

i.ith l.iston Elkins. ihe savior of this priceless American heritage. 

 11 id his present head guide. Will Cross, concur In the theory 

 luit they are produced by uprushings of enormous amounts of 

 iiarsh gas formed deep in the bog. Mr. Cross told me that he has 

 Mveral times gone by a place in the early morning that he had 

 seen the day before, and found there great new "holes" in the 

 bog. like circular ponds, as much as a hundred yards across and 

 tilled with mangled bog debris. I once witnessed a similar event 

 It the junction of three rivers in West Africa, and it shook the 

 \ory ground like an earthquake and brought up a seething mass 

 if rotting tree trunks, many alarmed crocodiles, and a family 

 [virty of somewhat hysterical hippopotamuses. 



You get "boils ■ in swamps, as we shall see in a minute, but 

 these explosions are more typical of bogs. The reason may be 

 that bogs, unlike swamps, are often — even usually— domes of 

 water that rise not only above the general water table even in 

 Hat territory but also above the surrounding water-surface level. 

 This may sound exaggerated, but consider a sponge. This you 

 can saturate to a point where, if it is fine enough in structure and 

 if its holes are small enough, it will hold standing water at its 

 top even if placed on the board beside the sink. A bog is a vast 

 natural sponge, and the Okefenokee does demonstrably (as 

 proved by the use of sensitive surveying instruments) form a 

 distinct dome. How the water gets into it when all the sur- 

 rounding area is in drought and its water table low would be a 

 complete mystery were it not for the phenomenon called 

 'suction pressure" discovered by botanists studying the way 

 water can rise or be pumped to the topmost leaves of a four- 

 hundred-foot tree. The matter is too complex to go into here, but 

 is a combination of air pressure, capillary attraction, and evap- 

 oration, and these are just what a good bog employs to maintain 

 its water-surface level. 



In doing this, the Okefenokee — and some bogs in the tropics — 

 do something even more remarkable. In cross section there is 

 found, far down, a layer of impermeable clay forming a shallow 

 basin. In this is a layer of organically formed muck going up 

 to the general level of the land. This usually has an extremely 

 firm surface — strangely enough— but then, on top of it. there is 

 a stratum of pure, limpid water. Finally, over that again and 

 actually "rising into the air." is a layer of surface soil, usually 

 composed of a tangled mass of roots and other vegetable matter. 

 In and on this last grow the small trees, shrubs, bushes, vines, 

 grasses, sedges, palmettos, and other plants. Only the bigger 

 trees break through it and proliferate their main roots into the 

 deep, firm muck below the water stratum, which is about eight 

 feet deep. If you are not too heavy and have fairly large feet. 

 you can step out of a boat onto this upper layer that is floating 

 on the water below, and either walk carefully about on it or 

 bounce up and down or rock and roll as if on the finest spring 

 mattress; and all but the largest trees around you will in time 

 pick up your rhythm and start swaying crazily. When one of 

 the gunfire explosions takes place this same earth does indeed 

 tremble, sometimes for minutes on end. 



ALLIGATORS AND PUMAS 



The Okefenokee has a rather strange and specialized fauna. The 

 whole area is swarming with gars and other fishes such as the 



Typical of the South and the Gulf coastlands is the Spanish 

 Woss (Tillandsia) that festoons trees. It is a flowering plant 

 I of the bromeliad family) hut is covered with tiny scales. 



