and great cotton trees
growing here and there, and so at length came to the borders of the
mighty forest.

Oh! dark, dark was that forest; he who entered it from the cheerful
sunshine felt as though suddenly and without preparation he had wandered
out of the light we know into some dim Hades such as the old Greek fancy
painted, where strengthless ghosts flit aimlessly, mourning the lost
light. Everywhere the giant boles of trees shooting the height of a
church tower into the air without a branch; great rib-rooted trees, and
beneath them a fierce and hungry growth of creepers. Where a tree had
fallen within the last century or so, these creepers ramped upwards in
luxuriance, their stems thick as the body of a man, drinking the shaft
of light that pierced downwards, drinking it with eagerness ere the
boughs above met again and starved them. Where no tree had fallen the
creepers were thin and weak; from year to year they lived on feebly,
biding their time, but still they lived, knowing that some day it would
come. And always it was coming to those expectant parasites, since from
minute to minute, somewhere in the vast depths, miles and miles away
perhaps, a great crash echoed in the stillness, the crash of a tree
that, sown when the Saxons ruled in England, or perhaps before Cleopatra
bewitched Anthony, came to its end at last.

On the second day of their march in the forest Alan chanced to see such
a tree fall, and the sight was one that he never could forget. As it
happened, owing to the vast spread of its branches which had killed out
all rivals beneath, for in its day it had been a very successful tree
embued with an excellent constitution by its parent, it stood somewhat
alone, so that from several hundred yards away as these six human beings
crept towards it like ants towards a sapling in a cornfield, its mighty
girth and bulk set upon a little mound and the luxuriant greenness of
its far-reaching boughs made a kind of landmark. Then in the hot noon
when no breath of wind stirred, suddenly the end came. Suddenly that
mighty bole seemed to crumble; suddenly those far-reaching arms were
thrown together as their support failed, gripping at each other like
living things, flogging the air, screaming in their last agony, and with
an awful wailing groan sinking, a tumbled ruin, to the earth.

Silence again, and in the midst of the silence Jeekie's cheerful voice.

"Old tree go flop! Glad he no flop on us, thanks be to L