第2章 THE LEGEND OF MONTE DEL DIABLO.(2)

Nothing could exceed the quiet gravity and unpretentiousness of the little cavalcade.First rode a stout muleteer,leading a pack-mule laden with the provisions of the party,together with a few cheap crucifixes and hawks'bells.After him came the devout Padre Jose,bearing his breviary and cross,with a black serapa thrown around his shoulders;while on either side trotted a dusky convert,anxious to show a proper sense of their regeneration by acting as guides into the wilds of their heathen brethren.Their new condition was agreeably shown by the absence of the usual mud-plaster,which in their unconverted state they assumed to keep away vermin and cold.The morning was bright and propitious.Before their departure,mass had been said in the chapel,and the protection of St.Ignatius invoked against all contingent evils,but especially against bears,which,like the fiery dragons of old,seemed to cherish unconquerable hostility to the Holy Church.

As they wound through the canyon,charming birds disported upon boughs and sprays,and sober quails piped from the alders;the willowy water-courses gave a musical utterance,and the long grass whispered on the hillside.On entering the deeper defiles,above them towered dark green masses of pine,and occasionally the madrono shook its bright scarlet berries.As they toiled up many a steep ascent,Father Jose sometimes picked up fragments of scoria,which spake to his imagination of direful volcanoes and impending earthquakes.To the less scientific mind of the muleteer Ignacio they had even a more terrifying significance;and he once or twice snuffed the air suspiciously,and declared that it smelt of sulphur.So the first day of their journey wore away,and at night they encamped without having met a single heathen face.

It was on this night that the Enemy of Souls appeared to Ignacio in an appalling form.He had retired to a secluded part of the camp and had sunk upon his knees in prayerful meditation,when he looked up and perceived the Arch-Fiend in the likeness of a monstrous bear.The Evil One was seated on his hind legs immediately before him,with his fore paws joined together just below his black muzzle.Wisely conceiving this remarkable attitude to be in mockery and derision of his devotions,the worthy muleteer was transported with fury.Seizing an arquebuse,he instantly closed his eyes and fired.When he had recovered from the effects of the terrific discharge,the apparition had disappeared.Father Jose,awakened by the report,reached the spot only in time to chide the muleteer for wasting powder and ball in a contest with one whom a single ave would have been sufficient to utterly discomfit.What further reliance he placed on Ignacio's story is not known;but,in commemoration of a worthy Californian custom,the place was called La Canada de la Tentacion del Pio Muletero,or "The Glen of the Temptation of the Pious Muleteer,"a name which it retains to this day.

The next morning the party,issuing from a narrow gorge,came upon a long valley,sear and burnt with the shadeless heat.Its lower extremity was lost in a fading line of low hills,which,gathering might and volume toward the upper end of the valley,upheaved a stupendous bulwark against the breezy North.The peak of this awful spur was just touched by a fleecy cloud that shifted to and fro like a banneret.Father Jose gazed at it with mingled awe and admiration.By a singular coincidence,the muleteer Ignacio uttered the simple ejaculation "Diablo!"As they penetrated the valley,they soon began to miss the agreeable life and companionable echoes of the canyon they had quitted.Huge fissures in the parched soil seemed to gape as with thirsty mouths.A few squirrels darted from the earth,and disappeared as mysteriously before the jingling mules.A gray wolf trotted leisurely along just ahead.But whichever way Father Jose turned,the mountain always asserted itself and arrested his wandering eye.Out of the dry and arid valley,it seemed to spring into cooler and bracing life.Deep cavernous shadows dwelt along its base;rocky fastnesses appeared midway of its elevation;and on either side huge black hills diverged like massy roots from a central trunk.His lively fancy pictured these hills peopled with a majestic and intelligent race of savages;and looking into futurity,he already saw a monstrous cross crowning the dome-like summit.Far different were the sensations of the muleteer,who saw in those awful solitudes only fiery dragons,colossal bears and break-neck trails.The converts,Concepcion and Incarnacion,trotting modestly beside the Padre,recognized,perhaps,some manifestation of their former weird mythology.

At nightfall they reached the base of the mountain.Here Father Jose unpacked his mules,said vespers,and,formally ringing his bell,called upon the Gentiles within hearing to come and accept the Holy Faith.The echoes of the black frowning hills around him caught up the pious invitation,and repeated it at intervals;but no Gentiles appeared that night.Nor were the devotions of the muleteer again disturbed,although he afterward asserted,that,when the Father's exhortation was ended,a mocking peal of laughter came from the mountain.Nothing daunted by these intimations of the near hostility of the Evil One,Father Jose declared his intention to ascend the mountain at early dawn;and before the sun rose the next morning he was leading the way.