High up on the Montecito hills I found a villa beside the gateway of one of the deep canons that furrow the mountain side,and day after day I lay in a chair on the sunny terrace,with a continually recurring amazement at the brilliancy of my surroundings.In the early morning I looked down on a feathery mist hiding the world,a mist presently to be shot with silver and sapphire-blue,dissolved by slow enchantment until there lay revealed the plain and the shimmering ocean with its distant islands trembling in the haze.At sunset my eyes sought the mountains,mountains unreal,like glorified scenery of grand opera,with violet shadows in the wooded canon clefts,and crags of pink tourmaline and ruby against the skies.All day long in the tempered heat flowers blazed around me,insects hummed,lizards darted in and out of the terrace wall,birds flashed among the checkered shadows of the live oaks.That grove of gnarled oaks summoned up before me visions of some classic villa poised above Grecian seas,shining amidst dark foliage,the refuge of forgotten kings.Below me,on the slope,the spaced orange trees were heavy with golden fruit.
After a while,as I grew stronger,I was driven down and allowed to walk on the wide beach that stretched in front of the gay houses facing the sea.Cormorants dived under the long rollers that came crashing in from the Pacific;gulls wheeled and screamed in the soft wind;alert little birds darted here and there with incredible swiftness,leaving tiny footprints across the ribs and furrows of the wet sand.Far to the southward a dark barrier of mountains rose out of the sea.Sometimes Isat with my back against the dunes watching the drag of the outgoing water rolling the pebbles after it,making a gleaming floor for the light to dance.