【英文原著类】The Silverado Squatters(锡尔瓦多蹲坐的人).pdf

The Silverado Squatters
The Silverado Squatters
by Robert Louis Stevenson
1
The Silverado Squatters
The Silverado Squatters
THE scene of this little book is on a high mountain. There are, indeed,
many higher; there are many of a nobler outline. It is no place of
pilgrimage for the summary globe-trotter; but to one who lives upon its
sides, Mount Saint Helena soon es a centre of interest. It is the
Mont Blanc of one section of the Californian Coast Range, none of its near
neighbours rising to one-half its altitude. It looks down on much green,
intricate country. It feeds in the spring-time many splashing brooks. From
its summit you must have an excellent lesson of geography: seeing, to the
south, San Francisco Bay, with Tamalpais on the one hand and Monte
Diablo on the other; to the west and thirty miles away, the open ocean;
eastward, across the corn-lands and thick tule swamps of Sacramento
Valley, to where the Central Pacific railroad begins to climb the sides of
the Sierras; and northward, for what I know, the white head of Shasta
looking down on Oregon. Three counties, Napa County, Lake County, and
Sonoma County, march across its cliffy shoulders. Its naked peak stands
nearly four thousand five hundred feet above the sea; its sides are fringed
with forest; and the soil, where it is bare, glows warm with cinnabar.
Life in its shadow goes rustically forward. Bucks, and bears, and
rattle-snakes, and former mining operations, are the staple of men's talk.
Agriculture has only begun to mount above the valley. And though in a
few years from now the whole district may be smiling with farms, passing
trains shaking the mountain to the heart, many-windowed hotels lighting
up the night like factories, and a prosperous city occupying the site of
sleepy Calistoga; yet in the mean time, around the foot of that mountain
the silence of nature reigns in a great measure unbroken, and the people of
hill and valley go sauntering about their busin