The sunlight stood in fluted slanting columns hardly more ephemeral than the trees. There was an obsession of trees in Edward’s mind. Out of the corners of his eyes he could see an unceasing bustle of birds and squirrels and insects among the trees, like a hinted joke on lips that were sealed when he looked directly at them. Everything was secret. A few acres of the forest were secretly and quietly on fire. It was the spirit of fire with its eyes shut, intensely malevolent. There was but little flame; a little dagger of flame or two, as though the keeper of the savage secret could barely refrain from committing himself. Blue smoke curled from the roots in the ground; thin snakes of smoke writhed about the innocent strong trunks of the trees. The air was hot and the hanging pale scarves of lichen waved in the heat. It was an intense relief to leave the smoke behind and pass through the living, unthreatened spaces of cool forest again.
There was a pause in the day at the foot of a monstrous horned tree. An experiment on the part of the Creator but not, Edward thought, a very successful one. Trees should be young and shining or they should be immortal and carry their age like a gentle green dream. The greatest sequoia of all is a horned devil with a senile brow. The weight of his thousands of years is like a torpid curse upon him. One thinks miserably of his contemporaries, Moses and the jewelled Pharaohs, and one is glad that the ancients died decently and thoroughly and are only very sparsely survived. Some of the trees on the slope—younger by a thousand years or so—were very much more splendid. The grain of their rough and rusty bark ran up in slow spirals—for ever, it seemed. No great branches drew the eye away from its climb upward to the tapering spear of the tree. Only, far up, near the sun, the little delicate branches and needles sprang out and shone like the drops of a fountain.
“Why, why, why ...” said Mr. Hope, after reading the notice board at the foot of the horned tree. He gave the tree a quick congratulatory glance and said to Edward, “Say listen, you don’t get trees like that where you come from.”
Edward’s mind ran home. “No,” he agreed vaguely. “Not trees like this. No notice-boardy trees like this. Primroses, of course, and what not.”
“Your notice boards in Britain,” said Avery Bird, “say ‘Trespassers will be shot at sight,’ or something very like it. Our notice boards in California say ‘See here, folks, come and look at this tree,’ or some such thing.”
“That’s true,” admitted Edward. “Still, it’s more fun to disobey a notice board warning you off than to obey a notice board calling you on.” I am not sure that he really said this. If he did I do not think anyone heard him. After a second or two he realised at any rate that he might have said it and he thought, “Really, you know, I am quite clever. Only Emily is never there when I am clever. Nobody is on my side. There is nobody to think, ‘Well, by Jove, our hero is not so very unworthy of his Emily after all....’”
The grotesque dance of the Ford car between the quiet trees began again. Back and forth, back and forth, along the climbing roads it toiled. Higher and higher. There were patches of old crusted snow beside the road now. The little meadows among the trees were extravagantly green. The very shadows were green.
The earth opened before them. There was suddenly nothing at all between them and another world. The faces of the opposite mountains—El Capitan, Half Dome—were made gracious with Gothic curves. There were far mountains—red mountains, patterned with snow—to the east of the Half Dome. They were like still flames in the low red sunlight. Yosemite Valley was filling with blue shadow as the sun went down. The line of shadow climbed up the sheer cliffs like rising water and overflowed the tall shallow arches of the cliffs.
Edward thought, “I can’t bear to be alone with this. One can’t be anything but alone in such an indecently enormous world. There is nothing that will ever come near enough to save me.... Unless Emily would come....”
Avery Bird said, “The other party ought to be quite a short ways from here. They’d planned to wait for us before going down into the valley. Let’s all call Emily, let’s sing Emily all through the woods.”