Down the perspective of years I could see before me spectacled wise men of some scientific society, and one who pronounced my obituary, ending thus: “In summing up the character and labors of this fallen follower of science, let it never be forgotten that he discovered the belemnites;” and perhaps, I mused, they will put over me a slab of fossil raindrops, those eternally embalmed tears of nature.
But all this came and went without the longed-for elation. There was no doubt I was not so happy as I thought I should be.
Once in after years I met an aged German paleontologist, fresh from his fatherland, where through threescore years and ten his soul had fattened on Solenhofen limestone and effete shells from many and wide-spread strata.
We were introduced.
“Ach!” he said, with a kindle of enthusiasm, “I have pleasure you to meet, when it is you which the cephalopoda discovered has.”
Then turning to one who enacted the part of Ganymede, he remarked, “Zwei lager.”
Now, with freed mind, I should say something of the foot-hills about our camp as they looked in June. Once before, the reader may remember, I pictured their autumn garb.
It has become a fixed habit with me to climb Mount Bullion whenever I get a chance. My winter Sundays were many times spent there in a peace and repose which Bear Valley village did not afford; for that hamlet gave itself up, after the Saturday night’s sleep, to a day of hellish jocularity. The town passed through a period of horse-racing, noisy, quarrelsome drinking, and disorderly service of Satan; then an hour in which the Spaniard loved and “treated” the “Americano.” Later the Americano kicked the “damned Greaser” out of town. Manly forms slept serenely under steps, and the few “gentlemen of the old school” steadied themselves against the bar-room door-posts, and in ingenious language told of the good old pandemonium of 1849.
Thus Mount Bullion came to mean for me a Sabbath retreat over which heaven arched pure and blue, silent hours (marked by the slow sun) passing sacredly by in presence of nature and of God.
So now in June I climbed on a Sunday morning to my old retreat, found the same stone seat, with leaning oak-tree back, and wide, low canopy of boughs. A little down to the left, welling among tufts of grass and waving tulips, is the spring which Mrs. Fremont found for her camp-ground. North and south for miles extends our ridge in gently rising or falling outline, its top broadly round, and for the most part an open oak-grove with grass carpet and mountain flowers in wayward loveliness of growth. West, you overlook a wide panorama. Oak and pine mottled foot-hills, with rusty groundwork and cloudings of green, wander down in rolling lines to the ripe plain; beyond are plains, then coast ranges, rising in peaks, or curved down in passes, through which gray banks of fog drift in and vanish before the hot air of the plains. East, the Sierra slope is rent and gashed in a wilderness of cañons, yawning deep and savage. Miles of chaparral tangle in dense growth over walls and spurs, covering with kindly olive-green the staring red of riven mountain-side and gashed earth. Beyond this swells up the more refined plateau and hill country made of granite and trimmed with pine, bold domes rising above the green cover; and there the sharp, terrible front of El Capitan, guarding Yosemite and looking down into its purple gulf. Beyond, again, are the peaks, and among them one looms sharpest. It is that Obelisk from which the great storm drove Cotter and me in 1864. We were now bound to push there as soon as grass should grow among the upper cañons.