Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 3, 1895 - Travels and Excursions, Volume II

OLD AND NEW PACIFIC CAPITALS
On the other, to seaward, hill after hill is crowded
and crowned with the palaces of San Francisco ; its
long streets lie in regular bars of darkness, east and
west, across the sparkling picture ; a forest of masts
bristles like bulrushes about its feet ; nothing remains
of the days of Drake but the faithful trade-wind
scattering the smoke, the fogs that will begin to
muster about sundown, and the fine bulk of Tamal-
pais looking down on San Francisco, Hke Arthur's
Seat on Edinburgh.
Thus, in the course of a generation only, this city
and its suburb have arisen. Men are alive by the
score who have hunted all over the foundations in
a dreary waste. I have dined, near the ' punctual
centre ' of San Francisco, with a gentleman (then
newly married), who told me of his former pleasures,
wading with his fowhng-piece in sand and scrub, on
the site of the house where we were dining. In this
busy, moving generation, we have all known cities
to cover our boyish playgrounds, we have all started
for a country walk and stumbled on a new suburb ;
but I wonder what enchantment of the Arabian
Nights can have equalled this evocation of a roaring-
city, in a few years of a man's life, from the marshes
and the blowing sand. Such swiftness of increase,
as with an overgrown youth, suggests a correspond-
ing swiftness of destruction. The sandy peninsula
of San Francisco, mirroring itself on one side in the
bay, beaten on the other by the surge of the Pacific,
and shaken to the heart by frequent earthquakes,
seems in itself no very durable foundation. Accord-
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