of the forest--this Black Forest--it is as suave as a rolling, oily
sea. Inside only, it bristles horrific. And it terrified the Romans.

The Romans! They too seem very near. Nearer than Hindenburg or Foch or
even Napoleon. When I look across the Rhine plain, it is Rome, and the
legionaries of the Rhine that my soul notices. It must have been
wonderful to come from South Italy to the shores of this sea-like
forest: this dark, moist forest, with its enormously powerful
intensity of tree life. Now I know, coming myself from rock-dry
Sicily, open to the day.

The Romans and the Greeks found everything human. Everything had a
face, and a human voice. Men spoke, and their fountains piped an
answer.

But when the legions crossed the Rhine they found a vast impenetrable
life which had no voice. They met the faceless silence of the Black
Forest. This huge, huge wood did not answer when they called. Its
silence was too crude and massive. And the soldiers shrank: shrank
before the trees that had no faces, and no answer. A vast array of
non-human life, darkly self-sufficient, and bristling with indomitable
energy. The Hercynian wood, not to be fathomed. The enormous power of
these collective trees, stronger in their somber life even than Rome.

No wonder the soldiers were terrified. No wonder they thrilled with
horror when, deep in the woods, they found the skulls and trophies of
their dead comrades upon the trees. The trees had devoured them:
silently, in mouthfuls, and left the white bones. Bones of the mindful
Romans--and savage, preconscious trees, indomitable. The true German
has something of the sap of trees in his veins even now: and a sort of
pristine savageness, like trees, helpless, but most powerful, under
all his mentality. He is a tree-soul, and his gods are not human. His
instinct still is to nail skulls and trophies to the sacred tree, deep
in the forest. The tree of life and death, tree of good and evil, tree
of abstraction and of immense, mindless life; tree of everything
except the spirit, spirituality.

But after bone-dry Sicily, and after the gibbering of myriad people
all rattling their personalities, I am glad to be with the profound
indifference of faceless trees. Their rudimentariness cannot know why
we care for the things we care for. They have no faces, no minds and
bowels: only deep, lustful roots stretching in earth, and vast,
lissome life in air, and primeval individuality. You can sacrifice the