Trees A Hundred
Feet High And Five And Six And Eight Feet In Circumference, Were
On Fire From The Root To The Top.
Vast pyramids of flame, now
surging in eddies of air that caught them, now bending as if
about to yield the struggle, then lifting superior to the foe
and dying, martyr-like, in the vast furnace.
Shorn of their
glory, their flashing, trembling forms stood crisping and
writhing in the blaze till, weary of their long suffering, they
threw themselves with a sudden and hurried sweep on the funeral
pile around. From the noble pine to the bending sprout, the
trees were aflame, while the crackling underbrush seemed a fiery
network cast over the prostrate forms of the monarchs of the
forest. When the fire caught a dry stump, it ran up the huge
trunk like a serpent, and coiling around the withered branches,
shot out its fiery tongue as if in mad joy over the raging
element below; while ever and anon came a crash that
reverberated far away in the gorges - the crash of falling trees,
at the overthrow of which there went up a cloud of sparks and
cinders and ashes. Sweeping along its terrible path, the tramp
of that conflagration filled the air with an uproar like the
bursting of billows on a rocky shore."
Across a narrow valley gigantic boulders seemed to have
accumulated and formed masses that appeared to be slowly
creeping downward. Farther away we beheld the serrated mountains
breaking into the wildest confusion of pinnacles, which rose
above the forest and relieved their masses of vivid green tints
like ruined castles along the Rhine, clothing them with an
atmosphere of age.
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