The Vision of Elijah Berl

Eight hundred and fifty miles of winding coast line bend in and out. So far as the eye can reach over the wrinkling sheet of the Pacific, to where its giant swells beat against bare, brown cliffs and break in smothers of hissing foam, not a sail is seen, not a sign of life, save flocks of white-winged gulls and sea-mews, or herds of barking seals that swarm on rocky islets. Mountains spring from the sea and climb, mount on mount, three miles into the air, or sloping sea-washed sands stretch dry and barren and forbidding, to rise at length in verdure-clad hills and snow-capped mountains. In the mountains are savage beasts and more savage men. On the plains a few straggling herds of cattle, with uncouth vaqueros, cluster around a seeping spring of bitter water. Here and there white-washed adobe mission houses, all but hidden in a clamber of vines and trees, mark a feeble stream that trickles from the distant mountains. Olive-skinned sigñors and olive-skinned sigñoritas round out the circle of their lives and there lie down and die, unknowing and unknown; they and their fellows, undreamed of, the land of their abode a hazy myth.
As by the wave of a magic wand, all is changed. The ocean now is dotted with sails from the uttermost parts of the earth. They choke the Golden Gate with their numbers. From their crowded decks, swarms of men, ministers of God and ministers of the devil—learned, ignorant, murderers, thieves—women, traitors to their kind, pour forth and swarm over the land. Mad with the lust of Gold, they burrow in the beds of streams, tear and claw at mountain-gulch and slope. Tented towns rise like night-grown fungi, and wither away, to spring again into existence, lawless, in a land where law is not, in a land that no man owns. Through days that are full of sweating toil and nights that cover vigils of lust and death, the ferment of hell grows in the blood of human beings who have left their God with their country.
Another wave of the wand and God reclaims his own. The courthouse and the gibbet, without mercy but full of stern justice, have taken the place of the murderer's greed that sharpened the murderer's knife.