Lake Tahoe Is Before Me, A Sheet Of Water
Twenty-Two Miles Long By Ten Broad, And In Some Places 1,700 Feet
Deep.
It lies at a height of 6,000 feet, and the snow-crowned
summits which wall it in are from 8,000 to 11,000 feet in
altitude.
The air is keen and elastic. There is no sound but
the distant and slightly musical ring of the lumberer's axe.
It is a weariness to go back, even in thought, to the clang of
San Francisco, which I left in its cold morning fog early
yesterday, driving to the Oakland ferry through streets with
side-walks heaped with thousands of cantaloupe and water-melons,
tomatoes, cucumbers, squashes, pears, grapes, peaches,
apricots - all of startling size as compared with any I ever saw
before. Other streets were piled with sacks of flour, left out
all night, owing to the security from rain at this season. I
pass hastily over the early part of the journey, the crossing
the bay in a fog as chill as November, the number of "lunch
baskets," which gave the car the look of conveying a great picnic
party, the last view of the Pacific, on which I had looked for
nearly a year, the fierce sunshine and brilliant sky inland, the
look of long RAINLESSNESS, which one may not call drought, the
valleys with sides crimson with the poison oak, the dusty
vineyards, with great purple clusters thick among the leaves, and
between the vines great dusty melons lying on the dusty earth.
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