It is a warm, sunshiny day, and I am walking around Old Monterey, alongside an historic adobe building that I know well enough. However, as I glance through an open double doorway, I am startled to observe the ranks and divisions of a pipe organ, in a rather baroque framework of gilded wood. I have no idea why this instrument should be in this place, and it is rather stunning that it exists at all. So far as I know, this building was a Spanish colonial residence.

To one side of the double doors, in a small recess, is a fearsome large hole, as if an open well or cistern. It is totally dark, and I cannot see a thing down there. I do feel a cold current of wind emerging. I bend over and inadvertently knock an object, maybe a doorstop, into the hole. I did not mean to do this, but there is nothing I can do about it now. The object has disappeared in the black.

Continuing to walk clockwise around the corner of the building, as the street and sidewalk incline steeply downward, I am surprised to arrive at another double doorway that discloses a lower elevation of this building. Although I am very familiar with this zone of town, I have never known about this lower level or seen this wide doorway. I go inside.

The room is shaped by heavy, sinuous, entangled branches of a tree—formed by a buried live oak, not a fossil but a complete tree buried or sealed in clay. Thus the room has a thoroughly organic shape, nothing of a carpentered Euclidean geometry. The actual branches of the tree are visible in places but it is mostly encased in adobe mud. It is like tree climbing in reverse.

And here it is that I observe Lee. He is very animated and seems to be serving as concierge of sorts. There are visitors other than myself. It is possible to have a drink here—Lee will see to that—and relax, and otherwise behold the exotic environment as Lee attends to this or that matter, attentive to all.

Through the middle of this chamber is a strong, swiftly running stream. It is luminous and glistening along with the forcefully rushing, rustling sound of its own Aeolian current.

While underground, this is a highly charged, expansively spacious situation.

I remember that Lee plays the organ.