Nothing More Helped This Impression Of Awe Than The Extreme
Darkness Beneath Those Aged Growths, And The Change In The
Sky that
introduced my entry into the silence and perfume of so vast a temple.
Great clouds, so charged with
Rain that you would have thought them
lower than the hills (and yet just missing their tops), came covering
me like a tumbled roof and gathered all around; the heat of the day
waned suddenly in their shade: it seemed suddenly as though summer was
over or as though the mountains demanded an uncertain summer of their
own, and shot the sunshine with the chill of their heights. A little
wind ran along the grass and died again. As I gained the darkness of
the first trees, rain was falling.
The silence of the interior wood was enhanced by a bare drip of water
from the boughs that stood out straight and tangled I know not how far
above me. Its gloom was rendered more tremendous by the half-light
and lowering of the sky which the ceiling of branches concealed.
Height, stillness, and a sort of expectancy controlled the memories of
the place, and I passed silently and lightly between the high columns
of the trees from night (as it seemed) through a kind of twilight
forward to a near night beyond. On every side the perspective of these
bare innumerable shafts, each standing apart in order, purple and
fragrant, merged into recesses of distance where all light
disappeared, yet as I advanced the slight gloaming still surrounded
me, as did the stillness framed in the drip of water, and beneath my
feet was the level carpet of the pine needles deadening and making
distant every tiny noise.
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