Winslow, who had no relish for an indiscriminate scrimmage, and had his
own ideas of placating their captors.
Nevertheless, by degrees they fell into a silence, partly the effect
of the strangely enervating air. The fog had completely risen from the
landscape, and hung high in mid-air, through which an intense sun, shorn
of its fierceness, diffused a lambent warmth, and a yellowish, unctuous
light, as if it had passed through amber. The bay gleamed clearly and
distinctly; not a shadow flecked its surface to the gray impenetrable
rampart of fog that stretched like a granite wall before its entrance.
On one side of the narrow road billows of monstrous grain undulated to
the crest of the low hills, that looked like larger undulations of the
soil, furrowed by bosky canadas or shining arroyos. Banks was startled
into a burst of professional admiration.
"There's enough grain there to feed a thousand Todos Santos; and raised,
too, with tools like that," he continued, pointing to a primitive plow
that lay on the wayside, formed by a single forked root. A passing
ox-cart, whose creaking wheels were made of a solid circle of wood,
apparently sawn from an ordinary log, again plunged him into cogitation.
Here and there little areas of the rudest cultivation broke into a
luxuriousness of orange, lime, and fig trees. The joyous earth at the
slightest provocation seemed to smile and dimple with fruit and flowers.
Everywhere the rare beatitudes of Todos Santos revealed and repeated
its simple story. The fructifying influence of earth and sky; the
intervention of a vaporous veil between a fiery sun and fiery soil; the
combination of heat and moisture, purified of feverish exhalations, and
made sweet and wholesome by the saline breath of the mighty sea,
had been the beneficent legacy of their isolation, the munificent
compensation of their oblivion.
A gradual and gentle ascent at the end of two hours brought the
cavalcade to a halt upon a rugged upland with semi-tropical shrubbery,
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