A tall mountain backs it. The
Pacific kisses its feet. A spring bursting from the mountain, about
four thousand feet up, has cut a gorge down which it tumbles in
cascades to the beach and the salt water. Where the source leaps
from the rock the vegetation begins, as you would expect. It widens
and grows more luxuriant all the way down. The stream comes to a
forty-foot waterfall between sheer rock curtained with creepers;
whence it hurries down through plantations of banana, past San Ramon,
which perches where it can, house by house, on shelves hidden in
greenery. There it takes another great leap into a basin it has
hollowed for itself in the steep-to beach.
We have come down by nature's route. Now we'll climb back by man's.
A sort of stairway, broad-stepped, made of pebbles and pounded earth,
mounts in fairly well engineered zigzags to the plateau above the
lower fall, and in a straighter flight beside the gorge to the hotel
which is the topmost building of San Ramon. Above that it becomes a
gully curved by torrential rains; above that, zigzags again as a
mule-track up to a pass in the mountains--and thereafter God knows
whither.
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