My hotel room had a fine outlook to summer-blue mountains, but was blessed with neither mirror, towel, nor water. I descended to the alleyway between "dining-room" and barnyard, where I had seen the general washbasin, but found the landlady seated on the kitchen floor shelling into it peas for our _almuerzo_. This and the evening _comida_ were always identically the same. A cheerful but slatternly Indian woman set before me a thin soup containing a piece of squash and a square of boiled beef, and eight hot corn tortillas of the size and shape of our pancakes, or _gkebis_, the Arab bread, which it outdid in toughness and total absence of taste. Next followed a plate of rice with peppers, a plate of tripe less tough than it should have been, and a plate of brown beans which was known by the name of _chile con carne_, but in which I never succeeded in finding anything carnal. Every meal ended with a cup of the blackest coffee.
Out at the end of calle B a well-worn rocky path leads up to a ruined chapel on the summit of a hill, the famous Obispado from which the city was shelled and taken by the Americans in 1847. Below, Monterey lies flat, with many low trees peering above the whitish houses, all set in a perfectly level plain giving a great sense of roominess, as if it could easily hold ten such cities. At the foot of the hill, some three hundred feet high, is an unoccupied space. Then the city begins, leisurely at first, with few houses and many gardens and trees, thickening farther on. All about are mountains. The Silla (Saddle), a sharp rugged height backing the city on the right, has a notch in it much like the seat of a Texas saddle; to the far left are fantastic sharp peaks, and across the plain a ragged range perhaps fifteen miles distant shuts off the view. Behind the chapel stand Los Dientes, a teeth or saw-like range resembling that behind Leceo in Italy. Only a young beggar and his female mate occupied the ruined chapel, built, like the town, of whitish stone that is soft when dug but hardens upon exposure to the air. They cooked on the littered floor of one of the dozen rooms, and all the walls of the chamber under the great dome were set with pegs for birds, absent now, but which had carpeted the floor with proof of their frequent presence.