THE FOREST OF THE PAST 



47 



Another deeply sunk into the soil can have been scarcely less than 

 fifteen feet through. Huge boles of less durable species, their shrunken 

 bulk unmarked by the least mound, lie to this day absorbed in the dark 

 gritty soil, unseen and unsuspected until advertised by fire. They 

 appear to have disintegrated into mould, or perhaps more correctly to 

 have been reduced by former fires into a sort of charcoal. It would 

 seem impossible that the material of these rotted boles could once again 

 take form these dry bones live. They do so nevertheless. After a 

 fire has swept the bracken the long-vanished giants will sometimes 

 rekindle and burn for days in a slow, smokeless smoulder. 



Shape of fallen tree rediscovered by fire, 



As the invisible image on a photographic plate is revealed by chemi- 

 cals, so by fire is the entire shape of the fallen tree rediscovered. At first 

 on the dark ground it lies flat, a fragmentary skeleton, the massy trunk, 

 the mighty boughs, portrayed in deep soft masses of grey ash, which 

 after rain becomes an emerald fur of softest velvet moss. The tree by a 

 natural miracle, again after long death supports a verdure deeper than 

 in its leafy prime. Nor does even then change cease. The skeleton 

 of the prone tree can only for a few days perhaps be visible in ash, 

 for a few weeks in moss. It remains more durably marked in scrub. 

 Better fed on the potash, this scrub manuka (Leptospermum scopariurri) 



