California

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.