Transplanted by Gertrude Atherton — Read

Lee awoke first. She remembered at once where she was, and sat up with a sense of terror she had not experienced in the darkness of the night. The fog was gone, the sun was well above the horizon. She and Cecil were alone on a mountain peak so high above the world that the blue depths of space seemed nigher than the planet below. The redwood forest at the foot of the mountain looked like brush; on a glassy pond were hundreds of toy boats; beyond was a toy city on toy hills. Far to the South another solitary peak lifted itself into the heavens, dwarfing the mountain ranges about it. Lee glanced to the left. Nothing there but peak after peak bristling away into the north, black and rigid with redwoods.

But it was not the stupendous isolation that terrified Lee. It was a vague menace in the atmosphere about her, an accentuated stillness. Over the scene was a grey web, so delicate, so transparent, that it concealed nothing. Lee rubbed her eyes to make sure it was really there. It might have been the malignant breath of the evil genius of California. As she gazed, the mist slowly cohered. It became an almost tangible veil through which San Francisco looked the phantom of a city long since sunken to the bed of the Pacific. The sun glared through it like the suspended crater of an angry volcano. The forests on the mountain all at once seemed dead. The very air was petrified. The silence was awful, appalling.