V.
Hot and tired, I left the party, who wished to make the entire circuit, and took my way over the yielding pitch, over the sulphurous yellow puddles, until I finally came to the grateful shade of the power-house. A rickety old carryall looked very inviting, and in no time I had ensconced myself therein, and leaned back in full anticipatory enjoyment of a restful quarter of an hour.
As I sat there, looking out over the distant sea,—for I was on the brow of a hill,—gradually the unsightly power-house, the pitch cars, the little huts where bananas were sold, the native shanties, the long, narrow bridge, even the rim of the canopy above my head, seemed to fade away into nothing. The ships at anchor had slipped their cables and were gone; the iron pier, with its busy life, had disappeared; all had changed, vanished. It was silent, ghostly.
Then, out of nothing, out of dimness, there came a moving, a forming, a changing, and I became conscious that I was no longer alone, but that a company, great and illustrious, was assembling by ship-loads upon the beach of La Brea; and that, without word or confusion, five ancient, lofty-sterned, lumbering craft, and a quaint little caravel, lay bow-on to the strand, while one was already being careened on her side in the shoal water of the beach by cumbersome tackle fast to her thick mastheads. Their huge, clumsy hulks were gray with time; their gaping seams told of hot, blistering suns, and upon their decks there lay an array of guns and armament, crudely ancient and unwieldy. Silent men were noiselessly moving about at the command of one most beautiful to behold, in scarlet cloak, and silken hose and doublet of rare elegance, with hat beplumed, and glittering sword, who walked amongst the company as a king.
To and from the ship there moved a ghostly procession of grimy sailors, carrying pitch to the beach, where fires were burning, and the venerable three-deckers were being daubed with the smoking fluid, and made ready for the high seas.
It was a merry company, in truth, of lords and gentlemen, and scholars, too, who came upon my vision, and wonderingly my eyes followed the gallant leader. It seemed to me that I could all but catch his words. He spoke with a poet’s grace, so full of charm and so deliberate, so courtly was his address. His face once turned, I knew him to be English. His fair skin was burned by deep-sea voyaging; his pointed beard just touched the lace of a deep, white ruff, and over his shoulder hung a plume, white and curling. In all my life, I had never seen so gay a gentleman, and I could not get my fill of looking and of wondering.
Could it be that this great company were the revivified followers of the dauntless Sir Walter Raleigh, searching, centuries ago, for El Dorado? And it came to me, in that curious mixing of past and present, of which dreams are made, “Does Sir Walter, with all his wisdom, suspect that here, where he pitches his ships, is to be the great gold mine—some later man’s El Dorado—while he eagerly sails away in futile quest of golden sands that are always just beyond his reach?”
I lifted myself to strain my farthest sight, when lo! all was gone; galleons, gentlemen, scholars, sailors, even the little caravel—all! The sun was beating down upon the black road, the air was blistering; negroes were weighing the buckets of pitch, and the machinery clanked, with deafening indifference, through the quivering air; and up from behind a clump of bushes a red bow, atop of a well-known white hat, chased away the phantoms of long ago. I took off my dark glasses, rubbed my eyes, and, half-dazed, stepped from my enchanted carryall.