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

THE SEA FOGS
Through the Toll House gap and over the near
ridges on the other side the deluge was immense.
A spray of thin vapour was thrown high above it,
rising and falling, and blown into fantastic shapes.
The speed of its course was like a mountain torrent.
Here and there a few tree-tops were discovered and
then whelmed again ; and for one second the bough
of a dead pine beckoned out of the spray like the
arm of a drowning man. But still the imagination
was dissatisfied, still the ear waited for something
more. Had this indeed been water (as it seemed so
to the eye) with what a plunge of reverberating-
thunder would it have rolled upon its course, dis-
embowelling mountains and deracinating pines !
And yet water it was, and sea-water at that — true
Pacific billows, only somewhat rarefied, roUing in
mid-air among the hill-tops.
I climbed still higher, among the red rattling
gravel and dwarf underwood of Mount Saint Helena,
until I could look right down upon Silverado, and
admire the favoured nook in which it lay. The
sunny plain of fog was several hundred feet higher ;
behind the protecting spur a gigantic accumulation
of cottony vapour threatened, with every second, to
blow over and submerge our homestead ; but the
vortex setting past the Toll House was too strong ;
and there lay our little platform, in the arms of the
deluge, but still enjoying its unbroken sunshine.
About eleven, however, thin spray came flying over
the friendly buttress, and I began to think the fog
had hunted out its Jonah after all. But it was the
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