第96章 Linda's First Party(9)

Sometimes Linda lifted her hand from the wheel to wave a passing salute to a particularly appealing flower picture. Sometimes she whistled a note or cried a greeting to a mockingbird, a rosy finch, or a song sparrow.

"Look at the pie timber!" she cried to Donald, calling his attention to a lawn almost covered with red-winged blackbirds.

"Four hundred and twenty might be baked in that pie," she laughed.

Then a subtle change began to creep over the world. The sun peered over the mountains inquiringly, a timid young thing, as if she were asking what degree of light and warmth they would like for the day. A new brilliancy tinged every flower face in this light, a throbbing ecstasy mellowed every bird note; the orchards dropped farther apart, meadows filled with grazing cattle flashed past them, the earthy scent of freshly turned fields mingled with flower perfume, and on their right came drifting in a cool salt breath from the sea. At mid-forenoon, as they neared Laguna, they ran past great hills, untouched since the days when David cried: "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help." At one particularly beautiful range, draped with the flowing emerald of spring, decorated with beds of gold poppy, set with flowering madrona and manzanita, with the gold of yellow monkey flower or the rich red of the related species, with specimens of lupin growing in small trees, here and there adventurous streams singing and flashing their unexpected way to the mother breast of the waiting ocean very near to the road which at one surprising turn carried them to the never-ending wonder of the troubled sea, they drove as slowly as the Bear Cat would consent to travel, so that they might study great boulders, huge as many of the buildings they had passed, their faces scarred by the wrack of ages. Studying their ancient records one could see that they had been familiar with the star that rested over Bethlehem. On their faces had shone the same moon that opened the highways Journeying into Damascus. They had stood the storms that had beaten upon the world since the days when the floods subsided, the land lifted above the face of the waters in gigantic upheavals that had ripped the surface of the globe from north to south and forced up the hills, the foothills, and the mountains of the Coast Range. They had been born then, they had first seen the light of day, in glowing, molten, red-hot, high-piled streams of lava that had gushed forth in that awful evolution of birth.

Sometimes Linda stopped the car, they left it, and climbed over the faces of these mighty upheavals. Once Linda reached her hand to Donald and cried, half laughingly, half in tense earnest:

"Oh, kid, we have got to hurry. Compared with the age of these, we've only a few minutes. It's all right to talk jestingly about 'the crack of doom' but you know there really was a crack of doom, and right here is where it cracked and spewed out the material that hardened into these very rocks. Beside them I feel as a shrimp must feel beside a whale, and I feel that we must hurry.""And so we must," said Donald. "I'm hungry as Likeliest when he waited for them to find enough peacock tongues to satisfy his appetite.""I wonder what brand of home-brew made him think of that," said Linda.

"Well, you know," said Donald, "the world was only a smallish place then. They didn't have to go far to find everything to which they had access, and it must have been rather a decent time in which to live. Awful lot of light and color and music and unique entertainment.""You're talking," said Linda, "from the standpoint of the king or the master. Suppose you had lived then and had been the slave.""There you go again," said Donald, "throwing a brick into the most delicate mechanism of my profound thought. You ought to be ashamed to round me up with something scientific and materialistic every time I go a-glimmering. Don't you think this would be a fine place to have lunch?""You wait and see where we lunch today, and you will have the answer to that," said Linda, starting back to the Bear Cat.

A few miles farther on they followed the road around the frowning menace of an overhanging rock and sped out directly to the panorama of the sea. The sun was shining on it, but, as always round the Laguna shore, the rip tide was working itself into undue fury. It came dashing up on the ancient rocks until one could easily understand why a poet of long ago wrote of sea horses. Some of the waves did suggest monstrous white chargers racing madly to place their feet upon the solid rock.