The Carlyle of vegetables--The moral in blight--Bee-farms--The city
Of Angels--Of squashes--Curious Vegetation--The incompatibility of
camels and Americans--Are rabbits "seals"?--All wilderness and no
weather--An "infinite torment of flies."
THE cactus is the Carlyle of vegetation. Here, in Southern California,
it assumes many of its most uncouth and affected attitudes, puts on all
its prickles and its angles, and its blossoms of rare splendour. Those
who are better informed than myself assure me that the cactus is a
vegetable. I take their word for it. Indeed, the cactus itself may have
said so to them. There is nothing a cactus might not do. But it surely
stands among plants somewhere where bats do among animals, and the
apteryx among birds. Look for instance at this tract of cactus which
we cross before Caliente. There are chair-legs and footstools, pokers,
brooms, and telegraph-poles; but can you honestly call them plants?
But stay a moment. Can you not call them plants? Look! See those
superb blossoms of crimson upon that footstool of thorns, those golden
stars upon the telegraph-pole yonder, those beautiful flowers of rosy
pink upon that besom-head. Yes, they are plants, and worthy of all
admiration, for they have the genius of a true originality, and the
sudden splendour of the flowers they put forth are made all the more
admirable by the surprise of them and the eccentricity. And with them
grows the yucca, that wonderful plant that sends up from its rosette
of bayonets--they call it the "Spanish bayonet" in the West--a green
shaft, six feet high, and all hung with white waxen bells. I got out of
the train at one of its stoppages, and cut a couple of heads of this
wonderland plant, and found the blossoms on each numbered between 400
and 406. And there was a certain moral discipline in it too. For we
found these exquisite flower-hung shafts were smothered in "blight,"
those detestable, green, sticky aphides, that sometimes make rose-buds
so dreadful, and are the enemy of all hothouses. Looking out at the
yuccas as we passed, those splendid coronals of waxen blossoms--pure
enough for cathedral chancels--it seemed as if they were things of a
perfect and unsullied beauty. My arrival with them was hailed with
cries of admiration, and for the first moment enthusiasm was supreme.
But the next, alas for impure beauty! the swarms of clinging parasites
were detected. Hands that had been stretched out to hold such things
of grace, shrank from even touching them, known to be polluted, and
so, at last, with honours that were more than half condescension,
the yucca-spikes were put out on the platform, to be admired from
a distance. Passing through the cactus land we saw numbers of tiny
rabbits--the "cotton tails," as distinguished from the "mule-ears"
or jack-rabbits--dodging about the stems and grass; but in about an
hour the grotesque vegetable began to sober down into a botanical
conglomerate that defies analysis, and gives the little rabbits a
denser covert. The general result of this change in the botany was as
Asiatic, as Indian as it could be, but why, it were difficult to say,
unless it was the prevalence of the baboon-like "muskeet," and the
beautiful but murderous dhatura--the "thorn-apple" of Europe. Yet there
was sage-brush enough to make Asia impossible, while the variations
of the botany were too sudden for any generalizations of character.
And so on, past an oil-mill on the left--petroleum bubbling out of the
hillock--and a great farm "Newhall's," on the right; past Andrews and
up the hill to the San Fernando tunnel, 7000 feet in length, and then
down the hill again into San Fernando. Has any one ever "stopped off"
at San Fernando and spent any time with the monks at their picturesque
old mission, smothered in orangeries, and dozed away the summer hours
amongst them, watching the peaches ripen and the bees gathering honey,
and opening bottles of mellow California wine to help along the
intervals between drowsy mass and merry meal-times? I think when my
sins weigh too heavily on me to let me live among men, I will retire to
San Fernando, to the bee-keeping, orange-growing fathers, ask them to
receive my bones, and start a beehive and an orange-tree of my own. It
does not seem to me, looking forward to it, a very arduous life, and I
might then, at last, overtake that seldom-captured will-o'-the-wisp,
fleet-footed Leisure.
The bees, by the way, are kept on a "ranch," whole herds and herds of
bees, all hived together in long rows of hives, hundreds to the acre.
They fly afield to feed themselves, and come home with their honey to
make the monks rich. I am not sure that these fathers have done all
they might for the country they settled in, and yet who is not grateful
to the brethren for the picturesqueness of comparative antiquity? Their
very idleness is a charm, and their quiet, comfortable life, half in
cloisters, half in orange groves, is a delight and a refreshment in
modern America.
But the loveliness of their country, and the wonder of its
possibilities! Can any one be surprised that we are approaching the
city of Los Angeles? A bright river comes tumbling along under cliffs
all hung with flowering creepers, and between banks that are beautiful
with ferns and flowers, and the land widens out into cornfield
and meadow; and away to right and left, lying under the hills and
overflowing into all the valleys, are the vineyards, and orchards, and
orangeries that make the City of Angels worthy of a king's envy and a
people's pride. As yet, of course, it is the day of small things, as
compared with what will be when water is everywhere; but even now Los
Angeles is a place for the artist to stay in and the tourist to visit.
There is a great deal to remind you of the East, in this valley of
dark-skinned men, and in the "bazaars," with their long ropes of chilis
dangling on the door-posts, the fruit piled up in baskets on the mules,
the brown bare-legged children under hats with wide ragged brims, there
are all the familiar features of Southern Europe, hot, strong-smelling,
and picturesque. But Los Angeles shares with the rest of California
the disadvantage under which all climates of great forcing power and
rudimentary science must lie, for its fruits, though exquisite to look
upon, often prodigious in size, and always incredible in quantity,
fail, as a rule, dismally in flavour. The figs are very large,
both green and black, but they seem to have ripened in a perpetual
rainstorm; the oranges look perfection, and are as bad as any I have
had in America; the peaches are splendid in their appearance, for their
coarse barbaric skins are painted with deep yellow and red, but they
ought not to be called "peaches" at all. They would taste just as well
by any other name, and the traveller who knows the peaches of Europe,
or the peaches of Persia, would not then be disappointed.
So away from Los Angeles, with its groups of idle, brown-faced men,
in their flap brimmed Mexican hats, leaning against the posts smoking
thin cigars, and its groups of listless, dark-eyed women, with bright
kerchiefs round their heads or necks, sitting on the doorsteps; away
through valleys of corn, broken up by orangeries and vineyards, where
the river flows through a tangle of willow and elder and muskeet; past
the San Gabriel Mission, overtaken, poor idle old fragment of the past,
by the railroad civilization of the present, and already isolated in
its sleepiness and antiquity from the busier, younger world about it;
on through a scene of perpetual fertility, orange groves and lemon,
fields of vegetables and corn, with pomegranates all aglow with scarlet
flowers, and eucalyptus-trees in their ragged foliage of blue and brown.
The squash grows here to a monstrous size. "I have seen them, sir,"
said a passenger, "weighing as much as yourself." The impertinence of
it! Think of a squash venturing to turn the scale against me. Perhaps
it will pretend that it has as good a seat on a horse? Or will it play
me a single-wicket match at cricket? I should not have minded so much
if it had been a water-melon, "simlin," or some other refined variety
of or even a the family. But that a squash, the 'poor relation' of the
pumpkin, should--. But enough. Let us be generous, even to squashes.
Some one ought to write the psychology of the squash. There is a very
large human family of the same name and character. If you ask what
the bulky, tasteless thing is good for, people always say, "Oh, for
a pie!" Now that is the only form in which I have tasted it. And I
can say, from personal experience, therefore, that it is not good for
that. It never hurts anybody, or speaks ill of any one--an inoffensive,
tedious, stupid person, too commonplace to be either liked or disliked.
Economical parents say squashes are "very good for children,"
especially in pies. They may be. But they are not conducive to the
formation of character.
Some one, too, ought to visit these old Franciscan missions in Southern
California--some one who could write about them, and sketch them.
They are very delightful; the more delightful, perhaps, because they
are in the United States, in the same continent as "live" towns, as
Chicago, and Omaha, and Leadville, and Tombstone. Scattered about among
the rolling grassland are hollows filled with orchards, in which old
settlements and new are fairly embowered, while the missions themselves
are singularly picturesque; and San Gabriel's Church, they say, has a
pretty peal of bells, which the monks carried overland from Mexico in
the old Spaniard days, and which still chime for vespers as sweetly as
ever. What a wonder it must have been to the wandering Indians to hear
that most beautiful of all melodies, the chime of bells, ascending with
the evening mists from under the feet of the hills! No wonder they had
campanile legends, these poor poets of the river and prairie, and still
speak of Valleys of Enchantment whence music may be heard at nightfall!
Past Savanna and Monte, with its swine droves, and its settlement
of men who live on "hog and hominy," past Puente, and Spadra, and
Pomona, into Colton, where we dine, and well, for half a dollar,
enjoying for dessert a chat with a very pretty girl. She tells us of
the beauties of San Bernardino, and I could easily credit even more
than she says. For San Bernardino was settled by Mormons some fifty
years ago, and has all the charms of Salt Lake City, with those of
natural fertility and a profusion of natural vegetation added. But I
can say nothing of San Bernardino, for the train does not enter it.
And then, reinforced by another engine--a dumpy engine-of-all-work
sort of "help"--clambers up the San Gorgonio pass. All along the road
I notice a yellow thread-like epiphyte, or air-plant, tangling itself
round the muskeet-trees, and killing them. They call it the "mistletoe"
here but it is the same curious plant that strangles the orange trees
in Indian gardens, and the jujubes in the jungles, that cobwebs the
aloe hedges, and hangs its pretty little white bells of flower all
over the undergrowth. On the bare, sandy ground a wild gourd, with
yellow flowers and sharp-pointed spear-head leaves, throws out long
strands, that creep flat upon the ground with a curious snake-like
appearance. Clumps of wild oleander find a frugal subsistence, and
here and there an elder or a walnut manages to thrive. But the profuse
fertility of California is fast disappearing. And so to Gorgonio, at
the top of the pass; and then we begin to go down, down, down, till we
are not surprised to hear that we are far below the level of the sea.
The cactus has once more reasserted itself, and to right and left are
"forests" of this grotesque candelabra-like vegetable, with stiff arms,
covered apparently with some woolly sort of fluff. The soil beneath
them is a desperate-looking desert-sand, and here and there are bare
levels of white glistening sterility. But water works such wonders that
there is no saying what may happen. At present, however, it is pure,
unadulterated desert--wilderness enough to delight a camel, were it not
for the quantity of stones which strew the waste, and which would make
it an abomination to that fastidious beast. Camels were once imported
into the country, but the experiment failed--and no wonder. Imagine the
modern American trying to drive a camel! The Mexican might do it, but I
doubt if any other race in all America could be found with sufficient
contempt for time, sufficient patience in idleness, sufficient
camelishness in fact, to "personally conduct" a camel train. There is
a tradition, by the way, that somewhere in Arizona, wild camels, the
descendants of the discarded brutes, are to be met with to this day,
enjoying a life without occupations.
At present the most formidable animal in possession of these cactus
plains is the rabbit. But such a licence of ears as the creature has
taken! It must be developing them as weapons of offence: the future
"horned rabbit." They call these long-eared animals "mules," and deny
that you can make a rabbit-pie of them. This seems to me hardly fair
on the rabbit. But in England the small rodent suffers under even more
pointed injustice.
A certain railway porter, it is said, was once sorely puzzled by a
tortoise which the owner wished to send by train. The official was
nonplussed by the inquiry as to which head of the tariff the creature
should be considered to fall under; but, at last, deciding that it was
neither "a dog" nor "a parrot" (the broad zoological classification in
use on British railways) pronounced the tortoise to be "an insect," and
therefore not liable to charge. This profound decision was prefaced
by a brief enumeration of the animals which the railway company call
"dogs." "Cats is dogs, and rabbits is dogs, and so is guinea-pigs,"
said the porter, "but squirrels in cages is parrots!"
But please note particularly the porter's confusion of identity with
regard to the rabbit. This excellent rodent is emphatically called "a
dog." But the rabbit knows much better than to mistake itself for a
dog. It might as well think itself a poacher.
Meanwhile, other attempts have been made to confuse it as to its own
individuality; and if the rabbit eventually gives itself up as a
hopeless conundrum, it is not more than might be expected. Its fur
is now called "seal-skin" in the cheap goods market; the fluke has
attacked it as if it were a sheep; while in recent English elections,
when the Ground Game Bill was to the front, it was a very important
factor. All the same, everybody goes on shooting it just as if it
were a mere rabbit. This, I would contend, is hardly fair; for if its
skin is really sealskin, the rabbit must, of necessity, be a seal,
and, as such, ought to be harpooned from a boat, and not shot at with
double-barrelled guns. It is absurd to talk of going out "sealing"
in gaiters, with a terrier, for the pursuit of the seal is a marine
operation, and concerned with ships and icebergs and whaling line. A
sportsman, therefore, who goes out in quest of this valuable pelt
should, in common regard for the proprieties, affect Arctic apparel;
and, instead of ranging with his gun, should station himself with a
harpoon over the "seal's" blow-hole, and, when it comes up to breathe,
take his chance of striking it, not forgetting to have some water handy
to pour over the line while it is being rapidly paid out, as otherwise
it is very liable to catch fire from friction. By this means the rabbit
would arrive at some intelligible conception of itself, and be spared
much of the discomfort which must now arise from doubts as to its
personality. Nothing, indeed, is so precious to sentient things as a
conviction of their own "identity" and their "individuality," and I
need only refer those who have any doubt about it to the whole range
of moral philosophy to assure themselves of this fact. If we were not
certain who we were two days running, much of the pleasure of life
would be lost to us.
We entered the arid tract somewhere near the station of the Seven
Palms. They can be seen growing far away on the left under the
"foot-hills." About half way through we find ourselves at the station
of Two Palms, but they are in tubs. Of course there may be others,
and no doubt are. But all you can see from the cars is a limited
wilderness. Yet on those mountains there, on the right--one is 12,000
feet--there is splendid pine timber; and on the other side of them,
incredible as it seems, are glorious pastures, where the cattle are
wading knee-deep in grass! For us, however, the hideous wilderness
continues. The hours pass in a monotony of glaring sand, ugly rock
fragments, and occasional bristly cactus. And then begins a low
chapparal of "camel-thorn" or "muskeet," and as evening closes in we
find ourselves at the Colorado River and at Yuma, where the sun shines
from a cloudless sky three hundred and ten days in the year.
And the weather? I have not mentioned it as we travelled along, for I
wished to emphasize it by bringing it in at the end of the chapter.
Well, the weather. There was none to speak of, unless you can call a
fierce dry over-heat, averaging 96 in the shade, weather. And this is
all that we have had for the last twelve hours or so; heat enough to
blister even a lizard, or frizzle a salamander. A hot wind, like the
"100" of the Indian plains, blew across the desperate sands, getting
scorched itself as it went, and spitefully passing on its heat to
us. It was as hot as Cawnpore in June; nearly as hot as Aden. And
then the change at Yuma! We had suddenly stepped from Egypt in August
into Lower Bengal in September--from a villainous dry heat into afar
more villainous damp one. The thermometer, though the sun had set,
was at and, added to all, was such a plague of mosquitoes as would
have subdued even Pharaoh into docility. The instant--literally, the
instant--that we stepped from our cars our necks, hands, and faces were
attacked, and on the platform everybody, even the half-breed Indians
loafing outside the dining-room, were hard at work with both hands
defending themselves from the small miscreants. The effect would have
been ludicrous enough to any armour-plated onlooker, but it was no
laughing matter. We were too busy slapping ourselves in two places at
once to think of even smiling at others similarly engaged; and the last
I remember of detestable Yuma was the man who sells photographs on the
platform, whirling his hands with experienced skill round his head and
packing up his wares by snatches in between his whirls.