The San Francisco call. [volume] (San Francisco [Calif.]) 1895-1913, 1904-04-03
EPILoGUE.
THE PRIMA DONNA.
And thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness"


Beside me singing in the wilderness"
Omar Khayyam.
The plant of the Silver Star mine lay
scattered along the edge of a mountain
river on the site of one of the camps Of
forty-nine. Where the pioneers had
scratched the surface with their picks
: their successors had torn wounds in the
Sierras mighty flank. Where once the
miners shouts had broken the quiet har-
monies of stirred pine boughs. and sing
ing river. the throb of engines now beat
on the air, thick with the dust, noisy
with the strife of toiling men.
1t was a morning in the end of May.
The mountain wall was dark against the
rising sun; tall fir and giant pine stood
along its crest in inky silhouette
thrown out by background of gold leaf
Here and there, far and aerial in the
clear. cool dawn, a white peak of the
high Sierra f1oated above the shadows,
rosy pinnacle. The air was chill and
family touched with woodland doors
The expectant hush Of Nature awaiting
the miracle of sunrise. held this world of
huge. primordial forms. grouped in CO.
lossal indifference round the swarm of
men who deived in its rock-ribbed breast
In the stiffness the camps awakening
movements rose upon the morning air
with curious diStinctness. Through the
blue shadows in which ii swan the tall
chimneys scared aloft, sending their
feathers of smoke up to the new day. 1t
lay in its hollow like a picture, all trans
parent washes of amethyst and gray,
overlaid by clear mountain shadows. The
world was in this waiting stage of
flushed sky and shaded earth when the
superintendent wife pushed open the
tread of one who fears to wake sleeper
stepped out on the balcony.
With her hand on the rail she stood,
deeply inhaling the freshness of the
y, III +a,a n
story cottage. painted white, and skirted
by broad balcony, stood on an emf
nence above the camp. From its front
steps she looked down on the slant of
many roofs, the car tracks and the red
wagon roads that wound along the
slopes. Raising her eyes. they swept the
ramparts OF the everlasting hills, and
looking higher still, her face met the ra-
dance of the dawn.
She stepped off the balcony with the
same cautious tread, and along the beat
en- footpath that led through the patch of
garden in front of the house. Beyond
this the path wound through growth
of chaparral to where the pines assembled
proached she saw the sky barred with
their trunks, arrow-straight and bare OF
branches to great height. Farther on
she could see the long dim aisles. held
in the cloistral silence of the California
forest shot through with the golden
glimmer of sunrise.
The joy of the morning was in her
heart, and she walked forward with a
light step. humming to herself. Two
months before she had come here. bride
from San Francisco, weak from illness
pale, hollow-eyed, a shadow of her for
mer self. She had only crept about at
first, swung for hours on the balcony in
her hammock. or sat under the trees
looking down on the hive of men. where
her husband worked among his laborers
AS her mother had grown back to the
fullness of life in the healing breath of
the mountains. so Mariposa slowly re-
gained her old beauty. with an added
touch of subtlety. and found her old be-
liefs returned to her with a new signif-
canoe.
TO day she had awakened with the
first glirnmer of dawn, and stirred by a
sudden desire for the air OF the morning
on her face and in her lungs, had stolen
I'D and out. Breathing in the resinous
atmosphere a new influx of life seemed
to run like sap along her limbs and lend