The seed had now quitted the forest for an immense, bare, open desert, a new prospect of the world. Here were no rustling grasses nor fluttering leaves, no clashing together of dry branches, no birds to sing nor beasts to howl: none of that rich, wide, strange stirring of the mighty jungle, whose breathing and mysterious rumour was choked (like the cries of its animals and the laboured thrumming of the winds through its vaulted trees) by the rank smell of sap and the exhalations of dead leaves and teeming soil. A light wind blew the seed across the sand, for hours driving it about, backwards, forwards, to right or left, sometimes in great circles, and sometimes stationary against a stone till a new gust should send it forth again, past its obstacle, on yet another abandoned desultory course. The world was overspread with an intense blue, from which light seemed to fall in sheets. Later this brilliant blue turned to a bleeding red, through which the sun's golden arrows slid into violet bands and faded gently. An exquisite freshness fell from heaven as the purple mildness of evening came down upon the world. Yet the pine-seed could not rest. The wind, as it became sweeter, became stronger, and sent it again across the sand-spaces of its former road, while about it a new life began to stir. Insects which had been hiding all day danced over it, or circled violently about it, or stopped to smell it, or tried in vain to crack open its hard shell. Their grotesque shadows ran blackly over the silver sand. At times green shining specks came near, hovered a moment, and vanished in a soft shiver of wings. All the while the pine-seed resigned itself with unconquerable patience to its senseless course. Dawn came. The sun climbed high in the heavens. Yesterday's burning blue again hemmed in the world; and after it came night and dawn, and day and night again once more. In the same wide desert the pine-seed rolled about, the sport of the same winds, pitting against their caprice the constant apathetic endurance of its little, round, hard body. So weeks and months flowed by, times which for other things or other beings elsewhere may have been momentous; but which for the sequoia seed were all alike. Then one day the sky darkened, and rain began to fall. The first slow heavy drops seemed to nail the seed to the sand, and whole days passed; but in the end, just at twilight, water began to trickle over the ground and to collect in plashes here and there over the huge sandy surface.