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We rode for days from station to station, through a delightful country, under the feathery, scented redwoods and beside clear mountain-streams in which the trout leaped. We slept in barns on the hay or on the far-from-downy rawhide cots in the ranch shanties, and subsisted on freshly killed beef hastily barbecued over the campfire, coming back to Monterey sunburned to a fine mahogany.
This was the beginning of a long and dreary autumnal storm, a deferred "equinoctial," as many considered it. The mountain-streams were all swollen and turbulent, and the steep declivities were furrowed in every direction by new channels. It made the house seem doubly desolate to hear the wind howling and the rain beating upon the roofs.
Scarped rocks rise almost perpendicularly on either side of the mountain-streams, which descend rapidly with frequent cascades and falls. In order to cross from the Persian Gulf to the high plateau of Iran, no fewer than three or four of these kotuls, or strange gorge-passes, have to be traversed successively.
Having always heard their notes in rude, wild, and wooded places, they never fail to bring this kind of scenery vividly before the imagination, and their voices affect us like the sounds of mountain-streams. There is a little Sparrow which I often hear about the shores of unfrequented ponds, and in their untrodden islets, and never in any other situations.
And subsisting upon soft and green grass-blades, resembling the sprouts of lapis lazuli and which were both bitter and sweet to the taste, and drinking the sweet, pure, cool, crystal, and very superior water of sacred mountain-streams, and wandering with the deer in forests destitute of lions and tigers, in deserts free from forest-conflagration, and in thick woods, that maiden, leading the life of a wild doe, earned great religious merit by the practice of Brahmacharya austerities.
And some fled to caverns and some behind mountain-streams and springs and some through fear of death, died without much ado. And some who were brave and mighty bowmen cheerfully went out and took great trouble in tracking the Danavas. Unable, however, to find them out, for the Asuras had sought refuge in the depths of the sea, these brave men came back to their homes gratified with the search.
The devoted city of Baza now lay stripped of its beautiful covering of groves and gardens, at once its ornament, its delight, and its protection. The besiegers went on slowly and surely, with almost incredible labors, to invest and isolate the city. They connected their camps by a deep trench across the plain a league in length, into which they diverted the waters of the mountain-streams.
And some fled to caverns and some behind mountain-streams and springs and some through fear of death, died without much ado. And some who were brave and mighty bowmen cheerfully went out and took great trouble in tracking the Danavas. Unable, however, to find them out, for the Asuras had sought refuge in the depths of the sea, these brave men came back to their homes gratified with the search.
Others had only seen her in her drawing-room or in an opera-box, but he was free to ford mountain-streams at her side, or ride with her under arches of the great palms, or to play a guitar boldly beneath her window. He was free to come and go at any hour; not only free to do so, but the very nature of his duties made it necessary that they should be thrown constantly together.
But her delight was in the mountain-streams, with their mimic waterfalls and fairy wells.
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