was merely a broad sand and stone bed, although undoubtedly there was
water below the surface. California rivers are said to flow bottom up.
To the northward were mountains typical of the arid countries,--boldly
defined, clear in the edges of their folds, with sharp shadows and
hard, uncompromising surfaces. They looked brittle and hollow, as
though made of papier mache and set down in the landscape. A long four
hours' noon we spent beneath a live-oak near a tiny spring. I tried to
hunt, but had to give it up. After that I lay on my back and shot
doves as they came to drink at the spring. It was better than walking
about, and quite as effective as regards supper. A band of cattle
filed stolidly in, drank, and filed as stolidly away. Some half-wild
horses came to the edge of the hill, stamped, snorted, essayed a
tentative advance. Them we drove away, lest they decoy our own
animals. The flies would not let us sleep. Dozens of valley and
mountain quail called with maddening cheerfulness and energy. By a
mighty exercise of will we got under way again. In an hour we rode out
into what seemed to be a grassy foot-hill country, supplied with a most
refreshing breeze.
The little round hills of a few hundred feet rolled gently away to the
artificial horizon made by their closing in. The trail meandered white
and distinct through the clear fur-like brown of their grasses. Cattle
grazed. Here and there grew live-oaks, planted singly as in a park.
Beyond we could imagine the great plain, grading insensibly into these
little hills.
And then all at once we surmounted a slight elevation, and found that
we had been traveling on a plateau, and that these apparent little
hills were in reality the peaks of high mountains.
We stood on the brink of a wide smooth velvet-creased range that dipped
down and down to miniature cañons far below. Not a single little
boulder broke the rounded uniformity of the wild grasses. Out from
beneath us crept the plain, sluggish and inert with heat.
Threads of trails, dull white patches of alkali, vague brown areas of
brush, showed indeterminate for a little distance. But only for a
little distance. Almost at once they grew dim, faded in the thickness
of atmosphere, lost themselves in the mantle of heat that lay palpable
and brown like a shimmering changing veil, hiding the distance in
mystery and in dread. It was a land apart; a land to be looked on
curiously from the vantage-ground of safety,--as we were looking on it
from the shoulder of the mountain,--and then to be turned away from, to
be left waiting behind its brown veil for what might come. To abandon
the high country, deliberately to cut loose from the known,
deliberately to seek the presence that lay in wait,--all at once it
seemed the height of grotesque perversity. We wanted to turn on our
heels. We wanted to get back to our hills and fresh breezes and clear
water, to our beloved cheerful quail, to our trails and the sweet upper
air.
For perhaps a quarter of an hour we sat our horses, gazing down. Some
unknown disturbance lazily rifted the brown veil by ever so little. We
saw, lying inert and languid, obscured by its own rank steam, a great
round lake. We knew the water to be bitter, poisonous. The veil drew
together again. Wes shook himself and sighed, "There she is,--damn
her!" said he.
[1] In all Spanish names the final e should be pronounced.
VI
THE INFERNO
For eight days we did penance, checking off the hours, meeting doggedly
one after another the disagreeable things. We were bathed in heat; we
inhaled it; it soaked into us until we seemed to radiate it like so
many furnaces. A condition of thirst became the normal condition, to
be only slightly mitigated by a few mouthfuls from zinc canteens of
tepid water. Food had no attractions: even smoking did not taste good.
Always the flat country stretched out before us. We could see far
ahead a landmark which we would reach only by a morning's travel.
Nothing intervened between us and it. After we had looked at it a
while, we became possessed of an almost insane necessity to make a run
for it. The slow maddening three miles an hour of the pack-train drove
us frantic. There were times when it seemed that unless we shifted our
gait, unless we stepped outside the slow strain of patience to which
the Inferno held us relentlessly, we should lose our minds and run
round and round in circles--as people often do, in the desert.
And when the last and most formidable hundred yards had slunk sullenly
behind us to insignificance, and we had dared let our minds relax from
the insistent need of self-control--then, beyond the cotton-woods, or
creek-bed, or group of buildings, whichever it might be, we made out
another, remote as paradise, to which we must gain by sunset. So again
the wagon-trail, with its white choking dust, its staggering sun, its
miles made up of monotonous inches, each clutching for a man's sanity.
We sang everything we knew; we told stories; we rode cross-saddle,
sidewise, erect, slouching; we walked and led our horses; we shook the
powder of years from old worn jokes, conundrums, and puzzles,--and at
the end, in spite of our best efforts, we fell to morose silence and
the red-eyed vindictive contemplation of the objective point that would
not seem to come nearer.
For now we lost accurate sense of time. At first it had been merely a
question of going in at one side of eight days, pressing through them,
and coming out on the other side. Then the eight days would be behind
us. But once we had entered that enchanted period, we found ourselves
more deeply involved. The seemingly limited area spread with startling
swiftness to the very horizon. Abruptly it was borne in on us that
this was never going to end; just as now for the first time we realized
that it had begun infinite ages ago. We were caught in the
entanglement of days. The Coast Ranges were the experiences of a past
incarnation: the Mountains were a myth.
Nothing was real but this; and this would endure forever. We plodded
on because somehow it was part of the great plan that we should do so.
Not that it did any good:--we had long since given up such ideas. The
illusion was very real; perhaps it was the anodyne mercifully
administered to those who pass through the Inferno.
Most of the time we got on well enough. One day, only, the Desert
showed her power. That day, at five of the afternoon, it was one
hundred and twenty degrees in the shade. And we, through necessity of
reaching the next water, journeyed over the alkali at noon. Then the
Desert came close on us and looked us fair in the eyes, concealing
nothing. She killed poor Deuce, the beautiful setter who had traveled
the wild countries so long; she struck Wes and the Tenderfoot from
their horses when finally they had reached a long-legged water tank;
she even staggered the horses themselves. And I, lying under a bush
where I had stayed after the others in the hope of succoring Deuce,
began idly shooting at ghostly jack-rabbits that looked real, but
through which the revolver bullets passed without resistance.
After this day the Tenderfoot went water-crazy. Watering the horses
became almost a mania with him. He could not bear to pass even a
mud-hole without offering the astonished Tunemah a chance to fill up,
even though that animal had drunk freely not twenty rods back. As for
himself, he embraced every opportunity; and journeyed draped in many
canteens.
After that it was not so bad. The thermometer stood from a hundred to
a hundred and five or six, to be sure, but we were getting used to it.
Discomfort, ordinary physical discomfort, we came to accept as the
normal environment of man. It is astonishing how soon uniformly
uncomfortable conditions, by very lack of contrast, do lose their power
to color the habit of mind. I imagine merely physical unhappiness is a
matter more of contrasts than of actual circumstances. We swallowed
dust; we humped our shoulders philosophically under the beating of the
sun, we breathed the debris of high winds; we cooked anyhow, ate
anything, spent long idle fly-infested hours waiting for the noon to
pass; we slept in horse-corrals, in the trail, in the dust, behind
stables, in hay, anywhere. There was little water, less wood for the
cooking.
It is now all confused, an impression of events with out sequence, a
mass of little prominent purposeless things like rock conglomerate. I
remember leaning my elbows on a low window-ledge and watching a poker
game going on in the room of a dive. The light came from a sickly
suspended lamp. It fell on five players,--two miners in their
shirt-sleeves, a Mexican, a tough youth with side-tilted derby hat, and
a fat gorgeously dressed Chinaman. The men held their cards close to
their bodies, and wagered in silence. Slowly and regularly the great
drops of sweat gathered on their faces. As regularly they raised the
backs of their hands to wipe them away. Only the Chinaman,
broad-faced, calm, impassive as Buddha, save for a little crafty smile
in one corner of his eye, seemed utterly unaffected by the heat, cool
as autumn. His loose sleeve fell back from his forearm when he moved
his hand forward, laying his bets. A jade bracelet slipped back and
forth as smoothly as on yellow ivory.
Or again, one night when the plain was like a sea of liquid black, and
the sky blazed with stars, we rode by a sheep-herder's camp. The
flicker of a fire threw a glow out into the dark. A tall wagon, a
group of silhouetted men, three or four squatting dogs, were squarely
within the circle of illumination. And outside, in the penumbra of
shifting half light, now showing clearly, now fading into darkness,
were the sheep, indeterminate in bulk, melting away by mysterious
thousands into the mass of night. We passed them. They looked up,
squinting their eyes against the dazzle of their fire. The night
closed about us again.
Or still another: in the glare of broad noon, after a hot and trying
day, a little inn kept by a French couple. And there, in the very
middle of the Inferno, was served to us on clean scrubbed tables, a
meal such as one gets in rural France, all complete, with the potage,
the fish fried in oil, the wonderful ragout, the chicken and salad, the
cheese and the black coffee, even the vin ordinaire. I have forgotten
the name of the place, its location on the map, the name of its
people,--one has little to do with detail in the Inferno,--but that
dinner never will I forget, any more than the Tenderfoot will forget
his first sight of water the day when the Desert "held us up."
Once the brown veil lifted to the eastward. We, souls struggling, saw
great mountains and the whiteness of eternal snow. That noon we
crossed a river, hurrying down through the flat plain, and in its
current came the body of a drowned bear-cub, an alien from the high
country.
These things should have been as signs to our jaded spirits that we
were nearly at the end of our penance, but discipline had seared over
our souls, and we rode on unknowing.
Then we came on a real indication. It did not amount to much. Merely
a dry river-bed; but the farther bank, instead of being flat, cut into
a low swell of land. We skirted it. Another swell of land, like the
sullen after-heave of a storm, lay in our way. Then we crossed a
ravine. It was not much of a ravine; in fact it was more like a slight
gouge in the flatness of the country. After that we began to see
oak-trees, scattered at rare intervals. So interested were we in them
that we did not notice rocks beginning to outcrop through the soil
until they had become numerous enough to be a feature of the landscape.
The hills, gently, quietly, without abrupt transition, almost as though
they feared to awaken our alarm by too abrupt movement of growth,
glided from little swells to bigger swells. The oaks gathered closer
together. The ravine's brother could almost be called a cañon. The
character of the country had entirely changed.
And yet, so gradually had this change come about that we did not awaken
to a full realization of our escape. To us it was still the plain, a
trifle modified by local peculiarity, but presently to resume its
wonted aspect. We plodded on dully, anodyned with the desert patience.
But at a little before noon, as we rounded the cheek of a slope, we
encountered an errant current of air. It came up to us curiously,
touched us each in turn, and went on. The warm furnace heat drew in on
us again. But it had been a cool little current of air, with something
of the sweetness of pines and water and snow-banks in it. The
Tenderfoot suddenly reined in his horse and looked about him.
"Boys!" he cried, a new ring of joy in his voice, "we're in the
foot-hills!"
Wes calculated rapidly. "It's the eighth day to-day: I guessed right
on the time."
We stretched our arms and looked about us. They were dry brown hills
enough; but they were hills, and they had trees on them, and cañons in
them, so to our eyes, wearied with flatness, they seemed wonderful.
VII
THE FOOT-HILLS
At once our spirits rose. We straightened in our saddles, we breathed
deep, we joked. The country was scorched and sterile; the wagon-trail,
almost paralleling the mountains themselves on a long easy slant toward
the high country, was ankle-deep in dust; the ravines were still dry of
water. But it was not the Inferno, and that one fact sufficed. After
a while we crossed high above a river which dashed white water against
black rocks, and so were happy.
The country went on changing. The change was always imperceptible, as
is growth, or the stealthy advance of autumn through the woods. From
moment to moment one could detect no alteration. Something intangible
was taken away; something impalpable added. At the end of an hour we
were in the oaks and sycamores; at the end of two we were in the pines
and low mountains of Bret Harte's Forty-Nine.
The wagon-trail felt ever farther and farther into the hills. It had
not been used as a stage-route for years, but the freighting kept it
deep with dust, that writhed and twisted and crawled lazily knee-high
to our horses, like a living creature. We felt the swing and sweep of
the route. The boldness of its stretches, the freedom of its reaches
for the opposite slope, the wide curve of its horseshoes, all filled us
with the breath of an expansion which as yet the broad low country only
suggested.
Everything here was reminiscent of long ago. The very names hinted
stories of the Argonauts. Coarse Gold Gulch, Whiskey Creek, Grub
Gulch, Fine Gold Post-Office in turn we passed. Occasionally, with a
fine round dash into the open, the trail drew one side to a
stage-station. The huge stables, the wide corrals, the low
living-houses, each shut in its dooryard of blazing riotous flowers,
were all familiar. Only lacked the old-fashioned Concord coach, from
which to descend Jack Hamlin or Judge Starbottle. As for M'liss, she
was there, sunbonnet and all.
Down in the gulch bottoms were the old placer diggings. Elaborate
little ditches for the deflection of water, long cradles for the
separation of gold, decayed rockers, and shining in the sun the tons
and tons of pay dirt which had been turned over pound by pound in the
concentrating of its treasure. Some of the old cabins still stood. It
was all deserted now, save for the few who kept trail for the
freighters, or who tilled the restricted bottom-lands of the flats.
Road-runners racked away down the paths; squirrels scurried over
worn-out placers; jays screamed and chattered in and out of the
abandoned cabins. Strange and shy little creatures and birds,
reassured by the silence of many years, had ventured to take to
themselves the engines of man's industry. And the warm California sun
embalmed it all in a peaceful forgetfulness.
Now the trees grew bigger, and the hills more impressive. We should
call them mountains in the East. Pines covered them to the top,
straight slender pines with voices. The little flats were planted with
great oaks. When we rode through them, they shut out the hills, so
that we might have imagined ourselves in the level wooded country.
There insisted the effect of limitless tree-grown plains, which the
warm drowsy sun, the park-like landscape, corroborated. And yet the
contrast of the clear atmosphere and the sharp air equally insisted on
the mountains. It was a strange and delicious double effect, a
contradiction of natural impressions, a negation of our right to
generalize from previous experience.
Always the trail wound up and up. Never was it steep; never did it
command an outlook. Yet we felt that at last we were rising, were
leaving the level of the Inferno, were nearing the threshold of the
high country.
Mountain peoples came to the edges of their clearings and gazed at us,
responding solemnly to our salutations. They dwelt in cabins and held
to agriculture and the herding of the wild mountain cattle. From them
we heard of the high country to which we were bound. They spoke of it
as you or I would speak of interior Africa, as something inconceivably
remote, to be visited only by the adventurous, an uninhabited realm of
vast magnitude and unknown dangers. In the same way they spoke of the
plains. Only the narrow pine-clad strip between the two and six
thousand feet of elevation they felt to be their natural environment.
In it they found the proper conditions for their existence. Out of it
those conditions lacked. They were as much a localized product as are
certain plants which occur only at certain altitudes. Also were they
densely ignorant of trails and routes outside of their own little
districts.
All this, you will understand, was in what is known as the low country.
The landscape was still brown; the streams but trickles; sage-brush
clung to the ravines; the valley quail whistled on the side hills.
But one day we came suddenly into the big pines and rocks; and that
very night we made our first camp in a meadow typical of the mountains
we had dreamed about.
VIII
THE PINES
I do not know exactly how to make you feel the charm of that first camp
in the big country. Certainly I can never quite repeat it in my own
experience.
Remember that for two months we had grown accustomed to the brown of
the California landscape, and that for over a week we had traveled in
the Inferno. We had forgotten the look of green grass, of abundant
water; almost had we forgotten the taste of cool air. So invariably
had the trails been dusty, and the camping-places hard and exposed,
that we had come subconsciously to think of such as typical of the
country. Try to put yourself in the frame of mind those conditions
would make.
Then imagine yourself climbing in an hour or so up into a high ridge
country of broad cup-like sweeps and bold outcropping ledges. Imagine
a forest of pine-trees bigger than any pines you ever saw
before,--pines eight and ten feet through, so huge that you can hardly
look over one of their prostrate trunks even from the back of your
pony. Imagine, further, singing little streams of ice-cold water, deep
refreshing shadows, a soft carpet of pine-needles through which the
faint furrow of the trail runs as over velvet. And then, last of all,
in a wide opening, clear as though chopped and plowed by some
back-woodsman, a park of grass, fresh grass, green as a precious stone.
This was our first sight of the mountain meadows. From time to time we
found others, sometimes a half dozen in a day. The rough country came
down close about them, edging to the very hair-line of the magic
circle, which seemed to assure their placid sunny peace. An upheaval
of splintered granite often tossed and tumbled in the abandon of an
unrestrained passion that seemed irresistibly to overwhelm the sanities
of a whole region; but somewhere, in the very forefront of turmoil, was
like to slumber one of these little meadows, as unconscious of anything
but its own flawless green simplicity as a child asleep in mid-ocean.
Or, away up in the snows, warmed by the fortuity of reflected heat, its
emerald eye looked bravely out to the heavens. Or, as here, it rested
confidingly in the very heart of the austere forest.
Always these parks are green; always are they clear and open. Their
size varies widely. Some are as little as a city lawn; others, like
the great Monache,[1] are miles in extent. In them resides the
possibility of your traveling the high country; for they supply the
feed for your horses.
Being desert-weary, the Tenderfoot and I cried out with the joy of it,
and told in extravagant language how this was the best camp we had ever
made.
"It's a bum camp," growled Wes. "If we couldn't get better camps than
this, I'd quit the game."
He expatiated on the fact that this particular meadow was somewhat
boggy; that the feed was too watery; that there'd be a cold wind down
through the pines; and other small and minor details. But we, our
backs propped against appropriately slanted rocks, our pipes well
aglow, gazed down the twilight through the wonderful great columns of
the trees to where the white horses shone like snow against the
unaccustomed relief of green, and laughed him to scorn. What did
we--or the horses for that matter--care for trifling discomforts of the
body? In these intangible comforts of the eye was a great refreshment
of the spirit.
The following day we rode through the pine forests growing on the
ridges and hills and in the elevated bowl-like hollows. These were not
the so-called "big trees,"--with those we had to do later, as you shall
see. They were merely sugar and yellow pines, but never anywhere have
I seen finer specimens. They were planted with a grand sumptuousness of
space, and their trunks were from five to twelve feet in diameter and
upwards of two hundred feet high to the topmost spear. Underbrush,
ground growth, even saplings of the same species lacked entirely, so
that we proceeded in the clear open aisles of a tremendous and spacious
magnificence.
This very lack of the smaller and usual growths, the generous plan of
spacing, and the size of the trees themselves necessarily deprived us
of a standard of comparison. At first the forest seemed immense. But
after a little our eyes became accustomed to its proportions. We
referred it back to the measures of long experience. The trees, the
wood-aisles, the extent of vision shrunk to the normal proportions of
an Eastern pinery. And then we would lower our gaze. The pack-train
would come into view. It had become lilliputian, the horses small as
white mice, the men like tin soldiers, as though we had undergone an
enchantment. But in a moment, with the rush of a mighty
transformation, the great trees would tower huge again.
In the pine woods of the mountains grows also a certain close-clipped
parasitic moss. In color it is a brilliant yellow-green, more yellow
than green. In shape it is crinkly and curly and tangled up with
itself like very fine shavings. In consistency it is dry and brittle.
This moss girdles the trunks of trees with innumerable parallel
inch-wide bands a foot or so apart, in the manner of old-fashioned
striped stockings. It covers entirely sundry twigless branches. Always
in appearance is it fantastic, decorative, almost Japanese, as though
consciously laid in with its vivid yellow-green as an intentional note
of a tone scheme. The somberest shadows, the most neutral twilights,
the most austere recesses are lighted by it as though so many freakish
sunbeams had severed relations with the parent luminary to rest quietly
in the coolnesses of the ancient forest.