In the very localities least frequented by the wasps, light, hoarse, internal rustlings seemed to issue from the trees. Were these the voices of their genii, their Dryads? No, indeed; but of their mysterious enemies, the mighty populace of the shadows, which, following up the veins of the trunk and penetrating its entire extent, work out for themselves, with patient teeth, innumerable ways and channels and galleries. Sometimes nearly a hundred thousand _scolyti_[B] (for such is their name) are found in a single tree. The sickly fir is at length reduced by their teeth to the condition of a piece of delicate lace-work. Yet the bark remains intact, and deludes us with the phantom of life. [Footnote B: A genus of _Coleoptera_.] How does the tree defend itself? Sometimes by its sap, which, while preserving its strength, asphyxiates the enemy; but more frequently it is assisted by a friend, a physician, from without--the woodpecker--which carefully auscultates it, taps and strikes it with its strong hammer, and with persevering ardour watches for and pursues the nibbling colony. Is this internal combat between the two lives, the animal and the vegetable, really understood? Of this I cannot be sure, and there are times when I think myself deceived. [Illustration] In that silence which was not silence, a something--I know not what--assured us that the dead forest was in truth alive, and on the point of breaking forth into speech. We entered it full of hope, and believing that we should discover some secret. We felt certain that to our inquiring spirit a great manifold Spirit was about to reply. Though fatigued by the walk, and in an infirm state of health, I felt great pleasure in the search I had undertaken in these pallid glooms. I loved to see before me a person deeply moved, and enthusiastically smitten by their great mysteries. Stick in hand, she advanced into this fantastic twilight, interrogating the sombre forest, and seeking, as it were, the Virgilian "golden bough." I was about to quit the scene, and seat myself in a sunny opening, when at length a more successful sounding in one of the ancient trunks brought to light a world whose existence no one would have suspected. At the summit of this trunk, cut off within a foot of the ground, you could very easily distinguish the works wrought by the _scolyti_ and weevils, the former inhabitants of the tree, in conformity to the concentric arrangement of the sap. But all this belonged to ancient history; a different condition of things now existed. These miserable _scolyti_ had perished, having undergone, like their tree, the energetic action of a great chemical transformation which excluded all life.