The air
was steaming with delightful fragrance, not rising and wafting past in
separate masses, but diffused through all the atmosphere. Pine woods are
always fragrant, but most so in spring when the young tassels are
opening and in warm weather when the various gums and balsams are
softened by the sun. The wind was now chafing their innumerable needles
and the warm rain was steeping them. Monardella grows here in large beds
in the openings, and there is plenty of laurel in dells and manzanita on
the hillsides, and the rosy, fragrant chamoebatia carpets the ground
almost everywhere. These, with the gums and balsams of the woods, form
the main local fragrance-fountains of the storm. The ascending clouds of
aroma wind-rolled and rain-washed became pure like light and traveled
with the wind as part of it. Toward the middle of the afternoon the main
flood cloud lifted along its western border revealing a beautiful
section of the Sacramento Valley some twenty or thirty miles away,
brilliantly sun-lighted and glistering with rain-sheets as if paved with
silver. Soon afterward a jagged bluff-like cloud with a sheer face
appeared over the valley of the Yuba, dark-colored and roughened with
numerous furrows like some huge lava-table.
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