THE SEQUOIA :311 



cords of peeled, split, smashed wood has been 

 piled around some old giant by a single stroke of 

 lightning is another grand sight in the night. 

 The light is so great I found I could read com- 

 mon print three hundred yards from them, 

 and the illumination of the circle of onlooking 

 trees is indescribably impressive. Other big fires, 

 roaring and booming like waterfalls, were blaz- 

 ing on the upper sides of trees on hillslopes, 

 against which limbs broken off by heavy snow 

 had rolled, while branches high overhead, tossed 

 and shaken by the ascending air current, seemed 

 to be writhing in pain. Perhaps the most start- 

 ling phenomenon of all was the quick death of 

 childlike Sequoias only a century or two of age. 

 In the midst of the other comparatively slow and 

 steady fire work one of these tall, beautiful sap- 

 lings, leafy and branchy, would be seen blazing 

 up suddenly, all in one heaving, booming, pas- 

 sionate flame reaching from the ground to the 

 top of the tree and fifty to a hundred feet or 

 more above it, with a smoke column bending for- 

 ward and streaming away on the upper, free- 

 flowing wind. To burn these green trees a 

 strong fire of dry wood beneath them is required, 

 to send up a current of air hot enough to distill 

 inflammable gases from the leaves and sprays ; 

 then instead of the lower limbs gradually catch- 

 ing fire and igniting the next and next in succes- 

 sion, the whole tree seems to explode almost simul- 



