The trees have each their own voice--a degree of flexibility or length of needles upon which the wind harps to produce its characteristic note. The traveller in the dark of mountain nights knows his way among them as by the street cries of his own city. The creaking of the firs, the sough of the long-leaved pines, the whispering whistle of the lodgepole pine, the delicate frou-frou of the redwoods in a wind, these come out for him in the darkness with the night scent of moth-haunted flowers. But there is one tree that for the footer of the mountain trails is voiceless; it speaks no doubt, but it speaks only to the austere mountain-heads, to the mindful winds and the watching stars. It speaks as men speak to one another and are not heard by the little ants crawling over their boots. This is the "big tree," the sequoia. In something less than a score of forest patches about the rim of the Twin Valleys, the sequoia abides, out of some possible preglacial period, out of some past of which nothing is left to us but the fading memory of the "giants in those days." The age of individual big trees can be computed in terms of human history. There are evidences written in the rings of these that they endured the drouth which made the famine in the days of Ahab the king, against which Elijah prayed. These are growing trees whose seeds are fertile. One might make a very dramatic collocation of the rise and fall of empires against the life period of a single sequoia, and that would be easier than to transcribe by mere phrases the impression of one of these green towers of silence on the sense. Single and deeply corrugated as a Corinthian column, with only a lightly-branched crown for a capital, they spire for five thousand years or so, and then the leaf-crown becomes rounded to a dome in which the winds breed. Warm days of Spring, their young nestling zephyrs come fluttering down the deep wells of shade to shake the saplings of a hundred years. In Summer the fine-leafed foliage catches the sun like spray, diffusing vaporous blueness; but the majesty of their gigantic trunks is incommunicable. After a while the stifling sense of awe breaks before it, and you go on with your small affairs as children will go on playing even in the royal presence. [Illustration: BLUE LAKE, LAKE COUNTY] The name _Sequoia_ is one of the few cheering notes among our habitual botanical stupidities--an attempt to express quality as it is humanly measured in a name. There was once an American Cadmus, Sequoyah, a Cherokee who invented an Indian alphabet and taught his tribe to read. Seeing them outnumbered in their own territory, he started west with the idea of founding a great Indian empire. He was last seen trailing north across the desert and was heard of no more. Tradition has it that he reached the forest of the upper Kern River and gave the trees his name. At least no botanist with his nose in a book has usurped it.