“‘I suppose so,’ she said,’but like all the rest, it is just stone and mortar stuck up in a crowded, noisy street, and the newspapers blow up around the door.’
“Then she stopped, and seeing how disappointed I was, patted me on the arm: ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I was born and grew up in an orange grove, and you people stifle me. I want to go home.’”
CHAPTER XXIX
THE FAIR
The Fair will be over when this account is published, but it was so dominant a part of San Francisco at the time we—and all the thousands of others—were there I haven’t the heart to cut the pages out.
With merely a phrase, you can make a picture of the little fair at San Diego; cloister-like gray buildings with clumps of dense green, and a vivid stroke of blue and orange. But to visualize the Pan-American Exposition in a few sentences is impossible. You could begin its description from a hundred different points and miss the best one, you can say one thing about it and the next moment find you were quite wrong. In the shade or fog, it was a city of baked earth color, oxydized with any quantity of terra cotta; in the sun it was deep cream glowing with light. If you thought of half the domes as brown, and others as faded green, you found, the next time you saw them, that they looked like a bit of the sky itself, and the brown ones glimmered a dull, yet living, rose.
Seeing it first from a distance, coming down upon it from the hill streets of San Francisco, you saw a biscuit-colored city with terra-cotta roofs, green domes and blue. Beyond it the wide waters of a glorious bay, rimmed with far gray-green mountains. But you were luckiest if you saw it first when the sun was painting it for you, which was invariably unless there was a fog, or perhaps you looked down upon it at night when the scintillating central point, the Tower of Jewels, looked like a diamond and turquoise wedding-cake and behind it an aurora of prismatic-colored search-lights—the most thrilling illumination possible to imagine.
Or entering one of its many gates you wandered like an ant through bewildering chaos. Not that it lacked plan; its architectural balance was one of the most noteworthy things about it. But there were so many courts, so much detail. Gradually, you noticed that there were eight great exhibition palaces, and a ninth, the Palace of the Fine Arts, like a half-circle at the end. You perceived that the buildings of the separate States and foreign nations trailed off like a suburb at one end, and that the Zone was a straight street also by itself. Among the thousands of embellishments, you noticed perhaps the lovely statues of Borglum’s “Pioneer,” Fraser’s “End of the Trail,” Daniel Chester French’s “Genius of Creation,” the adventurous bowman on the top of the Column of Progress, nor could you miss the nations of the West and East, and the figures of the rising and the setting sun.
The murals of Brangwyn no chair boy would let you pass. Each one pushed you in front, and backing off to give you the proper distance, declared that they cost five thousand dollars “each one.”