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Indirectly, however, it is worth more than two thousand million dollars yearly to the rest of the United States; for it is a great highland whose rims, the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountain ranges, are about two miles high.
Thirstily, after the long drought, the Darro, the Arab stream which ran scarlet with the blood of Moorish strife, wound its way over its stony bed among the hills; and beyond, in strange contrast with all the fertility, was the grey and silent grandeur of the Sierra Nevada.
Leaving Cordova, our road followed the Guadalquivir, along the foot of the Sierra Morena, which rose dark and stern, a barrier to the central table-lands of La Mancha. At Alcolea, we crossed the river on a noble bridge of black marble, out of all keeping with the miserable road. It rained incessantly, and the scenery through which we passed had a wild and gloomy character.
From the main-line tracks a branch railroad now extends north across the desert, through the eastern part of Kern county and up the Owens river valley into Inyo, although at the time Donna Corblay enters into this story the railroad had not been built and a stage line bore the brunt of the desert travel as far north as Keeler constituting the main outlet from that vast but little known section of California that lies east of the Sierra Nevada range.
In a minute more I began to catch the idea of this wonderful glass, for I now saw rising up before me the wonderful beauties of the Yosemite, and then, like a flash of the lightning, my vision passed over the Sierra Nevada range, my eye swept down upon San Francisco, and was soon speeding over the waters of the Pacific. "Two minutes later I saw the strange pagodas of the Chinese rising before me.
This was found in such immense quantities on many of the little islands along the coast, as to have the appeaarnce of lofty hills, which, covered with a white saline incrustation, led the Conquerors to give them the name of the sierra nevada, or "snowy mountains." The Incas took their usual precautions for securing the benefits of this important article to the husbandman.
The rain lasts a week, a fortnight, or even more, and then the sky takes at least three days to clear, during which it resembles our English white-flecked blue, or its hurrying grey masses, and the cloud-shadows fly over the wide landscape, now all suddenly changed to verdure, and lie on the distant sierra, giving an unwonted charm to the scene.
But, ere long, he repented his anger, and, in a fit of impatience at what he had done, he threw up quantities of earth that smoked with heat, and thus created the Sierra Nevada, while he broke away the hills at the foot of the lake, and the waters drained into the sea at the Golden Gate. This again made dry land of the valley, and, opening the earth once more, he released the captive tribe.
"Chop wood, carry water," Martin said and launched into an explanation of the latest fund drive. "Of course," Arthur said. "After the I.R.S., my gambling debts, the Sierra Club, and Psi Upsilon, you shall have everything." "Thank you, Arthur. We know we can count on you. You have been a great help to the zendo."
About both there was that air of wild picturesqueness, which we observe in art paintings of the gipsy, and sometimes in the gipsy herself for those sirens of the green lanes have not all disappeared; and, but that saw the snowy cone of Pike's Peak rising over the crest of the cliff, I might have fancied myself in the Sierra Asturias, with a beautiful gitana standing before me.
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