IV.
Anomalous beeches sustain the slopes here; no description can give an idea of these stunted colossi, eight feet high, and round which three men could not reach. Beaten back by the wind that desolates the declivity, their sap has been accumulating for centuries in huge, stunted, twisted and interlaced branches; all embossed with knots misshapen and blackened, they stretch and coil themselves fantastically, like limbs swollen by disease and distended by a supreme effort.
[FULL-SIZE] -- [Medium-Size]
Through the split bark may be seen the vegetable muscles enrolling themselves about the trunk, and crushing each other like the limbs of wrestlers. These squat torsos, half overthrown, almost horizontal, lean toward the plain; but their feet bury themselves among the rocks with such ties, that sooner than break that forest of roots, one might tear out a side of the mountain. Now and then a trunk, rotted by water, breaks open, hideously eventerated; the edges of the wound spread farther apart with every year; they wear no longer the shape of trees, and yet they live, and cannot be conquered by winter, by their slope, nor by time, but boldly put forth into their native air their whitish shoots. If, under the shades of evening, you pass by the tortured tops and yawning trunks of these old inhabitants of the mountains, when the wind is beating the branches, you seem to hear a hollow plaint, extorted by a century’s toil; these strange forms recall the fantastic creatures of the old Scandinavian mythology. You think on the giants imprisoned by fate, between walls that contracted day by day, and bent them down and lessened them, and then returned them to the light, after a thousand years of torture, furious, misshapen and dwarfed.