124 FROM NORTH POLE TO EQUATOR. 



districts. The devastation is sometimes on a scale of vast magni- 

 tude; thus, in 1870, a fire which raged for about fourteen days 

 destroyed a million and a quarter acres of valuable forest in the 

 government of Tobolsk, while clouds of smoke and showers of ashes 

 were borne to a distance of a thousand miles from the seat of the 

 conflagration. 



For many years the devastated woodland remains like an 

 immense succession of ruins; even after a generation or two the 

 limits of the conflagration may be recognized and defined. The 

 flames destroy the life of almost all the trees, but they devour only 

 those which were already dry ; thus stems more smoked than charred 

 remain standing, and even their tops may remain bereft only of 

 their needles, young shoots, and dry twigs. But they are dead and 

 their destruction is in process. Sooner or later they are bound to 

 fall before the storm. One after another is hurled to the ground, 

 and one after another is robbed of its branches, its crown, or a third 

 or a fourth of the trunk is broken off from the top. Across one 

 another, at all angles, and at different levels, thousands of these 

 tree-corpses lie prostrate on the ground already thickly covered with 

 piles of debris. Some rest on their roots and top-branches, others 

 lean on the still upright stems of their neighbours, and others 

 already lie crumbling among the fallen branches, their tops often 

 far from their trunks, their branches scattered all around. To the 

 lover of the woods, those stems which still withstand the storm 

 have perhaps an even more doleful appearance than those which 

 have fallen. They stand up in nakedness like bare masts. Only a 

 few retain their tops, or parts of them, for several years after the 

 fire; but the weather-beaten twigless branches of the crowns rather 

 increase than lessen the mournfulness of the picture. Gradually all 

 the crowns sink to the ground, and the still upright trunks become 

 more and more rotten. Woodpeckers attack them on all sides, 

 chisel out nesting-holes, and make yard-long passages leading into 

 the tree's heart, thus allowing the moisture free entrance and 

 accelerating the process of decay. In the course of years even the 

 largest trunk has mouldered so completely that it is really one huge 

 homogeneous mass of rotten tinder which has lost all stability. 



