s of country faster than a horse. The
inhabitants must turn out and work like demons, for it is not only the
pleasant groves that are destroyed; the climate and the soil are equally
at stake, and these fires prevent the rains of the next winter and dry
up perennial fountains. California has been a land of promise in its
time, like Palestine; but if the woods continue so swiftly to perish, it
may become, like Palestine, a land of desolation.

To visit the woods while they are languidly burning is a strange piece
of experience. The fire passes through the underbrush at a run. Every
here and there a tree flares up instantaneously from root to summit,
scattering tufts of flame, and is quenched, it seems, as quickly. But
this last is only in semblance. For after this first squib-like
conflagration of the dry moss and twigs, there remains behind a
deep-rooted and consuming fire in the very entrails of the tree. The
resin of the pitch-pine is principally condensed at the base of the bole
and in the spreading roots. Thus, after the light, showy, skirmishing
flames, which are only as the match to the explosion, have already
scampered down the wind into the distance, the true harm is but
beginning for this giant of the woods. You may approach the tree from
one side, and see it, scorched indeed from top to bottom, but apparently
survivor of the peril. Make the circuit, and there, on the other side of
the column, is a clear mass of living coal, spreading like an ulcer;
while underground, to their most extended fibre, the roots are being
eaten out by fire, and the smoke is rising through the fissures to the
surface. A little while and, without a nod of warning, the huge
pine-tree snaps off short across the ground, and falls prostrate with a
crash. Meanwhile the fire continues its silent business; the roots are
reduced to a fine ash; and long afterwards, if you pass by, you will
find the earth pierced with radiating galleries, and preserving the
design of all these subterranean spurs, as though it were the mould for
a new tree instead of the print of an old one. These pitch-pines of
Monterey are, with the single exception of the Monterey cypress, the
most fantastic of forest trees. No words can give an idea of the
contortion of their growth; they might figure without change in a circle
of the nether hell as Dante pictured it; and at the rate at which trees
grow, and at which forest fires spring up and gallop through the hills
of Cali