. Shall not the mother of the land do
+what she will with it?
+
+Entering the canyons of the San Gabriel, one is struck with the
+endearing quality of their charm. In a country which disdains every
+sort of prettiness, and dares even to use monotony as an element of
+beauty, as California does, it is surprising to find, cut in the solid
+granite wall, little dells all laced with fern and saxifrage, and
+wind swung, frail, flowery bells. Little streams come dashing down the
+runways with an elfin movement, with here and there a miniature fall
+"singing like a bird," as Muir described it, between moss-encrusted
+banks.
+
+  [Illustration: GLENDALE, VALLEY OF THE SAN GABRIEL]
+
+Into the open mouths of such canyons have retreated the hosts of
+wildflowers that once in the wet seasons overran all that country from
+San Bernardino to the sea,--the white sage, most honeyful of all the
+sages, the poppies, gilias, cream cups, nemophilias which twenty-five
+years ago were as common as meadow grass, as thick as the planted
+fields of alfalfa which have usurped them. Settlers who came into
+this country when the trail over the San Gorgiono had not yet hardened
+between iron rails, tell of riding belly deep for miles in wild oats
+and waving bloom, and where the trail goes out over the San Fernando,
+toward Camulas, the yellow mustard reached its scriptural height, and
+the birds of the air built their nests in it. Now and then in very
+wet years a faint yellow tinge, high up under the bases of the hills,
+is all that is left of the seed which, by report, the Padres sowed
+along the coastwise trails, to mark where they trod the circuit of the
+Missions.
+
+Everywhere within the canyons, honeyful flowers abound, and up from the
+rocky floors the slopes are stiff with chaparral. This characteristic
+growth, which, seen from the open valley flooded by dry sun, appears as
+a mere scurf, a roughened lichen on the mountain wall, is in reality a
+riot of manzanita, mahogany, ceanothus, cherry and black sage, from ten
+to fifteen feet high, all but impassable. Elsewhere in the ranges to
+the north, the chaparral is loose enough to admit fern and herbaceous
+plants, carpeting the earth, but here the rigid, spiny stems contend
+for three or four feet, thick as the carving in old cathedral choirs,
+before they attain light and air enough to put forth leaf or twig. On
+the seaward side of the mountains, miles and miles of this dense growth
+flow over the ranges, parted here and there by knife-edge ridges, or
+by huge bosses of country rock, affording a great sweep to the eye,
+reaching far to seaward. From here the lower country shrinks to its
+proper proportion--a toy landscape planted with Noah's Ark trees--and
+the noise of men is overlaid by the great swells of the Pacific which
+come thundering in, lifting far and faint reverberations along the
+ranges.
+
+On either side of these vast conning towers it is still possible to
+trace the indefinite tracks which wild creatures make, running clear
+and well defined for short distances and then melting unaccountably
+into the scrub again. Occasionally still they discover traces of the
+wild life in which the Sierra Madre once abounded. Deer are known to
+take advantage of such natural outlooks in protecting themselves from
+their natural enemies, and from the evidence of frequent visits here,
+bears and foxes and bobcats must have made much the same use of them.
+From such high escarpments the Indians would have seen Cabrillo's
+winged boats go by, and from them, all up the coast, ascended the
+pillars of smoke that attended the galleon of Francis Drake.
+
+Once within the portals of the range, the granite walls sheer away
+from sequestered parks of oak, madrono, and Douglas spruce. The trees
+are not thickly set here as in the north, but admit of sunny space
+and murmurous bee pasture between their gracefully contrasting boles,
+and to a thousand bright-feathered and scaled things unknown to the
+all-pine or all-redwood forests. Such parks or basins vary from a few
+yards to an acre or two in extent, threaded like beads upon a single
+stream. One thinks indeed of the old-fashioned "charm string" in which
+each meadow space has its peculiar virtue:--open sunny shallows, arrowy
+cascades, troops of lilies standing high as a man's head, forested
+fern, columbine, delphinum, and scarlet mimulus along the water
+borders.
+
+They grow slighter as the trail ascends--it is possible now to make
+nearly the whole distance in gravity cars for that purpose provided,
+but I recommend a sure-footed mule for the true mountain-lover--until
+above the source of the streams, from dips and saddles of the range,
+above the summer-shrunken glaciers, where the trees are bowed and the
+chaparral creeps as if awed and dizzy, it is possible to have a glimpse
+of the still unconquered and unconquerable "sage brush county." All
+along the back of the Sierra Madre wall the desert laps like a slow
+tide, rolling up and receding with the drouths and rains. The eye takes
+it in no less slowly than the imagination. It stretches, in fact, to
+the Colorado, but a haze of heat obscures its eastern border; long
+whitened lines of alkali, like wave marks, set the seasonal limit of
+its encroachments. Here and there shows the dark checkering of fertile
+patches, spilled over from the rich west-lying valleys; trending east
+by south lies the Sierra Madre like an arm, guarding the favoured
+region.
+
+And yet in her very favour the Mother Mountain is impartial, for
+equally as she saves the south from desertness, she has denied to us
+the one instrument by which the desert could be mastered. Mighty as
+man is in transforming the face of the earth, he is nothing without the
+Rains.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE COASTS OF ADVENTURE
+
+
+Old trails, older than the memory of man, go out from the southern
+country by way of Cahuenga, by Eagle Rock, toward that part of the
+shelving coast where the Padre's mustard gold lingered longest, as if
+to mark the locality where the gold they missed was first uncovered.
+But suppose, on that day of the year '41, Francisco Lopez, _major-domo_
+of the Mission San Fernando, had not had an appetite for onions? Who
+knows how history would have made itself?
+
+The speculation is idle; anybody named Lopez has always a
+taste for onions because they are the nearest thing to garlic.
+Senor Francisco,--I suppose one may grant him the title at this
+distance--rested under an oak and dug up the wild root with his
+knife, and the tide of the world's emigration set toward the Coasts
+of Adventure. I have, holding my papers as I write, an Indian basket
+reputed to be one of those in which, in those days, placer gold was
+washed out of the sandy loam; it was given me by one who had it from
+Don Antonio Coronel, and has a pattern about it of the low serried
+hills of the coast district. Where it breaks, as all patterns of Indian
+baskets do, to give egress to the spirit resident in things dedicated
+to human use, there are two figures of men with arms outstretched, but
+divided as the pioneers who carried the cross into that country were
+from those who followed the lure of gold. The basket wears with time,
+but the pattern holds, inwoven with its texture as Romance is woven
+with the history of all that region lying between San Francisco on the
+north and Cahuenga where, after a bloodless battle, was consummated the
+cession of California from Mexico.
+
+  [Illustration: A canyon IN THE SIERRA MADRES]
+
+From the white landmark of San Juan Capistrano to a point opposite
+Santa Inez, saints thick as sea-birds, standing seaward, break the
+long Pacific swell: San Clemente, Santa Catalina, Santa Rosa--their
+deep-scored cliffs searched by the light, revealing their kinship
+with the parallel mainland ranges. But there are hints here, in the
+plant and animal life and in the climate, milder even than that of
+the opposing channel ports, hints which not even the Driest-Dustiness
+dare despise, of those mellower times than ours from which all fables
+of Blessed Islands are sprung. Islands "very near the terrestrial
+paradise" the old Spanish romancer described them. Often as not the
+imagination sees more truly than the eye. I myself am ready to affirm
+that something of man's early Eden drifted thither on the Kuro-Siwa,
+that warm current deflected to our coast, which, for all we know of it,
+might well be one of the four great rivers that went about the Garden
+and watered it. Great golden sun-fish doze upon the island tides,
+flying-fish go by in purple and silver streaks, and under the flat
+bays, which take at times colour that rivals the lagoons of Venice,
+forests of kelp, a-crawl with rainbow-coloured life, sleep and sway
+upon tides unfelt of men. There are days at Catalina so steeped with
+harmonies of sea and sun that the singing of the birds excites the
+soothed sense no more than if the lucent air had that moment dripped in
+sound. These are the days when the accounts that Cabrillo left of his
+findings there, of a civil and religious development superior to the
+tribes of the mainland, beguile the imagination.
+
+One thinks of the watery highway between the west coast and the
+channel islands as another _Camino Real_ of the sea, where in place
+of mule trains and pacing Padres, went balsas, skin canoes, galleons,
+far-blown Chinese junks, Russian traders, slipping under the cliffs
+of San Juan for untaxed hides and tallow, Atlantic whalers, packets
+rounding the Horn, sunk past the load line with Argonauts of '49,
+opium smugglers dropping a contraband cask or an equally prohibited
+coolie under the very wing of San Clemente. So many things could have
+happened--Odysseys, AEneids--that it is with a sigh one resigns the
+peaks of the submerged range, paling and purpling on the west, to the
+student of sea-birds and sea-nourished plants.
+
+Looking from the islands landward, the locked shores have still for
+long stretches the aspect of undiscovered country. Hills break abruptly
+in the surf or run into narrow moon-shaped belts of sand where a
+mountain arm curves out or the sea eats inward. And yet for nearly four
+centuries the secret of the land was blazoned to all the ships that
+passed, in the great fields of poppy gold that every wet season flamed
+fifty miles or more to seaward.
+
+One must have seen the Eschscholtzia so, smouldering under the mists
+of spring, to understand the thrill that comes of finding them later
+scattered as they are, throughout the gardens of the world. I recall
+how at Rome, coming up suddenly out of the catacombs--we had gone down
+by another entrance and had been wandering for hours in the mortuary
+gloom--memory leaped up to find a great bed of golden poppies tended
+by brown, bearded Franciscans. They couldn't say--Fray Filippo, whom I
+questioned, had no notion--whence the sun-bright cups had come, except
+that they were common in the gardens of his order. It seemed a natural
+sort of thing for some Mission Padre, seeking a memento of himself to
+send back to his Brothers of St. Francis half a world away, to have
+chosen these shining offsprings of the sun. There was confirmation in
+the fact that Fray Filippo knew them not by the unspellable botanical
+name, but by the endearing Castilian "dormidera," sleepy-eyed, in
+reference to their habit of unfolding only to the light; but the
+connecting thread was lost. Channel fishermen still, in spite of the
+obliterating crops, can trace the blue lines of lupins between faint
+streaks of poppy fires, and catch above the reek of their boats, when
+the land wind begins, blown scents of _islay_ and ceanothus.
+
+No rivers of water of notable size pour down this west coast, but
+rivers of green flood the shallow canyons. Here and there from the crest
+of the range one catches an arrowy glimpse of a seasonal stream, but
+from the sea-view the furred chaparral is unbroken except for bare
+ridges, wind-swept even of the round-headed oaks. This coast country is
+a favourite browsing place for deer; they can be seen there still in
+early summer, feeding on the acorns of the scrub oaks, and especially
+on the tender twigs of wind-fallen trees, or herding at noon in the
+deep fern which closes like cleft waters over their heads. Until
+within a few years it was no unlikely thing to hear little black bears
+snorting and snuffing under the manzanita, of the berries of which
+they are inordinately fond. This lovely shrub with its twisty, satiny
+stems of wine-red, suffusing brown, its pale conventionalised leaves
+and flat little umbels of berries, suggests somehow the carving on old
+Gothic choirs, as though it borrowed its characteristic touch from an
+external shaping hand; as if with its predetermined habit of growth it
+had a secret affinity for man, and waited but to be transplanted into
+gardens. It needs, however, no garden facilities, but shapes itself
+to the most inhospitable conditions. About the time it begins to put
+forth its thousand waxy bells, in December or January, the toyon, the
+native holly, is at its handsomest. This is a late summer flowering
+shrub that in mid-winter loses a little of its glossy green, and above
+its yellowing foliage bears berries in great scarlet clusters. Between
+these two overlapping ends, the gaumet of the chaparral is run in blues
+of wild lilac, reds and purples of rhus and buckthorn and the wide,
+white umbels of the alder, which here becomes a tree fifty to sixty
+feet in height. It is the only one of the tall chaparral which has
+edible fruit, for though bears and Indians make a meal of manzanita,
+it does not commend itself to cultivated taste. More humble species,
+huckleberry, thimble, and blackberry, crowd the open spaces under the
+oak-madrono forests, or, as if they knew their particular usefulness
+to man, come hurrying to clearings of the axe, and may be seen holding
+hands as they climb to cover the track of careless fires. In June whole
+hill-slopes, under the pine and madronos, burn crimson with sweet, wild
+strawberries. The wild currant and the fuchsia-flowered gooseberry are
+not edible, but they are under no such obligation; they "make good"
+with long wands of jewel-red, drooping blossoms, and in the case of
+the currant, with delicate pink racemes, thrown out almost before
+the leaves while the earth still smells of winter dampness. Though
+nobody seems to know how it travelled so far, the "incense shrub" is
+a favourite of English gardens where, before the primroses begin, it
+serves the same purpose as in the west coast canyons, quickening the
+sense into anticipations of beauty on every side.
+
+Inland the close, round-backed hills draw into ranks and ranges, making
+way for chains of fertile valleys which also fill out the Californian's
+calendar of saints. But, in fact, your true Californian prays to his
+land as much as ever the early Roman did, and pours on it libations
+of water and continuous incense of praise. Every one of these longish,
+north-trending basins is superlatively good for something,--olives or
+wheat, perhaps; Pajaro produces apples and Santa Clara has become the
+patroness of prunes.
+
+Nothing could be more ethereally lovely than the spring aspect of the
+orchard country. It begins with the yellowing of the meadow lark's
+breast, and then of early mornings, with the appearance, as if flecks
+of the sky had fallen, of great flocks of bluebirds that blow about
+in the ploughed lands and are dissolved in rain. Then the poppies
+spring up like torchmen in the winter wheat, and along the tips of
+the apricots, petals begin to show, crumpled as the pink lips of
+children shut upon mischievous secrets; a day or two of this and then
+the blossoms swarm as bees, white fire breaks out among the prunes,
+it scatters along the foothills like the surf. Toward the end of the
+blooming season all the country roads are defined by thin lines of
+petal drift, and any wind that blows is alive with whiteness. After
+which, thick leafage covers the ripening fruit and the valley dozes
+through the summer heat with the farms outlined in firm green, like a
+patchwork quilt drawn up across the mountains' knees.
+
+The tree that gives the memorable touch to the landscape of the coast
+valleys is the oak, both the roble and encinas varieties. There are
+others with greater claims to distinction, the sequoia, the "big
+tree," lurking in the Santa Cruz mountains, the madrono, red-breeched,
+green-coated, a very Robin Hood of trees, sequestered in cool canyons,
+and the redwood, the _palo colorado_, discovered by the first Governor,
+Don Gaspar de Portola, on his search for the lost port of Monte Rey.
+All these keep well back from the main lines of travel. The most that
+the rail tourist sees of them is a line of redwoods, perhaps, climbing
+up from the sea-fronting canyons to peer and whisper on the ridges above
+the fruiting orchards. But the oaks go on, keeping well in the laps
+of the hills, avoiding the wind rivers, marching steadily across the
+alluvial basins on into the hot interior. They are more susceptible to
+wind influence than almost any other, and mark the prevailing direction
+of the seasonal air currents with their three-hundred-year-old trunks
+as readily as reeds under a freshet. You can see them hugging the
+lee side of any canyon, leaning as far as they may out of the sea-born
+draughts, but standing apart, true aristocrats among trees, disdaining
+alike one another and the whole race of orchard inmates. When in full
+leaf, for the _roble_ is deciduous, they are both of them distinctly
+paintable, particularly when in summer the trunks, grey and aslant,
+upbearing cloud-shaped masses of dark green, make an agreeable
+note against the fawn-coloured hills. The _roble_ is a noble tree,
+high-crowned, with a great sweep of branches, but seen in winter
+stripped of its thick, small leafage, it loses interest. Its method of
+branching is fussy, too finely divided, and without grace.
+
+  [Illustration: THE CEMETERY, SANTA BARBARA MISSION]
+
+Around Santa Margarita and Paso Robles filmy moss spreads a veil over
+the _robles_ as of Druid meditation; one fancies them aloof from the
+stir of present-day life as they were from the bears that used to
+feed on the mast under them. A hundred years or so ago the Franciscans
+drove out the bears by an incantation--I mean by the exorcism of the
+Church enforced with holy water and a procession with banners around
+the Mission precinct: "I adjure you, O Bears, by the true God, by the
+Holy God ... to leave the fields to our flocks, not to molest them nor
+come near them." But bears or _homo sapiens_, it is all one to the oaks
+of San Antonio; indeed, if legend is to be credited, the four-footed
+brothers would have been equally as acceptable to the patron of the
+Mission where this interesting ceremony took place. I can testify,
+however, that after all this lapse of time the exorcism is still in
+force, for though I have been up and down that country many times I
+have seen no bears in it.
+
+Things more pestiferous than bears are driven out, humours of the
+blood, stiffness of the joints, by the medicinal waters that bubble
+and seep along certain ancient fissures of the country rock. This has
+always seemed to me the very insolence of superfluity. Who wishes, when
+all the air is censed with the fragrance of wild vines, to have his
+nose assaulted with fumes of sulphur, even though it is known to be
+good for a number of things? But there are some people who could never
+be got to observe the noble proportions of five-hundred-year-old oaks
+with the wild grapes going from tree to tree like a tent, except as a
+by-process incident to the drinking of nasty waters. So the land has
+its way even with our weaknesses.
+
+  [Illustration: SYCAMORES, A COAST RANGE canyon]
+
+Besides these excursions inland, which bring us in almost every case to
+one of the ancient Franciscan foundations, there are two or three ports
+of call on the sea front worth lingering at for more things than the
+pleasant air and the radiant wild bloom. One of these is Santa Barbara
+which Santa Inez holds in its lap, curving like a scimitar opposite
+the most northerly of the channel islands. Understand, however, that
+no good comes of thinking of Santa Barbara as a place on the map. It
+is a Sargossa of Romance, a haven of last things, the last Mission in
+the hands of the Franciscans, the last splendour of the Occupation, the
+last place where mantillas were worn and they danced the _fandango_ and
+_la jota_; an eddy into which have drifted remnants of every delightful
+thing that has passed on the highways of land and sea, which here hail
+one another across the curving moon-white beach. Summer has settled
+there, California summer which never swelters, never scorches. Frost
+descends at times from Santa Inez to the roofs, but lays no finger on
+the fuchsias, poinsettias, and the heliotropes climbing to second-story
+windows. The wild thickets which connect the territory with the town,
+are vocal with night-singing mocking-birds; along the foreshore white
+pelicans divide the mountain-shadowed waters. The waters, taking all
+the sky's changes, race to the fairy islands, the chaparral runs back
+to the flanks of Santa Inez showing yellowly through the distant blue
+of pines; overhead a sky clouded with light. This is not a paradox but
+an attempt to express the misty luminosity of a heaven filled with
+refractions of the summer-tinted slope, the glaucous leafage of the
+chaparral, the white sand and sapphire-glinting water. The sky _beyond_
+the enclosing mountains has the cambric blueness of the superheated
+interior, but directly overhead it has depth and immensity of colour
+unequalled except along the Mediterranean.
+
+Santa Barbara is a port of distinguished visitors; more, and more
+varieties, of sea-birds put in there on the long flight from the Arctic
+to the Isthmus than is easily believable. In the Estero--_esteril_,
+sterile--an ill-smelling tide pool lying behind the town, may be found
+at one season or another, all the western species that delight the
+ornithologist. The black brant, going by night, and wild swans, as
+many as a score of them together, have been noted in its backwaters,
+and scarcely any stroll along the receding surf but is enlivened by
+the resonant, sweet whistle of the plover. In hollows of the sands
+thousands of beach-haunting birds may be seen camping for the night,
+looking like some sea-coloured, strange vegetation, and early mornings
+when the channel racing by, leaves the bay placid, tens of thousands
+of shearwaters sleep in shouldering ranks that sway with the incoming
+swell as the kelp sways, without being scattered by it. One can see
+the same sight, augmented as to numbers, around Monterey, a long day's
+journey to the north as the car goes, long enough and lovely enough to
+deserve another chapter.
+
+
+
+
+  [Illustration: TALL CHAPARRAL, SANTA CRUZ]
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE PORT OF MONTEREY
+
+
+Without doubt history is made quite as much by the mistakes of men
+as by their utmost certainties. The persistent belief of the ancient
+geographers in the existence of the Straits of Anian, the traditional
+North-West Passage, led to some romancing, and to the exploration of
+the California coast a century or so before it was of any particular
+use to anybody. It led also to the bluest bay. Viscaino took possession
+of it for Philip of Spain as early as 1602, nearly two hundred years
+before the Franciscans planted a cross there under Viscaino's very
+tree. During all that time the same oaks staggered up the slope
+away from the wind, and the scimitar curve of the beach kept back
+the brilliant waters. There is a figure of immensity in this more
+terrifying than the mere lapse of years. Not how many times but with
+what sureness for every day the sapphire deep shudders into chrysoprase
+along the white line of the breakers. We struggle so to achieve a
+little brief moment of beauty, but every hour at Monterey it is given
+away.
+
+The bay lies squarely fronting the Pacific swell, about a hundred
+miles south of the Golden Gate, between the horns of two of the little
+tumbled coast ranges, cutting back to receive the waters of the Pajaro
+and the Salinas. From the south the hill juts out sharply, taking
+the town and the harbour between its knees, but the north shore is
+blunted by the mountains of Santa Cruz. The beach is narrow, and all
+along its inner curve blown up into dunes contested every season by
+the wind and by the quick, bright growth of sand verbena, lupins, and
+mesembryanthemums. The waters of the rivers are set back by the tides,
+they are choked with bars and sluiced out by winter floods. For miles
+back into the valleys of Pajaro and Salinas, blue and yellow lupins
+continue the colour of the sand and the pools of tide water. They climb
+up the landward slope of the high dunes and set the shore a little
+seaward against the diminished surf. Then the equinoctial tide rises
+against the land that the lupins have taken and smooths out their
+lovely gardens with a swift, white hand, to leave the beach smooth
+again for the building of pale, wind-pointed cones.
+
+  [Illustration: LOOKING DOWN ON MONTEREY AND THE BAY]
+
+The valley of the Salinas, which has its only natural outlet on the
+bay, is of the type of coast valleys, long, narrow and shallow, given
+over to farming and to memories of Our Lady of Solitude lying now as
+a heap of ruins in a barley field. It is a place set apart, where any
+morning you might wake to find the sea has entered between the little,
+brooding hills to rest.
+
+Gulls follow the plough there, and pines avoid the river basin as
+though each of them knew very well their respective rights in it. One
+has, however, to make a point of such discoveries, for the entrance to
+the valley is obscured by its very candour, lying all open as it does
+to drifting dune and variable sea marshes.
+
+It is even more worth while to follow the flat-bordered Pajaro into the
+shut valley where dozes the little town of San Juan Bautista, taking
+on its well-sunned mesa, those placid lapses of self-forgetfulness
+which are to the aged as a foretaste of the long sleep. Here it was
+that the magic muse of Music came into the country. It came in a
+little tin-piped, wooden hand-organ, built by one Benjamin Dobson of
+22 Swan Street, London, in the year 1735, but of all its history until
+it was unpacked from mule-back by Padre Lausan in 1797, there is not
+a word current. Our acquaintance with it begins on the day that the
+Padre set it up in the hills and played, "The Siren's Waltz," "Lady
+Campbell's Reel," and all its repertoire of favourite London airs, of
+which the least appropriate to its present mission must have been the
+one called "Go to the Devil." Which only goes to prove that the spirit
+of the Franciscans was often superior to their means, for what the
+simple savages did do as soon as they had overcome their superstitious
+fear of the noise box, was to come to Mass to hear it as often as
+possible. There remain three old volumes of music written later for
+the Mission which came true to its founding and excelled in all sweet
+sounds, but none, it is said, pleased the Indians so much or so raised
+their spirits as "The Siren's Waltz." No doubt its inspiriting strains
+added something to the warlike spirit which led here to the only
+local resistance opposed to the American invasion, for it was on the
+Gavilan heights above the little town that Fremont, on the tallest
+tree that he could find, raised the Stars and Stripes, gallantly if
+somewhat prematurely. It was from San Juan that Castro's men marched
+to the final capitulation of Cahuenga, and finally from here the last
+remnant of the old life drains away. One hears the echo of it faint as
+the sea sounds that on rare days come trembling up the valley on the
+translucent air.
+
+Returning to the bay, one finds all interest centering about the Point
+of Pines, a very ancient, rocky termination of the most westerly of
+the coast barriers. The Point, which is really a peninsula, is one
+of the most notable landmarks between Point Conception on the south
+and Fort Point at San Francisco. Its lighthouse stands well out on a
+rocky finger, ringed with incessant, clanging buoys; between it and
+Santa Cruz light is a roadstead for an empire. A windy bay at best,
+deep tides, and squally surfaces, the waters of Monterey have other
+values than the colourist finds in them. Sardines, salmon, cod, tuna,
+yellow tail run with its tides. At most seasons of the year whales
+may be seen spouting there, or are cast upon its shoals. At one time
+the port enjoyed a certain prosperity as a whaling station, of which
+small trace remains beside the bleaching vertebrae that border certain
+of the old gardens and the persistent whalebone souvenirs of the curio
+dealer. Lateen-rigged fisher fleets flock in and out of the harbour,
+butterfly winged; and all about the rock beaches creep the square-toed
+boats of the Japanese and Chinese abalone gatherers. Thousands of
+purple sea-urchins, squid, hundred-fingered star-fish, and all manner
+of slimy sea delicacies, these slant-eyed Orientals draw up out of
+the rainbow rock pools and the deeps below the receding surf. They go
+creeping and peering about the ebb, their guttural hunting cries borne
+inshore on the quiet air, seeming as much a native sea speech as the
+gabble of the gulls. So in their skin canoes and balsas the Indians
+must have crept about the inlets for as long as it requires to lay a
+yard or two of mould over the ancient middens of the tribe, as long as
+it takes to build a barrier of silver dunes half a mile seaward. Even
+at that distance the plough turns up the soil evenly sprinkled with
+crumbling shell which holds to the last a shred of its old iridescence.
+Far inland, past the Sierra Wall even to the country of Lost Borders,
+I have found amulets of this loveliest of the pearl shells, traded for
+and treasured by a people to whom the "Big Water" is a half-credited
+traveller's tale.
+
+About five hundred yards outside the surf, from Laboratory Point,
+circling the peninsula to Mission Point on the south, the submerged
+rocky ridge has grown a great, tawny mane of kelp. Every year it is
+combed and cut by the equinoctial tides, and cast ashore in brown,
+sea-smelling wind-rows, and every year it grows again to be the
+feeding-ground of a million water-haunting birds. Here the Ancient
+Murrelet fattens for the long flight to the Alaskan breeding-grounds,
+and in the wildest gales the little nocturnal auklets may be heard
+calling to one another above the warring thunder of the surf, or
+when the nights are clear and the mists all banded low beneath the
+moon, they startle the beach wanderer with their high keen notes and
+beetle whirring wings. Long triangular flights of curlew drop down
+these beaches against the westering sun, with wings extended straight
+above their heads, furling like the little lateen sails come home from
+fishing. Sandpipers, sanderlings, all the ripple runners, the skimmers
+of the receding foam, all the scavengers of the tide, the gulls,
+glaucous-winged, ringbilled, and the species that take their name from
+the locality, may be found here following the plough as robins do in
+the spring. When the herring school in the bay nothing could exceed the
+multitude and clamour of the herring gulls. They stretch out in close
+order, wing beating against wing, actually over square miles of the
+ruffling water between Point Pinos and the anchorage. But any attempt
+to render an account of the wild, winged life that flashes about the
+bays of Carmel and Monterey would read like an ornithologist's record.
+
+After storms that divide the waters outside the bay into great toppling
+mountains, in the quiet strip between the kelp and the beaches,
+thousands of shearwaters may be seen sleeping in long, swaying,
+feathered pontoons, shoulder to shoulder. The island rocks standing
+within the surf, from the Point of Pines all down the coast to Point
+Sur, are famous rookeries of cormorant. Watchful and black against the
+guano-whitened rocks, they guard their ancestral nests, redecorated
+each season with gay weed, pulled from the painted gardens of the deep;
+turning their long necks this way and that like revolving turret-tops,
+they beat off the gluttonous gulls with a devotion which would seem to
+demand some better excuse than the naked, greasy, wide-mouthed young.
+Warm mornings these can be seen stretching black-stemmed, gaping bills
+from the nesting hollows, waving this way and that like the tips of
+voracious sea anemones. Other rocks, white with salty rime, are given
+by mutual consent to rookeries of the yelping seals, the "sea lions" of
+this coast. Moonlight nights they can be seen playing there, with the
+weird half-human suggestion as of some mythical sea creatures.
+
+Other and less fortunate adventurers on the waters of Monterey have
+left strange traces on that coast; one stumbles on a signboard set up
+among the rocks to mark where such and such a vessel went to pieces in
+a night of storm. Buried deep in the beach beyond the anchorage is the
+ancient teakwood hull of the _Natala_, the ship that carried Napoleon
+to Elba. It brought secularisation to the Missions also, after which
+unfriendly service the wind woke in the night and broke it against the
+shore. Just off Point Lobos, the Japanese divers after abalones report
+a strange, uncharted, sunken craft, a Chinese junk blown out of her
+course perhaps, or one of those unreported galleons that followed a
+phantom trail of gold all up the west coast of the New World. Strange
+mosses come ashore here, tide by tide, all lacy and scarf-coloured, and
+once we found on the tiny strand below Pescadero, a log of sandal-wood
+with faint waterworn traces of tool marks still upon it.
+
+Most mysterious of all the hints held by the farthest west--for
+behold, when you have come to land again, sailing from this port, it is
+east!--of a time before our time, is the Monterey cypress.
+
+Across the neck of the peninsula, a matter of six or eight miles,
+cuts in the little bay of Carmel, a blue jewel set in silver sand.
+Two points divide it from the racing Pacific, the southern limb of
+Punta Pinos, and the deeply divided rocky ledge of Lobos--Lobos,
+the wolf, with thin, raking, granite jaws. Now on these two points,
+and nowhere else in the world, are found natural plantations of the
+trees that might have grown in Dante's Purgatorio, or in the imagined
+forests where walked the rapt, tormented soul of Blake. Blake, indeed,
+might have had a hint of these from some transplanted seedling on an
+English terrace, for the Monterey cypress is quick-growing for the
+first century or so and one of the most widely diffused of trees; but
+only here on the Point and south to Pescadero ranch do they grow of
+God's planting. With writhen trunks and stiff contorted limbs they
+take the storm and flying scud as poppies take the sun. Incredibly
+old, even to the eye, they have no soil, nor seek none other than
+the thousand-year litter of their scaly needles, the husk of their
+nut-shaped, woody cones--the Spirit of the Ancient Rocks come to life
+in a tree. Grown under friendly conditions the young trees spire as do
+other conifers, but here they take on strange enchanted shapes. Their
+flat, wind-depressed tops are resilient as springs; one may lie full
+length along them, scarcely sunk in the minutely-feathered twigs, and
+watch the coasting steamers trail by on seas polished by the heat, or
+the winter surf bursting high in air. Or one could steal through their
+thick plantations unsuspected, from twisty trunk to trunk in the black
+shade, feeling the old earth-mood and man's primeval fear, the pricks
+and warnings of a world half made. The oldest of the cypresses are
+attacked by a red fungus rust, the colour of corroding time. It creeps
+along the under side of boughs and eats away the green, but even then
+the twisted heart wood will outlast most human things.
+
+  [Illustration: PESCADERO, A CHINESE FISHING VILLAGE, MONTEREY BAY]
+
+The pines of Monterey, though characteristic enough of the locality
+to take on its identifying name, are thoroughly plebeian: prolific,
+quick-growing, branching like candelabra when young; but in a hundred
+years or so their wide limbs, studded with persistent cones, take on
+something of the picturesque eccentricity that may be noticed among
+the old in rural neighbourhoods. They grow freely back into the hills
+till they are warned away from the canyons by the more sequestered _palo
+colorado_. The Monterey pine is one of the long-needled varieties, but
+of a too open growth perhaps, or too flexile to have any voice but a
+faint rustling echo of the ocean. The hill above Monterey, crowned with
+them, is impressive enough; they look lofty and aloof and dark against
+the sky, but growing in a wood they are seen to be too spindling and
+sparse-limbed to be interesting. The oaks do better by the landscape,
+all of the _encinas_ variety, bearing stiff clouds of evergreen foliage
+in lines simple enough to compose beautifully with the slow scimitar
+sweep of the bay and the round cloud-masses that, gathering from the
+sea, hang faintly pearled above the horizon. There are no redwoods
+on the peninsula; straggling lines of them look down from Palo Corona
+on Carmel Bay, walking one after another, with their odd tent-shaped
+tops and long branches all on the windward side, like a procession of
+friars walking against the wind. On the Santa Cruz coast, and in small
+groups near Carmel, grows the tan bark oak, not a true oak, but of the
+genus _Pasania_, whose nearest surviving congeners are no nearer than
+Siam. How it came here, survivor of an earlier world, or drifting in on
+the changing Japanese current, no one knows. Apparently no one cares,
+for the only use the Santa Crucians have found for it is to tan shoe
+leather.
+
+  [Illustration: CYPRESS POINT, NEAR CARMEL]
+
+Three little towns have taken root on the Peninsula: two on the bay
+side, the old pueblo of Monterey with its white-washed adobes still
+contriving to give character to the one wide street; Pacific Grove,
+utterly modern, on the surf side of Punta de Pinos, a town which
+began, I believe, as a resort for the churchly minded--a very clean
+and well-kept and proper town, absolutely exempt, as the deeds are
+drawn to assure us, "from anything having a tendency to lower the moral
+atmosphere," a town where the lovely natural woods have given place to
+houses every fifty feet or so, all nicely soldered together with lines
+of bright scarlet and clashing magentas and rosy pinks of geraniums and
+pelargoniums in a kind of predetermined cheerfulness; in short, a town
+where nobody would think of living who wanted anything interesting to
+happen to him. Above it on the hill, the Presidio commands the naked
+slope, fronting toward Santa Cruz, raking the open roadstead with its
+guns. It was under this hill on the harbour side, where a little creek
+still runs a rill in the rainy season, that Viscaino heard the first
+mass in California, and nearly two hundred years later, Padre Serra set
+up the cross.
+
+On June 30, 1770, that being the Holy Day of Pentecost, was founded
+here the Mission of San Carlos Borromeo, afterward transplanted for
+sufficient reasons, over the hill six miles away, on Carmel River. The
+town is full of reminders of the days of the Spanish Occupation, when
+it was the capital of Alta California. Old gardens here have still the
+high adobe walls, old houses the long galleries and little wrought-iron
+balconies; times yet the tide rises in the streets of the town, and
+still the speech is soft.
+
+It is also possible to buy _tomales_ there and _enchiladas_ and _chile
+concarne_ which will for the moment restore your faith in certain
+conceptions of a hereafter that of late have lost popularity.
+
+Half a mile back from the beach, and divided from the town by the old
+cemetery, in a deep alluvial flat grown to great oaks and creeping
+sycamores, is situated one of the famous winter resorts of the world,
+Hotel Del Monte. I can recommend it with great freedom to those
+curiously constituted people who have to have an excuse for being out
+of doors. The Del Monte drives and golf links are said by those who
+have used them, to provide such excuse in its most compelling form.
+Those who suffer under no such necessity will do well to take the white
+road climbing the hill out of old Monterey, and drop down the other
+side of it into Carmel.
+
+From the top of this hill the lovely curve of the bay, disappearing far
+to the north under a violet mist, is pure Greek in its power to affect
+the imagination. Its blueness is the colour that lies upon the Gulf of
+Dreams; the ivory rim of the dunes, the shadowed blue of the terraces
+set on a sudden all the tides of recollection back on Salonica,
+Lepanto, the hill of Athens. You are reconciled for a moment to the
+chance of history which whelmed the colourful days of the Spanish
+Occupation. They could never have lived up to it.
+
+But once on the Carmel side of the peninsula, regret comes back very
+poignantly. The bay is a miniature of the other, intensified, the
+connoisseur's collection,--blue like the eye of a peacock's feather,
+fewer dunes but whiter, a more delicate tracery on them of the beach
+verbena, hills of softer contours, tawny, rippled like the coat of a
+great cat sleeping in the sun. Carmel Valley breaks upon the bay by
+way of the river which chokes and bars, runs dry in summer or carries
+the yellow of its sands miles out in winter a winding track across the
+purple inlet. It is a little valley and devious, reaching far inland.
+Above its source the peaks of Santa Lucia stand up; for its southern
+bulwark, Palo Corona. Willows, sycamores, elder, wild honeysuckle, and
+great heaps of blackberry vines hedge the path of its waters.
+
+  [Illustration: SANTA CRUZ MOUNTAINS, THE COAST RANGE]
+
+Where the valley widens behind the low barrier that shuts out the sea,
+sits the Mission of San Carlos Borromeo, once the spiritual capital
+of Alta California. Here Junipero Serra, and after him the other Padre
+Presidentes, held the administration of Mission affairs, and from here
+he wandered forth on foot, up and down this whole coast from San Diego
+to Solano, with pacification and the seeds of civilisation. Here on the
+walls, faintly to be traced beneath the scorn of time, he blazoned with
+his own hands the Burning Heart, the symbol of his own inward flame.
+Here, in his seventy-first year, he died and was buried on the gospel
+side of the altar. It is reported that his last act was to walk to the
+doorway to look once, a long look, on the hills turning amber under
+the August sun, on the heaven-blue water and the white hands of the
+surf beating against the cliffs of Lobos; looked on the fields and the
+orchard planted by his own hand, on the wattled huts of the neophytes
+redeemed, as he believed them, to all eternity, after which he lay down
+and slept. It is further reported in the annals of the Mission that
+it was necessary to place a guard about the wasted body in its shabby
+brown gown, to defend it from the crowding mourners craving each a
+relic of the blessed remains. Had I lived at that time I should have
+been among them, for he was a great soul, and have I not felt even at
+this distance of the years the touch of his high fervours! San Carlos
+is one of the best-conditioned of these abandoned fortresses of the
+faith: the ancient pear trees are still in bearing, the wild mustard
+yellows in the fields, its architecture still betrays the uncertain
+hand of the savage; back in unsearchable recesses of the hills linger
+still some Indians whose garbled greeting is a memory of the _Ama Dios_
+which the padres taught them. Until a few years ago the prayer-post,
+a rude slab with the triple-knotted cord of the Franciscans carved
+around it, still stood on the hill at the end of the path their devout
+feet made, resorting to it for courage and consolation. These mementos
+fade, but year by year the impress of the great spirit of Serra grows
+plainer, like one of those trodden paths of long ago which show not at
+all if you seek them in the grass or near at hand, but from the vantage
+of Palo Corona are traceable far across the landscape.
+
+The modern Carmel is a place of resort for painter and poet folk.
+Beauty is cheap there; it may be had in superlative quality for the
+mere labour of looking out of the window. It is the absolute setting
+for romance. No shipping ever puts in at the singing beaches. The
+freighting teams from the Sur with their bells a-jangle, go by on the
+country road, but great dreams have visited the inhabitants thereof.
+Spring visits it also with yellow violets all up the wooded hills,
+and great fountain sprays of sea-blue ceanothus. Summer reddens the
+berries of the manzanita and mellows the poppy-blazoned slopes to tawny
+saffron. Strong tides arrive unheralded from some far-off deep-sea
+disturbance and shake the beaches. Suddenly, on the quietest days, some
+flying squadron of the deep breaks high over Lobos and neighs in her
+narrow caverns. Blown foam, whipped all across the Pacific, is cast
+up like weed along the sand and skims the wave-marks with a winged
+motion. Whole flocks of these foam-birds may be seen scudding toward
+the rock-corners of Mission Point after the equinoctial winds. Other
+tides the sea slips far out on new-made level reaches, and leaves the
+wet sand shining after the sun goes down like the rosy inside pearl of
+the abalone.
+
+The forests of Point Pinos are sanctuary. It is still possible to hear
+there at long intervals the demoniac howl of the little grey dog of
+the wilderness, "Brother Coyote," the butt, the cat's-paw, the Jack
+Dullard of Indian folklore, and sometimes in the open country below
+Point Lobos to see one curious and agaze from brown, naked bosses of
+the hills. Any warm afternoon, by lying very still a long time in the
+_encinal_, one may observe the country-coloured bobcat, tawny as the
+grass in summer, slipping from shade to shade. Sometimes if startled
+he will turn and face you with his blinking, yellow, half-hypnotic
+stare before he returns to his unguessed errand. Any morning you may
+find about your bungalow innumerable prints as of baby palms pressed
+downward in the dust, the tracks of the friendly little racoons who
+may be heard bubbling in the shallow canyons any moonlight night. Often
+I have left a cut melon under my window for the sake of seeing, an
+hour after moonrise, two or three of them scooping out the pink heart,
+spatting one another for helpings out of turn, keeping, in spite
+of the little gluttons you know them to be, a great affectation of
+daintiness. The night-cry of these little creatures is difficult to
+distinguish from the love-call of the horned owl, who on the undark
+nights of summer skims the low foreshore for the sake of the field-mice
+and gophers that feed on the seeds of the beach grasses. Every sort of
+migratory bird that passes up and down this coast lingers a while in
+the neighbourhood of Monterey, and some species, like the Point Pinos
+juncos, take from it their distinctive name. But if, when you walk
+in the woods, the Stellar jay has first sight of you, you will find
+them singularly empty, for these blue-jacketed policemen of the pines
+permit nothing to pass them unannounced. Of all the wood-folk, the wise
+quail alone ignores their strident warnings. The quail have learned not
+only the certainty of safety but its absolute limit. I have seen whole
+flocks of them, scared by the gun, whirring out of the public lands to
+a point not out of gunshot but within the forbidden ground, from which
+they send back soft twitterings of defiance. It is not, however, their
+habit to flush except in great danger, but to run to cover, moving with
+a peculiar elusive rhythm, like the rippling of a snake. This plump
+little partridge, for it is only in the common speech that he becomes
+a quail, is the apt spirit of the chaparral--cheerful, social, strong
+in the domestic virtues; his crest not floating backward in warrior
+fashion, but cocked forward over an eye, he has all the air of the
+militant bourgeois, who could fight of course, but finds that running
+matches better with his inclinations. Just at the end of rains, before
+mating begins, hundreds of them may be seen feeding in the flock on
+open hillsides, and the thickets of buckthorn and ceanothus ring with
+their soft Spanish _Cuidado!_--Have a care!
+
+Three roads go up out of the peninsula to entice the imagination--that
+which we have already taken to the hills of Salinas and the little
+town of San Juan, the road to Carmel Valley, and the adventurous
+trail which leads all down the well-bitten coast past Sur and Pieoras
+Blancos. The Valley road turns off at the top of the divide between
+Carmel and Monterey; it passes on the landward side of the Mission
+into the river-bottom and skirts the narrow chain of farms, rising
+with the rise of the thinly-forested hills toward Tasajara, the Place
+of Springs. Here it is lost in the intricacies of the "back country."
+Deer-hunters go that way in the season, and those whose delight it is
+to lose themselves in the wilderness, to taste wild fruit and know no
+roof but the windy tent of stars. Years since there used to come out
+of that country shy-spoken, bearded men with bear-meat to sell and wild
+honey in the honeycomb, rifled from hiving rocks and hollow trees; but
+I fancy they are all dead now, or translated into the tall moss-bearded
+pines.
+
+The coast road, after it leaves Point Lobos behind, goes south and
+south, between high trackless hills and the lineless Pacific floor.
+From the Point you can see it rise over bare, sea-breasting hills, and
+disappear in narrow canyons down which, it is reported, immeasurable
+redwoods follow the white-footed creeks almost to the surf. Dim,
+violet-tinted islands rise offshore to break the sea's assault. Now
+and then one ventures in that direction as far as Arbolado, to return
+prophesying. But the most of us are wiser, understanding that the best
+service the road can render us is to remain a dramatic and unlimned
+possibility.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+OLD SPANISH GARDENS
+
+
+Dona Ina Manuelita Echivarra had come to the time of life when waists
+were not to be mentioned. It took all the evidence of her name to
+convince you that her cheek had once known tints of the olive and
+apricot. Tio Juan, who sunned himself daily in her patio, had achieved
+the richness of weathered teak; his moustachios were whitened as with
+the rime that collects on old adobes sometimes near the sea-shore.
+But Dona Ina, who missed by a score of years his mark of the days of
+_manana por la manana_, was muddily dark, and her moustache--but one
+does not suggest such things of a lady, and that Dona Ina was a lady
+could be proved by a foot so delicately arched and pointed, an ankle so
+neat that there was not another like it in your acquaintance save the
+mate to it.
+
+Once you had seen it peeping forth from under the black skirt--have
+not Castilian ladies worn black immemorially?--you did not require
+the assurance of Tio Juan that there was no one in her day could have
+danced _la jota_ with Dona Ina Manuelita.
+
+She would clack the castanets for you occasionally still, just to
+show how it was done, or with the guitar resting on the arm of her
+chair--laps were no more to be thought of than waists were--she would
+quaver a song, _La Golindrina_ for choice, or _La Noche esta Serena_.
+But unquestionably Dona Ina's time had gone by for shining at anything
+but conversation. She could talk, and never so fruitfully as when the
+subject was her garden.
+
+A Spanish garden is a very intimate affair. It is the innermost
+under-garment of the family life. Dona Ina's was walled away from the
+world by six feet of adobe, around the top of which still lingered the
+curved red tiles of Mission manufacture. It was not spoken of as the
+garden at all, it was the patio, an integral part of the dwelling.
+There was, in fact, a raw hide cot on the long gallery which gave
+access to it, and Dona Ina's drawn-work chemises bleaching in the
+sun. The patio is a gift to us from Andalusia; it is more Greek than
+Oriental, and the English porch has about as much relation to it as
+the buttons on the back of a man's coat to the sword-belt they were
+once supposed to accommodate. The patio is the original mud-walled
+enclosure of a people who preferred living in the open but were driven
+to protection; the rooms about three sides of it were an afterthought.
+
+  [Illustration: THE PATIO, OLD SPANISH RESIDENCE]
+
+The Echivarra patio did not lack the indispensable features of the
+early California establishment, the raised grill or cooking platform,
+and the ramada, the long vine-covered trellis where one took wine
+with one's friends, or the ladies of the family sat sewing at their
+interminable drawn work, _enramada_. The single vine which covered the
+twenty-foot trellis was of Mission stock, and had been planted by Dona
+Ina's father in the year the Pathfinder came over Tejon Pass into the
+great twin valleys. In Dona Ina's childhood a wine-press had stood in
+the corner of the patio where now there was a row of artichokes, which
+had been allowed to seed in order that their stiff silken tassels,
+dyed blue and crimson, might adorn the pair of china vases on either
+side the high altar. Dona Ina was nothing if not religious. In the
+corner of the patio farthest from the gallery, a fig-tree--this also
+is indispensable--hung over the tiled wall like a cloud. There was a
+weeping willow in the midst of the garden, and just outside, on either
+side the door, two great pepper trees of the very stock of the parent
+of all pepper trees in Alta California, which a sea captain from South
+America gave to the Padre at San Luis Rey. Along the east wall there
+were pomegranates.
+
+A pomegranate is the one thing that makes me understand what a pretty
+woman is to some men--the kind of prettiness that was Dona Ina's in the
+days when she danced _la jota_. The flower of the pomegranate has the
+crumpled scarlet of lips that find their excuse in simply being scarlet
+and folded like the petals of a flower; and then the fruit, warm from
+the sunny wall, faintly odorous, dusky flushed! It is so tempting when
+broken open--that sort opens of its own accord if you leave it long
+enough on the bush--the rich heart colour, and the pleasant uncloying,
+sweet, sub-acid taste. One tastes and tastes--but when all is said and
+done there is nothing to a pomegranate except colour and flavour, and
+at least if it does not nourish neither does it give you indigestion.
+That is what suggests the comparison; there are so many people who
+would like to find a pretty woman in the same category. Always when
+we sat together nibbling the rosy seeds, I could believe, even without
+the evidence of the ankles, that Dona Ina had had her pomegranate days.
+Only, of course, she would not have smelled so of musk and--there is
+no denying it--of garlic. Thick-walled old adobes of the period of the
+Spanish Occupation give off a faint reek of this compelling condiment
+at every pore, and as for the musk, it was always about the gallery in
+saucers and broken flower-pots.
+
+And yet Dona Ina was sensitive to odours: she told me that she had had
+the datura moved from the place where her mother had planted it, to the
+far end of the patio, where after nightfall its heavy, slightly fetid
+perfume, unnoticeable by day, scented all the air. She added that she
+felt convicted by this aversion of a want of sentiment toward a plant
+whose wide, papery-white bells went by the name of "Angels' trumpets."
+
+On the day that she told me about the datura, which I had only
+recognised by its resemblance to its offensive wayside congener, the
+"jimson weed," the Senora Echivarra had been washing her hair with a
+tonic made of oil expressed from the seeds of the megharizza after a
+recipe which her mother had had from _her_ mother, who had it from an
+Indian who used to peddle vegetables from the Mission, driving in every
+Saturday in an ancient caretta. I was interested to know if it were
+any more efficacious than the young shoots of the golden poppy fried
+in olive oil, which I had already tried. So we fell to talking of the
+virtues of plants and their application.
+
+We began with the blessed "herb of the saints," dried bunches of which
+hung up under the rafters of the gallery as an unfailing resort in
+affections of the respiratory tract, and _yerba buena_, in which she
+was careful to distinguish between the creeping, aromatic _del campo_
+of the woodlands and the _yerba buena del poso_, "herb of the well,"
+the common mint of damp places. When she added that the buckskin bag on
+the wall contained shavings of _cascara sagrada_, the sacred bark of
+the native buckthorn, indispensable to all nurseries, I knew that she
+had named two of the three most important contributions of the west to
+the modern pharmacopoeia. This particular bag of bark had been sent from
+Sonoma County, for south of Monterey it grows too thin to be worth the
+gathering. The Grindelia, she told me, had come from the salt marshes
+about the mouth of the Pajaro, where Don Gaspar de Portola must have
+crossed going northward.
+
+"And were you then at such pains to secure them?"
+
+"In the old days, yes," she assured me. In her mother's time there
+was a regular traffic carried on by means of roving Indians in healing
+herbs and simples; things you could get now by no means whatever.
+
+"As for instance----?" I was curious.
+
+Well, there was creosote gum, which came from the desert beyond the
+Sierra Wall, valuable for sores and for rheumatism. It took me a moment
+or two, however, to recognise in her appellation of it (_hideondo_,
+stinking) the shiny, shellac-covered _larrea_ of the arid regions.
+There were roots also of the holly-leaved barberry, which came from wet
+mountains northward, and of the "skunk cabbage," which were to be found
+only in soggy mountain meadows, where any early spring, almost before
+the frost was out of the ground, bears could be seen rooting it from
+the sod, fairly burying themselves in the black, peaty loam.
+
+But when it came to _yerba mansa_, Dona Ina averred, her mother would
+trust nobody for its gathering. She would take an Indian or two and
+as many of her ten children as could not be trusted to be left at
+home, and make long _pasears_ into the coast ranges for this succulent
+cure-all. I knew it well for one of the loveliest of meadow-haunting
+plants; wherever springs babbled, wherever a mountain stream lost
+itself under the roble oaks, the _yerba mansa_ lifted above its
+heart-shaped leaves of pale green, quaint, winged cones on pink,
+pellucid stems. But I had never heard one half of the curative wonders
+which Dona Ina related of it. Efficacious in rheumatism, invaluable in
+pulmonary complaints, its bruised leaves reduced swellings, the roots
+were tonic and alterative.
+
+I spare you the whole list, for Dona Ina was directly of the line of
+that lovely Senorita who had disdainfully described the English as the
+race who "pay for everything," and to her mind it took a whole category
+of virtues to induce so much effort as a trip into the mountains
+which had not a _baile_ or a _fiesta_ at the end of it. Other things
+that were sought for by the housewives of the Spanish Occupation were
+_amole_, or soap-root, the bulbs of a delicate, orchid-like lily which
+comes up in the late summer among the stems of the chaparral, and the
+roots of the wild gourd, the _chili-cojote_, a powerful purgative.
+Green fruit of this most common pest, said Dona Ina, pounded to a pulp,
+did wonders in the way of removing stains from clothing.
+
+Then there was artemisia, romero, azalea, the blue-eyed grass of our
+meadows, upon an infusion of which fever patients can subsist for days,
+and elder, potent against spells, and there was Virgin's bower, which
+brought us back to the patio, for a great heap of it lay on the roof
+of the gallery, contesting the space there with the yellow banksia
+roses. I had supposed, until the Senora Echivarra mentioned it, that
+its purpose was purely ornamental, but I was to learn that it had come
+into the garden as _yerba de chivato_ about the time the barbed-wire
+fences of the gringo began to make a remedy for cuts indispensable to
+the ranchero who valued the appearance of his live stock. When the eye,
+travelling along its twisty stems and twining leaf-stalks, came to a
+clump of yarrow growing at the root of it I began at once to suspect
+the whole garden. Was not the virtue of yarrow known even to the
+Greeks?
+
+There was thyme flowering in the damp corner beyond the dripping
+faucet, and pot-marigold, lavender, rosemary, and lemon verbena, all
+plants that grow deep into the use and remembrance of man.
+
+No friend of our race, not even the dog, has been more faithful. The
+stock of these had come overseas from Spain--were not the Phoenicians
+credited with introducing the pomegranate into Hispaniola?--and thence
+by way of the Missions.
+
+All the borders of Dona Ina's garden were edged with rosy thrift, a
+European variety; and out on the headlands, a mile away, a paler,
+native cousin of it bloomed gaily with beach asters and yellow
+sand verbenas, but there was no one who knew by what winds, what
+communicating rootlets, they had exchanged greetings.
+
+Observation, travelling by way of the borders, came to the datura,
+which was to set the conversation off again, this time not of plants
+curative, but hurtful. We knew of the stupefying effects of the bruised
+pods and roots of this species, and--this was my contribution--how
+the Paiute Indians used to administer the commoner variety, called
+_main-oph-weep_, to their warriors to produce the proper battle frenzy,
+and especially to young women about to undergo the annual ordeal of the
+"Dance of Marriageable Maidens."
+
+Every year, at the spring gathering of the tribes, the maidens piled
+their dowries in a heap, and for three days, fasting, danced about it.
+If they fell or fainted, it was a sure sign they were not yet equal to
+the duties of housekeeping and childbearing; but I had had Paiute women
+tell me that they would never have endured the trial without a mild
+decoction of _main-oph-weep_.
+
+"It was different with us," insisted Dona Ina; "many a time we have
+danced the sun up over the mountain, and been ready to begin again the
+next evening...." But I wished to talk of the properties of plants, not
+of young ladies.
+
+The mystery of poison plants oppressed me. One may understand how a
+scorpion stings in self-protection, but what profit has the "poison
+oak" of its virulence? It is not oak at all, but _Rhus trilobata_, and
+in the spring whole hillsides are enlivened by the shining bronze of
+its young foliage, or made crimson in September. But the pollen that
+floats from it in May in clouds, the sticky sap, or even the acrid
+smoke from the clearing where it is being exterminated, is an active
+poison to the human skin, though I had not heard that any animal
+suffered similarly. Dona Ina opined that there was never an evil plant
+let loose in the gardens of the Lord but the remedy was set to grow
+beside it. A wash of manzanita tea, Grindelia, or even buckthorn, she
+insisted, was excellent for poison oak. Best of all was a paste of
+pounded "soap root." She knew a plant, too, which was corrective of
+the form of madness induced by the "loco" weed, whose pale foliage and
+delicately tinted, bladdery pods may be found always about the borders
+of the chaparral. For the convulsions caused by wild parsnip there was
+the wonder-working _yerba del pasmo_. This she knew also as a specific
+for snake-bite and tetanus. So greatly was it valued by mothers of
+families in the time of the Spanish Occupation, that when a clearing
+was made for a house and patio, in any country where it grew, a plant
+or two was always left standing. But it was not until I had looked for
+it, where she said I would find it between the oleander and the lemon
+verbena, that I recognised the common "grease-wood," the chamise of the
+mesa country.
+
+"But were there no plants, Dona Ina, which had another meaning, flowers
+of affection, corrective to the spirit?"
+
+"Angelica," she considered doubtfully. Young maids, on occasions of
+indecision, would pin a sprig of it across their bosoms, she said,
+and after they had been to church would find their doubts resolved;
+and there was yarrow, which kept your lover true, particularly if you
+plucked it with the proper ceremony from a young man's grave.
+
+Dona Ina remembered a fascinating volume of her mother's time, the
+_Album Mexicana_, in which the sentimental properties of all flowers
+were set forth. "There was the camelia, a beautiful woman without
+virtue, and the pomegranate----"
+
+"But the flowers of New Spain, Dona Ina, was there nothing of these?"
+I insisted.
+
+"Of a truth, yes, there was the cactus flower, not the opunta, the
+broad-leaved spiny sort, of which hedges were built in the old days,
+but the low, flamy-blossomed, prickly variety of hot sandy places. If
+a young man wore such a one pinned upon his velvet jacket it signified,
+'I burn for you.'"
+
+"And if he wore no flower at all, how then?"
+
+Dona Ina laughed, "_Si me quieros, no me quieros_"; she referred to the
+common yellow composite which goes by the name of "sunshine," or in the
+San Joaquin, where miles of it mixed with blue phacelias brighten with
+the spring, as "fly-flower." "In the old Spanish playing-cards," said
+Dona Ina, "the Jack of spades had such a one in his hand, but when I
+was a girl no caballero would have been caught saying, 'Love me, love
+me not!' They left all that to the senoritas."
+
+There was a Castilian rose growing beside me. Now a Castilian rose
+is not in the least what you expect it to be. It is a thick, cabbagy
+florescence, the petals short and not recurved, the pink hardly deeper
+than that of the common wild rose, the leafage uninteresting. One has
+to remember that it distinguished itself long before the time of the
+tea and garden hybrids, and, I suspect, borrowed half its charm from
+the faces it set off. For there was never but one way in the world for
+a rose to be worn, and that is the way Castilian beauties discovered so
+long ago that centuries have not made any improvement in it. Set just
+behind the ear and discreetly veiled by the mantilla, it suggests the
+effulgent charm of Spain, tempered by mystery. The Senora Echivarra had
+followed my glance, and nodded acquiescence to my thought. "In dressing
+for a _baile_, one would have as soon left off the rose as one's fan.
+One wore it even when the dress was wreathed with other flowers."
+
+"And did you, then, go wreathed in flowers?"
+
+"Assuredly; from the garden if we had them, or from the field.
+I remember once I was all blue larkspurs, here and here ..." she
+illustrated on her person, "and long flat festoons of the _yerba buena_
+holding them together."
+
+"It would have taken hoop skirts for that?" I opined.
+
+"That also. It was the time that the waltz had been learned from the
+officers of the American ships, and we were quite wild about it. The
+good Padre had threatened to excommunicate us all if we danced it
+... but we danced ... we danced...." Dona Ina's pretty feet twitched
+reminiscently. The conversation wandered a long time in the past before
+it came back to the patio lying so still, divided from the street by
+the high wall, the clouding fig, and the gnarly pear tree. Beyond the
+artichokes a low partition wall shut off the vegetable plot; strings
+of chili reddened against it. There was not a blade of grass in
+sight, only the flat, black adobe paths worn smooth by generations of
+treading, house and enclosing walls all of one earth.
+
+"But if so much came into the garden from the field, Senora, did
+nothing ever go out?"
+
+Ah, yes, yes--the land is gracious; there was mustard of course, and
+pepper grass and horehound, blessed herb, which spread all over the
+west with healing. The pimpernel, too, crept out of the enclosing
+wall, and the tree mallow which came from the Channel Islands by way
+of the gardens and has become a common hedge plant on the sandy lands
+about the bay of San Francisco. Along streams which ran down from
+the unfenced gardens of the _Americanos_, callas had domesticated
+themselves and lifted their pure white spathes serenely amid a tangle
+of mint and wild blackberries and painted cup. The almond, the rude
+stock on which the tender sorts were grafted, if allowed to bear
+its worthless bitter nuts would take to hillsides naturally. It is
+not, after all, walls which hold gardens but water. This is all that
+constrains the commingling of wild and cultivated species; they care
+little for man, their benefactor. Give them water, said Dona Ina,
+and they come to your door like a fed dog, or if you like the figure
+better, like grateful children. They repay you with sweetness and
+healing.
+
+A swift darted among the fig, marigolds, and portulacca of the
+inevitable rock-work which was the pride of the old Spanish gardens.
+Great rockets of tritoma flamed against the wall, on the other side of
+which traffic went unnoted and unsuspecting.
+
+"But we, Dona Ina, we Americans, when we make a garden, make it in the
+sight of all so that all may have pleasure in it."
+
+"Eh, the _Americanos_ ..." she shrugged; she moved to give a drink
+to the spotted musk, flowering in a chipped saucer; the subject did
+not interest her; her thought, like her flowers, had grown up in an
+enclosure.
+
+
+
+
+ [Illustration: THE GOLDEN GATE AND BLACK POINT, FROM HYDE STREET, SAN
+  FRANCISCO. (SITE OF THE PANAMA EXPOSITION, 1915)]
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE LAND OF THE LITTLE DUCK
+
+
+Where the twin rivers set back the tides from the bay, the Land of the
+Little Duck begins. The tides come head-on past the Golden Gate and the
+river answers to their tremendous compulsion far inland, past the point
+where the Sacramento and San Joaquin flow together. On the lee side
+of the headland which makes the southern pilaster of the Gate, sits
+San Francisco, making of the name she borrowed from the bay a new and
+distinguished thing, as some women do with their husbands' titles. A
+better location for a city is Carquinez Strait; the Mexican comandante
+resident at Sonoma would have had it there, bearing the name of his
+wife, Francesca. Said he to the newly arrived American authorities,
+"Do so, and I will furnish you the finest site in the world, with State
+house and Residence complete." But it appears the land has chosen its
+own name.
+
+All the years after the Pope had divided the New World between Spain
+and the Portuguese, the harbour lay hidden. Cabrillo, Drake, Maldonado,
+Juan de Fuca, Viscaino passed it in the night or veiled in obscuring
+fogs. And then Saint Francis showed it clear and lovely to Don Gaspar
+Portola, having for that revelation led him with holden eyes past his
+journey's objective. Likewise, when the time was ripe, he put it into
+the mind of the Yankee alcalde at Yerba Buena, a trading-post in the
+neighbourhood of Mission Dolores, that if the hamlet should be called
+San Francisco it might catch by implication the vessels clearing all
+ports of the world for San Francisco bay.
+
+O Chance, Chance! says the historian and turns another page. But it
+is my opinion that among the birds to which Saint Francis preached was
+included the Little Duck.
+
+The piers of the city front east, they face the Berkeley Hills,
+the Oaklands, the lands of the Sycamore, or, as the first settlers
+named them, the Alamedas. From thence vast settlements take their
+name, feeding the city as sea-birds do, from their own breasts.
+Back and forth between them the shuttling ferries weave thin webs of
+glistening wakes, duck-bodied tugs chugg and scuttle, busy still at
+world-building. From the promontory which makes the northern barrier of
+the Gate, Tamalpias swims out of atmospheric blueness. On its seaward
+slope, hardly out of reach of the siren's bellowing note, Muir Park
+preserves the ancient forest, rooted in the litter of a thousand years.
+And round about the foot of city and mountain the waters of the bay
+are blue, the hills are bluer. The hills melt down to greenness in the
+spring, the water runs to liquid emerald, flashing amber; the hills are
+tawny after rains, the waters tone to the turbid, clayey river-floods;
+land and sea they pursue one another as lovers through changing moods
+of colour; they have mists for mystery between revealing suns. Unless
+these things count for something, San Francisco is the very worst
+site in the world for a city. You take your heart in your mouth every
+time you go out to afternoon tea in the tram-cars that dip and swing
+like cockles at sea. They cut across streets so steep that grass grows
+between the cobbles where no traffic ever passes, to plunge down lanes
+of dwellings perched precariously as sea-birds' nests on the bare bones
+of hills that for true hilliness shame Rome's imperial seven. The bay
+side of the peninsula is mud, the Pacific side is sand. There great
+wasteful dunes blow up, they shift and pile, they take the contours of
+the wind-lashed waters--the very worst site in the world for a great
+city's pleasure-ground, and yet somehow it is there.
+
+For this city is one of those which have souls; it is a spirit sitting
+on a height, taking to itself form and the offices of civilisation.
+This is a thing that we know, because we have seen the land shake it
+as a terrier shakes a rat, until the form of the city was broken; it
+dissolved in smoke and flame. And then as a polyp of the sea draws out
+of the fluent water form and perpetuity for itself, we saw our city
+draw back its shapes of wood and stone, and statelier, more befitting
+a spirit that has endured so much. Nobody knows really what a city is
+except that it is something more than a collocation of houses. From
+Telegraph Hill, where the old semaphore stood, which signalled the
+far-between arrivals of ships around the Horn, you can see the trade
+of the world pass and repass the pillars of the Gate, the wall-sided
+warships. But none of these things really explain how San Francisco
+came to be clinging there to the leeward of a windy spit of land, like
+a great, grey sea-bird with palpitating wings.
+
+  [Illustration: TAMALPIAS]
+
+True to her situation, San Francisco is nothing if not dramatic. One
+recalls that the earliest foundation was dedicated to Our Lady of
+Dolors, _Nuestro Senora de Dolores_; the Indians fought here as they
+did nowhere else against Christian dominion. There were more burials
+than baptisms, and in the old cemetery of Yerba Buena the dead were
+so abandoned of all grace that the sand refused to hold them. One who
+spent his boyhood in the shifting purlieus of the old Laguna told me
+how in the hollows where the scrub oaks shrugged off the wind and the
+sand waved like water, the nameless coffins were covered and uncovered
+between a night and day. But if the dead could not hold their tenancy,
+the living succeeded. They did it by the very force of that dramatic
+instinct awakened by the plot and counterplot of natural forces.
+
+No Greek tragedy moved to more relentless measures than the moral
+upheaval of '56, when the whole city, in solemn funeral train behind
+the victim of one of those wild outbursts of lawlessness peculiar to
+the "gold rush," saw the lifeless bodies of the perpetrators hanging
+from the upper windows of the Vigilance Committee. Fifty years later
+came a wilder rout, down streets searched out by fire, snatching
+at humour as they ran, as so many points of contact for the city's
+rebuilding.
+
+The very worst location in the world, as I have remarked, is this windy
+promontory past which the grey tides race, but so long as a city can
+dramatise itself, one situation will do as well as another in which to
+render itself immortal.
+
+The bay of San Francisco with its contingencies is one of the most
+interesting of inland yachting waters, full of adventurous weather. It
+is possible to sail in one general direction from Alviso to the city of
+Sacramento, a hundred and fifty miles, and that without attempting the
+thousand miles of estuary and slough through which the waters slink and
+wind.
+
+At this season of the year the river is pushed backward by the tide a
+matter of ten miles or more above Sacramento City: on the San Joaquin
+it is felt as far as Crow's Landing. At Antioch it begins to be
+saltish, and down through Suisun and Carquinez the river-water fights
+its way as far as San Pablo before its identity is wholly lost. At
+flood-times it may be traced, a yellowish, turgid streak, as far as
+Alcatraz. This is the islet of the albatross which lies south of the
+tide race, as Tiburon is on the north, fragments all of them of that
+salt-rimed ledge outside the gate where hoarse sea-lions play, and
+brother to the castellated cloud far along on the sea's horizon, the
+very capital of the kingdom of the Little Duck.
+
+  [Illustration: MILL VALLEY, AND BACKWATER OF SAN FRANCISCO BAY]
+
+The Faralone Light is the last dropped astern by the Island steamships
+sagging south to the equator; it is also the sea-birds' city of
+refuge. This is the great murre rookery of the west coast, and formerly
+thousands of dozens of eggs were regularly taken from the Faralones
+to the San Francisco market; but since the islands became a Government
+station the murres have no enemy but the pirates of the air. In clefts
+and ledges close against the wall-sided cliffs they defend their
+shallow nests against the sheering gulls, or, hard beset, will push
+their single, new-hatched nestling into the friendlier sea, darting to
+break its fall with incredible swiftness, for a swimming gait is one
+of the things that come out of the shell with the native-born at the
+Faralones. On the same shelving rocks puffins rear their ratty young in
+burrows or under sheltering boulders, and the ashy petrel, the "little
+Peter" of the sea, walking by night before the storm, comes ashore here
+to hide his seldom nest. On the south Faralone the fierce cormorant
+builds her house of painted weed, which often the gulls steal from her
+as fast as she brings it ashore, for the gulls are the grafters of the
+sea-birds' city. This particular variety, known as the western gull,
+neither fishes for himself nor forages for building material. He feeds
+on the eggs and nestlings of his neighbours, or waits to snatch the
+day's catch from the beak that brought it up from the sea. He has the
+virtue of all predatory classes, an exemplary domesticity. His nest is
+soft and clean, his nestlings handsome. The western gull is often found
+marauding far up the estuary of Sacramento, but it is his congener,
+the herring gull, who follows the long white wake the ferries make
+ploughing the windy bay; or, distinguished among the silent shore birds
+for multitude and clamour, scavenges its reedy borders.
+
+Except for the promontories north and south, and the bold front of the
+Berkeley Hills opposing the Gate, the inland borders of the bay are
+flat tide-lands and sea-smelling lagunas. Stilts, avocets, herons,
+all the waders that haunt this coast or visit it in their seasonal
+flights, may be seen stalking the shallows for minnows, or where the
+marsh grass reddens, poised like some strange tide-land blossom, lifted
+on two slender stems. Low over them any clear day may be seen the grey
+old marsh hawk sailing, or the "duck hawk," the peregrine of falconry,
+following fiercely in the wake of the migrating hordes of water-fowl.
+All about Alviso the guttural cry of the black-crowned night-heron
+sounds eerily above the marshes, along with the peculiar "pumping"
+love-song of the bittern.
+
+For some reason the air of the marshes is friendly to the mistletoe
+infesting the oaks and sycamores which stand back from the tide-line;
+but the marshes themselves are treeless. They have their own sorts
+of growth, cane and cat-tails and tule, goosefoot, samphire, and the
+tasselled sedges. This samphire of Shakespeare, _l'herbe de Saint
+Pierre_ of the Normandy Marshes, is the glory of the Franciscan
+tide-lands; miles of it, barely above the level of the slow-moving
+water, spread a magic carpet of blending crimsons, purples, and
+bronzes. Under the creeping mists and subject to the changes of the
+water, beaten to gold and copper under the sun, it redeems the flat
+lines of the landscape with a touch of Oriental splendour.
+
+For it is a flat kingdom, that of the Little Duck--the hills hanging
+remotely on the horizon, the few trees and scattered hugging the low
+shore of the sloughs as the shipwrecked cling to their rafts, desperate
+of rescue. The rich web of the samphire, the shifting colour of the
+water, faintly reminiscent of Venice, borrow another foreign touch
+from the names under which the borders recommended themselves to
+attention:--Sausalito, "little willows," Tiburon, Corta Madero, San
+Quentin, San Raphael. Approached from the water, these names, with
+the exception of San Quentin, do no more than stir the imagination.
+San Quentin, on one of those courtesy islands newly rescued from the
+primordial mud, shows itself uncompromisingly for what it is, one of
+those places for the sequestration of public offenders, which is itself
+such an offence to our common humanity--to say nothing of our common
+sense. Free tides, free sails go by, and long, untrammelled lines of
+birds; south above the blue bay and bluer shore, the ethereal blue
+dome of Diablo lifts into the free air. Across the upper end of San
+Pablo Bay, which is really the north arm of the bay of San Francisco
+extending inland, Mare Island lies so low on the water that if it had
+not been made a naval reserve station it is difficult to know to what
+other use it could be put. One expects to have the land dip and swing
+from under like the ship's deck. It is in line with the guns which lie
+beside the Gate like watchful, muzzle-pointed dogs, and commands the
+whole upper bay and the opposing bluffs of Contra Costa in a manner
+highly commendable to those curious persons whose chief excitement
+lies in anticipating an Asiatic invasion. Nevertheless, along with
+the bastions of San Quentin it strikes, somehow, the note of human
+distrust amid all this charm of light and line and elusive colour,
+as if suddenly one should discover the tip of a barbed tail under the
+skirt of some seductive stranger.
+
+Between San Quentin and the Straits, all about the curve of the bay,
+winding, wide-mouthed sloughs give access to a land as fertile as
+Egypt. A slough is a mere wallow of unprofitable waters, waters unused
+by men and still reluctant of the sea. Pushed aside by the compelling
+tides, too undisciplined to make proper banks for themselves, they are
+neglected by all but a few fringing willows and shapeless sycamores in
+which the herons nest.
+
+Often at evening the white-faced ibis can be seen flying in long,
+voiceless lines, just clearing the twilight-tinted water, to their
+accustomed night perches in the wind-beaten willows. They return there,
+if undisturbed, year after year, accompanied in few and far-between
+seasons by the egret and the snowy heron, grown man-shy, or if they
+but knew the purpose for which their nuptial plumage is sacrificed,
+woman-shy, and seldom seen even by the most wishful eyes.
+
+At Napa a few bull-headed oaks come down almost to the tide-line, and
+in Sonoma a clump of alien blue gums huddles aloof and unregarded,
+but from the water little is visible beside the stilted cabins of some
+gun club or the ramshackle resorts of the flat-nosed, slow craft that
+wind on mysterious errands between the sunken lands. Whole families
+of half-amphibious humans appear to live comfortably on these drifting
+scows, but one never by any chance catches them doing any distinctive
+thing.
+
+The waters of the sloughs come down from the little inland valleys,
+where summer nests and broods in a blue haze along the redwood-serried
+hills. Whether it is white with cherry bloom at Napa, or purple with
+winy clusters at Sonoma, there is always something interesting going
+on there of the large process by which granite mountains are made food
+for man. It is worth a visit if only to learn that a country which does
+that sort of thing supremely well, finds it also worth while to do it
+beautifully. Yachting off San Rafael, it is possible to catch at times
+the scent of roses on an off-shore wind above the salt smell of the
+marshes.
+
+The last rip of the tide is through the Straits of Carquinez into the
+back-water of Suisun. From here on, it is a rhythmic heaving to and fro
+as of well-matched wrestlers, the river-water is set back to Crow's
+Landing on the San Joaquin, and miles above Sacramento it returns
+again past Antioch and the Suisun islands. It is lost in a wilderness
+of tules, through which the sluggish currents blindly wind. Here we
+have nothing to do with men, our business is all with the tribe of the
+Little Duck: mallard, teal, tern, coot, heron, eared grebe, and awkward
+loon.
+
+The tule is a round leafless reed. It springs up along the tide-lands
+or in the stagnant back-water of the rivers, or by any least dribble
+of a desert spring. No condition daunts it but absolute dearth of
+water; far-called, it travels on the wind over mountain ranges, over
+great wastes of waterless plain to find the one absolute condition, a
+pool--white rimmed with alkali or poisonous green with arsenic. I have
+seen it flourish by springs so charged with mineral that each slender
+column is ringed with its stony deposit, but I do not recall any
+standing water where tules are not. The stems are filled with papery
+pith so light that the Indians of the San Joaquin made boats of bundles
+of them, faggoted together and tied upon a wooden frame.
+
+Year by year the tules reclaim the muddy confluence of the twin rivers.
+They make an annual growth, die palely, and are beaten down by the
+wind; between their matted stems the young green comes up again. In the
+Land of the Little Duck, miles upon miles of them, and not one other
+thing, stand up on either side the winding water-lanes, man-high and
+impenetrable.
+
+The Tulare--the place of the tule--is the haunt not only of water-birds
+but innumerable insect-catchers, and especially of the red-winged
+blackbirds. In the spring these betake themselves to the reed-fringed
+marshes in hundreds, building their nests in such neighbourly proximity
+that the young can hop from rim to rim of the tight-slung, grassy
+hammocks. Great clouds of the young birds can be seen, just before
+mating and after nesting in the fall, rising from the low islands
+of the river-junction. In the season also the male yellow-headed
+blackbird may be heard singing his sweet but noisy cheering-song to
+his sombre mate as she weaves marsh grass and wet pond-weed together
+as a foundation for her home, always prudently completed some weeks in
+advance of any need of it.
+
+  [Illustration: WAITING FOR DUCK--LOS BANOS]
+
+Where the tules thin out along the moving currents, numerous woven
+balls of marsh vegetation hang like some strange fruit safely above the
+summer rise of the waters. These are the nests of the tule wren, built
+by the industrious male, with who knows what excess of parental care
+or what intention to deceive. All the while he is at work upon them,
+in one, the least conspicuous and apparently the least skilfully built,
+the mother bird nurses the brown nestlings with which, suddenly at the
+end of July, all the whispering galleries of the tulares are alive.
+
+One who has the courage to penetrate deeper within the tulares, past
+the crazy wooden landings of nameless ports at which the flat scows
+put in, past the broken willows where the herons nest and the weedy
+back-waters lie all smoothly green with the deceptive duck-weed, will
+see many wished-for sights. Just before dawn and after nightfall the
+inner marshes are vocal with the varied cries of coot and mallard
+and the complaining skirl of the mud-hen, the whistling redwing,
+the bittern booming from his dingy pool, and all the windy beat of
+wings. But by day a stillness falls through which the clicking whisper
+of the reeds and the croon of the great rivers cradling to the sea
+reaches the sense almost with sound. The air is all alive with the
+metallic glint of dragon-flies; now and then the plop of some shining
+turtle dropping into the smooth lagoon, or the frightened splash of a
+marsh-nesting bird, flecks the silence with a flash of sound. Here one
+might see all the duck kind leading forth their young broods, or the
+eared grebe swimming with her day-old nestlings on her back. If the
+day is dark--black clouds with lightnings playing under--one may hear
+the voice of the loon sliding through his sonorous scale to shaking,
+witless laughter. Or perhaps the day's sight might be a flock of
+pelicans on their way to their nesting-ground in Buena Vista, breasting
+the shallows, and with beating wings driving a school of minnows into
+some tiny inlet where they may be scooped up in the pouched bills, a
+dozen to a mouthful. Better still, some morning mist might rise for
+you suddenly on a strip of sandy shore the cranes had chosen for their
+wild dances, from which the stately measures of the Greek are said to
+be derived. Against the yellow sand, as on the background of a vase,
+the dipping figures and white outstretched wing draperies make the
+connection clear to you for the moment, along with some other things
+long overlaid in the racial memory.
+
+Always at evening in the tulares the air is winnowed by the clanging
+hordes of geese and ducks. Triangular flights of teal wing by you,
+whizzing like bullets, hazy with speed. Beach-nesting birds, paddlers
+in the foodful creeks, go seaward. Now and then some winged frigate of
+the open sea, an albatross perhaps blown inland on a storm, will climb
+the air to the sea-going wind. Low on the twilight-coloured waters the
+tule fog creeps in.
+
+You emerge properly from the vast intricacies of the tulares--if you
+emerge at all, and are not completely mazed and lost in them--at
+Sacramento, a city but barely rescued from the marsh, and still
+marsh-coloured with the damp-loving lichens. _La Dame aux Camelias_, to
+the eye, rich in that exotic blossom as no city in the world, but with
+a past, oh, unmistakably, and a touch of hectic disorder. The Russians
+possessed her, and then the breed of Jack Hamlin, and then--but it
+is unfair to list the lovers of a lady of so much charm and such
+indubitable capacity for reformation. Sacramento is the State capital,
+the geographical pivot of the great twin valleys; she divides with
+Stockton on the San Joaquin the tribute of their waters. It was here
+on her banks that the overland emigrant trains sat down to wait for
+the subsidence of waters in the new world of the West, from here they
+scattered to all its hopeful quarters.
+
+If the part the city has played in history has been that of a hostel, a
+distributing station, at least she has played it to some purpose. There
+are few empires richer than the land the twin rivers drain.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE TWIN VALLEYS
+
+
+It is geographical courtesy merely, to treat of intramontane California
+as a valley; it is in reality a vast, rolling plain. Several little
+kingdoms of Europe could be tucked away in it. North and south it has
+no natural line of demarcation other than the rivers meeting for their
+single assault upon the sea, but its diversity deserves the double
+name. They make, the Sacramento rushing from the wooded north and the
+sluggish San Joaquin, one of the most interesting waterways of the
+world. I should say they made, for of the San Joaquin one must be able
+to speak in the past also, to understand it. One must have seen it
+before man had tamed it and taught it, supine as a lioness in the sun.
+
+To arrive at a proper feeling for the continuity of the great central
+plain, it must be approached from the south, by way of the old Tejon
+Pass, up from San Fernando, or down the Tehachapi grade where the
+railroad loops and winds through the confluence of the Coast Range with
+the Sierra Nevada. Here the hills curve graciously about the vast oval
+of the lower San Joaquin. The downthrow of the mountain, stippled with
+sage-brush, gives way to tawny sand glistening here and there with
+white patches of alkali, mottled with dark blocks of irrigated land.
+Its immensity is obscured by the haze of heat.
+
+One is reduced to the figures of the real estate "booster" for terms of
+proportion. That modest checkering of green, hours away to the left,
+is a forty-mile field of alfalfa; beyond it lie the vineyards that in
+less than a quarter of a century relegated Spain to a second place in
+the raisin industry of the world. This is the San Joaquin of to-day
+and to-morrow. The white-tilted vans of the Argonauts saw it as one
+vast, overlapping field of radiant corollas, blue of lupins, phacelias,
+nemophilias, gold of a hundred packed species of composite. Wet years
+it is still possible for the settler in the unirrigated districts to
+wake some morning to blossomy lakes of sky-blueness in the hollows;
+from San Emigdio in the Temblors, I have seen, across the whole width of
+the valley, the smouldering poppy fires along the bluffs of Kern River.
+On the mesa below Tejon the moon-white gilia that the children call
+"evening snow" unfurls its musky-scented drifts mile after mile. But
+the prevailing note of the San Joaquin is tawny russet; gold it will
+be in the season, resplendent as those idols which the Incas overlaid
+yearly with fresh-beaten leaf, and in September the barrancas above
+Bakersfield and Visalia as yellow as brass, but all up and down the
+hill-rimmed hollow is every lion-coloured tint contending still with
+the thin belts of planted orchard.
+
+  [Illustration: MIRROR LAKE, YOSEMITE]
+
+Twenty-five years of cultivation have served to shift the lines of
+greenness but not greatly to modify the desert key. Once it was all
+massed in the tulares which fringed the series of lakes and connecting
+sloughs, continuing northward from the lowest point of the San Joaquin.
+Kern, Kings, Kaweah, Tule, Merced, and Tuolumne, mighty rivers, and a
+hundred lesser singing streams fed it. Elk by thousands ramped in its
+reedy borders. It was a haven of nesting water-birds. Whole islands
+were populated by pelicans, repairing there annually for the strange,
+sidling wing-dances that attend their mating. Blue herons nested in
+the tulares; they could be seen trailing their long dangly legs for
+hours above the shallows. Indians paddled in their frail balsas, built
+of papery, dry reeds, down intricate water-lanes in which white men
+venturing, lost themselves and were mazed to madness. Malaria of a
+surpassing virulence rode up and down that country on the "tule fogs."
+Even yet it is the dread of the cities of the plain to find themselves
+beleaguered by the thick, ghost-white mists that at long intervals roll
+along the ground, retaking the ancient marshes.
+
+Into this potential opulence the cattleman precipitated himself.
+He bought--it is more exact to say he acquired--vast acreage of
+Spanish grants; along the rim of the Coast Ranges, territory equal to
+principalities was given over to long-horned, lean herds. All about the
+old beach-line of the San Joaquin may still be seen the remnant of the
+cattle ranches, low formless houses with purlieus of pomegranate and
+pampas grass and black figs, and the high, stockaded, acrid-smelling
+corrals, to mark the receding waves of the cattle industry. On the
+Sierra side the guttered mesas, the hoof-worn foothills advertise
+the devastation of the wandering flocks. Early in the 'sixties these
+appeared, little, long-armed French and Basques, with hungry hordes
+of sheep at their heels, pasturing on the public lands. They ate into
+the roots of the lush grass and left the quick rains to cut the soil.
+The wool in the hand was always worth the next season's feed to the
+sheep-herder.
+
+  [Illustration: AMONG THE REDWOODS OF THE GREAT TWIN VALLEYS]
+
+Never was a land so planned for the uses of man, its shielding
+mountains, its deep alluvial terraces sloping gently to the sun. Men
+read it in the hieroglyphic the glistening waters spelled between the
+dark patches of the tulares, but it took some experimenting to read the
+message aright.
+
+After the cattle and the flocks came the wheat. Up from the meeting
+waters the land billowed with grain. Owners buckled the ploughs
+together and drove them with engines by tens and twenties across the
+thousand-acre fields. But men and engines, they were alike driven
+by the drouth. In wet years the wheat rancher rode to view his
+shoulder-high harvest, but when the rains, going high and wide over
+the valley to break along the saw-teeth of the Sierras, left the wheat
+unwatered, the same thing happened to the crops that had happened to
+the cattle and the sheep. And at last, amid the rotting carcases and
+the shrivelled acres, the message came clear--not the land, but the
+water. So they shut up the rivers in the canyons and the day of the
+orchardist began.
+
+Geographically it begins at Bakersfield, below the gap where the Kern
+comes down from the giant sequoias and is constrained to the wide,
+willow-planted canals, governed by head-gates and weirs. Such waters as
+find again their ancient levels, do so by way of the loose sandy soil
+through which they are filtered in vineyard and orchard. The tulares
+have been turned under; the elk are strictly preserved in the hope
+that enough of them will breed to serve the purposes of curiosity.
+The antelope bands that once flashed their white rumps from bench
+to bench of the tawny mesas were reduced, the last time I saw them,
+to a scant half-score roving the Tejon under the watchful eye of the
+superintendent. But with all this change, nowhere as at this diminished
+end, does one gather such an impression of the variety, the imperial
+extent of the San Joaquin. For at Bakersfield is one of the world's
+largest petroleum fields. The gaunt derricks rear along the unwatered
+hills like half-formed prehistoric creatures come up out of the ground
+to see what men are about. Reservoirs, fed with the stinking juices
+of a time decayed, squat along the barrancas, considering with a slow
+leech-like intelligence the tank cars in the form of a Gargantuan
+joint-worm of the same period that produced the derricks, as they clank
+between the oil-fields and the town. One of the largest oil-fields in
+the world--and yet the turn of the road drops it out of sight in the
+valley's immensity!
+
+Bakersfield is a heaven of roses. Doubtless there are other things by
+which the inhabitants would be glad to have it remembered, but this is
+the item that the traveller in the season carries away with him. Roses
+do not die there, they fall apart of their own sweetness, wafts of
+which envelop the town for miles out on the highway. After nightfall,
+when each particular attar distils upon the quiescent air, the
+townspeople walk abroad in the streets and the moon comes up full-orbed
+across the Temblors at about the level of the clock-tower. Overhead
+and beyond it the sky retains a deep velvety blueness until long past
+midnight. Traces of colour can be seen sometimes in the zenith when the
+glimmer along the knife-edge of the Sierras announces the dawn.
+
+North of Bakersfield, as the valley widens, the Coast Range fades
+to a mere shadow mountain, the peaks of Kaweah stand out above the
+banded haze, angel-white like the ranked Host. As the road swings in
+to the Sierra outposts, broad-headed oaks begin to appear; it skirts
+the foot of the great Sierra fault close enough for the landscape to
+borrow something from the dark, impending pines. But for the most part
+what the observer has to consider is soil and water and the miraculous
+product of these two. One must learn to think of the land in terms of
+human achievement.
+
+  [Illustration: CLEAR LAKE, LAKE COUNTY]
+
+North from the delta of Kern River lies a hundred miles of country
+scarcely disputed with the flocks, far-called and few, which still
+at the set time of the year forgather in green swales behind the
+town for the annual shearing, for the herders to play hand-ball at
+Noriegas', to grow riotously claret drunk and render an evanescent
+foreign touch to the brisk modern community. And every foot of that
+hundred miles is rife with the seeds of life, awaiting the touch of
+the impregnating water. One holds to that conviction as to a friendly
+assuring hand. In the presence of that vast plain, palpitating with
+the heat, the sluggish, untamed water lolling in the midst of it, the
+white-fanged Sierra combing the cloudless blue, beauty becomes a poor
+word: appreciation is shipwrecked and cast away. With relief one hails
+the beginning of a stripe, dark green like a scarf, scalloping the
+foothills--the citrus belt. From Portersville, Lindsay, Exeter it runs
+north past the meeting of the waters into the valley of the Sacramento,
+and for quality and early fruiting sets the figure of the world market.
+As if its waters had some special virtue, wherever a river is poured
+out upon the plain some particular crop is favoured. About Fresno
+it is raisins, at Madera port wine, sherry, and mild muscatel. The
+Merced, which takes its rise in the valley of Yosemite, is partial to
+melons and figs. But everywhere are prunes, peaches, apricots, almonds,
+sugar-beets, alfalfa, unmeasurable acreage of barley, beans, and
+asparagus. Anything is impressive if the scale be large enough, even a
+field of onions. Here the league-long rows are as terrible as an army.
+
+Up and down this empire belt proceed two great companies, the hordes
+of "fruit-hands" and the army of the bees, following its successive
+waves of fruit and bloom. Gangs of pruners, pickers, and packers
+are shifted and shunted as the crop demands. Interesting economic
+experiments transact themselves under the worried producer's eye; alien
+race contending with alien race. The jarring interests of men have by
+no means worked out the absolute solution, but the bees have long ago
+settled their business. They kill the drones and gather the honey for
+the gods who kindly provide them with hives--the more fortunate perhaps
+in knowing what their particular gods require.
+
+Wherever along the belt the rivers fail, the pumps take up the work;
+strenuous little Davids contending against the Goliaths of drouth. They
+can be heard chugging away like the active pulse of the vineyards,
+completing the ribbon of greenness that spans from ridge to ridge of
+the down-plunging hills.
+
+And then one must take account of the cities of the plain! Twenty-five
+years ago they fringed the Sierra base, mere feeders to the mines, the
+cattle ranches, the sheep country. They had the manners of the frontier
+and the decaying, tawdry vices that filtered down from San Francisco,
+sluiced out by intermittent spasms of reform. They were "wide open."
+Hairy little herders with jabbering tongues knifed one another in the
+shearing season, vaqueros "shot up the town" occasionally; it is still
+within memory that prominent citizen "packed a gun" for prominent
+citizen. Twenty years ago the last, most southerly, of the chain of
+settlements was a very cesspool of the iniquities driven to a last
+stand by the influx of home-seekers. I who went through the years of
+change with it could tell tales if I would--but, thank Heaven, nobody
+would believe them! Now in those old places of unsavoury renown rise
+handsome "business blocks," the true mark of cities. Homes heaped
+with roses spread on either side of miles of palm-fringed boulevard.
+Over it all flows the clear, inspiring current of Sierra-cooled air,
+sliding down from the ranked peaks that, whitened from flank to flank
+by perpetual snows, hover like phalanxes of protecting wings.
+
+  [Illustration: CASTLE CRAG, RATTLESNAKE canyon]
+
+Into the very thick of the cities drop down from the high Sierras
+trails to all its places of delight, the sequoia groves, King's River
+canyon, and all the lordly peaks about Mt. Whitney and Yosemite; and
+setting hillward from San Francisco the old Stockton-Sonora road
+along which surged the undisciplined rout of the gold-seekers of
+'forty-nine. It leads, this earliest of valley highways, across the
+basin of the Stanislaus, past places made famous by the red-shirted,
+lusty miners, the sleek-coated gamblers of Bret Harte. It passes the
+twenty-eight Mile House where Jack Hamlin ran a poker game, and many a
+scene rendered memorable by the gay ladies of Poker Flat. It reaches,
+by way of a deep-rutted, ancient track, choked with the characteristic
+red dust of the country, Table Mountain, the home of Truthful James.
+Table Mountain, having consideration for the near-by Sierras, is a hill
+merely, with a flat deposit of _malpais_, the "black rock" of regions
+far north and east. Beyond Sonora lie the old placer "diggings," every
+foot of which has been combed and sifted for gold. The bones of the
+earth are laid bare; all the masking clay, tossed and tumbled, clogged
+with rusty pipes and decaying sluices, lies in heaps and depressions
+where the gold-seekers cast it. The sense of violation is heightened by
+the hue of the soil, redder than the hills of Devon, redder than a red
+heifer--but the river furnishes the more descriptive figure, the martyr
+hue of the Sacrament. In the flood season it carries the tint of its
+ensanguined clays far down into the bay's blueness.
+
+The remnant of that riotous life,--the abandoned cabins, the towns
+falling into dissolution,--like the remaining specimens of the fir and
+redwood forests cut off to timber the Mother Lode, is left standing by
+unfitness. The best of it is a little nugget of remembrance of Francis
+Bret Harte and Mark Twain.
+
+  [Illustration: McCLOUD RIVER, UPPER SACRAMENTO VALLEY]
+
+It was at Angels in the foothills of Calaveras that Twain, to his
+everlasting fame, was so impressed with the performance of the Jumping
+Frog. But life at Angels and all up and down that placer country is
+as heavy with desuetude as the frog was after the bar-keeper had fed
+him with buckshot. As well try to get a draught of that old time as a
+drink at any of the dismantled bars, high, ornate, black walnut affairs
+across which, in dust and nuggets, passed and repassed probably as much
+gold as would serve to buy the orange belt of the San Joaquin--and for
+a figure of magnificence you would find nothing more acceptable to its
+inhabitants.
+
+Much of the history of that country is written in the names. Here the
+soft Spanish locutions give place to harsher, but not less descriptive,
+Americanisms--Jimtown, Jackass Hill, Squaw Creek; the canyons become
+"gulches," the mesas "flats." Later both of these were overlaid by
+-villes and -tons, the plain rural names of Anglo-Saxon derivation,
+Coulterville, Farmington, Turlock. They smell of orchards. Prosperity
+is coming back on the surface of the fruitful waters, but the redwood
+forests have not come back. Centuries, nothing less, are required for
+the building of one of these towers of greenness, and it is barely
+forty years since all that district was one roaring blast of mining
+life, rioting, jostling, snatching each from each. In the language
+of the country, the Italian truck gardeners will "beat them to it."
+They have smoothed over the old "slickens" and comforted the land with
+crops.
+
+As one travels north, the bulk of the Sierra lessens, the pines climb
+higher, the oaks march well down into the middle valley to catch the
+wet coast winds, the character of the plantations change, there are
+more grain fields, more neat little farms. Finally the old Overland
+emigrant trail climbs down from Donner Lake and Emigrant Gap, and you
+find yourself deep in the Valley of the Sacramento.
+
+By an air-line from the meeting of the waters, its geographical
+frontier is passed in the neighbourhood of Sonora; perhaps the bridge
+over the Mokelumne is a better indicator, since that river joins the
+San Joaquin at the estuary, but it is not until the Overland road is
+crossed that the character of the country definitely betrays the upper
+valley.
+
+Ascending the river, the works of man are less and less, the forest
+and the mountains more. The rapid rise of the wooded slopes keeps
+the Sacramento troublous. Tributaries, not large but swift and of
+tremendous volume, pour into it. Occasionally from dark canyons is
+heard the steady pound of the quartz mill, working some ancient lead,
+or a smelter blocks out a whole forested slope with its poisonous
+exhalations; but for the most part the northern valley is given over to
+brooding quiet, to unending green, and streams as swift as adders.
+
+In Mendocino county, on the coast side, the Range begins to lift
+toward the snow-line; on the Sierra side the alpine crest shears away.
+From time to time the "logging" industry cuts a wide track down the
+redwood forest. One hears above the singing rivers, the clucking of
+the donkey-engine or the rip of a mill still going in the midst of its
+self-created, sawdust desert. The glutting of the lumber region has
+been accomplished as wastefully, as violently, as the search for gold.
+All up the valley tall prophets of the rain have been butchered to
+make a lumberman's fat purse. But, link by link, the forestry bureau
+is closing in the line of the reserves against the lumber "kings," the
+Ahabs of a grasping time.
+
+The hills fall into a certain order, serried rank on rank. Deciduous
+growth of the lower slopes gives way to redwoods and Shasta fir. Miles
+upon miles of them stand so thick that when one dies it does not fall
+but remains erect in the arms of its brothers. Great columnar boles
+rise out of the river-basins, soaring high over what, except for their
+dwarfing proportions, would be a considerable grove of graceful oak
+and bay and glistening, magnolia-leafed, crimson-shafted madrono.
+Over these the redwoods rise, as over the heads of worshippers the
+clustered columns of Milan seek the dome. High up the tops are caught
+in a froth of pale-green foliage through which the sunlight filters
+blue. This characteristic refraction from their yellowish, inch-long
+needles dwells about the redwood as an aura, and far on the horizon
+distinguishes their ranks from the hill-slopes masked with pines. So,
+blue ridge on ridge, they advance on the imperious height of Shasta.
+
+  [Illustration: DONNER LAKE, ON THE OLD EMIGRANT TRAIL]
+
+Shasta is a brother of Fuji and Tacoma, one of those solitary crater
+peaks whose whiteness is the honourable age of fiery youth, a good
+mountain dead and gone to heaven. Do not go up on it; you will see
+a great deal more of what you have seen, wooded hills on hills and
+perhaps the sapphire belt of the sea, the glitter of lovely, sail-less
+lakes, but you will not understand it any better, for Shasta has no
+more to do with the abutting ranges than a great genius with the stock
+which produced him. This is a prophet among mountains, a vent from
+the burning heart of creation. One is not surprised to learn that the
+Indians hereabout count their descent from the Spirit of Shasta and
+the Grizzly Bear. That dark belt of forest circling the mountain's
+base looks to be the proper haunt for him, the lumbering, little-eyed
+embodiment of brute creation. It is well to think of those two things
+together, the rip of those mighty claws with a ton or two of brute bulk
+behind them, and the awful witness towering to the blue, and suffer the
+soul-satisfying fear that lies in wait for man in the great places of
+the earth. All our modern fears are mean, fears of the common opinion
+and the bill collector. Shasta will have done its best for you if it
+enables you to quake in the very marrow of consciousness.
+
+After this it is well to turn southward along the Coast Range, camping
+by the trout-abounding rivers, losing yourself in the stiff laurels and
+azaleas of Mendocino, fishing at the clear lakes cupped in the hollows.
+If the season is right there will be salmon running in Klamath and
+Trinity rivers or deer in the steep-sided canyons. And everywhere there
+will be the redwoods. It is not, however, in the crowds that the tree
+reveals itself. Far down the deforested hills of Sonoma, in isolated
+groves, in small groups or singles on the tops of bossy, brass-coloured
+hills, it takes on character and charm.
+
+A redwood grove is a three-story affair. On the ground floor, turned
+rusty brown, as though the sunlight filtering through had mellowed
+there a thousand years, creep the wild ginger, the rosy-flowered
+oxalis, trilliums, and violets. All these lower rooms are crowded with
+dogwood, with the great berried manzanitas, woodwardias, man-high,
+and glistening bays, silver-tipped with light. By one of those
+strange but charming affinities of wild life, the redwood grove is
+the peculiar haunt of lilies. Every variation of the soil--the peat
+bogs of the coast, the high sandy ridges, the damp meadows--has each
+its appropriate variety; and not merely lilies, but droves of them,
+hundreds of swaying stems, files of them up the line of seeping springs
+or round the bases of great boulders, lilies breast high, lilies
+overhead, ruby-spotted, golden-throated, shining white, dowered with
+the special genius of perfume. Along the chaparral-covered slope and
+deep within the canyons one tracks them by the subtle, intoxicating
+scent spreading, as I am persuaded no other perfume does, by a
+conscious distillation on the melting air.
+
+  [Illustration: LAUREL LAKE, UPPER SACRAMENTO]
+
+The second redwood story, that wondrous space of blue-diffusing sun,
+between the deciduous underforest and the fairy web of redwood green,
+is bird and squirrel haunted. Jays flash back and forth, bright
+flickers of the humming-bird go buzzing by. Woodpeckers may be heard
+calling the ever-missing "Jacob, Jacob!" who must in their opinion
+be concealing himself somewhere about the upper story. The wire-drawn
+warble of the brown creeper follows the singer up and down the deeply
+corrugated trunks. Wrens, sparrows, juncos, all manner of little
+feathered folk in whose coats the tones of brown predominate, frequent
+the pillared middle rooms. Once I heard what I thought to be a hermit
+thrush, singing out of the dusk of Muir Wood. But I have not the art
+of knowing birds by note. People who live much in the redwoods find
+them silent; I think it might more easily be that the great trunks
+and green-shot glooms have the same quality of dwarfing sound as size.
+Redwoods, as I know them, are really lighter and more alive than any
+other coniferous forests, but the _effect_ of umbrageous stillness is
+induced by vast proportions.
+
+As for what goes on in the upper rooms, who has been there? What birds
+arise to their three- or four-hundred-foot heights? The few and slight
+boughs, the feathery layers of foliage rounding in age to sloping
+crowns, who knows them but the wind and the snows that neither stir nor
+are stayed by them? There are some matters that the great Twin Valleys
+keep even from the men for whom they have borne an empire.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE HIGH SIERRAS AND THE SAGE-BRUSH COUNTRY
+
+
+The proper vehicle for mountain study is not yet available. A great
+mountain range is like a great public character, there is much more
+to it than is presented to the observation, and it is not open to
+familiarity. But if one could fly high and wide over its cloud-lifting
+summits, one might learn something of its private relations.
+
+From such a vantage it would instantly appear how distinct are the
+Nevadas (_nieve_, snowy) among the Sierras of California. A very
+Bonaparte of mountains, new-born and lording it over the ancient
+ranges, not content with its vast empery but swinging north into the
+unpre-empted icy regions. San Bernardino and San Jacinto are as far
+from it as the Faubourg St. Germain from an island in the sea. Sierra
+Madre is of the Coast Range; Shasta a fire-hole, a revolutionist; the
+true Sierra is the midriff of a continent. From its northern extremity
+one sees the sun in a circle and the Northern Lights; that portion of
+it we know as Sierra Nevada swings into the state above Honey Lake,
+and ends southward in a tumble of blunt peaks below Kern River. This
+is quite enough, however, for Californians to make free with, and more
+than they can appreciate.
+
+Geographically the range begins on the south at Tehachapi, but at
+Walker's Pass, a day's journey to the north, is the first appearance
+of its most salient characteristic, the great Sierra Fault. In its
+youth the range suffered incredible cataclysms. For two hundred
+miles the great eastern plain dropped; weighted as it was with its
+withered aristocracy of hills--how weazened and old you can see to
+this day--it tore sharply downward, and the depth of that fall from
+the heaven-affronting peak of Whitney to the desert valley of Inyo is
+a matter of two miles of sheer descent.
+
+The whole Sierra along the line of faultage has the contour of a
+wave about to break. It swings up in long water-shaped lines from
+the valley of the San Joaquin, and rears its jagged crest above the
+abrupt desert shore. Seen from close under, some of these two- and
+three-thousand-foot precipices have the pitch of toppling waters. As
+they rose new-riven from the earth their proportions must have been
+more than terrifying.
+
+Later the Ice Age bore downward from the north, and through
+immeasurable years carved the fractured granite into shapes of enduring
+beauty. It rounded the great jutting fronts, it insured them against
+the tooth of time with the keen icy polish with which they shine
+still against the morning. It gouged narrow wall-sided canyons, cut the
+course of rivers, and sinking like a graver's tool into the heart of
+the range, scooped out deep wells of pleasantness. Afterward, when the
+ice was old, it must have moved more slowly, for the lines it left,
+retreating northward, are more flowing, the hill-crowns rounder. And
+then the mountain was besieged with trees. They stormed it, scaled its
+free precipices; you can see by the thick mould of the valleys what
+ranks and ranks of them went down, and along the snow-line how by the
+persistence of assault they are bent and contorted.
+
+This is the whole effect of the sombre swathes of pine that mask the
+Sierra slopes. They march along the water-courses, they climb up sheer
+precipices in staggering files, trooping in the passes; across the
+smooth meadow spaces they lock arms, they await the word of command.
+By a very little observation they are seen to be ranged in orderly
+companies. Here a warm current of air travelling steadily from the
+superheated valleys carries the life zone higher, there a defiant
+bony ridge drops it a few thousand feet, but the relative arrangement
+of species does not greatly vary. The broad oaks, like reverend
+grandsires, from the foothills see the procession go by, they follow
+as far as the gates of the mountain, crutched and bowed. All the lower
+canyons are full of a rabble of deciduous trees, chinquapins, scrub oak,
+madrono, full of gay camp-followers, lilac, dogwood, azaleas, strumpet
+penstemons, flaunting lupins, monk's-hood, columbine.
+
+  [Illustration: YOSEMITE FALLS]
+
+The grey nut pine, wide-branched, unwarlike but serviceable, opens
+the ranks of conifers. Then the long-leaved pines begin, _ponderoso_,
+_Coulteri_, and the slender, arrowy, fire-resisting _attenuata_. On the
+western slope, increasing as they go northward, the redwood holds all
+the open country, but it is no climber like _monticola_, the largest
+of all true pines, the captain of the Sierra forests. The firs usurp
+the water-borders and the low moraines; clannish, incommunicable, they
+seem not to find it worth while to grow unless they grow stately. Above
+all these range the thin-barked pines, the lodgepole, Douglas spruce,
+librocedrus, and hardy junipers in windy passes. About the meadows and
+lake-borders the quaking asps push like children between the knees
+along the line; and highest, most persistent, the creeping-limbed,
+wind-depressed white-barked pine, under whose matted boughs the wild
+sheep bed.
+
+The trees have each their own voice--a degree of flexibility or length
+of needles upon which the wind harps to produce its characteristic
+note. The traveller in the dark of mountain nights knows his way among
+them as by the street cries of his own city. The creaking of the firs,
+the sough of the long-leaved pines, the whispering whistle of the
+lodgepole pine, the delicate frou-frou of the redwoods in a wind, these
+come out for him in the darkness with the night scent of moth-haunted
+flowers. But there is one tree that for the footer of the mountain
+trails is voiceless; it speaks no doubt, but it speaks only to the
+austere mountain-heads, to the mindful winds and the watching stars.
+It speaks as men speak to one another and are not heard by the little
+ants crawling over their boots. This is the "big tree," the sequoia. In
+something less than a score of forest patches about the rim of the Twin
+Valleys, the sequoia abides, out of some possible preglacial period,
+out of some past of which nothing is left to us but the fading memory
+of the "giants in those days." The age of individual big trees can
+be computed in terms of human history. There are evidences written in
+the rings of these that they endured the drouth which made the famine
+in the days of Ahab the king, against which Elijah prayed. These are
+growing trees whose seeds are fertile.
+
+One might make a very dramatic collocation of the rise and fall of
+empires against the life period of a single sequoia, and that would
+be easier than to transcribe by mere phrases the impression of one
+of these green towers of silence on the sense. Single and deeply
+corrugated as a Corinthian column, with only a lightly-branched crown
+for a capital, they spire for five thousand years or so, and then the
+leaf-crown becomes rounded to a dome in which the winds breed. Warm
+days of Spring, their young nestling zephyrs come fluttering down the
+deep wells of shade to shake the saplings of a hundred years. In Summer
+the fine-leafed foliage catches the sun like spray, diffusing vaporous
+blueness; but the majesty of their gigantic trunks is incommunicable.
+After a while the stifling sense of awe breaks before it, and you go
+on with your small affairs as children will go on playing even in the
+royal presence.
+
+  [Illustration: BLUE LAKE, LAKE COUNTY]
+
+The name _Sequoia_ is one of the few cheering notes among our habitual
+botanical stupidities--an attempt to express quality as it is humanly
+measured in a name. There was once an American Cadmus, Sequoyah, a
+Cherokee who invented an Indian alphabet and taught his tribe to read.
+Seeing them outnumbered in their own territory, he started west with
+the idea of founding a great Indian empire. He was last seen trailing
+north across the desert and was heard of no more. Tradition has it that
+he reached the forest of the upper Kern River and gave the trees his
+name. At least no botanist with his nose in a book has usurped it.
+
+Forests are for cover. They mask not only the naked rock, but the paths
+of deer and bear and bighorn. Under the spire-pointed ranks of conifers
+that look so black from above, verging to blueness, a world of furtive
+folk goes on. A world of birds is in its branches, squirrels nimble
+as sparrows, but scarcely anything of this is visible to the watcher
+on the heights. Rabbits playing on your lawn would be more noticeable
+in proportion than the seldom-seen bighorn leading his light-footed
+young from ledge to rocky ledge. The jealous trees cover the trails and
+obscure the passes.
+
+As you come up through them you observe the flat, soddy spaces of
+old lake basins, green as jewels, and the hanging meadows gay with
+cascades of flowers, the stream tangles, the new-made moraines bright
+with bindweed and sulphur-flower. But from the heights all this lovely
+detail is hidden by the overlapping tents of boughs. Here and there a
+stream leaps forth at the falls like a sword from a green scabbard,
+or higher up, may be traced as the silver wire on which are strung
+unrippled lakes as blue as cobalt. Great chains of such lakes lead down
+from the snow-line to the foothill borders, encroached upon by the
+silent ranks of trees. As they go down they show soddy borders, they
+tend to fill and to grow meadows where presently deep-rooting trees
+assume their stations. This is the strategic rule for the taking of a
+granite mountain. First the grinding ice and the disintegrating water;
+what the streams wash down collects in the glacier-ploughed basins. It
+makes lake borders by which the grass comes in--the small grass that
+is mightier than mountains, that eats them for its food. Lakes at the
+lower levels become meadows, then trees arrive; they overrun the soddy
+ground, the snow-manured moraines. The trees themselves take centuries
+to fruition. At a later stage men dispossess the forest and build
+cities, but this has not yet come to the Sierras. There is something
+indomitable in the will of the trees to spread and climb. In the floor
+of Yosemite and Hetch Hetchy there are hundred-year-old oaks of full
+form and generous growth, and on the slopes above them the same oaks
+and of almost the same age are so dwarfed by drouth and altitude that
+they are not knee-high to a man, but they keep the due proportions of
+their type. A white bark pine will climb where the weight of the winter
+drifts is so heavy that it is never able to lift its decumbent trunk
+from the ground, clinging like ivy to the wall in which it roots.
+
+In the Spring the rich florescence of the conifers sheds pollen in
+drifts that, carried down the melting water, warn the sheep-herder and
+the orchardist a hundred miles away of the advancing season. A pine
+forest in flower is one of the things worth seeing which is most seldom
+seen, for at its best the high passes are still choked by snow, the
+lakes ice-locked, the trails dangerous. And then the blossoms, yellow
+and crimson tassels and rosy spathes, are carried on the leafy crowns
+high over the heads of the most adventurous foresters. What one finds,
+as late as the end of June when the trails are open, is a stain of
+pollen on the lingering snow, and great clouds of it flying wherever a
+bough is brushed by a light wing. In the autumn the whole wood is full
+of the click and glint of the winged seeds. Storms of them, like clouds
+of locusts, are carried past on the wind, to be dropped in the nearest
+clearing or to find a chance lodging in a moss-lined crevice of the
+weathered headlands.
+
+  [Illustration: LAKE TAHOE, THE HIGH SIERRAS]
+
+But from the heights, all feeling for the process of the forest is
+lost in the sense of its irresistible march--it creeps and winds, it
+waits darkly for the word. Above the tree-line no sound ascends but a
+faint vibration, the body of sound making itself felt in the silence.
+On windless days the forest lies black like weed at the bottom of a
+lake of air as clear as a vacuum. When the great wind rivers pour about
+the peaks, it can be seen lashing like weed in the currents, but still
+almost soundlessly--the roar of it passes down the canyons, and is heard
+in the cities of the plain. But if the peaks cannot hear what the trees
+are plotting about, it is not so with the voices of the water. These
+are sharper, more definitive; they rise re-echoing from the rocky walls
+and are recognisable each by its distinctive note at incredible heights
+of the sheer, glassy, granite frontlets.
+
+In the glacial valleys, such as Yosemite, Tehipite, and Hetch Hetchy,
+where young rivers drop from the headlands in long streaming falls,
+the noise of them contending with the wind makes mimic thunder. Immense
+curtains of falling water are tossed this way and that, they are caught
+up and suspended in mid-air, and let fall crashing to the lower levels.
+When the wind blows straight up the canyon they will rear against it,
+and leap out a shining arc, shattering in mid-air like bursting bombs
+of spray. But later in the season, when the streams are heavy with the
+melting snows, the wind itself is shattered by the weight of falling
+water--it exhausts itself in obscuring clouds of silver dust. When from
+Whitney or Williamson or King's Mountain you can see half-a-hundred
+such young rivers roaring to the morning, it is as beautiful and as
+terrifying as the sight of youth to timorous age. They go leaping with
+their shining shields, and their shouting shakes the rocks. Neither
+you nor they believe that the most and the best they will come to is an
+irrigating canal between sober rows of prunes and barley.
+
+Higher than the forests, or the waters rising out of them, is the
+_Py-weack_, the Land of Shining Rocks. They shine with glacier polish;
+horses on the high trails sniff suspiciously at their glittering
+surfaces. Time can lay slight hold on them by thunder, by frost, and
+the little grey moss; it has not yet subdued the front of Oppapago.
+Here between snowless ribs and buttresses are the shrunken glaciers
+that feed the streams, little toy models of the ancient rivers of ice.
+The snowfields of the Sierras are not so inconsiderable as they seem:
+they are dwarfed by the precipices among which they hide. Inaccessible
+to ordinary mountain travel, they make their best showing from the
+surrounding plains, where, lifted in the middle air, they glow with
+ethereal whiteness. Close by they display a bewildering waste of broken
+ice, boulders, and crevasses, made bleaker by the cobalt shadows.
+
+  [Illustration: MOUNT SHASTA--SIERRA GLOW]
+
+North the line of peaks stretches, broken by the passes that give
+access to the west. Between them, above the source of streams, in the
+ice-gouged hollows, lie unfathomable waters that take all their life
+from the sky. Or perhaps they are reservoirs from which the sky is
+made, fluid jade and azulite and hyacinth and chrysoprase, as if the
+skies of many days had run their colours in those bleak bowls. For at
+this altitude the wave contour of the range comes out most sharply; the
+sky is strangely deep and darker, as if through its translucence one
+glimpsed the void of space. One sees the moon and the planets wandering
+there with pale lamps held aloft.
+
+No life of any sort is visible from here. Farther down toward the
+coast, over the forested moraines, the condor may be seen leaning
+against the wind at sunrise. On the edge of the abysmal canyons eagles
+make their nests and go dropping down the shadowy depths to seek their
+food from God, but they do not rise to these stark heights. Sometimes
+a clanging horde of water-fowl, beating up from the Gulf of California
+overland to the Canadian marshes, will grow bewildered in the face of
+the great wall-sided cliffs; circling they attempt the forward flight,
+only to circle and rise anew, until, wing-weary in that thin air, they
+sink exhausted to the margin of a mountain lake, satisfied at last to
+thread their way humbly along the creek-beds to open country.
+
+The live forces of the High Sierra are the forces of wind and light.
+One feels the push of tremendous currents flowing between the peaks
+as among rocky islands. Day by day they may be charted by the cloud
+fragments floating on them, by the banners of dry snow dust, streaming
+out like long grass from the island shores. Thundering fleets of cumuli
+drift up the wind rivers and assault the great domes of Whitney and
+Oppapago. The light breaks through all the varying cloud strata, and
+colours them with splendour; the glow of the clouds reflected on the
+snow is caught by the watchful mountain-lover far down the valleys of
+Inyo and San Joaquin. This painted hour of sunset is the apotheosis of
+mountains, but for me it has less of majesty than the morning after
+deep snows. These come usually early in the season. The air for days
+will be full of the formless stir, then the range withdraws itself
+behind a veil which closes from tented peak to peak, and includes
+sometimes the parallel desert ranges which lie along its eastern coast.
+Twenty feet will fall in a single session of the white gods behind the
+veil. Then comes a morning blue and sharp as a spear-thrust. Every tree
+is like an arrow feathered in green and white. Airy bridges built upon
+the bending stems shut in the water-courses; the moraines are smooth
+and soft as the backs of huddled sheep. By night the range shows from
+the valley as a procession of winged figures holding the snows upon
+their bosoms. And that, after all, is the business of mountains. The
+western front of the Sierra Nevada, which receives the full force of
+the Pacific storms, is rewarded with the stateliest forests. Before
+those extended snowy mountain arms lie the great Twin Valleys; behind
+them stretches the illimitable sage-brush country, the backyard of the
+Sierra.
+
+  [Illustration: VALLEY OF THE YOSEMITE]
+
+"Sage-brush country" is one of those local terms that stand for a type
+of landscape as distinctive as the moors of England and the campagna
+of Italy. It means first of all, open country, great space of sky,
+what the inhabitants of it call "eye-reach," treeless except for a few
+cotton-woods and willows along the sink of intermittent streams, and
+stippled with low shrubs of artemesia. This is the true "sage-brush,"
+though it is no sage, the sacred bush of Diana, _Artemisia tridentata_.
+It may grow in favoured districts man-high, but ordinarily not more
+than two or three feet in the arid regions which it haunts. Other
+social shrubs will be found pre-empting miles of the territory to
+which the artemesia gives its name, _coleogeny_, _pursia_, _dalia_,
+"creosote," but none other gives it the distinctive feature, the web of
+pale, silky sage-green against the sun-burned sand.
+
+Other items of the sage-brush landscape are so constant that they
+are immediately suggested by it: mountains hanging on the horizon in
+opalescent haze, low flowing lines of hills overlaid by old lava-flows,
+the "black rock" simulating cloud shadows on the distant ranges, dry
+red cones of ancient volcanic ash, and great flat table-topped "buttes"
+of the painted desert.
+
+White-crested ranges on the one hand and buttes on the other mark the
+limits of the sage; for where snow-caps are, there are trees, and where
+the buttes begin the cactus and the palo verde reign.
+
+A sage-brush country is a cattle country primarily; perhaps there may
+be mines; where there is water to be stored for irrigation there will
+be towns, but the virtue of the sage is that it grows in lands that
+man, at least, has found no other use for.
+
+It can thrive on an allowance of water that will support no larger
+thing than a chipmunk or a lizard, and, growing, feeds the cattle
+on a thousand hills. Therefore it is indispensable to any picture of
+the sage-brush country that there should be herds at large in it and
+vaqueros riding, or far down the bleached valley the dust of a rodeo
+rising. It is impossible to think of such a land and not think of these
+things, free life, and air as clear and vibrant with vitality as a
+bell. I can never think of it myself without seeing, in addition, the
+vultures making a merry-go-round over Panamint, and up from Coso the
+creaking line of a twenty-mule team.
+
+The sage-brush country of California begins properly at the foot of
+the Sierras where the state-line sheers east by south from Lake Tahoe.
+It covers the high valleys that divide the true Sierra from the older,
+lesser ranges that keep it company as far south as Olancha. Below
+Mono Lake, that part of the gold region made immortal by Mark Twain,
+it gives to the chrome- and ochre-tinted soil its distinguishing
+characteristic. From the long arm of Death Valley it begins to be
+encroached upon by the mesquite, and at Indian Wells it is driven close
+under the lee of the last Sierra. The range of which San Bernardino
+and San Jacinto are outposts carries the artemisia farther desertward,
+almost to the Colorado River in fact, and south again about the Salton
+Sea it holds its own with sahuro and palo verde. Its eastern border,
+like that of the wild tribes along the Mojave line, is lost in pure
+desertness. Formerly much of that country from San Bernardino to
+the sea was native to the sage, and all the southern end of the San
+Joaquin. But now all this is replaced with orchards, for the artemisia
+proves nothing so much of the soil on which it grows as that, given a
+due allowance of water, it is as desirable for other things.
+
+  [Illustration: THE HALF DOME, YOSEMITE]
+
+All this country which I have described to you has so recently been sea
+that the mark of its old beach-line is plainly to be traced along the
+east Sierra wall. Still the evaporating water leaves vast deposits of
+salt and alkali, blinking white in the sink of Death Valley. There are
+lakes there still where the salt crusts over hard and clear like ice,
+and deep thick puddles of bitter minerals, the lees of that ancient
+inland ocean. From the top of any of the denuded desert ranges it is
+possible to trace the winding bays and estuaries, and, with an eye for
+location, to choose the points at which one may fairly expect to find
+potsherds, amulets, fire-blackened hearthstones, and the middens of a
+nameless people who built their primitive towns along its beaches. It
+must have had much to recommend it in those days before the sage-brush
+took it, for this inland sea, rather than the more mountainous Pacific
+shore, was the route taken by the ancient migratory peoples who left
+their undecipherable signs scored into the rocks from the Aztec country
+to the Arctic. On isolated igneous rocks near their old encampments,
+and high on the walls of the box canyons, such as might have been
+tide-rifts, high above any mechanical contrivance of the present-day
+Indians, the records resist equally the shifts of sea and sand and the
+efforts of modern science to read them.
+
+Whether the ghosts of the departed peoples ever revisit the ancient
+beaches, the ghosts of waters haunt there daily. Morning and
+mid-afternoon the rivers of mirage arise; they well out of the past
+and are poured trembling on the plain; phantom fogs blow across them,
+wraiths of trees grow up and are reflected in false streams. Often
+in very early light there are strange suggestions of----dunes and
+boulders perhaps? Only no boulders in that country are flat-topped like
+the houses built in lands of the sun, and no dunes are wall-sided.
+Mirage, we are told, is but a picture of distant things, mirrored on
+atmospheric planes, but then maybe a ghost is only a mirage deflected
+on our atmosphere from worlds outside our ken, and it is always easy
+in the desert to see things that you cannot possibly believe. Whatever
+they are, mirages are real to the eye. I mean that they are not to
+be winked away nor dissipated by contact. I have watched a vaquero
+ride into one of them and drown to all appearances, or seem to be
+swimming his horse across its billows, all of him below its surface as
+completely hidden as by rivers of water. Moreover, mirages tend always
+to occur under given conditions and in the same places. I recall one
+of the stations on the old Mojave stage road, which, approached from
+the north about an hour after sunrise, would instantly duplicate: two
+houses, two lines of poplars, two high corrals.
+
+  [Illustration: SHASTA--SNOW CLOUDS]
+
+Occasionally along the edge of the sage-brush country one may see that
+surpassing wonder, the moon mirage, poured like quicksilver along the
+narrow valleys, as if the thirsty land had dreamed of water.
+
+It is odd how this suggestion of sea and river clings to a country
+where there is nothing harder to come by than good water to drink.
+For any other purpose it is not to be thought of. After one of those
+terrible wind storms, the only really incommoding desert weather, it is
+possible to find great spaces all rippled and lined in water-markings
+like a sea that has suddenly undergone a magic transformation into
+sand. The contours of the desert ranges are billowy; they rise out
+of the plain like the grey-backed breakers of open sea. The valleys
+between are narrow and trough-like; the shores of them are lined with
+crawling dunes that, under the steady pressure of wind currents, are
+for ever sliding up their own peaks and down the other side, changing
+place without ever once losing the long slope to windward and the
+abrupt landward fall of waves.
+
+Another item which adds to the suggestion of the illimitable spread
+of sage-brush country, like the sea, is the way the sparse forests
+of the mountain-tops appear to be islanded by it. For the sage-brush
+extends on across the Great Basin, it stretches into Montana and
+south to Arizona and New Mexico, it works about the lower end of the
+Rocky Mountains and well into the great central plain. The ranges
+lie thick in it as ocean swells, as I have said, and stepping from
+crest to crest has come the fox-tail pine, _Pinus flexilis_, all the
+way from Humboldt Mountain to San Jacinto. A sinewy, thinly-branched
+species, as straight-backed as an Indian, it has little affinity for
+its noble congeners of the Sierra forests, but keeps to the dry and
+open ridges, nourished by clouds and by infrequent shallow snows. With
+it, but at lower levels to which the _flexilis_ will never come, is
+found frequently the one-leaved pinon pine, the food-crop of the wild
+tribes. But the pinon is a pushing sort, it establishes itself upon the
+slightest invitation.
+
+There is a story told in the desert of how this grey, round-headed tree
+was once a very great _capitan_, who, in order that his death might be
+as beneficent to his people as his life had been, was changed into the
+foodful pine. Whether the legend is true or not, certain it is that
+if you sit down by a pinon, wherever found, and stay long enough, you
+will see Indians. They might come in the Spring looking for _taboose_,
+or later for willows and grasses for basketry, for seeds of sunflower
+and chia, to shoot doves by the water-holes or to hunt chuckwallas. A
+chuckwalla is a lizard, a kind of dragon in miniature, barred black and
+white, and as offensive to look at as he is harmless, in fact very good
+eating and not too plentiful. Mojaves, Shoshones, Paiutes, Pimas, all
+the tribes of the sage-brush country, have this in common, that they
+live very close to the earth; roots, seeds, reptiles, thick pads of
+the cholla cactus, even the grass of the field, serve them. They look,
+indeed, as though they had been made of the earth on the very spot that
+produced them, of the black rock, the brown sand, and the dark water
+that collects in polished basins of the wind-denuded ranges.
+
+Very little rain gets past the heaven-raking crest of the Sierra Nevada
+into the sage-brush country; the most that falls is blown up from the
+Gulf of California along the draw created by the close, parallel desert
+ranges. It is precipitated usually under atmospheric conditions that
+produce violent drops and changes. All that the traveller is likely to
+find of it is in these rock reservoirs under the run-off of some bare
+granite cliff, or in the rare, persistent "water-holes" hollowed out by
+beasts or men, marked in the landscape by one lone tree perhaps, or a
+clump of shrubby willows. Often there will be no mark at all except the
+frequency along the trail of skeleton cattle or wild sheep, pointing
+all in one direction, as they died on their way to the far-between
+drinking-places. There are districts in this back-door country where
+evaporation from the body is so rapid that death overtakes the chance
+prospector even with water in sight or in his canteen across his back.
+For years a notorious outlaw protected himself in the Death Valley
+region, by filling in all the springs in a circle about the territory
+to which he had retreated. Beyond that waterless rim even the law could
+not penetrate.
+
+And yet how the land repays the slightest moisture! Years when the
+Kuro-Siwa swings closer to our coast and the winds are friendly,
+I have seen all that country, from Tehachapi, outside the wall, to
+San Gorgiono, one sheet of blue and gold. Seeds of a hundred tender
+annuals lie in the loose sands for years between the shrubby sage,
+their vitality unimpaired by the delayed resurrection of a chance wet
+spring. Often I have sifted the sand in my fingers looking for a sign
+of the life-giving principle which bursts so suddenly into beauty,
+without finding it. Yet after years in which there is no alteration
+in the aspect of the country, except the insensible change of the sage
+tints from grey to green and grey again, the miracle takes place, the
+blossomy wonder is upon the world.
+
+As a matter of fact, the sage-brush country is by no means the desert
+that it looks to the casual eye. Besides the social shrubs which have
+each their own blossom and seed time, even the driest years will
+afford a few blooms of crimson mallow, and in the shelter of every
+considerable shrub some dwarfed and delicate phacelia or nemophilia.
+Even out of dunes which bury its hundred old trunks to the new season's
+twigs, the mesquite will bear its sweet foodful pods. If you know at
+what hours to look for it, wild life is never absent, but it is not
+ordinarily to be found by white men blundering about in broad noon.
+
+It is only when you meet, in the midst of great open valleys wherein
+there is nothing growing higher than the knees of your horse, and
+nothing moving bigger than the little horned toad under the cactus
+bush, bands of Indians well fed, cushiony with fat of mesquite meal and
+chia, that you understand how little you know of the land in which you
+move.
+
+There is a Paiute proverb to the effect that no man should attempt the
+country east of the Sierras until he has learned to sleep in the shade
+of his arrows. This is a picturesque way of saying that he must be able
+to reduce his wants to the limit of necessity. Those who have been able
+to do so, and have trusted the land to repay them, have discovered that
+the measure is over-full.
+
+A man may not find wealth there, nor too much of food even, but he
+often finds himself, which is much more important.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+_The illustrations are indexed in italics._
+
+
+     Alcatraz, 112
+
+     Alviso, 112
+
+     Angels, 138
+
+     Antioch, 112, 119
+
+     Arbolado, 84
+
+     "Arroya," definition of, 30
+
+
+     Bakersfield, 129, 132, 133
+
+     Berkeley Hills, 108, 114
+
+     _Blue Lake, Lake County_, 155
+
+     Buena Vista, 122
+
+
+     Cabrillo, 49, 108
+
+     Cahuenga, 47, 48, 67
+
+     Calaveras, 139
+
+     Camulas, 41
+
+     _canyon in the Sierra Madres_, 49
+
+     Carmel, 74, 77, 80, 83
+
+     Carmel River, 76
+
+     Carmel Valley, 78
+
+     Carquinez, 112
+
+     Carquinez Strait, 107, 119
+
+     _Castle Crag, Rattlesnake canyon_, 136
+
+     Castro, 66
+
+     Catalina, 49
+
+     _Cemetery, The, Santa Barbara Mission_, 56
+
+     Cession of California from Mexico, 48
+
+     _Clear Lake, Lake County_, 134
+
+     "Coasts of Adventure, The," 47-60
+
+     Colorado River, 166
+
+     Contra Costa, 117
+
+     Coronado, 23
+
+     Coronel, Don Antonio, 48
+
+     Corta Madero, 116
+
+     Coso, 165
+
+     Coulterville, 139
+
+     _Cypress Point, near Carmel_, 75
+
+
+     Death Valley, 166, 172
+
+     _Donner Lake_, 142
+
+     Donner Lake, 140
+
+     Drake, Sir Francis, 9, 43, 108
+
+
+     Eagle Rock, 47
+
+     Emigrant Gap, 140
+
+     _Eucalyptus Grove, A_, 33
+
+     Exeter, 135
+
+
+     Faralones, The, 113
+
+     Farmington, 139
+
+     Fort Point, 67
+
+     Francis of Assisi, 10, 108
+
+     Franciscan "Frailes," 9, 12
+
+     Fremont, 66
+
+     Fresno, 135
+
+     Fuca, Juan de, 108
+
+
+     _Glendale, Valley of the San Gabriel_, 40
+
+     Golden Gate, 107
+
+     _Golden Gate and Black Point_, 107
+
+     Gulf of California, 161, 171
+
+
+     _Half Dome, The, Yosemite_, 166
+
+     Hamlin, Jack, 137
+
+     Harte, Bret, 137, 138
+
+     Hetch Hetchy Valley, 159
+
+     "High Sierras and the Sage-Brush Country, The" 149-174
+
+     Hotel Del Monte, 76
+
+     Humboldt Mountain, 170
+
+
+     Indian Wells, 166
+
+     Inyo Valley, 162
+
+
+     Jackass Hill, 139
+
+     Jimtown, 139
+
+     Jumping Frog, the, 139
+
+
+     Kaweah Mountain, 133
+
+     Kaweah River, 129
+
+     Kern River, 129, 132, 134, 155
+
+     King's Mountain, 159
+
+     King's River, 129
+
+     King's River canyon, 137
+
+     Klamath River, 143
+
+     Kuro-Siwa Current, 49, 172
+
+
+     Laboratory Point, 68
+
+     Lake Mono, 165
+
+     Lake Tahoe, 165
+
+     _Lake Tahoe_, 158
+
+     "Land of the Little Duck, The," 107-124
+
+     _Laurel Lake, Upper Sacramento_, 145
+
+     Lindsay, 135
+
+     _Looking down on Monterey and the Bay_, 65
+
+     Lopez, Francisco, 47
+
+     Los Angeles, 29, 35
+
+     Los Angeles River, 30
+
+
+     _McCloud River_, 139
+
+     Madera, 135
+
+     Maldonado, 108
+
+     Mare Island, 116
+
+     Mendocino Country, 141
+
+     Merced River, 129, 135
+
+     _Mill Valley_, 113
+
+     _Mirror Lake, Yosemite_, 129
+
+     Mission Dolores, 108
+
+     Mission Point, 69, 81
+
+     Mission River, 17
+
+     Mission of San Carlos Borromeo, 76, 78
+
+     Mission San Fernando, 47
+
+     Missions, ruins of, 19
+
+     Mokelumne River, 140
+
+     Monterey, 11, 18, 35, 55, 60
+
+     "Monterey, the Port of," 63-84
+
+     Monterey Cypress, 72
+
+     "Mothering Mountains," 27-24
+
+     Mount Oppapago, 160, 162
+
+     Mount Shasta, 5, 143, 150
+
+     _Mount Shasta_, 161
+
+     Mount Whitney, 6, 137, 150, 159, 162
+
+     Mount Williamson, 159
+
+
+     Napa, 118
+
+     Noriega's, 134
+
+
+     Olancha, 165
+
+     "Old Spanish Gardens," 87-103
+
+
+     Pacific Grove, 75
+
+     Padre Jayme Bravo, 7, 17, 18
+
+     Padre Lausan, 66
+
+     Padre Serra (Junipero Serra), 11, 76, 78
+
+     Paiute Indians, 96
+
+     Pajaro, 54, 93
+
+     Pajaro river, 64
+
+     Pala, 19
+
+     "Palatingwas," 20
+
+     Palo Corona, 80
+
+     Panamint, 165
+
+     Pasadena, 34
+
+     Paso Robles, 56
+
+     _Patio, The, Old Spanish Residence_, 88
+
+     _Pescadero, Monterey Bay_, 72
+
+     Pieoras Blancos, 83
+
+     Point Conception, 67
+
+     Point Lobos, 71, 81, 84
+
+     Point of Pines, 67
+
+     Point Pinos, 70, 81
+
+     Point Sur, 70
+
+     Portersville, 135
+
+     Portola, Don Gaspar de, 11, 55, 93, 108
+
+
+     _Redlands_, 16
+
+     _Redwoods_, 131
+
+     "Rio," A, 30
+
+     Riverside, 33, 39
+
+
+     Sacramento, 112, 123
+
+     Sacramento River, 107, 127, 135, 140
+
+     "Sage-Brush country," meaning of term, 163
+
+     Salinas, 83
+
+     Salinas River, 64
+
+     Salton Sea, 166
+
+     Sausalito, 116
+
+     San Antonio, 57
+
+     "San Antonio," the, 10
+
+     San Bernardino, 7, 33, 39, 149, 166
+
+     San Carlos, 79
+
+     San Clemente, 48
+
+     San Diego, 22, 78
+
+     San Diego, Bay of, 9
+
+     _San Diego, looking towards Point Loma_, 9
+
+     San Emigdio, 128
+
+     San Fernando, 41, 128
+
+     San Francisco, 67, 107, 108, 110
+
+     San Francisco, Bay of, 112
+
+     San Gabriel, 36
+
+     San Gabriel Valley, 27, 33, 40
+
+     San Gorgiono, 41, 172
+
+     San Gorgiono, Pass of, 6
+
+     San Jacinto, 5, 27, 149, 166, 170
+
+     San Joaquin, 128, 132, 139, 166
+
+     San Joaquin River, 107, 112, 123, 127, 129, 130, 140, 150
+
+     San Joaquin Valley, 162
+
+     San Jose, Senor, 10
+
+     San Juan, 83
+
+     San Juan Bautista, 65, 66
+
+     San Juan Capistrano, 18, 48, 50
+
+     San Luis Rey, 19
+
+     San Pablo, 112
+
+     San Pablo Bay, 116
+
+     San Quentin, 116
+
+     San Raphael, 116, 118
+
+     Santa Barbara, 58
+
+     Santa Catalina, 48
+
+     Santa Clara, 54
+
+     Santa Cruz Coast, 74
+
+     Santa Cruz Mountains, 55, 64
+
+     _Santa Cruz Mountains, the Coast Range_, 78
+
+     Santa Inez, 48, 58
+
+     Santa Margarita, 56
+
+     Santa Rosa, 48
+
+     Sequoia, origin of name, 155
+
+     _Shasta--Snow Clouds_, 168
+
+     Sierra Madre, 27, 28, 37, 40, 42, 44, 149
+
+     Sierra Nevada, 128, 163, 171
+
+     Sierra Nevada, origin of name, 149
+
+     Sierras, the, 4
+
+     Solano, 78
+
+     Sonoma, 107, 118, 144
+
+     Sonoma County, 92
+
+     Sonora, 138, 140
+
+     "Sparrow-Hawk's Own, The," 3-23
+
+     Squaw Creek, 139
+
+     Stanislaus River, 137
+
+     Stockton, 123
+
+     Suisun, 112, 119
+
+     Sur, 80, 83
+
+     _Sycamores, a Coast Range canyon_, 59
+
+
+     Table Mountain, 138
+
+     _Tall Chaparral, Santa Cruz_, 62
+
+     Tamalpias, Mount, 109
+
+     _Tamalpias_, 110
+
+     Tasajara, 83
+
+     Tehachapi, 128, 150, 172
+
+     Tehipite Valley, 159
+
+     Tejon, 129
+
+     Tejon Pass, 89, 128, 132
+
+     Temblors, The, 128, 133
+
+     _"Three Brothers, The," Yosemite_--_Frontispiece_
+
+     Tiburon, 112, 116
+
+     Trinity River, 143
+
+     Truthful James, 138
+
+     Tulare, the, 120
+
+     Tule River, 129
+
+     Tuolumne River, 129
+
+     Turlock, 139
+
+     Twain, Mark, 138, 139, 165
+
+     "Twin Valleys, The," 127-146
+
+
+     _Valley of the Yosemite_, 163
+
+     Visalia, 129
+
+     Viscaino, Sebastian, 9, 63, 76, 108
+
+
+     _Waiting for Duck--Los Banos_, 120
+
+     Walker's Pass, 150
+
+     Warner's Ranch, 20
+
+
+     Yerba Buena, 108
+
+     _Yosemite Falls_, 152
+
+     Yosemite Valley, 135, 137, 157, 159
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+_Printed by_ R. & R. Clark, Limited, _Edinburgh_.
+
+  [Illustration: SKETCH MAP ACCOMPANYING "CALIFORNIA" BY SUTTON PALMER
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of California, by Mary Austin
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CALIFORNIA ***
+
+***** This file should be named 44764.txt or 44764.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/4/4/7/6/44764/
+
+Produced by Melissa McDaniel and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive)
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
+  www.gutenberg.org/license.
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at 809
+North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887.  Email
+contact links and up to date contact information can be found at the
+Foundation's web site and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit:  www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For forty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
diff --git a/old/44764.zip b/old/44764.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2325027
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/44764.zip
author	Roger Frank <rfrank@pglaf.org>	2025-10-14 18:56:53 -0700
committer	Roger Frank <rfrank@pglaf.org>	2025-10-14 18:56:53 -0700
commit	b4fcae0391802e06892ab0d45249ce6ec61b74b9 (patch)
tree	aeca1a0d6ea8ee7a63ec41238a655d9f186399bf