One might make a very dramatic collocation of the rise and fall of empires against the life period of a single sequoia, and that would be easier than to transcribe by mere phrases the impression of one of these green towers of silence on the sense. Single and deeply corrugated as a Corinthian column, with only a lightly-branched crown for a capital, they spire for five thousand years or so, and then the leaf-crown becomes rounded to a dome in which the winds breed. Warm days of Spring, their young nestling zephyrs come fluttering down the deep wells of shade to shake the saplings of a hundred years. In Summer the fine-leafed foliage catches the sun like spray, diffusing vaporous blueness; but the majesty of their gigantic trunks is incommunicable. After a while the stifling sense of awe breaks before it, and you go on with your small affairs as children will go on playing even in the royal presence.
BLUE LAKE, LAKE COUNTY
The name Sequoia is one of the few cheering notes among our habitual botanical stupidities—an attempt to express quality as it is humanly measured in a name. There was once an American Cadmus, Sequoyah, a Cherokee who invented an Indian alphabet and taught his tribe to read. Seeing them outnumbered in their own territory, he started west with the idea of founding a great Indian empire. He was last seen trailing north across the desert and was heard of no more. Tradition has it that he reached the forest of the upper Kern River and gave the trees his name. At least no botanist with his nose in a book has usurped it.
Forests are for cover. They mask not only the naked rock, but the paths of deer and bear and bighorn. Under the spire-pointed ranks of conifers that look so black from above, verging to blueness, a world of furtive folk goes on. A world of birds is in its branches, squirrels nimble as sparrows, but scarcely anything of this is visible to the watcher on the heights. Rabbits playing on your lawn would be more noticeable in proportion than the seldom-seen bighorn leading his light-footed young from ledge to rocky ledge. The jealous trees cover the trails and obscure the passes.
As you come up through them you observe the flat, soddy spaces of old lake basins, green as jewels, and the hanging meadows gay with cascades of flowers, the stream tangles, the new-made moraines bright with bindweed and sulphur-flower. But from the heights all this lovely detail is hidden by the overlapping tents of boughs. Here and there a stream leaps forth at the falls like a sword from a green scabbard, or higher up, may be traced as the silver wire on which are strung unrippled lakes as blue as cobalt. Great chains of such lakes lead down from the snow-line to the foothill borders, encroached upon by the silent ranks of trees. As they go down they show soddy borders, they tend to fill and to grow meadows where presently deep-rooting trees assume their stations. This is the strategic rule for the taking of a granite mountain. First the grinding ice and the disintegrating water; what the streams wash down collects in the glacier-ploughed basins. It makes lake borders by which the grass comes in—the small grass that is mightier than mountains, that eats them for its food. Lakes at the lower levels become meadows, then trees arrive; they overrun the soddy ground, the snow-manured moraines. The trees themselves take centuries to fruition. At a later stage men dispossess the forest and build cities, but this has not yet come to the Sierras. There is something indomitable in the will of the trees to spread and climb. In the floor of Yosemite and Hetch Hetchy there are hundred-year-old oaks of full form and generous growth, and on the slopes above them the same oaks and of almost the same age are so dwarfed by drouth and altitude that they are not knee-high to a man, but they keep the due proportions of their type. A white bark pine will climb where the weight of the winter drifts is so heavy that it is never able to lift its decumbent trunk from the ground, clinging like ivy to the wall in which it roots.
In the Spring the rich florescence of the conifers sheds pollen in drifts that, carried down the melting water, warn the sheep-herder and the orchardist a hundred miles away of the advancing season. A pine forest in flower is one of the things worth seeing which is most seldom seen, for at its best the high passes are still choked by snow, the lakes ice-locked, the trails dangerous. And then the blossoms, yellow and crimson tassels and rosy spathes, are carried on the leafy crowns high over the heads of the most adventurous foresters. What one finds, as late as the end of June when the trails are open, is a stain of pollen on the lingering snow, and great clouds of it flying wherever a bough is brushed by a light wing. In the autumn the whole wood is full of the click and glint of the winged seeds. Storms of them, like clouds of locusts, are carried past on the wind, to be dropped in the nearest clearing or to find a chance lodging in a moss-lined crevice of the weathered headlands.
