A change in the
colour of the light usually called me in the morning. By
a certain hour, the long, vertical chinks in our western
gable, where the boards had shrunk and separated, flashed
suddenly into my eyes as stripes of dazzling blue, at
once so dark and splendid that I used to marvel how the
qualities could be combined. At an earlier hour, the
heavens in that quarter were still quietly coloured, but
the shoulder of the mountain which shuts in the canyon
already glowed with sunlight in a wonderful compound of
gold and rose and green; and this too would kindle,
although more mildly and with rainbow tints, the fissures
of our crazy gable. If I were sleeping heavily, it was
the bold blue that struck me awake; if more lightly, then
I would come to myself in that earlier and fairier light.
One Sunday morning,
about five, the first brightness called me. I rose and
turned to the east, not for my devotions, but for air.
The night had been very still. The little private gale
that blew every evening in our canyon, for ten minutes or
perhaps a quarter of an hour, had swiftly blown itself
out; in the hours that followed, not a sigh of wind had
shaken the treetops; and our barrack, for all its
breaches, was less fresh that morning than of wont. But I
had no sooner reached the window than I forgot all else
in the sight that met my eyes, and I made but two bounds
into my clothes, and down the crazy plank to the platform.
The sun was still concealed below the opposite hilltops,
though it was shining already, not twenty feet above my
head, on our own mountain slope. But the scene, beyond a
few near features, was entirely changed. Napa Valley was
gone; gone were all the lower slopes and woody foothills
of the range; and in their place, not a thousand feet
below me, rolled a great level ocean. It was as though I
had gone to bed the night before, safe in a nook of
inland mountains and had awakened in a bay upon the coast.
I had seen these inundations from below; at Calistoga I
had risen and gone abroad in the early morning, coughing
and sneezing, under fathoms on fathoms of gray sea vapour,
like a cloudy sky - a dull sight for the artist, and a
painful experience for the invalid. But to sit aloft one's
self in the pure air and under the unclouded dome of
heaven, and thus look down on the submergence of the
valley, was strangely different and even delightful to
the eyes. Far away were hilltops like little islands.
Nearer, a smoky surf beat about the foot of precipices
and poured into all the coves of these rough mountains.
The colour of that fog ocean was a thing never to be
forgotten. For an instant, among the Hebrides and just
about sundown, I have seen something like it on the sea
itself. But the white was not so opaline; nor was there,
what surprisingly increased the effect, that breathless
crystal stillness over all. Even in its gentlest moods
the salt sea travails, moaning among the weeds or lisping
on the sand; but that vast fog ocean lay in a trance of
silence, nor did the sweet air of the morning tremble
with a sound.
As I continued to
sit upon the dump, I began to observe that this sea was
not so level as at first sight it appeared to be. Away in
the extreme south, a little hill of fog arose against the
sky above the general surface, and as it had already
caught the sun it shone on the horizon like the topsails
of some giant ship. There were huge waves, stationary, as
it seemed, like waves in a frozen sea; and yet, as I
looked again, I was not sure but they were moving after
all, with a slow and august advance. And while I was yet
doubting, a promontory of the hills some four or five
miles away, conspicuous by a bouquet of tall pines, was
in a single instant overtaken and swallowed up. It
reappeared in a little, with its pines, but this time as
an islet and only to be swallowed up once more and then
for good. This set me looking nearer, and I saw that in
every cove along the line of mountains the fog was being
piled in higher and higher, as though by some wind that
was inaudible to me. I could trace its progress, one pine
tree first growing hazy and then disappearing after
another; although sometimes there was none of this
forerunning haze, but the whole opaque white ocean gave a
start and swallowed a piece of mountain at a gulp. It was
to flee these poisonous fogs that I had left the seaboard,
and climbed so high among the mountains. And now, behold,
here came the fog to besiege me in my chosen altitudes,
and yet came so beautifully that my first thought was of
welcome.
The sun had now
gotten much higher, and through all the gaps of the hills
it cast long bars of gold across that white ocean. An
eagle, or some other very great bird of the mountain,
came wheeling over the nearer pinetops, and hung, poised
and something sideways, as if to look abroad on that
unwonted desolation, spying, perhaps with terror, for the
eyries of her comrades. Then, with a long cry, she
disappeared again toward Lake County and the clearer air.
At length it seemed to me as if the flood were beginning
to subside. The old landmarks, by whose disappearance I
had measured its advance, here a crag, there a brave pine
tree, now began, in the inverse order, to make their
reappearance into daylight. I judged all danger of the
fog was over. This was not Noah's flood; it was but a
morning spring, and would now drift out seaward whence it
came. So, mightily relieved, and a good deal exhilarated
by the sight, I went into the house to light the fire.
I suppose it was nearly seven when I once more mounted
the platform to look abroad. The fog ocean had swelled up
enormously since last I saw it; and a few hundred feet
below me, in the deep gap where the Toll House stands and
the road runs through into Lake County, it had already
topped the slope, and was pouring over and down the other
side like driving smoke. The wind had climbed along with
it; and though I was still in calm air, I could see the
trees tossing below me, and their long, strident sighing
mounted to me where I stood.
Half an hour later,
the fog had surmounted all the ridge on the opposite side
of the gap, though a shoulder of the mountain still
warded it out of our canyon. Napa Valley and its bounding
hills were now utterly blotted out. The fog, sunny white
in the sunshine, was pouring over into Lake County in a
huge, ragged cataract, tossing treetops appearing and
disappearing in the spray. The air struck with a little
chill, and set me coughing. It smelt strong of the fog,
like the smell of a washing-house, but with a shrewd tang
of the sea-salt.
Had it not been for
two things - the sheltering spur which answered as a dyke,
and the great valley on the other side which rapidly
engulfed whatever mounted - our own little platform in
the canyon must have been already buried a hundred feet
in salt and poisonous air. As it was, the interest of the
scene entirely occupied our minds. We were set just out
of the wind, and but just above the fog; we could listen
to the voice of the one as to music on the stage; we
could plunge our eyes down into the other, as into some
flowing stream from over the parapet of a bridge; thus we
looked on upon a strange, impetuous, silent, shifting
exhibition of the powers of nature, and saw the familiar
landscape changing from moment to moment like figures in
a dream.
The imagination loves to trifle with what is not. Had
this been indeed the deluge, I should have felt more
strongly, but the emotion would have been similar in kind.
I played with the idea as the child flees in delighted
terror from the creations of his fancy. The look of the
thing helped me. And when at last I began to flee up the
mountain, it was indeed partly to escape from the raw air
that kept me coughing, but it was also part in play.
As I ascended the
mountainside, I came once more to overlook the upper
surface of the fog; but it wore a different appearance
from what I had beheld at daybreak. For, first, the sun
now fell on it from high overhead, and its surface shone
and undulated like a great nor'land moor country, sheeted
with untrodden morning snow. And, next, the new level
must have been a thousand or fifteen hundred feet higher
than the old, so that only five or six points of all the
broken country below me still stood out. Napa Valley was
now one with Sonoma on the west. On the hither side, only
a thin scattered fringe of bluffs was unsubmerged; and
through all the gaps the fog was pouring over, like an
ocean into the blue clear sunny country on the east.
There it was soon lost; for it fell instantly into the
bottom of the valleys, following the watershed; and the
hilltops in that quarter were still clear cut upon the
eastern sky.
Through the Toll
House gap and over the near ridges on the other side, the
deluge was immense. A spray of thin vapour was thrown
high above it, rising and falling, and blown into
fantastic shapes. The speed of its course was like a
mountain torrent. Here and there a few treetops were
discovered and then whelmed again; and for one second,
the bough of a dead pine beckoned out of the spray like
the arm of a drowning man. But still the imagination was
dissatisfied, still the ear waited for something more.
Had this indeed been water (as it seemed so, to the eye),
with what a plunge of reverberating thunder would it have
rolled upon its course, disembowelling mountains and
deracinating pines And yet water it was and sea-water at
that - true Pacific billows, only somewhat rarefied,
rolling in mid-air among the hilltops.
I climbed still
higher, among the red rattling gravel and dwarf underwood
of Mount Saint Helena, until I could look right down upon
Silverado, and admire the favoured nook in which it lay.
The sunny plain of fog was several hundred feet higher;
behind the protecting spur a gigantic accumulation of
cottony vapour threatened, with every second to blow over
and submerge our homestead; but the vortex setting past
the Toll House was too strong; and there lay our little
platform, in the arms of the deluge, but still enjoying
its unbroken sunshine. About eleven, however, thin spray
came flying over the friendly buttress, and I began to
think the fog had hunted out its Jonah after all. But it
was the last effort. The wind veered while we were at
dinner, and began to blow squally from the mountain
summit and by half-past one all that world of sea fogs
was utterly routed and flying here and there into the
south in little rags of cloud. And instead of a lone sea-beach,
we found ourselves once more inhabiting a high
mountainside, with the clear green country far below us,
and the light smoke of Calistoga blowing in the air.
This was the great
Russian campaign for that season. Now and then, in the
early morning, a little white lakelet of fog would be
seen far down in Napa Valley but the heights were not
again assailed, nor was the surrounding world again shut
off from Silverado.
The end.
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