NONSUCH 



until at last these fell and returned to the stuff of 

 which cedars are made. 



The berries on my laboratory trees are now, in 

 August, ready to fall, much eaten by insects and 

 long past their prime. Beyond, in Sprayland, close 

 to the ocean, the crop of cedar berries has only be- 

 gun ; they are either very small, just after flowering, 

 or still greenish white with none of the purplish 

 bloom of maturity. And the male trees are still 

 powdered with the last billion grains of pollen dust. 

 The tiny feminine cedars seem to win in the last 

 test; at the sheer rim of the ocean I find a pitiful 

 offering of berries, perhaps four on the whole plant, 

 fertihzed in the very mist from the breakers, and 

 maturing where they are reflected in the tidepools. 

 These heroic bitter-enders can scatter their off- 

 spring nowhere but in the ocean itself — achieving 

 victory under terrific obstacles, for a culmination 

 only of defeat. 



I climb back to the second line, where the kneeling 

 cedars draw breath between storms. Prying up the 

 stiff branches and scraping away some of the sand- 

 stone, I find ancient trunks sprouting from still 

 older bases. One of these is a bole of unusually large 

 size, one end of which was in some long-past year 

 cut off rather unskillfully with an axe. I bare part 

 of the circumference, the rest being hidden behind 

 recently solidified sand. A fourteen-inch cedar on 

 the north slope of Nonsuch had seventy-nine rings. 

 This old, bleached, metal-hard trunk shows one hun- 

 dred far from the heart. 



26 



