William Hepworth Dixon, White Conquest: Volume 1

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Chapter 4: a lost Capital.

Lapping round Pinos Point, nine or ten miles from the Old Quarries, the water races on a pale and sandy beach, of bow-like form, ending in two green and picturesque bluffs. One bluff is Santa Cruz, the other Monterey. The arc is twenty miles across; a sweep of sunny water, over which flocks of gulls and pelicans dart and flash. A slip of sand, dotted along the line with ribs and tusks of whales, so many that they look like drifts of snow, divides the dark blue sea from amber dunes and light green woods. A plain rolls inward into mounds and ridges, covered to the top by oak and pine; beyond which forests rise the peaks and shoulders of the Galivano range.

Not thirty minutes since, the sun laughed out in front of us, peeping over Monte Toro with a face of burning gold; yet early in the day as it may seem,