He sped onward, through the long hot day, leaving the hills for the marshes and a long stretch of ugly country, traversing the beautiful San Antonio Valley in the night, reaching the Mission of San Miguel at dawn, resting there for a few hours.  That night he slept at a hospitable ranch-house in the park-like valley of Paso des Robles, a grim silent figure amongst gay-hearted people who delighted to welcome him.  The early morning found him among the chrome hills; and at the Mission of San Luis Obispo the good padres gave him breakfast.  The little valley, round as a well, its bare hills red and brown, gray and pink, violet and black, from fire, sloping steeply from a dizzy height, impressed him with a sense of being prisoned in an enchanted vale where no message of the outer world could come, and he hastened on his way.

Absorbed as he was, he felt the beauty he fled past.  A line of golden hills lay against sharp blue peaks.  A towering mass of gray rocks had been cut and lashed by wind and water, earthquake and fire, into the semblance of a massive castle, still warlike in its ruin.  He slept for a few hours that night in the Mission of Santa Ynes, and was high in the Santa Barbara Mountains at the next noon.  For brief whiles he forgot his journey’s purpose as his horse climbed slowly up the steep trails, knocking the loose stones down a thousand feet and more upon a roof of tree-tops which looked like stunted brush.  Those gigantic masses of immense stones, each wearing a semblance to the face of man or beast; those awful chasms and stupendous heights, densely wooded, bare, and many-hued, rising above, beyond, peak upon peak, cutting through the visible atmosphere—­was there no end?  He turned in his saddle and looked over low peaks and canons, rivers and abysms, black peaks smiting the fiery blue, far, far, to the dim azure mountains on the horizon.

“Mother of God!” he thought.  “No wonder California still shakes!  I would I could have stood upon a star and beheld the awful throes of this country’s birth.”  And then his horse reared between the sharp spurs and galloped on.

He avoided the Mission of Santa Barbara, resting at a rancho outside the town.  In the morning, supplied as usual with a fresh horse, he fled onward, with the ocean at his right, its splendid roar in his ears.  The cliffs towered high above him; he saw no man’s face for hours together; but his thoughts companioned him, savage and sinister shapes whirling about the figure of a woman.  On, on, sleeping at ranchos or missions, meeting hospitality everywhere, avoiding Los Angeles, keeping close to the ponderous ocean, he left civilization behind him at last, and with an Indian guide entered upon that desert of mountain-tops, Baja California.