[A CLEVER LITTLE BROWN ANT]
We were sitting in the warm sun on the very tip-top of Bungalow Hill. This is a gentle crest that rises three hundred and fifty feet above the campus level, and gives one a wonderful view far up and down the beautiful valley and across the blue bay to the lifting mountains of the Coast Range. Square-shouldered old Mt. Diablo standing as giant warder just inside the Golden Gate, the ocean entrance to California, looms massive and threatening directly to our east, while to its south stretches the long brown range with its series of peaks, Mission, Mt. Hamilton, Isabella, and so on, way down to the twin Pachecos that guard the pass over into the desert. In the north rises Mt. Tamalpais, the wonderful fog mountain that looks down on the busy life at its feet of San Francisco, and its clustering child cities growing up rapidly these days, while the mother is lying ill of her wounds by earthquake and conflagration. To the south stretch the long orchard leagues of the Santa Clara Valley, with the little white spots of towns peeping out from the massed trees so jealous of every foot of fertile ground. And to the west—ah, that is the view that Mary and I lie hours long to look at and drink in and feel,—"our view," we call it.
We think we see things there that other people cannot. We see these things especially well when we half-close our eyes, and describe what we see in a sort of low, drowsy, monotone murmur. Then the fringe of towering spiry redwoods along the crest of the mountain range that lies between us and the great ocean and lifts its forested flanks full two thousand feet above us, becomes a long row of giants' spears sticking up above the battlements of a mighty castle. And the shadow-filled somber slashes and tunnel-like holes of the dropping cañons are the great entrances and doors to this castle. At our feet the broad shallow cañada that stretches all along the foot of the mountains and was made ages ago by some tremendous earthquake seems, seen through our half-closed eyes, to be full of water and to be really a broad moat shutting off all access to the castle.
The giants themselves we have never yet seen. But some day when the light is just right, and they are stirring themselves to look out at the world, we probably shall. Perhaps if we had been up here that day not long ago when the last earthquake came, we should have seen the giants looking out to see who was knocking at their gates. For it will take an earthquake's knocking ever to be felt in the heart of that mountain castle where the giants keep themselves.
The air was so clear this day that it seemed as if we could see each individual great redwood, each red-trunked, glossy-leaved madroño, each thicket of crooked manzanita and purpling Ceanothus, on the whole mountain side. Straight across through the clear blue-tinged atmosphere above the cañada to the shoulders and cañons, the forests and clear spaces and chaparral of the mountain flanks, we look. And it rests our eyes that are so tired of reading. It is good to be a-stretch on sunbathed Bungalow Hill this afternoon in October. The rains will be coming in a few weeks and then we can't be out so much. Or at any rate we can't lie close to the warm, brown, dry earth as we can now. But the rains will bring the fresh, green grasses and the flowers. If they come early enough the manzanitas will have on their little trembling pink-white lily-of-the-valley bells by Christmas-day, and the wild currants will be all green-and-rose color, with little leaves and a myriad fragrant blossoms.