Читать книгу The Green Age of Asher Witherow - M Allen Cunningham - Страница 6

On a boggy day in 1806 a detachment of Spanish soldiers apprehended a band of Bay Miwok Indians in a marsh at the foot of a solitary California mountain. Commanded to redeliver the natives to the stern grace of the mission they’d fled, the Spaniards detained them in a nearby thicket as night fell. A dun darkness came on, browning out the stars. The night grew quiet but for the din of crickets. Then at some deep and slippery hour the Miwoks vanished, turned to vapor and floated away in the mist, dematerialized as demons were known to do. The next morning the soldiers woke in a dawn steam thick enough to blank the big mountain from sight. They found themselves bereft of their errant mission-folk and turned round on their heels till their heads swam. Bedeviled as they were, they forswore the place Monte del Diablo, Thicket of the Devil, and for years the name lingered like a fog over that marsh. When at length the English-speaking settlers arrived, the Spanish Monte was taken for Mountain and was believed to refer to the twin-shouldered mass looming nearby. So the mountain became Mount Diablo, made to bear an unholy namesake.