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further down the coast till, at last, he lands on the beach of San Francisco.
    Sutter is alone on the shore. The high billows of the Pacific roll up to his feet and expire. The sailing-ship that landed him here is already out of sight, heading for Monterey. Foaming waves succeed one another, slowly, in parallel lines. At some distance from the water's edge, the sand takes on a greyish hue; ceaselessly battered by the waves, it is perfectly smooth and of a very solid consistency, offering the traveller a most convenient roadway that owes nothing to the efforts of man, and which stretches as far as the eye can see. A plant with long sprawling stems is the only thing that grows here and even that is sparse. Countless seagulls are lined up at the edge of the ocean, waiting for the waves to bring them their food. Other birds, whose name he does not know, are running along the beach at lightning speed,  their heads outstretched in a line with their backs. Sea-swallows land and immediately take flight again. Some black birds are strolling up and down, always in pairs. There is also a large bird with feathers of a dark grey mingled with a paler shade; its beak is like an eagle's and it has a long horizontal plume at the back of its head. 
    When Sutter starts walking, he crushes a great many rose-coloured vesicular molluscs, which burst with a loud plop.

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FIFTH CHAPTER
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    16
    Ever since its discovery, California had always been linked with the crown of Spain. It formed one of the provinces of the Spanish Viceregency of Mexico. Neither its extent nor its configuration were known with any degree of exactitude. In 1828, when it finally became necessary to mark a northern boundary to this immense country, a straight line, at right angles to the ocean, was drawn on an atlas: it started at Cape Mendocino and finished at Evans' Pass, the great southern fault of the Rocky Mountains - a straight line more than fourteen hundred miles long.
    Baja California is a peninsula, almost an island, that juts out into the Vermilion Sea; although well-known, it is an unproductive, scarcely-inhabited region; as for Upper California, further north, it has hardly been explored. It is known that a mountainous chain runs the whole length of the coast and that, behind it, there is a second range, a little higher, which likewise runs from north to south; also, that there is yet a third range behind it, lying parallel to the two preceding chains. This is the Sierra Nevada, with its formidable peaks. The valleys between these three mountain ranges consist, in part, of vast plains. Behind the sierra stretches the great Californian desert, as far as the edges of the Great Basin, and beyond the great Salt Lake, the prairie and the steppes begin again.
    In 1839, this bipartite territory forms a province of the Republic of Mexico. It is administered by the Governor, Alvarado. The seat of government is Monterey, on the mainland. It has a population of about 35,000 inhabitants, of whom 5,000 are whites and the rest Indians.
    17
    Imagine a strip of land running from London to the oases of the Sahara and from St Petersburg to Constantinople. This strip of land is entirely coastal. Its land-mass is considerably larger than that of France. The North is exposed to the most rigorous winters, the South is tropical. A long, deep canyon, which cuts through two chains of mountains and divides this strip of land into two exactly equal parts, connects a great inland lake with the sea. This lake could accommodate all the fleets in the world. Two majestic rivers, which have irrigated the regions of the interior to the north and to the south, come to pour their waters into it. These are the Sacramento and the Joaquin. This is all we need remember about this vast province of California, and it is this crude sketch of it that Sutter consults in his notebook.
    He has just paddled up the channel and crossed the lake in a little pirogue with a triangular sail.
    He sets foot on