It was very wonderful. No words can describe adequately the still splendour of that vast forest as they stood there, waiting for the sunrise. Nothing stirred. The trees were carved out of some marvellous dream-stuff, motionless, yet conveying the impression of life. Paul knew it and recognised it. All primeval woods possess that quality—trees that know nothing of men and have never heard the ringing of the axe. The silence was of death, yet a sense of life that is far beyond death pulsed through it. Cisterns of quiet, gigantic, primitive life lay somewhere hidden in these shadowed glades. It seemed the counterpart of a man’s soul before rude passion and power have stirred it into activity. Here all slept potentially, as in a human soul. The huge, sombre pines rose from their beds of golden moss to shake their crests faintly to the stars, awaiting the coming of the true passion—the great Sun of life, that should call them to splendour, to reality, and to the struggle of a bigger life than they yet knew, when they might even try to shake free from their roots in the hard, confining earth, and fly to the source of their existence—the sun.
And the sun was coming now. The dawn was at hand. The trees moved gently together, it seemed. The wood grew lighter. An almost imperceptible shudder ran through it as through a vast spider’s web.
‘Look!’ cried Nixie. His simple, intuitive little guide was nearer, after all, to reality than he was, for all his subtle vision. ‘Look, Uncle Paul!’
His attempt to analyse wonder had prevented his seeing it sooner, but as she spoke he became aware that something very unusual was going forward about them. His skin began to tickle, and a strange sense of excitement took possession of him.
A pale, semi-transparent substance he saw hung everywhere in the air about them, clinging in spirals and circles to the trunks, and hanging down from the branches in long slender ribbons that reached almost to the ground. The colour was a delicate pearl-grey. It covered everything as with the softest of filtered light, and hung motionless in the air in painted streamers of thinnest possible vapour.
The silken threads of these gossamer ribbons dropped from the sky in millions upon millions. They wrapped themselves round the very star-beams, and lay in sheets upon the ground; they curled themselves round the stones and crept in among the tiniest crevices of moss and bark; they clothed the ferns with their fairy gauze. Paul could even feel them coiling about his hair and beard and eyelashes. They pervaded the entire scene as light does. The colour was uniform; whether in sheets or ribbons, it did not vary in shade or in degree of transparency. The entire atmosphere was pervaded by it, frozen into absolute stillness.
‘That’s the winds—all that stuff,’ Nixie whispered, her voice trembling with excitement. ‘They’re asleep still. Aren’t they awful and wonderful?’
As she spoke a faint vibration ran everywhere through the ribbons. Involuntarily he tightened his grasp on the child’s hand.
‘That’s their beginning to wake,’ she said, drawing closer to him, ‘like people moving in sleep.’
The vibration ran through the air again. It quivered as reflections in the surface of a pool quiver to a ghost of passing wind. They seated themselves on a fallen trunk and waited. The trees waited too; as gigantic notes in a set piece, Paul thought, that the coming sun would presently play upon like a hand upon a vast instrument. Then something moved a few feet away, and he jumped in spite of himself.