Around the World on a Bicycle, Vol. 1

MP3 Audio CD. Around the World on a Bicycle, Vol. 1

CHAPTER I.





OVER THE SIERRAS NEVADAS.

The beauties of nature are scattered with a more lavish hand across the
country lying between the summit of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the
shores where the surf romps and rolls over the auriferous sands of the
Pacific, in Golden Gate Park, than in a journey of the same length in
any other part of the world. Such, at least, is the verdict of many whose
fortune it has been to traverse that favored stretch of country. Nothing
but the limited power of man's eyes prevents him from standing on the
top of the mountains and surveying, at a glance, the whole glorious
panorama that stretches away for more than two hundred miles to the west,
terminating in the gleaming waters of the Pacific Ocean. Could he do
this, he would behold, for the first seventy-five or eighty miles, a
vast, billowy sea of foot-hills, clothed with forests of sombre pine and
bright, evergreen oaks; and, lower down, dense patches of white-blossomed
chaparral, looking in the enchanted distance like irregular banks of
snow. Then the world-renowned valley of the Sacramento River, with its
level plains of dark, rich soil, its matchless fields of ripening grain,
traversed here and there by streams that, emerging from the shadowy
depths of the foot-hills, wind their way, like gleaming threads of silver,
across the fertile plain and join the Sacramento, which receives them,
one and all, in her matronly bosom and hurries with them řn to the sea.

Towns and villages, with white church-spires, irregularly sprinkled over
hill and vale, although sown like seeds from the giant hand of a mighty
husbandman, would be seen nestling snugly amid groves of waving shade
and semi-tropical fruit trees. Beyond all this the lower coa