332 Personality of Trees [THIRD WEEK 



tree will topple and mingle with its shadow-double which 

 for so many years the stream has reflected. 



Thus we find that while without moisture no tree could 

 exist, yet the same element often brings death. The 

 amphibious mangroves which fringe the coral islands of 

 the southern seas hardly attain to the dignity of trees, 

 but in the mysterious depths of our southern swamps we 

 find the strangely picturesque cypresses, which defy the 

 waters about them. One cannot say where trunk ends 

 and root begins, but up from the stagnant slime rise great 

 arched buttresses, so that the tree seems to be supported 

 on giant six or eight-legged stools, between the arches of 

 which the water flows and finds no chance to use its power. 

 Here, in these lonely solitudes, heron-haunted, snake- 

 infested, the hanging moss and orchids search out every 

 dead limb and cover it with an unnatural greenness. 

 Here, great lichens grow and a myriad tropical insects 

 bore and tunnel their way from bark to heart of tree and 

 back again. Here, in the blackness of night, when the 

 air is heavy with hot, swampy odours, and only the occa- 

 sional squawk of a heron or cry of some animal is heard, 

 a rending, grinding, crashing, breaks suddenly upon the 

 stillness, a distant boom and splash, awakening every 

 creature. Then the silence again closes down and we 

 know that a cypress, perhaps linking a trio of centuries, 

 has yielded up its life. 



Leaving the hundred other mysteries which the trees 

 of the tropics might unfold, let us consider for a moment 

 the danger which the tall, successful tree invites, the 

 penalty which it pays for having surpassed all its other 



