Their eyes leapt absurdly and inevitably up the shafts of the trees. When the striped earth sloped the trees sprang at one angle from the slope like javelins thrown against one enemy, the sun. The sky seemed stabbed by the javelin trees. The high down-pointing cones were barbs, closely embedded in sky. The sunlight stood in fluted slanting columns hardly more ephemeral than the trees. There was an obsession of trees in Edward’s mind. Out of the corners of his eyes he could see an unceasing bustle of birds and squirrels and insects among the trees, like a hinted joke on lips that were sealed when he looked directly at them. Everything was secret. A few acres of the forest were secretly and quietly on fire. It was the spirit of fire with its eyes shut, intensely malevolent. There was but little flame; a little dagger of flame or two, as though the keeper of the savage secret could barely refrain from committing himself. Blue smoke curled from the roots in the ground; thin snakes of smoke writhed about the innocent strong trunks of the trees. The air was hot and the hanging pale scarves of lichen waved in the heat. It was an intense relief to leave the smoke behind and pass through the living, unthreatened spaces of cool forest again. There was a pause in the day at the foot of a monstrous horned tree. An experiment on the part of the Creator but not, Edward thought, a very successful one. Trees should be young and shining or they should be immortal and carry their age like a gentle green dream. The greatest sequoia of all is a horned devil with a senile brow. The weight of his thousands of years is like a torpid curse upon him. One thinks miserably of his contemporaries, Moses and the jewelled Pharaohs, and one is glad that the ancients died decently and thoroughly and are only very sparsely survived. Some of the trees on the slope—younger by a thousand years or so—were very much more splendid. The grain of their rough and rusty bark ran up in slow spirals—for ever, it seemed. No great branches drew the eye away from its climb upward to the tapering spear of the tree. Only, far up, near the sun, the little delicate branches and needles sprang out and shone like the drops of a fountain. “Why, why, why ...” said Mr. Hope, after reading the notice board at the foot of the horned tree. He gave the tree a quick congratulatory glance and said to Edward, “Say listen, you don’t get trees like that where you come from.” Edward’s mind ran home. “No,” he agreed vaguely. “Not trees like this. No notice-boardy trees like this. Primroses, of course, and what not.” “Your notice boards in Britain,” said Avery Bird, “say ‘Trespassers will be shot at sight,’ or something very like it. Our notice boards in California say ‘See here, folks, come and look at this tree,’ or some such thing.”