Anyhow, measured by human standards, the trunk of the dying giant as it lay there on the ground was huge. The wind was still rustling in its branches, though the air about them was made dense with wood-dust now. It used to be, to our mind, an immense tree ... and soon it will be nothing. Soon? Before the sequoia has given back to space the elements of which it was made, its carcass will have to rot for hundreds or thousands of years. It takes so long for all the constituents of such a tree to be resolved, for the oxygen to go back to oxygen, for the carbon to re-become carbon, the liquid to turn again into liquid. Yet this lapse of time, when the last trace of the tree has ceased to be, will have been as a second. To our fallibility it has seemed long, but eternity, which will bring the ultimate and certain destruction of all matter, recks not of a few thousand centuries. When it was alive the forest giant harboured in its branches thousands of bodies of insects. Some were crushed violently to dust by accidents. Some perished merely by lapse of time, but all in the end came to nothing: for eternity reduces everything to the same value, sooner or later--reduces them all to nothing. Our thousands of lives, magnificent or sordid, long or short, great or small, as they happen to be on earth, leave no mark in space and time. The glory or the shame of what has been bears value and meaning only in our fitful solitary dreams. Should we consider them as having never existed--all these things which have had life and have, under the law, returned to the chaos which called them forth--now only as the dust of forces and of time? The elements remain eternally unchanged, however protean their assumed shapes: perhaps what we term life and death are only their incidental phases. CHAPTER 13 _What is called Death_ The forest giant now lay low in the sunlight waiting the return of its substances to their kindred elements of time or space. For the moment the tree was dead, since it kept yet its living shape; but when nothing of it remained recognizable, it would be as if it had never been. Long and short lives, rich and poor lives, are all made equal at the moment when they have ended. Like the mass of beings and plants and things, our tree found rest in death. After so many and with so many we ask anxiously, "What is this Death?" a sempiternal, unanswered, fresh and vital question. No one has yet solved it, and probably no one will, for we cannot experience death and retain our power to register its effects. Sometimes we can feel it coming near, or imagine we do, and at that time may try to describe its onset; but such an experience has nothing in common with veritable death. To know it, and to impart our knowledge of it to others, would entail our having control of our faculties, whereas death's first act is to deprive us of just that control.