The thousands
of travellers who pass this way were all affected by these
unsightly monuments to one man's carelessness, proving that "Man
liveth not to himself alone."
As we emerged from that scene of heat and desolation, a prayer
trembled upon every lip and its only theme was, "Lord, help us
to be careful."
What an awful spectacle that vast stretch of burning forest must
have presented! We shall quote from Headley, who witnessed such
a scene in these mountains: "One night the whole mountain was
wrapped in a fiery mantle, a mighty bosom of fire from which
rose waving columns and lofty turrets of flame. Trees a hundred
feet high and five and six and eight feet in circumference, were
on fire from the root to the top. Vast pyramids of flame, now
surging in eddies of air that caught them, now bending as if
about to yield the struggle, then lifting superior to the foe
and dying, martyr-like, in the vast furnace. Shorn of their
glory, their flashing, trembling forms stood crisping and
writhing in the blaze till, weary of their long suffering, they
threw themselves with a sudden and hurried sweep on the funeral
pile around. From the noble pine to the bending sprout, the
trees were aflame, while the crackling underbrush seemed a fiery
network cast over the prostrate forms of the monarchs of the
forest. When the fire caught a dry stump, it ran up the huge
trunk like a serpent, and coiling around the withered branches,
shot out its fiery tongue as if in mad joy over the raging
element below; while ever and anon came a crash that
reverberated far away in the gorges--the crash of falling trees,
at the overthrow of which there went up a cloud of sparks and
cinders and ashes.
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