The bay lies squarely fronting the Pacific swell7, about a hundred miles south of the Golden Gate, between the horns of two of the little tumbled coast ranges, cutting back to receive the waters of the Pajaro and the Salinas. From the south the hill juts8 out sharply, taking the town and the harbour between its knees, but the north shore is blunted by the mountains of Santa Cruz. The beach is narrow, and all along its inner curve blown up into dunes9 contested every season by the wind and by the quick, bright growth of sand verbena, lupins, and mesembryanthemums. The waters of the rivers are set back by the tides, they are choked with bars and sluiced11 out by winter floods. For miles back into the valleys of Pajaro and Salinas, blue and yellow lupins continue the colour of the sand and the pools of tide water. They climb up the landward slope of the high dunes and set the shore a little seaward against the diminished surf. Then the equinoctial tide rises against the land that the lupins have taken [65] and smooths out their lovely gardens with a swift, white hand, to leave the beach smooth again for the building of pale, wind-pointed cones12.
The valley of the Salinas, which has its only natural outlet13 on the bay, is of the type of coast valleys, long, narrow and shallow, given over to farming and to memories of Our Lady of Solitude14 lying now as a heap of ruins in a barley15 field. It is a place set apart, where any morning you might wake to find the sea has entered between the little, brooding hills to rest.
Gulls16 follow the plough there, and pines avoid the river basin as though each of them knew very well their respective rights in it. One has, however, to make a point of such discoveries, for the entrance to the valley is obscured by its very candour, lying all open as it does to drifting dune10 and variable sea marshes17.
It is even more worth while to follow the flat-bordered Pajaro into the shut valley where dozes18 the little town of San Juan Bautista, taking on its well-sunned mesa, those placid19 lapses20 of self-forgetfulness which are to the aged21 as a foretaste of the long sleep. Here it was that the magic muse22 of Music came into the country. It came in a little tin-piped, wooden hand-organ, built by one [66] Benjamin Dobson of 22 Swan Street, London, in the year 1735, but of all its history until it was unpacked23 from mule-back by Padre Lausan in 1797, there is not a word current. Our acquaintance with it begins on the day that the Padre set it up in the hills and played, "The Siren's Waltz," "Lady Campbell's Reel," and all its repertoire24 of favourite London airs, of which the least appropriate to its present mission must have been the one called "Go to the Devil." Which only goes to prove that the spirit of the Franciscans was often superior to their means, for what the simple savages26 did do as soon as they had overcome their superstitious27 fear of the noise box, was to come to Mass to hear it as often as possible. There remain three old volumes of music written later for the Mission which came true to its founding and excelled in all sweet sounds, but none, it is said, pleased the Indians so much or so raised their spirits as "The Siren's Waltz." No doubt its inspiriting strains added something to the warlike spirit which led here to the only local resistance opposed to the American invasion, for it was on the Gavilan heights above the little town that Frémont, on the tallest tree that he could find, raised the Stars and Stripes, gallantly28 if somewhat prematurely29. It was from San Juan that Castro's [67] men marched to the final capitulation of Cahuenga, and finally from here the last remnant of the old life drains away. One hears the echo of it faint as the sea sounds that on rare days come trembling up the valley on the translucent30 air.
Returning to the bay, one finds all interest centering about the Point of Pines, a very ancient, rocky termination of the most westerly of the coast barriers. The Point, which is really a peninsula, is one of the most notable landmarks31 between Point Conception on the south and Fort Point at San Francisco. Its lighthouse stands well out on a rocky finger, ringed with incessant32, clanging buoys33; between it and Santa Cruz light is a roadstead for an empire. A windy bay at best, deep tides, and squally surfaces, the waters of Monterey have other values than the colourist finds in them. Sardines34, salmon35, cod36, tuna, yellow tail run with its tides. At most seasons of the year whales may be seen spouting37 there, or are cast upon its shoals. At one time the port enjoyed a certain prosperity as a whaling station, of which small trace remains38 beside the bleaching39 vertebræ that border certain of the old gardens and the persistent whalebone souvenirs of the curio dealer40. Lateen-rigged fisher fleets flock in and [68] out of the harbour, butterfly winged; and all about the rock beaches creep the square-toed boats of the Japanese and Chinese abalone gatherers. Thousands of purple sea-urchins, squid, hundred-fingered star-fish, and all manner of slimy sea delicacies42, these slant-eyed Orientals draw up out of the rainbow rock pools and the deeps below the receding43 surf. They go creeping and peering about the ebb44, their guttural hunting cries borne inshore on the quiet air, seeming as much a native sea speech as the gabble of the gulls. So in their skin canoes and balsas the Indians must have crept about the inlets for as long as it requires to lay a yard or two of mould over the ancient middens of the tribe, as long as it takes to build a barrier of silver dunes half a mile seaward. Even at that distance the plough turns up the soil evenly sprinkled with crumbling45 shell which holds to the last a shred46 of its old iridescence47. Far inland, past the Sierra Wall even to the country of Lost Borders, I have found amulets48 of this loveliest of the pearl shells, traded for and treasured by a people to whom the "Big Water" is a half-credited traveller's tale.
About five hundred yards outside the surf, from Laboratory Point, circling the peninsula to Mission [69] Point on the south, the submerged rocky ridge49 has grown a great, tawny50 mane of kelp. Every year it is combed and cut by the equinoctial tides, and cast ashore51 in brown, sea-smelling wind-rows, and every year it grows again to be the feeding-ground of a million water-haunting birds. Here the Ancient Murrelet fattens52 for the long flight to the Alaskan breeding-grounds, and in the wildest gales53 the little nocturnal auklets may be heard calling to one another above the warring thunder of the surf, or when the nights are clear and the mists all banded low beneath the moon, they startle the beach wanderer with their high keen notes and beetle54 whirring wings. Long triangular55 flights of curlew drop down these beaches against the westering sun, with wings extended straight above their heads, furling like the little lateen sails come home from fishing. Sandpipers, sanderlings, all the ripple56 runners, the skimmers of the receding foam57, all the scavengers of the tide, the gulls, glaucous-winged, ringbilled, and the species that take their name from the locality, may be found here following the plough as robins58 do in the spring. When the herring school in the bay nothing could exceed the multitude and clamour of the herring gulls. They stretch out in close [70] order, wing beating against wing, actually over square miles of the ruffling59 water between Point Pinos and the anchorage. But any attempt to render an account of the wild, winged life that flashes about the bays of Carmel and Monterey would read like an ornithologist's record.
After storms that divide the waters outside the bay into great toppling mountains, in the quiet strip between the kelp and the beaches, thousands of shearwaters may be seen sleeping in long, swaying, feathered pontoons, shoulder to shoulder. The island rocks standing60 within the surf, from the Point of Pines all down the coast to Point Sur, are famous rookeries of cormorant61. Watchful62 and black against the guano-whitened rocks, they guard their ancestral nests, redecorated each season with gay weed, pulled from the painted gardens of the deep; turning their long necks this way and that like revolving63 turret-tops, they beat off the gluttonous64 gulls with a devotion which would seem to demand some better excuse than the naked, greasy65, wide-mouthed young. Warm mornings these can be seen stretching black-stemmed, gaping66 bills from the nesting hollows, waving this way and that like the tips of voracious67 sea anemones68. Other rocks, white with salty [71] rime70, are given by mutual71 consent to rookeries of the yelping72 seals, the "sea lions" of this coast. Moonlight nights they can be seen playing there, with the weird73 half-human suggestion as of some mythical74 sea creatures.
Other and less fortunate adventurers on the waters of Monterey have left strange traces on that coast; one stumbles on a signboard set up among the rocks to mark where such and such a vessel75 went to pieces in a night of storm. Buried deep in the beach beyond the anchorage is the ancient teakwood hull76 of the Natala, the ship that carried Napoleon to Elba. It brought secularisation to the Missions also, after which unfriendly service the wind woke in the night and broke it against the shore. Just off Point Lobos, the Japanese divers77 after abalones report a strange, uncharted, sunken craft, a Chinese junk blown out of her course perhaps, or one of those unreported galleons78 that followed a phantom79 trail of gold all up the west coast of the New World. Strange mosses80 come ashore here, tide by tide, all lacy and scarf-coloured, and once we found on the tiny strand81 below Pescadero, a log of sandal-wood with faint waterworn traces of tool marks still upon it.
Most mysterious of all the hints held by the [72] farthest west—for behold82, when you have come to land again, sailing from this port, it is east!—of a time before our time, is the Monterey cypress83.
Across the neck of the peninsula, a matter of six or eight miles, cuts in the little bay of Carmel, a blue jewel set in silver sand. Two points divide it from the racing84 Pacific, the southern limb of Punta Pinos, and the deeply divided rocky ledge85 of Lobos—Lobos, the wolf, with thin, raking, granite86 jaws87. Now on these two points, and nowhere else in the world, are found natural plantations88 of the trees that might have grown in Dante's Purgatorio, or in the imagined forests where walked the rapt, tormented89 soul of Blake. Blake, indeed, might have had a hint of these from some transplanted seedling90 on an English terrace, for the Monterey cypress is quick-growing for the first century or so and one of the most widely diffused91 of trees; but only here on the Point and south to Pescadero ranch92 do they grow of God's planting. With writhen trunks and stiff contorted limbs they take the storm and flying scud93 as poppies take the sun. Incredibly old, even to the eye, they have no soil, nor seek none other than the thousand-year litter of their scaly94 needles, the husk of their nut-shaped, woody cones—the Spirit [73] of the Ancient Rocks come to life in a tree. Grown under friendly conditions the young trees spire95 as do other conifers, but here they take on strange enchanted96 shapes. Their flat, wind-depressed tops are resilient as springs; one may lie full length along them, scarcely sunk in the minutely-feathered twigs97, and watch the coasting steamers trail by on seas polished by the heat, or the winter surf bursting high in air. Or one could steal through their thick plantations unsuspected, from twisty trunk to trunk in the black shade, feeling the old earth-mood and man's primeval fear, the pricks98 and warnings of a world half made. The oldest of the cypresses99 are attacked by a red fungus100 rust101, the colour of corroding102 time. It creeps along the under side of boughs103 and eats away the green, but even then the twisted heart wood will outlast104 most human things.
The pines of Monterey, though characteristic enough of the locality to take on its identifying name, are thoroughly105 plebeian106:
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