"
END OF PART IV
PART V
The Promised Land
CHAPTER I
In the light of a clear September sun they stood and looked down on
it--the Promised Land.
For days they had been creeping up through defiles in the mountain
wall, crawling along ledges with murmurous seas of pine below and the
snow lying crisp in the hollows. On the western slope the great
bulwark dropped from granite heights to wooded ridges along the spines
of which the road wound. Through breaks in the pine's close ranks they
saw blue, vaporous distances, and on the far side of aerial chasms the
swell of other mountains, clothed to their summits, shape undulating
beyond shape.
Then on this bright September afternoon a sun-filled pallor of empty
space shone between the tree trunks, and they had hurried to the summit
of a knoll and seen it spread beneath them--California!
The long spurs, broken apart by ravines, wound downward to where a flat
stretch of valley ran out to a luminous horizon. It was a yellow
floor, dotted with the dark domes of trees and veined with a line of
water. The trail, a red thread, was plain along the naked ridges, and
then lost itself in the dusk of forests.
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