With a true driver’s pride in reading men, he scanned me from boots to barometer, and at last, to my immense delight, said, with the air of throwing his hat into a ring, “What mountain was you going down to measure?” Had he inquired after my grandfather by his first name, I could not have been more surprised. At once I told him the plain truth, and waited for further developments; but, like an indifferent shot who drives centre on a first trial, he proposed not to endanger his reputation for infallibility by other ventures, and withdrew again to that conspicuous stupidity which coachmen and Buddhists alike delight in.
Left to myself, I spent hours in looking out over the desert and up along that bold front of Sierra which rose on our right from the sage plains of Carson Valley up through ramparts of pine land to summits of rock and ravines with sunken snow-banks.
So far as Aurora, I remember little worth describing. Sierras, or outlying volcanic foot-hills, bound the west. About our road are desert plains and rolling sage-clad hills, fresh, light olive at this June season, and softly sloping in long glacis down to wide, impressive levels.
Green valleys and cultivated farms margin the Carson and Walker rivers. Sierras are not lofty enough to be grand, desert too gentle and overspread with sage to be terrible; yet the pale, high key of all its colors, and singular aërial brilliancy lend an otherwise dreary enough picture the charm,—as I once before said,—of water-color drawings. There is no perspective under this fierce white light; in midday intensely sharp reflections glare from hill and valley, except where the shadow of passing cloud spreads cool and blue over olive slopes.
Alas for Aurora, once so active and bustling with silver mines and its almost daily murder! Twenty-six whiskey hells and two Vigilance Committees graced those days of prosperity and mirthful gallows, of stock-board and the gay delirium of speculation. Now her sad streets are lined with closed doors; a painful silence broods over quartz mills, and through the whole deserted town one perceives that melancholy security of human life which is hereabouts one of the pathetic symptoms of bankruptcy. The “boys” have gone off to merrily shoot one another somewhere else, leaving poor Aurora in the hands of a sort of coroner’s jury who gather nightly at the one saloon and hold dreary inquests over departed enterprise.
My landlord’s tread echoed through a large, empty hotel, and when I responded to his call for lunch the silentest of girls became medium between me and a Chinaman, who gazed sad-eyed through his kitchen door as in pity for one who must choose between starving and his own cookery. But I have always felt it unpardonable egotism for a traveller to force the reader into sharing with him the inevitable miseries of roadside food. Whatever merit there may be in locking this prandial grief fast from public view, I feel myself entitled to in a high degree, for I hold it in my power to describe the most revolting cuisine on the planet, yet refrain.
From Aurora my road, still parallel with the mountains, though now hidden from them by banks of volcanic hills, climbed a long, wearisome slope from whose summit a glorious panorama of snowy Sierras lay before us. From our feet, steep declivities fell two thousand feet to the level of a wide desert basin, bounded upon the west by long ranks of high, white peaks, and otherwise walled in by chains of volcanic hills, smooth with dull sage flanks, and yet varied here and there by outcropping formations of eruptive rocks and dusky cedar forests.
Just at the Sierra foot, surrounded by bare, gray volcanoes and reaches of ashen plain, lies Mono lake, a broad oval darkened along its farther shore by reflecting the shadowed mountains, and pale tranquil blue where among light desert levels it mirrors the silken softness of sky and cloud. Flocks of pelicans, high against the sky, floated in slow, wheeling flight, reflecting the sun from white wings, and, turning, were lost in the blue to gleam out again like flakes of snow.
The eye ranges over strange, forbidding hill-forms and leagues of desert, from which no familiarity can ever banish suggestions of death. Traced along boundary hills, straight terraces of an ancient beach indicate former water-levels, and afar in the Sierra, great, empty gorges, glacier-burnished and moraine-flanked, lead up to amphitheatres of rock once white with névé.
I recognized the old familiar summits: Mount Ritter, Lyell, Dana, and that firm peak with Titan strength and brow so square and solid it seems altogether natural we should have named it for California’s statesman, John Conness.