The Silverado Squatters | Page 4

by fire, and has risen again from
its ashes. A lawn runs about the house, and the lawn is in its turn
surrounded by a system of little five-roomed cottages, each with a
verandah and a weedy palm before the door. Some of the cottages are
let to residents, and these are wreathed in flowers. The rest are
occupied by ordinary visitors to the Hotel; and a very pleasant way this
is, by which you have a little country cottage of your own, without
domestic burthens, and by the day or week.
The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena is full of sulphur and
of boiling springs. The Geysers are famous; they were the great health
resort of the Indians before the coming of the whites. Lake County is
dotted with spas; Hot Springs and White Sulphur Springs are the names
of two stations on the Napa Valley railroad; and Calistoga itself seems
to repose on a mere film above a boiling, subterranean lake. At one end
of the hotel enclosure are the springs from which it takes its name, hot
enough to scald a child seriously while I was there. At the other end,
the tenant of a cottage sank a well, and there also the water came up
boiling. It keeps this end of the valley as warm as a toast. I have gone
across to the hotel a little after five in the morning, when a sea fog from
the Pacific was hanging thick and gray, and dark and dirty overhead,
and found the thermometer had been up before me, and had already
climbed among the nineties; and in the stress of the day it was
sometimes too hot to move about.

But in spite of this heat from above and below, doing one on both sides,
Calistoga was a pleasant place to dwell in; beautifully green, for it was
then that favoured moment in the Californian year, when the rains are
over and the dusty summer has not yet set in; often visited by fresh airs,
now from the mountain, now across Sonoma from the sea; very quiet,
very idle, very silent but for the breezes and the cattle bells afield. And
there was something satisfactory in the sight of that great mountain that
enclosed us to the north: whether it stood, robed in sunshine, quaking to
its topmost pinnacle with the heat and brightness of the day; or whether
it set itself to weaving vapours, wisp after wisp growing, trembling,
fleeting, and fading in the blue.
The tangled, woody, and almost trackless foot-hills that enclose the
valley, shutting it off from Sonoma on the west, and from Yolo on the
east--rough as they were in outline, dug out by winter streams, crowned
by cliffy bluffs and nodding pine trees--wore dwarfed into satellites by
the bulk and bearing of Mount Saint Helena. She over-towered them by
two-thirds of her own stature. She excelled them by the boldness of her
profile. Her great bald summit, clear of trees and pasture, a cairn of
quartz and cinnabar, rejected kinship with the dark and shaggy
wilderness of lesser hill-tops.

CHAPTER II
--THE PETRIFIED FOREST

We drove off from the Springs Hotel about three in the afternoon. The
sun warmed me to the heart. A broad, cool wind streamed pauselessly
down the valley, laden with perfume. Up at the top stood Mount Saint
Helena, a bulk of mountain, bare atop, with tree- fringed spurs, and
radiating warmth. Once we saw it framed in a grove of tall and
exquisitely graceful white oaks, in line and colour a finished
composition. We passed a cow stretched by the roadside, her bell
slowly beating time to the movement of her ruminating jaws, her big
red face crawled over by half a dozen flies, a monument of content.
A little farther, and we struck to the left up a mountain road, and for
two hours threaded one valley after another, green, tangled, full of
noble timber, giving us every now and again a sight of Mount Saint

Helena and the blue hilly distance, and crossed by many streams,
through which we splashed to the carriage-step. To the right or the left,
there was scarce any trace of man but the road we followed; I think we
passed but one ranchero's house in the whole distance, and that was
closed and smokeless. But we had the society of these bright
streams--dazzlingly clear, as is their wont, splashing from the wheels in
diamonds, and striking a lively coolness through the sunshine. And
what with the innumerable variety of greens, the masses of foliage
tossing in the breeze, the glimpses of distance, the descents into
seemingly impenetrable thickets, the continual dodging of the road
which made haste to plunge again into the covert, we had a fine