On the morning of the twelfth day out Gardiner and I seated ourselves under the grateful shadow of palm-trees, a bewitching black-and-tan sister thrumming her guitar while the chocolate for our breakfast boiled. The slumberous haze of the tropics hung over Lake Nicaragua; but high above its indistinct, pearly vale rose the smooth cone of the volcano of Omatepec, robed in a cover of pale emerald green. Warmth, repose, the verdure of eternal spring, the poetical whisper of palms, the heavy odor of the tropical blooms, banished the grand, cold fury of the Sierra, which had left a permanent chill in our bones.
IX
MERCED RAMBLINGS
1866
Delightful oaks cast protecting shadows over our camp on the 1st of June, 1866. Just beyond a little cook-fire where Hoover was preparing his mind and pan for an omelet stood Mrs. Fremont’s Mariposa cottage, with doors and windows wide open, still keeping up its air of hospitable invitation, though now deserted and fallen into decay. A little farther on, through an opening, a few clustered roofs and chimneys of the Bear Valley village showed their distant red-brown tint among heavy masses of green. Eastward swelled up a great ridge, upon whose grassy slopes were rough, serpentine outcrops,—groups of pines, and oak-groves with pale green foliage and clean white bark. Under the roots of this famous Mount Bullion have been mined those gold veins whose treasure enriched so few, whose promise allured so many.
As I altogether distrust my ability to speak of this region without sooner or later alluding to a certain discovery of some scientific value which I once made here, I deem it wise frankly to tell the story and discharge my mind of it at once, and if possible forever.
In the winter of 1863 I came to Bear Valley as the sole occupant of a stage-coach. The Sierras were quite cloud-hidden, and desolation such as drought has never before or since been able to make reigned in dreary monotony over all the plains from Stockton to Hornitas.
Ordinarily solitude is with me only a happy synonym for content; but throughout that ride I was preyed upon by self-reproach, and in an aggravated manner. The paleontologist of our survey, my senior in rank and experience, had just said of me, rather in sorrow than in unkindness, yet with unwonted severity, “I believe that fellow had rather sit on a peak all day, and stare at those snow-mountains, than find a fossil in the metamorphic Sierra”; and, in spite of me, all that weary ride his judgment rang in my ear.
Can it be? I asked myself; has a student of geology so far forgotten his devotion to science? Am I really fallen to the level of a mere nature-lover? Later, when evening approached, and our wheels began to rumble over upturned edges of Sierra slate, every jolt seemed aimed at me, every thin, sharp outcrop appeared risen up to preach a sermon on my friend’s text.
I re-dedicated myself to geology, and was framing a resolution to delve for that greatly important but missing link of evidence, the fossil which should clear up an old unsolved riddle of upheaval age, when over to eastward a fervid, crimson light smote the vapor-bank and cleared a bright pathway through to the peaks, and on to a pale sea-green sky. Through this gateway of rolling gold and red cloud the summits seemed infinitely high and far, their stone and snow hung in the sky with lucent delicacy of hue, brilliant as gems yet soft as air,—a mosaic of amethyst and opal transfigured with passionate light, as gloriously above words as beyond art. Obsolete shell-fishes in the metamorphic were promptly forgotten, and during those lingering moments, while peak after peak flushed and faded back into recesses of the heavens, I forgot what paleontological unworthiness was loading me down, becoming finally quite jolly of heart. But for many days thereafter I did search and hope, leaving no stone unturned, and usually going so far as to break them open. Indeed, my third hammer and I were losing temper together, when one noon I was tired and sat down to rest and lunch in the bottom of Hell’s Hollow, a cañon whose profound uninterestingness is quite beyond portrayal. Shut in by great, monotonous slopes and innumerable spurs, each the exact fac-simile of the other; with no distance, no faintest suggestion of a snow-peak, only a lofty chaparral ridge sweeping around, cutting off all eastern lookout; with a few disordered bowlders tumbled pell-mell into the bed of a feeble brooklet of bitter water,—it seemed to me the place of places for a fossil. Here was nadir, the snow-capped zenith of my heart banished even from sight. A swallow of tepid alkaline water, with which I crowned the frugal and appropriate lunch, burned my throat, and completed the misery of the occasion.
Jagged outcrops of slate cut through vulgar gold-dirt at my feet. Picking up my hammer to turn homeward, I noticed in the rock an object about the size and shape of a small cigar. It was the fossil, the object for which science had searched and yearned and despaired! There he reclined comfortably upon his side, half-bedded in luxuriously fine-grained argillaceous material,—a plump, pampered belemnites (if it is belemnites), whom the terrible ordeal of metamorphism had spared. I knelt and observed the radiating structure as well as the characteristic central cavity, and assured myself it was beyond doubt he. The age of the gold-belt was discovered! I was at pains to chip my victim out whole, and when he chose to break in two was easily consoled, reflecting that he would do as well gummed together.
I knew this mollusk perfectly by sight, could remember how he looked on half a dozen plates of fossils, but I failed exactly to recollect his name. It troubled me that I could come so near uttering without ever precisely hitting upon it. In ten or fifteen minutes I judged it full time for my joy to begin.