At last you are on the peak and your first impulse is to look down. But no. Look up! You have read and heard many times of the “deep blue sky.” It is a stock phrase in narrative and romance; but I venture to doubt if you have ever seen one. It is seen only from high points—from just such a place as you are now standing upon. Therefore look up first of all and see a blue sky that is turning into violet. Were you ten thousand feet higher in the air you would see it darkened to a purple-violet with the stars even at midday shining through it. How beautiful it is in color and how wonderful it is in its vast reach! The dome instead of contracting as you rise into it, seems to expand. There are no limits to its uttermost edge, no horizon lines to say where it begins. It is not now a cup or cover for the world, but something that reaches to infinity—something in which the world floats.
White light.
Distant views.
The Pacific.
And do you notice that the sun is no longer yellow but white, and that the light that comes from it is cold with just the faintest shade of violet about it? The air, too, is changed. Look at the far-away ridges and peaks, some of them snow-capped, but the majority of them bare; and see the air how blue and purple it looks along the tops and about the slopes. Peak upon peak and chain upon chain disappear to the north and south in a mysterious veil of gray, blue, and purple. Green pine-clad spurs of the peaks, green slopes of the peaks themselves, keep fading away in blue-green mazes and hazes. Look down into the canyons, into the shadowed depths where the air lies packed in a mass, and the top of the mass seems to reflect purple again. This is a very different air from the glowing mockery that dances in the basin of Death Valley. It is mountain-air and yet has something of the sea in it. Even at this height you can feel the sea-breezes moving along the western slopes. For the ocean is near at hand—not a hundred miles away as the crow flies. From the mountain-top it looks like a flat blue band appended to the lower edge of the sky, and it counts in the landscape only as a strip of color or light.
Southern California.
Between the ocean and the mountain you are standing upon lies the habitable portion of Southern California, spread out like a relief map with its broken ranges, its chaparral-covered foot-hills, and its wide valleys. How fair it looks lying under the westering sun with the shadows drawing in the canyons, and the valleys glowing with the yellow light from fields of ripened barley! And what a contrast to the yellow of the grain are the dark green orchards of oranges and lemons scattered at regular intervals like the squares of a checker-board! And what pretty spots of light and color on the map are the orchards of prunes, apricots, peaches, pears, the patches of velvety alfalfa, the groves of eucalyptus and Monterey cypress, the long waving green lines of cottonwoods and willows that show where run the mountain-streams to the sea!
The garden in the desert.
Yet large as they are, these are only spots. The cultivated portion of the land is but a flower-garden beside the unbroken foot-hills and the untenanted valleys. As you look down upon them the terra-cotta of the granite shows through the chaparral of the hills; and the sands of the valleys have the glitter of the desert. You know intuitively that all this country was planned by Nature to be desert. Down to the water-edge of the Pacific she once carried the light, air, and life of the Mojave and the Colorado.
Reclaiming the valleys.