We were sitting in the warm sun on the very tip-top of Bungalow Hill.
This is a gentle crest that rises three hundred and fifty feet above
the campus level, and gives one a wonderful view far up and down the
beautiful valley and across the blue bay to the lifting mountains of
the Coast Range. Square-shouldered old Mt. Diablo standing as giant
warder just inside the Golden Gate, the ocean entrance to California,
looms massive and threatening directly to our east, while to its south
stretches the long brown range with its series of peaks, Mission, Mt.
Hamilton, Isabella, and so on, way down to the twin Pachecos that
guard the pass over into the desert. In the north rises Mt. Tamalpais,
the wonderful fog mountain that looks down on the busy life at its
feet of San Francisco, and its clustering child cities growing up
rapidly these days, while the mother is lying ill of her wounds by
earthquake and conflagration. To the south stretch the long orchard
leagues of the Santa Clara Valley, with the little white spots of
towns peeping out from the massed trees so jealous of every foot of
fertile ground. And to the west--ah, that is the view that Mary and I
lie hours long to look at and drink in and feel,--"our view," we call
it.
We think we see things there that other people cannot. We see these
things especially well when we half-close our eyes, and describe what
we see in a sort of low, drowsy, monotone murmur. Then the fringe of
towering spiry redwoods along the crest of the mountain range that
lies between us and the great ocean and lifts its forested flanks full
two thousand feet above us, becomes a long row of giants' spears
sticking up above the battlements of a mighty castle. And the
shadow-filled somber slashes and tunnel-like holes of the dropping
cañons are the great entrances and doors to this castle. At our feet
the broad shallow cañada that stretches all along the foot of the
mountains and was made ages ago by some tremendous earthquake seems,
seen through our half-closed eyes, to be full of water and to be
really a broad moat shutting off all access to the castle.
The giants themselves we have never yet seen. But some day when the
light is just right, and they are stirring themselves to look out at
the world, we probably shall. Perhaps if we had been up here that day
not long ago when the last earthquake came, we should have seen the
giants looking out to see who was knocking at their gates. For it will
take an earthquake's knocking ever to be felt in the heart of that
mountain castle where the giants keep themselves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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