1904 



FORESTRY AND IRRIGATION 



355 



meadows, vineyards, houses, churches, 

 even villages leaving behind them only 

 gray billows, to which clung bunches of 

 bracken, a few starved bushes of scrub 

 oak, and thickets of w r hite and purple 

 gorse, fighting stubbornly for a hold 

 upon the shifting sands, with here and 

 there some straggling groups of pines, 

 the protesting remains of a great forest 

 which wind and sand and fire and water 

 had spared. 



On the seaward side the great fur- 

 rows, lying one within the other, weie 



the steady western winds and the sand 

 thrown up by the restless waves, ate 

 away the forest and left only the shift- 

 ing dunes great sand billows that crept 

 on inch by inch and year by year, en- 

 tombing more of the bright-blossomed 

 bruyeres and genets, no matter how 

 bravely they fought for existence, leav- 

 ing behind them only dry roots, which 

 the ' ' f orestiers ' : gathered for their 

 hearths. Wherever the foot of the sand 

 dune rested, there was hopeless blight. 

 A little win^ grass grew 7 in the shadow 



FOREST OF MARITIME PINE ON THE DUNES IN GASCONY. THE WHITE SAND IN THE FORE- 

 GROUND IS THE EDGE OF A FIRE LANE. 



bare and gray. The western winds lifted 

 the light sands (baring the roots of trees 

 upon the seaward slopes) and dropped 

 them just beyond the crest to drown and 

 smother the shrubs which struggled up 

 the leeward side. Here and there in 

 favorable locations a few scattered pines 

 marked the location of the ancient forests 

 to which the Greeks and the Romans, 

 perhaps even the Phoenicians, came for 

 timber and pitch and left their names on 

 the shore to mark the limits of forgotten 

 commerce. They brought with them 

 not only reckless greed, but still more 

 reckless flame, which, cooperating with 



of the heather and gorse, on which the 

 sheep browsed, under the eyes of the 

 solemn-faced shepherds perched on stilts 

 and knitting as they watched. On and 

 on crept the phalanx of the terrible 

 dunes, slowly but surely blighting all in 

 their path, not only creating a desert, 

 but destroying hope. As long as the 

 winds blew from the west the dunes 

 marched to the east ; the desert fires 

 ravaged the intervening spaces ; the 

 flocks grew fewer, the desolation more 

 extreme. In the heart of sunny France 

 a desert was established, ever increasing 

 in extent and threatening to stretch 



