144 THE FOREST FLOOR AS A NURSERY AND A TOMB. 



The ruddy glow of light also, throws the tall 

 columnar trunks of the neighbouring trees, with their 

 brown and cinnamon coloured barks, and pendant 

 wreaths of silver-grey moss into bold relief; the shadowy 

 arcades of the forest, with its amphitheatre of surround- 

 ing trunks being dimly seen beyond, until the circle 

 of unfathomable darkness shuts out the view. 



The floor of pine needles, upon which the traveller's 

 couch is generally spread, is also worthy of a moment's 

 thought for it is at once a nursery and a tomb. 

 In nothing, to our mind, is the greatness of Nature 

 more strikingly apparent, than in this wonderful upris- 

 ing of exuberant masses of animated life out of the 

 products of decay and death, which we see to be 

 everywhere the law of life. 



In one of the finest passages in the Koran, * as we 

 have pointed out in our section on "The Desert Zone," 

 the Moslem prophet has laid peculiar stress upon this 

 curious and impressive fact; and nowhere can it be 

 witnessed in a more striking degree than in the primeval 

 woods; for beneath the traveller's feet, undisturbed 

 throughout the ages, lie the dust of many generations 

 (compared to which the Catacombs of Egypt are as a 

 thing of naught), of myriads of the forest giants, from 

 whose decay the present woods arose. Trees, as we 

 know, have like ourselves their allotted span of life, it 

 may be three hundred or four hundred years, or it may be a 

 thousand years and what does it matter, in the vast- 

 ness of an eternal past? But in the end they fall and 

 rot and are succeeded by others ; for it is evident that 

 in these great woods forest has succeeded forest, perhaps 

 through a greater number of centuries than it was 



* El Koran (of Mahomet), Sura vi.,. 96. 



