Whether or not it was here that Drake put in in 1597, we cannot tell. There is no other place so suitable… On the west, the deep lies open; nothing near… The coast is rough and barren. Tamalpais, a mountain of a memorable figure, springing direct from the sea-level, over-plumbs the narrow entrance from the north. On the south, the loud music of the Pacific sounds along beaches and cliffs, and among broken reefs, the sporting-place of the sea-lion. …shifting sandhills, wrinkled by the wind, appear behind. Perhaps, too, in the days of Drake, Tamalpais would be clothed to its peak with the majestic redwoods.

Within the memory of persons not yet old, a mariner might have steered into these narrows—not yet the Golden Gates—opened out the surface of the bay—here girt with hills, there lying broad to the horizon—and beheld a scene as empty of the presence, as pure from the handiwork, of man, as in the days of our old sea-commander. A Spanish mission, fort, and church… All else would be unchanged. Now, a generation later, a great city covers the sandhills on the west, a growing town lies along the muddy shallows of the east; steamboats pant continually between them from before sunrise till the small hours of the morning; lines of great sea-going ships lie ranged at anchor; colours fly upon the islands; and from all around the hum of corporate life, of beaten bells, and steam, and running carriages, goes cheerily abroad in the sunshine. Choose a place on one of the huge throbbing ferry-boats, and, when you are midway between the city and the suburb, look around. The air is fresh and salt as if you were at sea. On the one hand is Oakland, gleaming white among its gardens. On the other, to seaward, hill after hill is crowded and crowned with the palaces of San Francisco; its long streets lie in regular bars of darkness, east and west, across the sparkling picture; a forest of masts bristles like bulrushes about its feet; nothing remains of the days of Drake but the faithful trade-wind scattering the smoke, the fogs that will begin to muster about sundown, and the fine bulk of Tamalpais looking down on San Francisco…

Thus, in the course of a generation only, this city and its suburb have arisen. Men are alive by the score who have hunted all over the foundations… I have dined, near the “punctual centre” of San Francisco, with a gentleman (then newly married), who told me of his former pleasures, wading with his fowling-piece in sand and scrub, on the site of the house where we were dining. In this busy, moving generation, we have all known cities to cover our boyish playgrounds, we have all started for a country walk and stumbled on a new suburb; but I wonder what enchantment of the Arabian Nights can have equalled this evocation of a roaring city, in a few years of a man’s life, from the marshes and the blowing sand. Such swiftness of increase, as with an overgrown youth, suggests a corresponding swiftness of destruction. The sandy peninsula of San Francisco, mirroring itself on one side in the bay, beaten on the other by the surge of the Pacific, and shaken to the heart by frequent earthquakes, seems in itself no very durable foundation. According to Indian tales, perhaps older than the name of California, it once rose out of the sea in a moment, and sometime or other shall, in a moment, sink again. …Here, indeed, all is new, nature as well as towns. The very hills of California have an unfinished look; the rains and the streams have not yet carved them to their perfect shape. The forests spring like mushrooms from the unexhausted soil; and they are mown down yearly by the forest fires. We are in early geological epochs, changeful and insecure; and we feel, as with a sculptor’s model, that the author may yet grow weary of and shatter the rough sketch.

…

Next, perhaps, in order of strangeness to the rapidity of its appearance, is the mingling of the races that combine to people it. The town is essentially not Anglo-Saxon; still more essentially not American. The Yankee and the Englishman find themselves alike in a strange country. There are none of these touches—not of nature, and I dare scarcely say of art—by which the Anglo-Saxon feels himself at home in so great a diversity of lands. Here, on the contrary, are airs of Marseilles and of Pekin. The shops along the street are like the consulates of different nations. The passers-by vary in feature like the slides of a magic-lantern. For we are here in that city of gold to which adventurers congregated out of all the winds of heaven; we are in a land that till the other day was ruled and peopled by the countrymen of Cortes; and the sea that laves the piers of San Francisco is the ocean of the East and of the isles of summer. There goes the Mexican… there the blue-clad Chinaman with his white slippers… You hear French, German, Italian, Spanish, and English indifferently. You taste the food of all nations in the various restaurants; passing from a French prix-fixe where every one is French, to a roaring German ordinary where every one is German; ending, perhaps, in a cool and silent Chinese tea-house. For every man, for every race and nation, that city is a foreign city; humming with foreign tongues and customs; and yet each and all have made themselves at home. The Germans have a German theatre and innumerable beer-gardens. The French Fall of the Bastille is celebrated with squibs and banners, and marching patriots, as noisily as the American Fourth of July. The Italians have their dear domestic quarter, with… Chianti and polenta in the taverns. The Chinese are settled as in China. The goods they offer for sale are as foreign as the lettering on the signboard of the shop: dried fish from the China seas; pale cakes… ambiguous, outlandish vegetables… telling of a country where the trees are not as our trees, and the very back-garden is a cabinet of curiosities. The joss-house is hard by, heavy with incense, packed with quaint carvings and the paraphernalia of a foreign ceremonial. All these you behold, crowded together in the narrower arteries of the city, cool, sunless… with the unfamiliar faces at your elbow, and the high, musical sing-song of that alien language in your ears. Yet the houses are of Occidental build; the lines of a hundred telegraphs pass, thick as a ship’s rigging, overhead, a kite hanging among them, perhaps, or perhaps two, one European, one Chinese, in shape and colour; mercantile Jack, the Italian fisher, the Dutch merchant, the Mexican vaquero, go hustling by; at the sunny end of the street, a thoroughfare roars with European traffic; and meanwhile, high and clear, out breaks perhaps the San Francisco fire-alarm… and in the stations of the double fire-service you know that the electric bells are ringing, the traps opening, and clapping to, and the engine, manned and harnessed, being whisked into the street, before the sound of the alarm has ceased to vibrate on your ear.

…There are rough quarters where it is dangerous o’ nights; cellars of public entertainment which the wary pleasure-seeker chooses to avoid. …one night about ten o’clock, I saw a man standing watchfully at a street-corner with a long Smith-and-Wesson glittering in his hand behind his back… So do extremes meet in this city of contrasts: extremes of wealth and poverty, apathy and excitement, the conveniences of civilisation and the red justice of Judge Lynch.

The streets lie straight up and down the hills, and straight across at right angles, these in sun, those in shadow, a trenchant pattern of gloom and glare; and what with the crisp illumination, the sea-air singing in your ears, the chill and glitter, the changing aspects both of things and people, the fresh sights at every corner of your walk—sights of the bay, of Tamalpais, of steep, descending streets, of the outspread city—whiffs of alien speech, sailors singing on shipboard… one brief impression follows and obliterates another, and the city leaves upon the mind no general and stable picture, but a profusion of airy and incongruous images, of the sea and shore, the east and west, the summer and the winter.

…The same street in its career visits and unites so many different classes of society, here echoing with drays, there lying decorously silent between the mansions of Bonanza millionaires, to founder at last among the drifting sands beside Lone Mountain cemetery, or die out among the sheds and lumber of the north…

The great net of straight thoroughfares lying at right angles, east and west and north and south, over the shoulders of Nob Hill, the hill of palaces… It is there that the millionaires are gathered together vying with each other in display. From thence, looking down over the business wards of the city, we can descry a building with a little belfry, and that is the Stock Exchange, the heart of San Francisco: a great pump we might call it, continually pumping up the savings of the lower quarters into the pockets of the millionaires upon the hill. But these same thoroughfares that enjoy for awhile so elegant a destiny have their lines prolonged into more unpleasant places. Some meet their fate in the sands… some run into the sea; some perish unwept among pig-sties and rubbish-heaps.

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The yucca is tall, higher than the house. It is, too, in flower, hanging an arm’s-length of soft creamy bells, like a yard-long grape-cluster of foam. And the waxy bells break on their stems in the wind, fall noiselessly from the long creamy bunch, that hardly sways.

The coffee-berries are turning red. The hibiscus flowers, rose-coloured, sway at the tips of the thin branches, in rosettes of soft red.

In the second patio, there is a tall tree of the flimsy acacia sort. Above itself it puts up whitish fingers of flowers, naked on the blue sky. And in the wind these fingers of flowers in the bare blue sky, sway, sway with the reeling, roundward motion of tree-tips in a wind.

A restless morning, with clouds lower down, moving also with a larger roundward motion. Everything moving. Best to go out in motion too, the slow roundward motion like the hawks.

Everything seems slowly to circle and hover towards a central point, the clouds, the mountains round the valley, the dust that rises, the big, beautiful, white-barred hawks, gabilanes, and even the snow-white flakes of flowers upon the dim palo-blanco tree. Even the organ cactus, rising in stock-straight clumps, and the candelabrum cactus, seem to be slowly wheeling and pivoting upon a centre, close upon it.
…

Yet the dust advances like a ghost along the road, down the valley plain. The dry turf of the valley-bed gleams like soft skin, sunlit and pinkish ochre, spreading wide between the mountains that seem to emit their own darkness, a dark-blue vapor translucent, sombring them from the humped crests downwards. The many-pleated, noiseless mountains of Mexico.

And away on the footslope lie the white specks of Huayapa, among its lake of trees. It is Saturday, and the white dots of men are threading down the trail over the bare humps to the plain, following the dark twinkle-movement of donkeys [original: asses], the dark nodding of the woman’s head as she rides between the baskets. Saturday and market-day, and morning, so the white specks of men, like sea-gulls on plough-land, come ebbing like sparks from the palo-blanco, over the fawn undulating of the valley slope.

They are dressed in snow-white cotton… following the donkey where the woman sits… her child tight in the rebozo… And girls in long, full, soiled cotton skirts running, trotting, ebbing along after the twinkle-movement of the donkey. Down they come in families, in clusters, in solitary ones, threading with ebbing, running, barefoot movement noiseless towards the town, that blows the bubbles of its church-domes above the stagnant green of trees, away under the opposite fawn-skin hills.
…

From the valley villages and from the mountains the peasants and the Indians are coming in with supplies, the road is like a pilgrimage, with the dust in greatest haste, dashing for town. Dark-eared donkeys and running men, running women, running girls, running lads, twinkling donkeys ambling on fine little feet, under twin great baskets with tomatoes and gourds, twin great nets of bubble-shaped jars, twin bundles of neat-cut faggots of wood, neat as bunches of cigarettes, and twin net-sacks of charcoal. Donkeys, mules, on they come, great pannier baskets making a rhythm under the perched woman, great bundles bouncing against the sides of the slim-footed animals. A baby donkey trotting naked after its piled-up dam, a white, sandal-footed man following with the silent Indian haste, and a girl running again on light feet.

Onwards, on a strange current… And slowly rowing among the foot-travel, the ox-wagons rolling solid wheels below the high net of the body. Slow oxen, with heads pressed down nosing to the earth, swaying, swaying their great horns as a snake sways itself, the shovel-shaped collar of solid wood pressing down on their necks like a scoop. On, on between the burnt-up turf and the solid, monumental green of the organ cactus. Past the rocks and the floating palo-blanco flowers, past the towsled dust of the mesquite bushes. While the dust once more, in a greater haste than anyone, comes tall and rapid down the road, overpowering and obscuring all the little people, as in a cataclysm.

…the Zapotec men with lifted chests and quick, lifted knees, advancing with heavy energy in the midst of dust. And quiet… women running barefoot, tightening their blue rebozos round their shoulders, so often with a baby in the fold. The white cotton clothes of the men so white… under their big hats. …quickly, silently, with inexhaustible energy advancing to the town.

And many of the serranos, the Indians from the hills, wearing their… conical black felt hats, seem capped with night, above the straight white shoulders. Some have come far, walking all yesterday in their… black hats and black-sheathed sandals. To-morrow they will walk back. And their eyes will be just the same, black and bright and wild…

The market is a huge roofed-in place. Most extraordinary is the noise that comes out, as you pass along the adjacent street. It is a huge noise, yet you may never notice it. It sounds as if all the ghosts in the world were talking to one another, in ghost-voices, within the darkness of the market structure. It is a noise something like rain, or banana leaves in a wind. The market, full of Indians… silent-footed, hush-spoken, but pressing in in countless numbers. The… murmurs of the Zapotec idioma, among the sounds of Spanish, the quiet, aside-voices of the Mixtecas.

To buy and to sell, but above all, to commingle. In the old world, men make themselves two great excuses for coming together to a centre, and commingling freely in a mixed, unsuspicious host. Market and religion. These alone bring men, unarmed, together since time began. A little load of firewood, a woven blanket, a few eggs and tomatoes are excuse enough for men, women, and children to cross the foot-weary miles of valley and mountain. To buy, to sell, to barter, to exchange. To exchange, above all things, human contact.

That is why they like… to bargain, even if it’s only the difference of a centavo.
…
…one more moment of contact, with a stranger, a perfect stranger. An intermingling of voices, a threading together of different wills. It is life. The centavos are an excuse.

The stalls go off in straight lines, to the right, brilliant vegetables, to the left, bread and sweet buns. Away at the one end, cheese, butter, eggs, chickens, turkeys, meat. At the other, the native-woven blankets and rebozos, skirts, shirts, handkerchiefs. Down the far-side, sandals and leather things.

The sarape men spy you, and whistle to you like ferocious birds, and call “Señor! Señor! Look!” Then… one flings open a dazzling blanket, while another whistles more ear-piercingly still, to make you look at his blanket…
…

The great press of the quiet natives, some of them bright and clean, many in old rags… Many wild hillmen, in their… hats of conical black felt, with their wild, staring eyes. And as they cluster round the hat-stall, in a long, long suspense of indecision before they can commit themselves, trying on a new hat, their black hair gleams blue-black, and falls thick and rich over their foreheads, like gleaming bluey-black feathers…
…
Market lasts all day. …the donkeys are there by the hundred, crowded in the inn-yards, drooping their ears with the eternal patience of the beast that knows better than any other beast that every road curves round to the same centre of rest, and hither and thither means nothing.

And towards nightfall the dusty road will be thronged with shadowy people and unladen donkeys and new-laden mules, urging silently into the country again, their backs to the town, glad to get away from the town, to see the cactus and the pleated hills, and the trees that mean a village. In some village they will lie under a tree, or under a wall, and sleep. Then the next day, home.

It is fulfilled, what they came to market for. They have sold and bought. But more than that, they have had their moment of contact and centripetal flow. They have been part of a great stream of men flowing to a centre, to the vortex of the market-place. And here they have felt life concentrate upon them, they have been jammed between the soft hot bodies of strange men come from afar, they have had the sound of stranger’s voices in their ears, they have asked and been answered in unaccustomed ways.

There is no goal, and no abiding-place, and nothing is fixed, not even the cathedral towers. The cathedral towers are slowly leaning, seeking the curve of return. As the natives curved in a strong swirl, towards the vortex of the market. Then on a strong swerve of repulsion, curved out and away again, into space.

Nothing but the touch, the spark of contact. That, no more. That, which is most elusive, still the only treasure…

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On the whole earth—and anyone having seen it once will agree with me—there is no more beautiful city, and it is unlikely that there exists one more unfathomable, more difficult to get to know. There seems no end to its mysteries. Even the sea has made of the coast a strange zig-zagging line, and the mountain slopes follow it all the way. Everywhere are curves and corners; streets cross each other at random; over and over again one loses one’s way. In the belief that one has reached one’s destination, one realizes it is but a new beginning. On leaving a bay in an attempt to reach the centre of the town, one is astonished to find oneself at yet another bay. At each turn there is something new to discover—a surprising view from the hills, a small square looking as though it had been forgotten since colonial days, a market, a palm-lined canal, a garden, or a favella. By accidentally taking a side-street near a spot one has passed a hundred times, a new world suddenly appears. Before long one feels as though one were standing on a revolving platform, being constantly offered new things to see. …On all sides something is going on; everywhere there is colour, light, and movement. Nothing repeats itself; everything seems a jumble, yet all is in place. Strolling… is here a joy, offering daily an exciting discovery. From the window of a friend’s sixth-floor apartment, the bay, spread out before one with its shimmering islands and gliding steamers, is broad and majestic as one has never seen it before. But from a back room of the same apartment; the sea has disappeared, and there is the Cross of Corcovado glowing against the dark sky. The lights of the streets are shining miles into the distance; while below, bending over the balcony, one sees a… village with its little huts and coloured lights. Driving out of the town onto a road that passes over a mountain, one feels compelled every few minutes to ask one’s friend to stop so as not to miss one more astounding aspect of this city. Wandering through a suburb, enjoying the charm and colour of the small shops, one is suddenly amongst large feudal palacetes and their century-old gardens. Near Santa Theresa one takes a trolly-car up the mountain with the idea of getting away from civilization, only to run into an eighteenth-century aqueduct, and a few minutes later to find oneself surrounded by a group of high apartment houses. In a quarter of an hour one can move from the sea shore to the top of a mountain; in five minutes from a world of luxury… to the cosmopolitan bustle of life—to brilliant cafés and the maelstrom of automobiles. Everything here is a whirlpool of confusion, everything and everybody moving this way and that—poor and rich, Nature and civilization, huts and skyscrapers, Negro and white, old-fashioned carriages and automobiles, beach and rock and green and macadam. One never tires of it, never has enough. The full profile of this city is never properly seen, for it has dozens, even hundreds. It is different from each aspect, each perspective—different from the inside, from the outside, from above, from below, from the mountains, the street, the aeroplane, and the ferry; different from each house, from every floor and room of each house. A man from Rio finds the colours of all other towns lacking in intensity… After Rio… all else seems sober and weak.

In Rio everyone can live as he likes. … The sea is free for bathing, beauty free for all eyes; …people are kind; and the variety of those small daily surprises which help to bring contentment to people without their knowing why is inexhaustible. There is something soft and relaxing in the air, making humanity less aggressive… Here one is constantly absorbing pleasure through the eye; a mysterious comfort radiates from this landscape as from anything beautiful and exceptional on this earth. With its myriad stars and lights at night, by day its dazzling, hot, and explosive colours, its scented sultriness and its tropical cloudbursts, this town is always enchanting.
…
…no one wants to miss the famous moment of arrival in Rio de Janeiro.

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…

As I go across a meadow directly toward a low rising ground this bright afternoon, I see… the most intensely brilliant scarlet, orange, and yellow, equal to any flowers or fruits, or any tints ever painted.
…
Now, too, the first of October, or later, the Elms are at the height of their autumnal beauty, great brownish-yellow masses, warm from their September oven, hanging over the highway. Their leaves are perfectly ripe. I wonder if there is any answering ripeness in the lives of the men who live beneath them.
…
Some morning … there is perhaps a harder frost … and now, when the … wind rises, the leaves come down in denser showers than ever. They suddenly form thick beds or carpets on the ground … Some trees … appear to have dropped their leaves instantaneously … and … reflect a blaze of light from the ground where they lie. Down they have come on all sides, at the first earnest touch of autumn’s wand, making a sound like rain.

Or else it is after moist and rainy weather that we notice how great a fall of leaves there has been in the night … The streets are thickly strewn with the trophies, and fallen Elm-leaves make a … pavement under our feet.
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A queen might be proud to walk where these gallant trees have spread their bright cloaks…
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When I go to the river the day after the principal fall of leaves … I find my boat all covered … with the leaves of the Golden Willow under which it is moored, and I set sail with a cargo of them rustling under my feet. … When I turn up into the mouth of the Assabet, which is wooded, large fleets of leaves are floating on its surface … a little farther up, they are thicker than foam, quite concealing the water … and at a rocky bend where they are met and stopped by the morning wind, they sometimes form a broad and dense crescent quite across the river. … Often it is their undulation only which reveals the water beneath them.
…
Perchance, in the afternoon of such a day … I paddle gently down the main stream, and, turning up the Assabet, reach a quiet cove … I … find myself surrounded by myriads of leaves, like fellow-voyagers … And painted ducks, too, the splendid wood-duck among the rest, often come to sail and float amid the painted leaves…
…
For beautiful variety no crop can be compared with this. Here is not merely the plain yellow of the grains, but nearly all the colors that we know…: the early blushing Maple, the Poison-Sumach blazing its sins as scarlet, the mulberry Ash, the rich chrome-yellow of the Poplars, the brilliant red Huckleberry, with which the hills’ backs are painted … The frost touches them, and, with the slightest breath of returning day … see in what showers they come floating down!
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It is pleasant to walk over the beds of these fresh, crisp, and rustling leaves. How beautifully they go to their graves! how gently lay themselves down … painted of a thousand hues, and fit to make the beds of us living. …One wonders if the time will ever come when men … will lie down as gracefully and as ripe,—with such … serenity…

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