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]