There was the town that had been his father's home
deserted and in ruins.

"Two hundred years before, in this same place now so thickly strewn with
ruins, there had been no one living, and the mountains were accounted
impassable because of the dense forests. But in 1708 a Mongol horde
under a powerful chieftain settled in the valley, and the timber began
to be cut recklessly. Attracted by the fame of this chieftain, other
tribes poured down into these valleys, until by 1720 several hundred
thousand persons were living where thirty years before not a soul was to
be seen. The cold winters of Mongolia drew heavily upon the fuel
resources of the adjacent forests, and a disastrous fire stripped
hundreds of square miles. Farther and farther afield the inhabitants had
to go for fuel, until every stick which would burn had been swept clear;
bleaker and more barren grew the vicinity, until at last the tribes had
to decamp, and what was once a dense forest and next a smiling valley
has become a hideous desert which even the vultures have forsaken."

Masseth leaned over toward Wilbur and whispered:

"You don't have to go as far away as China. There are some terrible
cases of deforestation right here in the United States."

The lecturer then launched into a description of the once great forests
of China, and quoted the words of writers less than three centuries ago
who depicted the great Buddhist monasteries hid deep in the heart of
densely wooded regions. Then, with this realization of heavily forested
areas in mind, there was flashed upon the screen picture after picture
of desolation. Cities, once prosperous, were shown abandoned because the
mountains near by had become deforested. Man could not live there
because food could not grow without soil, and all the soil had been
washed away from the slopes. The streams, once navigable, were choked up
with the silt that had washed down. When rains came they acted as
torrents, since there was no vegetation to hold the water and the lower
levels became flooded.

"Nature made the world a garden," said the speaker, "and man is making
it a desert. Our children and our children's children for countless
generations are to enjoy the gardens we leave, or bewail the deserts
we create."

Startling, too, was the manner in which the lecturer showed the unhappy
fate of countries which an unthinking civilization had despoiled. The
hills and valleys where grew the famous cedars of Lebanon are a