"The rain had begun in earnest again, but there was one more stop. Instead of heading back up the slope when they had reached the highway, Murrah drove the jeep under the bridge and into the forest on the other side. At once the track came to an end, and Murrah announced that they would have to get out and walk again. The damp black earth around them was incisored by deer tracks, so many of them that Quisenberry wondered aloud if the area might not be overpopulated with the animals. Not so, said Murrah; they came through the winters sleek and fat. And it was a fact that even in this spot where most undergrowth had been shaded out, what there was of it didn't look overbrowsed.
"Wisner dropped behind, absorbed in the cathedral atmosphere of the place. When he glanced around, he saw Quisenberry and Murrah some distance ahead, their backs to him, looking at something in front of them. Wisner wondered what it could be. At first all he could see was the general, now familiar, impression of gray and black trunks massed together in the gray-blue light, endlessly repeating themselves in diminishing perspective as though the whole effect were created by mirrors. In this gloom, all color merged and it took him several seconds to realize what he was staring at. Once he did, he could notice nothing else. Before him was the largest cypress he had ever seen, or could ever imagine seeing. It dwarfed all those trees around it which he had been thinking were so large.
"It was also, he began to realize, the oddest-looking cypress tree he had ever seen, not because it outdid the normally extravagant tapering, the sometimes grotesque contortions, of that habitually eccentric species, but because it rejected all of that. It was the most matter-of-fact tree in the world, a tree such as a child might draw. Its enormous girth, twenty-eight feet in circumference and at least nine feet in diameter, rose up straight as a smokestack with no visible diminution at all to a height of more than one hundred feet, at which point it abruptly stopped, the top gone, presumably as a consequence of arboreal blight and/or some long ago wind. When Wisner gazed straight up he saw that one side of the vertical shaft was interrupted, half-way up, by an immense knot, a gouty looking extrusion draped in moss and lichen, commodious enough to seat himself and his two companions for a picnic lunch. At eye level, there were small holes through which he could see that the tree was entirely hollow. Quisenberry, circling around the other side, speculated that the core of the cypress must have rotted before the first loggers came here generations before, which was how this one tree got to be left alone.
"The effect of all this monumental agedness was neither grand nor solemn; it was better than that. The tree was not only the sort of tree that a child might draw, but one that a child might imaginatively live in. Wisner felt that he had seen it somewhere before, and then dimly remembered the illustrations in his childhood storybooks -- the fortress trees built by sympathetic nature to house truant boys and girls as well as clans of elves and dwarfs."
-- Schueler, Donald G. Preserving the Pascagoula, pp. 99-100: "In the Swamp."
"Wisner dropped behind, absorbed in the cathedral atmosphere of the place. When he glanced around, he saw Quisenberry and Murrah some distance ahead, their backs to him, looking at something in front of them. Wisner wondered what it could be. At first all he could see was the general, now familiar, impression of gray and black trunks massed together in the gray-blue light, endlessly repeating themselves in diminishing perspective as though the whole effect were created by mirrors. In this gloom, all color merged and it took him several seconds to realize what he was staring at. Once he did, he could notice nothing else. Before him was the largest cypress he had ever seen, or could ever imagine seeing. It dwarfed all those trees around it which he had been thinking were so large.
"It was also, he began to realize, the oddest-looking cypress tree he had ever seen, not because it outdid the normally extravagant tapering, the sometimes grotesque contortions, of that habitually eccentric species, but because it rejected all of that. It was the most matter-of-fact tree in the world, a tree such as a child might draw. Its enormous girth, twenty-eight feet in circumference and at least nine feet in diameter, rose up straight as a smokestack with no visible diminution at all to a height of more than one hundred feet, at which point it abruptly stopped, the top gone, presumably as a consequence of arboreal blight and/or some long ago wind. When Wisner gazed straight up he saw that one side of the vertical shaft was interrupted, half-way up, by an immense knot, a gouty looking extrusion draped in moss and lichen, commodious enough to seat himself and his two companions for a picnic lunch. At eye level, there were small holes through which he could see that the tree was entirely hollow. Quisenberry, circling around the other side, speculated that the core of the cypress must have rotted before the first loggers came here generations before, which was how this one tree got to be left alone.
"The effect of all this monumental agedness was neither grand nor solemn; it was better than that. The tree was not only the sort of tree that a child might draw, but one that a child might imaginatively live in. Wisner felt that he had seen it somewhere before, and then dimly remembered the illustrations in his childhood storybooks -- the fortress trees built by sympathetic nature to house truant boys and girls as well as clans of elves and dwarfs."
-- Schueler, Donald G. Preserving the Pascagoula, pp. 99-100: "In the Swamp."
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