II.
But the real inhabitants of the mountains are the pines, geometrical trees, akin to the ferruginous blocks hewn by the primitive eruptions. The vegetation of the plains unfolds itself in undulating forms with all the graceful caprices of liberty and wealth. The pines, on the other hand, seem scarcely alive; their shaft rises in a perpendicular line along the rocks; their horizontal branches part from the trunk at right angles, equal as the radii of a circle, and the entire tree is a cone terminated by a naked spike. The dull little blades that answer for leaves have a melancholy hue, without transparency or lustre; they seem hostile to the light; they neither reflect it, nor allow it to pass, they extinguish it; hardly does the noonday sun fringe them with a bluish reflection. Ten paces away, beneath such an aureole, the black pyramid cuts the horizon like an opaque mass. They crowd together in files under their funereal mantles. Their forests are silent as solitudes; the whistle of the wind makes there no noise; it glides over the stiff beard of the leaves without stirring or rubbing them together. One hears no sound save the whispering of the tops and the shrivelling of the little yellowish lamels which fall in showers as soon as you touch a branch.
[FULL-SIZE] -- [Medium-Size]
The turf is dead, the soil naked; you walk in the shade beneath an inanimate verdure, among pale shafts which rise like tapers. A strong odor fills the air, resembling the perfume of aromatics. The impression is that made by a deserted cathedral, while, after a ceremony, the smell of incense still floats under the arches, and the declining day outlines far away in the obscurity the forest of pillars.
They live in families and expel the other trees from their domain. Often, in a wasted gorge, they may be seen like a mourning drapery descending among the white glaciers. They love the cold, and in winter remain clothed in snow. Spring does not renew them; you see only a few green lines run through the foliage; they soon grow dark like the rest. But when the tree springs from a spot of deep earth, and rises to a height of a hundred feet, smooth and straight as the mast of a ship, the mind with buoyancy follows to the very summit the flight of its inflexible form, and the vegetable column seems as grand as the mountain which nurtures it.