308 THE CAROLINA MOUNTAINS 
above. For a little beyond here you enter the bal- 
sams, and it is like entering another world, for in the 
balsam groves no other trees grow, and the young 
trees and the bushes that so lighten other forests are 
entirely lacking here. The tall, dark columns of the 
trees stand so close together that looking ahead 
there seems scarcely room to pass. The overarching 
roof shuts out the light. The pillared aisles are dark 
and sombre. A deep-green, fernlike moss covers the 
ground with an unbroken surface. This wonderful 
moss, sometimes a foot thick, curiously intensifies 
the loneliness of the forest. Over humps and hollows 
the flawless mantle lies, deep, soft, interminable, 
here and there patterned with lighter green oxalis 
leaves, always moist, always sucking in and holding 
fast the clouds that enter, the rains that fall. Contin- 
ually saturated with the mists of heaven this ex- 
quisite monster with its insatiable pure desire be- 
comes the constantly renewing mother of the rivu- 
lets that trickle through the mossy carpet, uniting 
to descend in crystal streams to the earth below. 
This still, dark forest, its sombre aisles unlighted 
by flowers, unwarmed by the sun, covering immense 
spaces of the upper world, seems to exist for itself 
alone, to resent, as it were, the intrusion of human 
life into its mysteries. But it does not exist for itself. 
It is lonely because absorbed with the gigantic task 
of endlessly and without rest transforming the clouds 
into the life-giving streams of the plains. For man 
to slaughter the trees and tear that marvelous veil 
of moss would be to strip fertility from the cotton- 
