Saint Catherine's Isle

...Beyond the town of Avalon, the hills rise swiftly against the western sky...

...the going under foot was smooth and not too steep...

...It is sad that life uses us sometimes in such boorish ways that the passwords to the richer feasts are too dimly remembered when the gate is opened...

...They were rugged and almost shapeless heights, but they were fused and melted and blended one into the other-pinnacle into cliff and cliff into canyon- like huge claps of ancient thunder that had crashed upon the earth and were still prostrate where they fell, but whose jagged and titanic outlines were all but obliterated in the passing of unnumbered years...

...in and out along the mountainside...

...It was enough, perhaps, that there came into the mind a thought of white and roundly perfect hands holding a smiling Babe...

...Climactic as a magnificent and final major chord after intricate and involved passages in a minor mode, there lay before our vision, far, far down below us and running out to the horizon's edge, the open sea...

...Dull the eyes that would not follow them in their drumless marching...

...We might have been animated figures in a design-a pattern of sunlight and shadow, of barrenness and verdure...

...For one who has not been to Vallam-brosa does not know how thickly hang the leaves in that delightful vale...

...A curve or two...

...the intricate and jeweled embroidery of her flowing hems...

...But when the occasion comes, we have lost the precious syllables and we can show to heaven only our empty, outstretched hands...

...CATHERINE'S ISLE By JOSEPH FRANT-WALSH IF YOU look westward from the hills of Palos Verdes upon the California coast, you will see the island of Santa Cata-lina floating, as you may suspect, like a purple cloud just where the sky and water meet...

...Upward and outward rolled the mountainous bulks, folding one into the next in endless convolutions...

...To sing we had been bidden, but our lips were numb through mumbling too many, many times the tribal incantations of sheer existence...

...this suddenness of digressions...

...A field of burnished silver, the calm Pacific glittered in the sun afar, but in the island's lee, the water was a clean, translucent green shading into milky whiteness on the rocky shore...

...a briskly steep ascent, and our goal had been attained...

...It was cool and sweetly fresh along the way...

...The sound of them came to us like wind blowing through a distant forest...

...But it is, perhaps, a disappointment to know that Santa Catalina Island is devoid of sheep whose fleece is golden and that Circe, the classical hoyden, would be smartly drummed out of town did she but set one sandaled foot within the portals of a cafeteria in Avalon, the island town...

...we cannot frame them with our lips when we are called...

...The morning air was still heavily freighted with the bracing tang of sea mists of the night before and the grasses, dew-laden, exuded a rustic fragrance that, together with the aroma of the dampened soil itself, was indeed an honest odor and earnest as a peasant's face...

...And though a hasty and unscholarly perusal of the ancient epics fails to reveal that either Homer or Virgil have given us immortal encomiums in its behalf, the island of Santa Catalina is, nevertheless, a place of sure enchantment...

...And while we rested there along the trail, there came floating up to us from Avalon, from farther than we could see against the blinding sun, a sound of chiming bells...

...the grass about our feet was still and the rich, warm air seemed weighted with a vast and overwhelming silence...

...Not, perhaps, just that...

...When Moses had received the stony tablets, how must he have hastened down the mountain...

...We were free with a strange, fantastic freedom, and we possessed, however fleetingly it may have been, true liberty and a true heart's ease...

...For one was aware of a terrible inability to grasp truly what seemed so near at hand...

...Hills they are for a madonna to look out from wistfully and though Urbino's brilliant child did know them not, one thinks he may have seen them in a dream...

...We were nearing now the summit of the island range...

...We have been afraid, usually, ever to use them at all for we are incurably distrustful and we save them, foolishly enough, for occasions richer than the present...

...and one who has not walked abroad into the hills of Catalina does not know how warmth and silence, upon a mid-December day, can be as milk and honey unto the soul's delight...

...We were, one felt, beyond the reach of anything that put its hand against our hearts before...

...We were, now, quite in among the hills, and their lower reaches were solidly clothed in thickets of dwarf live-oak and manzanita, but in regions more exposed against the eternal sun, there grew areas of belligerent cactus, tortuously angular among the scattered boulders...

...In places, too, sage-brush and chaparral scrambled dizzily up precipitous slopes and at last gave way, as though contrite for wilful rudeness, to waves of trailing grasses so tenderly verdant, now that the rains had come, that it hurt you to look upon their trustful blades...

...Yet when our ears had grown accustomed to such unwonted stillness, we distinguished the sound of surf breaking upon the rugged shore so far down below us that the lines of shattering waves were but vaguely discernible in the terrifying distance...

...Blue mists still hovered in bower-like ravines, the blue shading smokily upward into vague tones of lavender, rose and buff...

...And, finally, there were little trees, perfect in outline and in form, that stood detached and isolated in precarious and defiant attitudes upon the brinks of invisible chasms...

...Rhythmically they marched away from Avalon and its harbor, piling themselves in jumbled phalanxes back across the narrow island...

...Suddenly, before your incredulous eyes, there were bright splashes of red columbine like nothing so much as crimson exclamation points poised in the windless air...

...back and forth...

...And being pleasantly illiterate as to metaphors, I still like to think that it was astonishingly like a fugue of Bach's-this surprising intricacy of curves...

...Where was the blue, the gold and the red of the madonna's robe...

...If we were walking in the shade, a bend in the way led us suddenly into sunlight and, later, as surely back into the shade...

...A true heart's ease...

...If it was cool within the canyon walls in that hour of early morning, the heights above were glowing vividly and clearly in the brilliant sun...

...To linger in that place seemed unbefitting...

...There was, a dream-like quality about the scene...

...One missed and looked in vain for miniature chapels and disproportioned shrines in the distance...

...The eye, roving spiritedly along the way, was made distraught at times by blurred heaps and smoky tangles of wild clematis...

...Breathless and nearly trembling with exhaustion, we stood upon the crest...

...There was no wind...

...Purple and a soft blue-green mantled the hills in places, and from rounded knolls thickly covered by the verdant grass there jutted unexpected rocks that were intricately irregular in shape and richly poly-chromed by variant accentuations of light and shade...

...But looking outward into the further distance from that hillside trail, there lay spread before one and rising in all directions, oddly familiar landscapes like those lovely but improbable backgrounds behind the Italian madonnas...

...There was a confusion of dainty and multicolored little blossoms growing closely to the ground in compact and dappled masses beneath a leaning bow-a fashion Keats would have loved, perhaps, and there were aloofly growing simple flowers on simpler stems demurely singular in the best Wordsworthian manner...

...Like the worth and virtue of those naively advertised commodities which "must be seen to be appreciated," the charms abounding on the isle must be experienced to be realized, as the Celts sometimes have it...

...O, where was she...

...leaden indeed the feet that would not leap onward and up along the winding trail that starts just at the canyon's further end...

...They are locked securely in our breasts...

...Dear things they were, the columbine, surprising you in secret places, and if you touched them, dew fell from them down upon your outstretched hand...

...they shelter you and they fold you in...

...this limitless variety of shifting vistas obscured to be revealed again, after a while, in greater grandeur and bolder relief...

...Mysterious and remote upon the far horizon's edge, its appeal is irresistible and one feels compelled to journey to its enchanted shores quite like a Jason of a kind...

...God's footsteps mark the earth in places even still and the most inarticulate among us may kiss them where they lay...

...Poor little grasses-how short the time until the sun would be too fiercely hot for their fragile delicacy and they but wither among the hardier weeds for all the sea winds blowing over them...

...For the hills of Santa Catalina are maternal hills...

...a painful impotence to behold truly what seemed but barely hidden from our eyes...

...Up and still higher led the way...

...Yet I truly doubt that we had utterly forgotten the passing words for which we groped: there were tears within our eyes...