In this fashion the internal decomposition of the pine-tree proceeded. Slowly its substance crumbled away to dust, amidst the close smell of age and decay. Tremors of dissolution began to pass through the giant. Dull creakings ran up and down the trunk. Its sorry boughs quivered with a thin resonance, while deep-buried in the soil its roots contracted in agony. A narrow crack opened in the wood just above ground level, and gradually spread round the trunk, growing deeper as it went: while the red tree-dust trickled out through every hollowed place and floated in the air as a fine cloud, proof of dry rot and presage of coming death. Still, at the very crest there shone out golden in the sunlight that last living branch, fresh and shining in all its needles. The gracious summer had fortified all life upon earth. From a hill far away there came a waft of air, which loaded itself on its passage with the emanations of plain and field and wood, till it reached the district of the tree. Its warm soft breath kissed the giant gently, just waving the little green twig up aloft, and then passed on, as though towards an endless series of new scenes and adventures. Yet it was early checked. A line of trees, making a wall with their interwoven branches, repulsed it, flung it back with a new impulse. It became a gust, sweeping along the ground-level, raising a cloud of leaves and dust and the dried powder of decomposed wood about the base of the sequoia, into whose fissured trunk it blew strongly. The tree shuddered, spiral tremors running up its length and down again, rather as the invigorating sap had once run up and down. At the foot of the tree, where the circular crack was, these tremors were stayed. They ran together, reinforced each other, swelled into lateral shocks. A deep low warning sounded in the body of the wood, and echoed outside. For a little the huge shape shivered in the liquid air, oscillating to right and left, while the tiny plume of green at its summit described vivid curves against the blueness of the sky. Then simply, powerfully, inevitably, as in all natural decisions, came a loud rending like the last cry of an agonizing spirit, and the immense pillar bowed down and fell upon the earth, which shook under the weight, while the sky, suddenly made vacant of such bulk, seemed to leap up as the giant fell. Thick clouds of ruddy dust rose widely into the air, filling it with the damp odour of decay, while the bottom of the trunk feathered out in splinters, as the dried roots, so long hidden from the day, were torn out from both ground and wood.