their rigidity. I stepped from
one slender tendon of wood to the next, expecting a bending which
never occurred. They might have been turned to stone, and even little
twigs resting on the bark often proved to have grown fast. And this
was the more unexpected because of the grace of curve and line, fold
upon fold, with no sharp angles, but as full of charm of contour as
their grays and olives were harmonious in color. Photographs showed a
little of this; sketches revealed more; but the great splendid things
themselves, devoid of similes and human imagination, were
soul-satisfying in their simplicity.

I seldom sat in one spot more than a few minutes, but climbed and
shifted, tried new seats, couches, perches, grips, sprawling out along
the tops of two parallel monsters, or slipping under their bellies,
always finding some easy way to swing up again. Two openings just
permitted me to squeeze through, and I wondered whether, in another
year, or ten, or fifty, the holes would have grown smaller. I became
imbued with the quiet joy of these roots, so that I hated to touch the
ground. Once I stepped down on the beach after something I had
dropped, and the soft yielding of the sand was so unpleasant that I
did not afterwards leave this strange mid-zone until I had to return.
Unlike Antaeus, I seemed to gain strength and poise by disassociation
with the earth.

Here and there were pockets in the folds of the sweeping draperies,
and each pocket was worth picking. When one tried to paint the roots,
these pockets seemed made expressly to take the place of palette cups,
except that now and then a crab resented the infusion of Hooker's
green with his Vandyke brown puddle, and seized the end of the brush.
The crabs were worthy tenants of such strange architecture, with
comical eyes twiddling on the end of their stalks, and their
white-mittened fists feinting and threatening as I looked into their
little dark rain or tide-pools.

I found three pockets on one wall, which seemed as if they must have
been "salted" for my benefit; and in them, as elsewhere on my beach,
the two extremes of life met. The topmost one, curiously enough,
contained a small crab, together with a large water-beetle at the
farther end. Both seemed rather self-conscious, and there was no hint
of fraternizing. The beetle seemed to be merely existing until
darkness, when he could fly to more water and better company; and the
crab appeared to be waiting for the be