BIG TIMBER.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4882, 25 September 1925, Page 1

BIG TIMBER.

ON THE SLOPES OF THE ROCKIES. DOOMED TO THE AXE. For hundreds of miles south of the Alaskan frontier the Pacific coast is paralleled by the Rockies. These gaunt and glacier-covered sunimits arrest the flow of the Japanese air currents, and, extracting their moisture, precipitate it on a belt of timber unequalled in the world. Here, where the rainfall is from one hundred to two hundred inches a year, are vast forests of ispruce, cedar, hemlock, and Douglas fir, now becoming the prey of axe and saw to’ furnish raw material for great pulp mils (writes .“A.E.S.” in the “Morning Post”). For thousands of years these giant growths, from twenty to forty feet in diameter, rested in security, finding sustenance on flat seaboard lands near the mouths of rivers and on the first slopes of the foothills. Sprung from soil deep'with moss, where the giant fern lifts its fronded head- these prodigious trunks tower skyward. Their size is beyond imagining, and beneath them man is dwarfed to a pigmy. Here • are ancienta of nigh two thousand years; saplings were ♦hey when the calm ‘Christ drank at the cool’Samarian well, a hundred feet or more high when the Crusaders sailed the Aegean, two hundred feet when Shakespeare came from Stratford. three hundred when Britain faced France at Waterloo.

For all these centuries they have absorbed the sweet influences of sun and ruin, thrilled but unthreatened by wintry blasts, drawing their deeprooted strength from the brown soil and thrusting their dark and feathered tops ever towards the zenith. Beneath them broods a perpetual peace in which the mind is hushed as is hushed one’s footfall bn the mossy earth.. There are vistas of columnar perspective where giant succeeds giant in majestic symmetry, and far overhead the sky is faintly visible through a fretted canopy of spreading branches. No wind penetrates these sheltered aisles, they are untenanted by bird or beast and the only sound is a distant murmur from far above or the chuckle of a mountain stream as it bubbles darkly tow’ards the sea.

It is not possible to visit these areas, to traverse these forests, to receive their wordless and nameless message and remain unaffected. Here the cares of the exterior world become smoothed out as though yielding to some vast inarticulate caress. From towering trunk and spreading branch there seems to be distilled an essence utterly ancient, utterly potent. It filters into the mind, soothing the soul with mysterious unction. At night, when the moon rides high, the forest appears populous with vanished tribes who once passed, lightfooted, beneath this green and arching roof. No trace of them remains save an occasional arrow head or a walrus tusk most marvellously carved. But the great trees live on sanctified by age, till, in the' not distant future, the last monarch of all shall crash to earth and be borne seaward towards the mechanical jaws of a grinding mill.