What makes them? A question not easily answered. But the shrewdest foresters say that they have held the roots of trees now dead. Either the tree has fallen, and torn its roots out of the ground, or the roots and stumps have rotted in their place, and the soil above them has fallen in.
But they must decay very quickly, these roots, to leave their quiet fresh graves thus empty; and—now one thinks of it—how few fallen trees, or even dead sticks, there are about. An English wood, if left to itself, would be cumbered with fallen timber; and one has heard of forests in North America through which it is all but impossible to make way, so high are piled up, among the still growing trees, dead logs in every stage of decay. Such a sight may be seen in Europe among the high silver-fir forests of the Pyrenees. How is it not so here? How, indeed? And how comes it—if you will look again—that there are few or no fallen leaves, and actually no leaf-mould? In an English wood there would be a foot—perhaps two feet—of black soil, renewed by every autumn leaf-fall. Two feet? One has heard often enough of bison-hunting in Himalayan forests among Deodaras one hundred and fifty feet high, and scarlet rhododendrons thirty feet high, growing in fifteen or twenty feet of leaf- and timber-mould. And here, in a forest equally ancient, every plant is growing out of the bare yellow loam as it might in a well-hoed garden-bed. Is it not strange?
Most strange, till you remember where you are,—in one of Nature’s hottest and dampest laboratories. Nearly eighty inches of yearly rain and more than eighty degrees of perpetual heat make swift work with vegetable fibre, which, in our cold and sluggard clime, would curdle into leaf-mould, perhaps into peat. Far to the north, in poor old Ireland, and far to the south, in Patagonia, begin the zones of peat, where dead vegetable fibre, its treasures of light and heat locked up, lies all but useless age after age. But this is the zone of illimitable sun force, which destroys as swiftly as it generates, and generates again as swiftly as it destroys. Here, when the forest giant falls, as some tell me that they have heard him fall, on silent nights, when the cracking of the roots below and the lianes aloft rattles like musketry through the woods, till the great trunk comes down, with a boom as of a heavy gun, re-echoing on from mountain-side to mountain-side; then
“Nothing in him that doth fade,
But doth suffer an air-change
Into something rich and strange.”
Under the genial rain and genial heat, the timber-tree itself, all its tangled ruin of lianes and parasites, and the boughs and leaves, snapped off not only by the blow, but by the very wind of the falling tree, all melt away swiftly and peacefully in a few months—say almost a few days—into the water, and carbonic acid, and sunlight out of which they were created at first, to be absorbed instantly by the green leaves around, and, transmuted into fresh forms of beauty, leave not a wrack behind. Explained thus,—and this I believe to be the true explanation,—the absence of leaf-mould is one of the grandest, as it is one of the most startling, phenomena of the forest.
[And thus the writer rambles on, telling fresh marvels of the tropic woods, from which a knowledge is attained that “defies all analysis.”]
[It is that of] the causes and effects of their beauty; that “æsthetic” of plants, of which Schleiden has spoken so well in that charming book of his, “The Plant,” which all should read who wish to know somewhat of “The Open Secret.” But when they read it let them read with open hearts. For that same “Open Secret” is, I suspect, one of those which God may hide from the wise and prudent, and yet reveal to babes.
At least, so it seemed to me, the first day that I went, awe-struck, into the High Woods; and so it seemed to me, the last day that I came, even more awe-struck, out of them.