Dense Forest Quotes

The family is like the forest: if you are outside it is dense; if you are inside you see that each tree has its own position.

However much you feed a wolf, it always looks to the forest. We are all wolves of the dense forest of Eternity.

A person was like a dense forest thicket, overgrown with a twisting mess of vines, weeds, shrubs, saplings, and flowers. No person was one single emotion; no person had only one desire. They had many, and usually those desires conflicted with one another like two rosebushes fighting for the same patch of ground.

Do not try to save the whole world or do anything grandiose. Instead, create a clearing in the dense forest of your life and wait there patiently, until the song that is yours alone to sing falls into your open cupped hands and you recognize and greet it. Only then will you know how to give yourself to this world so worthy of rescue.

I was born in a place humans call central Africa, in a dense rain forest so beautiful, no crayons could ever do it justice.

Tulips, I thought, staring at the jumble of letters before me. Had the ancient Greeks known them under a different name, if they’d had tulips at all? The letter psi, in Greek, is shaped like a tulip. All of a sudden, in the dense alphabet forest of the page, little black tulips began to pop up in a quick, random pattern like falling raindrops.

In the hour before a thunderstorm, the color of the forest deepens: the pine needles take on a dense vibrant greenness they possess at no other time, the slender trunks go black, and the leaden sky above sinks lower by the minute.

If only they let me, I'll go right into the dense forest where you can't find your way. And where the honey-sipping hummingbird rocks himself on the end of the thinnest branch, I will flower out as a champa.

When the world of man collapses in ruin, beauty will take over. The trees shall grow again where there were streets; the flowers will again cover the meadow that is now a dank field of hovels. That shall be the purpose of the Satanic master, to see the wild grass and the dense forest cover up all trace of the once great cities until nothing remains.

No genuine book has a first page. Like the rustling of a forest, it is begotten God knows where, and it grows and it rolls, arousing the dense wilds of the forest until suddenly, in the very darkest, most stunned and panicked moment, it rolls to its end and begins to speak with all the treetops at once.

You must be swift as the wind, dense as the forest, rapacious as fire, steadfast like a mountain, mysterious as night and mighty as thunder.

Luckily, the forest was so dense that the two escaped without injury, though one of the men peed in his pants.

It was a though we’d been living for a year in a dense grove of old trees, a cluster of firs, each with its own rhythm and character, from whom our bodies had drawn not just shelter but perhaps even a kind of guidance as we grew into a family.

Are we fruit of the same tree? No - Angela is everything I wanted to be and never was. What is she? She's the waves of the sea. While I'm the dense and gloomy forest. I'm in the depths. Angela scatters in sparkling fragments. Angela is my vertigo. Angela is my reverberation.

Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with trees up close but from outside, from the empty meadow, you see its true limits.

In temperate countries, where man had succeeded in putting most forms of nature save his own under a reasonable degree of restraint, the status of the triffid was thus made quite clear. But in the tropics, particularly in the dense forest areas, they quickly became a scourge.

Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with the trees up close but from the outside, from the empty meadow, you see its true limits. Being free had nothing to do with chains or how much space you had. On the plantation, she was not free, but she moved unrestricted on its acres, tasting the air and tracing the summer stars. The place was big in its smallness. Here, she was free of her master but slunk around a warren so tiny she couldn't stand.

I say “courage,” but it may be something else. Those who have not taken this step, who have not come to terms with themselves, are not necessarily frightened, they are perhaps helpless, disoriented, lost as one is in the middle of a forest that’s too dark or dense or vast.

THOREAU KNOWS (The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.) Making sense of things, Trying to track Nine pebbles of sadness To their source. Sly crows Stole them a mile back, But Thoreau knows I should walk anyway Under sun-coined trees Thick with wood-thrush song Till I reach undergrowth Dense and itchy with the past Till the air cools and I am near Enough to con crow talk Mouth fulls, stories dark.

Every morning, in his extreme loneliness, the Laughing Man stole off (he was as graceful on his feet as a cat) to the dense forest surrounding the bandits' hideout. There he befriended any number and species of animals: dogs, white mice, eagles, lions, boa constrictors, wolves. Moreover, he removed his mask and spoke to them, softly, melodiously, in their own tongues. They did not think him ugly.

watch as the dense forest shifts from chrome yellow to a translucent saffron and then slowly fades through ocher to umber to gloom.

Tall and built like a dense forest, Clint's broad shoulders made a girl want to learn how to scale trees. Except me. I wanted to start a forest fire.

Some people believe that they are guided by forces, that the universe cuts paths for them through the dense forest of life, showing them where to go.

This garden was no longer a garden, it was a colossal thicket, that is to say, something as impenetrable as a forest, as densely populated as a city, as tremulous as a nest, as tenebrous as a cathedral, as aromatic as a bouquet, as lonely as a tomb, as much a living thing as a crowd.

She was the lady of the woods, Picking up apples without knowing where she stood, But was not afraid although alone with no men near, She dared to go into dense forest without fear, I went after her as my spirit gave in, She sat under a tree with apple in her hand, Her love was free as she turned and looked at me as a friend, We both ate the apple as she accomplished her mission, Trust me women are nothing but an illusion.

Those who have not taken this step, who have not come to terms with themselves, are not necessarily frightened, they are perhaps helpless, disoriented, lost as one is in the middle of a forest that’s too dark or dense or vast.

Those who have not taken this step, who have not come to terms with themselves, are not necessarily frightened, they are perhaps helpless, disoriented, lost as one is in the middle of a forest that's too dark or dense or vast.

When the jīva, reflected consciousness, has its inert association with the body totally destroyed and ignited by the fire of jñāna, it burns in the huge and extensive cremation ground, the cidākāśa. The vision of this excellent effulgence is similar to the sight of an unbounded conflagration that rages when a vast forest, dense with dried trees, catches fire and spreads in all directions.

If you’ve never experienced anxiety, you might find it difficult to understand what that feels like. I can throw any number of clichés and similes at you: it’s like trying to find your way out of a dark and dense forest, only to keep circling back to the same point you started from; it feels like being caught in a washing machine, disorientating and dizzy-making and like you’re always on the precipice of drowning; it’s like a carnival tent full of distorting mirrors, and you’re too terrified to look into any of them because you’re afraid your own reflection might assume a life of its own and start to mock you. It’s like all of these things at once and that’s an easy way to visualise it. But the simple and most universal truth is that anxiety just makes you feel incredibly, desperately alone. I

But never, among all the cities I have wandered over the years, cities all over the earth, did I feel and smell and sense anything quite like the verb that is Chicago; and always, no matter how many years passed, I could hear and see and touch something inside me that only Chicago has and is, some intricate combination of flat sharp light off the lake grappling with dense light from the plains to the west, the fields to the south, the forests to the north.

I had never felt that Egypt was really Africa, but now that our route had taken us across the Sahara, I could look down from my window seat and see trees, and bushes, rivers and dense forest. It all began here. The jumble of poverty-stricken children sleeping in rat-infested tenements or abandoned cars. The terrifying moan of my grandmother, ‘Bread of Heaven, Bread of Heaven, feed me till I want no more.’ The drugged days and alcoholic nights of men for whom hope had not been born. The loneliness of women who would never know appreciation or a mite’s share of honor. Here, there, along the banks of that river, someone was taken, tied with ropes, shackled with chains, forced to march for weeks carrying the double burden of neck irons and abysmal fear. In that large clump of trees, looking like wood moss from the plane’s great height, boys and girls had been hunted like beasts, caught and tethered together. Sacrificial lambs on the altar of greed. America’s period of orgiastic lynchings had begun on yonder broad savannah.

All writers are like bomb-throwers, whether they attack with dense academic prose or jazzy riffs of stream-of-consciousness writing.

The fog lying on Myrkvid Forest was dense and had an irregular shape, calling to mind a heap of whipped cream squeezed onto a cake by a lunatic cook.

of a runaway? Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with trees up close but from outside, from the

It is always the same forest, always as dense as ever. And so, my son, put aside the branches as best you can, that's all.

Although the disappearance of the true wildwood [in the British Isles] occurred in the Neolithic period, before humanity began to record its own history, creation myths in almost all cultures look fabulously back to a forested earth. In the ancient Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, the quest-story which begins world literature, Gilgamesh sets out on his journey from Uruk to the Cedar Mountains, where he has been charged to slay the Huwawa, the guardian of the forest. The Roman empire also defined itself against the forests in which its capital city was first established, and out of which its founders, the wolf-suckled twins, emerged. It was the Roman Empire which would proceed to destroy the dense forests of the ancient world.

Humans are not made for sitting at a desk all day. We have been evolving for millions of years to hunt animals through dense forest and vast plains. To walk huge distances in search of water. To spend hours searching for edible fruit to bring home to our families. The sedentary lifestyle many of us lead these days is no more than a by-product of the last few centuries.

I think: In the end, he remained hidden all his life. In spite of the great departure, the ambitious effort to forge a new existence, he fell back into all the same traps: shame, the impossibility of sharing a love that endures. I think of all the men I met in bookstores, men who confided in me about having lied for years and years, before finally resolving to leave everything to start all over again (they will recognize themselves if they read these lines). Thomas never found their courage. I say “courage,” but it may be something else. Those who have not taken this step, who have not come to terms with themselves, are not necessarily frightened, they are perhaps helpless, disoriented, lost as one is in the middle of a forest that’s too dark or dense or vast.

The road goes west out of the village, past open pine woods and gallberry flats. An eagle's nest is a ragged cluster of sticks in a tall tree, and one of the eagles is usually black and silver against the sky. The other perches near the nest, hunched and proud, like a griffon. There is no magic here except the eagles. Yet the four miles to the Creek are stirring, like the bleak, portentous beginning of a good tale. The road curves sharply, the vegetation thickens, and around the bend masses into dense hammock. The hammock breaks, is pushed back on either side of the road, and set down in its brooding heart is the orange grove. Any grove or any wood is a fine thing to see. But the magic here, strangely, is not apparent from the road. It is necessary to leave the impersonal highway, to step inside the rusty gate and close it behind. By this, an act of faith is committed, through which one accepts blindly the communion cup of beauty. One is now inside the grove, out of one world and in the mysterious heart of another. Enchantment lies in different things for each of us. For me, it is in this: to step out of the bright sunlight into the shade of orange trees; to walk under the arched canopy of their jadelike leaves; to see the long aisles of lichened trunks stretch ahead in a geometric rhythm; to feel the mystery of a seclusion that yet has shafts of light striking through it. This is the essence of an ancient and secret magic. It goes back, perhaps, to the fairy tales of childhood, to Hansel and Gretel, to Babes in the Wood, to Alice in Wonderland, to all half-luminous places that pleased the imagination as a child. It may go back still farther, to racial Druid memories, to an atavistic sense of safety and delight in an open forest. And after long years of spiritual homelessness, of nostalgia, here is that mystic loveliness of childhood again. Here is home. An old thread, long tangled, comes straight again.

I believe it is customary,” the duke said, his tone low and a bit ominous, “for a guardian to spout vague threats to his ward’s new husband should that husband bring any harm to his new wife.” James nodded, glancing quickly at the duke’s right boot, where he’d learned a dagger was always sheathed. “I, however, do not make vague threats.” The duke’s eyes narrowed. “Should you show yourself in any way less than worthy of the trust Daphne has placed in you, you will find yourself swinging from the gibbet at Falstone Castle, taken down regularly to be beaten, then locked in irons in the dungeon and placed in the room I refer to as the Rat’s Nest, where the vermin will be delighted to make your better acquaintance. You will next be invited to join me in my vast, dense forest, where I will leave you for the wolves to chew on.

What a world it is, Cora thought, that makes a living prison into your only haven. Was she out of bondage or in its web: how to describe the status of a runaway? Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with trees up close but from outside, from the empty meadow, you see its true limits. Being free had nothing to do with chains or how much space you had. On the plantation, she was not free, but she moved unrestricted on its acres, tasting the air and tracing the summer stars. The place was big in its smallness. Here, she was free of her master but slunk around a warren so tiny she couldn't stand.

The second explanation is that by the time Sapiens reached Australia, they had already mastered fire agriculture. Faced with an alien and threatening environment, it seems that they deliberately burned vast areas of impassable thickets and dense forests to create open grasslands, which attracted more easily hunted game, and were better suited to their needs. They thereby completely changed the ecology of large parts of Australia

Beowulf’s picture was far more elaborate than those of his siblings, and it did need a bit more work coloring in the background, but the gist of it was on full, frightening view. In the sky: a full moon, its eerie glow partially obscured by dark, swirling clouds. In the foreground: the dense, ferny undergrowth of a forest, bordered by a few gnarled tree trunks rising upward. In the center of the page: an old woman, wrapped in a cloak. Her mouth hung open in a leering smile, and her teeth were large and razor sharp, with a prominent set of gleaming white incisors. From the back of her shroudlike garments poked a long, wolfish tail. Cassiopeia and Alexander clapped and barked with admiration, but Penelope’s skin went cold.

Most of the great cities were gone, but other points of interest had appeared in their places. In Vermont there was a dense forest, built up around a place called ORPHANHENGE; in New Hampshire there was a spot marked THE TREE HOUSE OF THE MIND. A little north of Boston, there was something called LOVECRAFT KEYHOLE; it was a crater in the rough shape of a padlock. In Maine, around the Lewiston/Auburn/Derry area, there was a place called PENNYWISE CIRCUS. A narrow highway titled THE NIGHT ROAD led south, reddening the farther it went, until it was a line of blood trickling into Florida.

In Views of Nature Humboldt showed how nature could have an influence on people’s imagination. Nature, he wrote, was in a mysterious communication with our ‘inner feelings’. A clear blue sky, for example, triggers different emotions than a heavy blanket of dark clouds. Tropical scenery, densely filled with banana and palm trees, has a different effect than an open forest of white-stemmed slender birches. What we might take for granted today – that there is a correlation between the external world and our mood – was a revelation to Humboldt’s readers. Poets had engaged with such ideas but never a scientist.

Traces of historical associations can long outlast actual contact. In the dense, subtropical forests from India across to the South China Sea, venomous snakes are common, and there is always an advantage in pretending to be something dangerous. The slow loris, a weird, nocturnal primate, has a number of unusual features that, taken together, seem to be mimicking spectacled cobras. They move in a sinuous, serpentine way through the branches, always smooth and slow. When threatened, they raise their arms up behind their head, shiver and hiss, their wide, round eyes closely resembling the markings on the inside of the spectacled cobra’s hood. Even more remarkably, when in this position, the loris has access to glands in its armpit which, when combined with saliva, can produce a venom capable of causing anaphylactic shock in humans. In behaviour, colour and even bite, the primate has come to resemble the snake, a sheep in wolf’s clothing. Today, the ranges of the loris and cobras do not overlap, but climate reconstructions reaching back tens of thousands of years suggest that once they would have been similar. It is possible that the loris is an outdated imitation artist, stuck in an evolutionary rut, compelled by instinct to act out an impression of something neither it nor its audience has ever seen.

Depending on the places we passed, the night around us shaded from ink black to red to purple to a washed-out yellow that hung like gauze in front of the dark, like you could see the dark sitting under the light, and then it would be back to ink black, and the air would change smells from sea salt to pine pulp to ammonia and burning oil. Trees and marshland crowded us and we passed over the Atchafalaya Basin, a long bridge suspended over a liquid murk, and I thought about the dense congestion of vines and forest when I was a kid, how the green and leafy things had seemed so full of shadows, and how it had felt like half the world was hidden in those shadows.

...God knew that I had some fine-tuning to do and obstacles to overcome before things could flow. I had to first walk through the forest, which had its periods of dense brush as well as wonderful moments where life filtered beautifully through the trees, before I could get to the meadow where I had a much clearer understanding of God.

Life hasn’t just begun. Art never had a beginning. Always, until the moment of its stopping, it was constantly there. It is infinite. It is here, at this moment, behind me and inside me, and, as if the doors of an Assembly Hall were suddenly flung open, I am immersed in its fresh, headlong omnilocality and omnitemporality, as if an oath of allegiance were to be sworn without delay. No genuine book has a first page. Like the rustling of a forest, it is begotten God knows where, and it grows and it rolls, arousing the dense wilds of the forest until suddenly, in the very darkest, most stunned and panicked moment, it rolls to its end and begins to speak with all the treetops at once.

They bear down upon Westminster, the ghost-consecrated Abbey, and the history-crammed Hall, through the arches of the bridge with a rush as the tide swelters round them; the city is buried in a dusky gloom save where the lights begin to gleam and trail with lurid reflections past black velvety- looking hulls - a dusky city of golden gleams. St. Paul's looms up like an immense bowl reversed, squat, un-English, and undignified in spite of its great size; they dart within the sombre shadows of the Bridge of Sighs, and pass the Tower of London, with the rising moon making the sky behind it luminous, and the crowd of shipping in front appear like a dense forest of withered pines, and then mooring their boat at the steps beyond, with a shuddering farewell look at the eel-like shadows and the glittering lights of that writhing river, with its burthen seen and invisible, they plunge into the purlieus of Wapping. ("The Phantom Model")

Was she out of bondage or in its web: how to describe the status of a runaway? Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with trees up close but from outside, from the empty meadow, you see its true limits. Being free had nothing to do with chains or how much space you had. On the plantation, she was not free, but she moved unrestricted on its acres, tasting the air and tracing the summer stars. The place was big in its smallness. Here, she was free of her master but slunk around a warren so tiny she couldn't stand.

Our house is full of tulips, if you want any,” said Charles inexplicably. “What do you mean?” “I mean, before the snow got too deep, we went outside and brought them in. Everything’s full of them. The water glasses, even.” Tulips, I thought, staring at the jumble of letters before me. Had the ancient Greeks known them under a different name, if they’d had tulips at all? The letter psi, in Greek, is shaped like a tulip. All of a sudden, in the dense alphabet forest of the page, little black tulips began to pop up in a quick, random pattern like falling raindrops.

Chapter 3, The Dark Forest....The sound of flowing water echoed in the distance and then the path converged upon a creek full of fast, rippling, white water cascading over brown and red colored rocks. Moss dangled across the pathway and swung back and forth as the trespassers moved under the green vegetation. Bright yellow fingers of sunlight attempted to filter through the dense tundra to touch the moist earth until finally, the appendages of light disappeared completely. “Come children, this way,” called Mrs. Beetle leading her group over a moldy, moss-laden, wood bridge.

For the Cambrian Mountains were once densely forested. The story of what happened to them and – at differing rates – to the uplands of much of Europe is told by a fine-grained pollen core taken from another range of Welsh hills, the Clwydians, some forty miles to the north.3 A pollen core is a tube of soil extracted from a place where sediments have been laid down steadily for a long period, ideally a lake or a bog in which layers of peat have accumulated. Each layer traps the pollen that rains unseen onto the earth, as well as the carbon particles which allow archaeologists to date it.

What a world it is, Cora thought, that makes a living prison into your only haven. Was she out of bondage or in its web: how to describe the status of a runaway? Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with trees up close but from outside, from the empty meadow, you see its true limits. Being free had nothing to do with chains or how much space you had. On the plantation, she was not free, but she moved unrestricted on its acres, tasting the air and tracing the summer stars. The place was big in its smallness. Here, she was free of her master but slunk around a warren so tiny she couldn’t stand.

Fir, cedar, pines, oaks, and maples densely timbered this section. But it was the redwoods that never failed to fill him with awe. Their feathery-looking needles and reddish bark. The way they stretched up to incredible heights and the sheer magnitude of their circumferences. How long ago had God planted their seeds? Hundreds of years? Thousands? As he stood amongst those mighty giants, he realized the land wasn’t his at all. It was God’s. God had formed and planted the seeds. He’d tended the soil and caused it to rain. He’d needed no man. Least of all Joe. Yet over and over Joe had thought of this as his own. My land. My logging camp. My house. My woman. My everything. Picking up his ax, he returned to his work. But in his mind, he reviewed a list of men in the Bible who’d left everything they held dear for parts unknown. Abraham. Jacob. Joseph. Moses. Even a woman. Esther. In every case, their circumstances were much more severe than his. God hadn’t commanded Joe to leave his land, though he’d prayed for guidance. Fasted. Read his Bible. But God had remained silent. Joe simply assumed God was letting him choose. But no matter what he chose, none of it was really his. It was all God’s. And God was sharing it with him. So which did he want? Both. Like a spoiled child, he definitely wanted both. But if he could only have one, wouldn’t he still be a man blessed? Yes. And he’d praise God and thank Him. But that didn’t immediately make the grief shrivel up and blow away. Eyeing where he wanted the tree to fall, he adjusted his stance. I want Anna, Lord. I choose Anna. Yet as long as he lived, he’d always miss this land. He’d miss the Territory. He’d miss the logging. He’d miss his friends. The cypress began to pop and splinter. Jumping away, he braced his feet, threw back his head, and shouted with everything he had. “Timber-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r!” The tree wavered, then crashed to the forest floor. Noise resounded through the copse. The ground shook. Debris flew. Before any of it settled, Joe fell to his knees, doubled over, and sobbed.

Only birds and the chittering and rustling of small animals sounded as I entered the still green western forest. I'd never ridden through these woods on my hunts with Lucien. There was no path here, nothing tame about it. Oaks, elms, and beeches intertwined in a thick weave, almost strangling the trickle of sunlight that crept in through the dense canopy. The moss-covered earth swallowed any sound I made. Old- this forest was ancient. And alive, in a way that I couldn't describe but could only feel, deep in the marrow of my bones. Perhaps I was the first human in five hundred years to walk beneath those heavy dark branches, to inhale the freshness of spring leaves masking the damp, thick rot.

I’m a lifelong environmentalist. My voice piped at age ten: “I give my pledge as an American to save and faithfully to defend from waste the natural resources of my country—its air, soil, and minerals, its forests, waters, and wildlife.” I got infected by that Conservation Pledge through the magazine Outdoor Life and proceeded to paste it on everything and everyone around me. Since the concept of pledge has long been rendered meaningless by the surreal Pledge of Allegiance that American schoolchildren have to recite, what I meant in 1948—and mean now—is: “I declare my intent to save and defend from waste the world’s natural resources—its air, soil, and minerals, its forests, waters, and wildlife.

almost forty square kilometers of woodland had been killed outright almost immediately. Within ten days, the dense stands of pine lining the main route between Pripyat and the station turned an unusual color, as their foliage changed gradually from deep green to coppery red. The soldiers and scientists who sped down this road had no need to peer from the observation ports of their armored personnel carriers to know they had entered the “Red Forest”; even shielded by armor plate and bulletproof glass, the needles of their radiometers began to swing wildly amid the extraordinary levels of contamination. The forest posed such a threat that it, too, would soon be mown down by combat engineers and buried in concrete-

Little heard of, Dakar with a population of over a million people is the capital and largest city of Senegal. Counting the surrounding area, the population would go well over 2,000,000. This would be our last landing for fuel, before our arrival in Liberia. Our DC-6 took a long turn over the Atlantic and made a slow decent to the runway of the “Aéroport international de Dakar” just north of Dakar. The Portuguese founded Dakar in 1444, as a base for the export of slaves. Dakar came under French rule in 1872 and was the capital of the Mali Federation for a year after 1959. On August 20, 1960, it became the capital of Senegal. It is here that the sand dunes of the North African desert, gives way to the dense tropical rain forests of Equatorial Africa.

After that, we don't talk much until she brings out a ginger cake from the larder. "An old family recipe," she says. "I've been experimenting with the quantities of cloves and Jamaica ginger. Tell me what you think." And she pushes a slice toward me. I try not to gobble for it, for I am starving. "The most important thing with this cake is to beat in every ingredient, one by one, with the back of a wooden spoon," she says. "Simply throwing everything in together and then beating produces a most unsuccessful cake. I know because my first attempt was as heavy as a brick---quite indigestible!" She gives a rueful smile and asks if I think it needs more ginger. I feel the crumb, dense and dark, melt on my tongue. My mouth floods with warmth and spice and sweetness. As I swallow, something sharp and clean seems to lift through my nose and throat until my head swims. "I can see you like it." Miss Eliza watches me and smiles. And then I blurt something out. Something I know Reverend Thorpe and his wife would not like. But it's too late, the words jump from my throat of their own accord. "I can taste an African heaven, a forest full of dark earth and heat." The smile on Miss Eliza's face stretches a little wider and her eyes grow brighter. And this gives me the courage to ask a question that's nothing to do with my work. "What is the flavor that cuts through it so keenly, so that it sings a high note on my tongue?" She stares at me with her forget-me-not eyes. "It's the lightly grated rinds of two fresh lemons!

But this isn't standard Japanese picnic fare: not a grain of rice or a pickled plum in sight. Instead, they fill the varnished wooden tables with thick slices of crusty bread, wedges of weeping cheese, batons of hard salamis, and slices of cured ham. To drink, bottles of local white wine, covered in condensation, and high-alcohol microbews rich in hops and local iconography. From the coastline we begin our slow, dramatic ascent into the mountains of Hokkaido. The colors bleed from broccoli to banana to butternut to beet as we climb, inching ever closer to the heart of autumn. My neighbors, an increasingly jovial group of thirtysomethings with a few words of English to spare, pass me a glass of wine and a plate of cheese, and I begin to feel the fog dissipate. We stop at a small train station in the foothills outside of Ginzan, and my entire car suddenly empties. A husband-and-wife team has set up a small stand on the train platform, selling warm apple hand pies made with layers of flaky pastry and apples from their orchard just outside of town. I buy one, take a bite, then immediately buy there more. Back on the train, young uniformed women flood the cars with samples of Hokkaido ice cream. The group behind me breaks out in song, a ballad, I'm later told, dedicated to the beauty of the season. Everywhere we go, from the golden fields of empty cornstalks to the dense forest thickets to the rushing rivers that carve up this land like the fat of a Wagyu steak, groups of camouflaged photographers lie in wait, tripods and shutter releases ready, hoping to capture the perfect photo of the SL Niseko steaming its way through the hills of Hokkaido.

Archaeological studies have documented how beginning around four thousand years ago, a new culture spread out of the region at the border of Nigeria and Cameroon in west-central Africa. People from this culture lived at the boundary of the forest and expanding savanna and developed a highly productive set of crops that was capable of supporting dense populations.15 By about twenty-five hundred years ago they had spread as far as Lake Victoria in eastern Africa and mastered iron toolmaking technology,16 and by around seventeen hundred years ago they had reached southern Africa.17 The consequence of this expansion is that the great majority of people in eastern, central, and southern Africa speak Bantu languages, which are most diverse today in present-day Cameroon, consistent with the theory that proto-Bantu languages originated there and were spread by the culture that also

Rice paddies climb the hillsides in wet, verdant staircases, dense woodlands trade space with geometric farmscapes, tiny Shinto shrines sprout like mushrooms in Noto forests. Villages seem to materialize from nowhere- wedged into valleys, perched atop hills, finessed into coastal corners. Pull over, climb out of your car, breathe deep for a taste of the finest air that will ever enter your lungs: green as a high mountain, salty and sweet, with just a whisper of decay in the finish. Noto gained its reputation as the Kingdom of Fermentation because of this air. For most of its history, Noto was cut off from the rest of Japan, forced into a subsistence model that in many ways endures today. That was possible not only because of the bounty of Noto's fertile environment of trees, grasslands, fresh water, and sea, but because the air is rich with humidity that encourages the growth of healthy bacteria, the building blocks of fermentation.

Have you ever been in a place where history becomes tangible? Where you stand motionless, feeling time and importance press around you, press into you? That was how I felt the first time I stood in the astronaut garden at OCA PNW. Is it still there? Do you know it? Every OCA campus had – has, please let it be has – one: a circular enclave, walled by smooth white stone that towered up and up until it abruptly cut off, definitive as the end of an atmosphere, making room for the sky above. Stretching up from the ground, standing in neat rows and with an equally neat carpet of microclover in between, were trees, one for every person who’d taken a trip off Earth on an OCA rocket. It didn’t matter where you from, where you trained, where your spacecraft launched. When someone went up, every OCA campus planted a sapling. The trees are an awesome sight, but bear in mind: the forest above is not the garden’s entry point. You enter from underground. I remember walking through a short tunnel and into a low-lit domed chamber that possessed nothing but a spiral staircase leading upward. The walls were made of thick glass, and behind it was the dense network you find below every forest. Roots interlocking like fingers, with gossamer fungus sprawled symbiotically between, allowing for the peaceful exchange of carbon and nutrients. Worms traversed roads of their own making. Pockets of water and pebbles decorated the scene. This is what a forest is, after all. Don’t believe the lie of individual trees, each a monument to its own self-made success. A forest is an interdependent community. Resources are shared, and life in isolation is a death sentence. As I stood contemplating the roots, a hidden timer triggered, and the lights faded out. My breath went with it. The glass was etched with some kind of luminescent colourant, invisible when the lights were on, but glowing boldly in the dark. I moved closer, and I saw names – thousands upon thousands of names, printed as small as possible. I understood what I was seeing without being told. The idea behind Open Cluster Astronautics was simple: citizen-funded spaceflight. Exploration for exploration’s sake. Apolitical, international, non-profit. Donations accepted from anyone, with no kickbacks or concessions or promises of anything beyond a fervent attempt to bring astronauts back from extinction. It began in a post thread kicked off in 2052, a literal moonshot by a collective of frustrated friends from all corners – former thinkers for big names gone bankrupt, starry-eyed academics who wanted to do more than teach the past, government bureau members whose governments no longer existed. If you want to do good science with clean money and clean hands, they argued, if you want to keep the fire burning even as flags and logos came down, if you understand that space exploration is best when it’s done in the name of the people, then the people are the ones who have to make it happen.

He broke off because of an ugly little sucking sound that ended in a tiny plop. In the hazy glow from the nobles’ quarter they saw a horridly supernatural sight: the Mouser’s bloody dagger poised above Gis’s punctured eye socket, supported only by a coiling white tentacle of the fog which had masked their attackers and which had now grown still more dense, as if it had sucked supreme nutriment—as indeed it had—from its dead servitors in their dying. Eldritch dreads woke in the Mouser and Fafhrd: dreads of the lightning that slays from the storm-cloud, of the giant sea-serpent that strikes from the sea, of the shadows that coalesce in the forest to suffocate the mighty man lost, of the black smoke-snake that comes questing from the wizard’s fire to strangle. All around them was a faint clattering of steel against cobble: other fog-tentacles were lifting the four dropped swords and Gis’s knife, while yet others were groping at that dead cutthroat’s belt for his undrawn weapons. It was as if some great ghost squid from the depths of the Inner Sea were arming itself for combat.

a forest has grown between us in the first silences, little leaves and shoots grew, still so small that we could crush them if we chose, but we stayed silent, never walking the space between us, never crunching underfoot the buds and the grass that were growing there with every month that passed, our untravelled distance became thorny with the beginnings of a tree that blocked my way, and i didn’t have the courage to travel that space between us. i felt tired thinking of scratching knees on tall thickets when the seasons changed and changed and changed and the hedges and brambles thickened, to walk to you would be to take a chainsaw and fight my way through what time had done to the space between us until one day, the space between us, so solid with life in the middle, so thick with wide trunks and leaves, so green and dense and dark, had closed into a wall and i could no longer see you on the other side to travel that distance between us now would be to risk my life and what if i cleared a path, fought my way through that forest only to find on the other side that you’re not there? m x

He plunged into the foliage, and was swept into a humid, wet world of towering trees, animal chirps and thick ferns. After a few steps, he turned, and could barely make out the village. He walked a few more steps. He could see nothing now except for the thick trees and long ferns and grasses that surrounded him. He was enveloped into the confined space between trees, surrounded by the jungle heat and staccato chirps. He turned in the direction of the village, but could only see thick, dense trees. Hoping his sense of direction had not been muddled, he turned back around to the direction of the alleged ocean, and kept walking. Now the calls he heard sounded more and more strange. How far had he walked by now? The jungle, or rain forest, whatever it was, did not relent, and he kept on weaving into narrow gaps between the sturdy ferns and towering trees, pressing onwards. This continued for a seemingly oppressive amount of time, and he began to doubt his decision. To come to this place. To take a chance with his life, which was going in the right direction. Why couldn’t he be happy with the normal and mundane, he cursed, scolding his own stubbornness

She finds herself, by some miraculous feat, no longer standing in the old nursery but returned to the clearing in the woods. It is the 'green cathedral', the place she first kissed Jack all those weeks ago. The place where they laid out the stunned sparrowhawk, then watched it spring miraculously back to life. All around, the smooth, grey trunks of ancient beech trees rise up from the walls of the room to tower over her, spreading their branches across the ceiling in a fan of tangled branches and leaves, paint and gold leaf cleverly combined to create the shimmering effect of a leafy canopy at its most dense and opulent. And yet it is not the clearing, not in any real or grounded sense, because instead of leaves, the trees taper up to a canopy of extraordinary feathers shimmering and spreading out like a peacock's tail across the ceiling, a hundred green, gold and sapphire eyes gazing down upon her. Jack's startling embellishments twist an otherwise literal interpretation of their woodland glade into a fantastical, dreamlike version of itself. Their green cathedral, more spectacular and beautiful than she could have ever imagined. She moves closer to one of the trees and stretches out a hand, feeling instead of rough bark the smooth, cool surface of a wall. She can't help but smile. The trompe-l'oeil effect is dazzling and disorienting in equal measure. Even the window shutters and cornicing have been painted to maintain the illusion of the trees, while high above her head the glass dome set into the roof spills light as if it were the sun itself, pouring through the canopy of eyes. The only other light falls from the glass windowpanes above the window seat, still flanked by the old green velvet curtains, which somehow appear to blend seamlessly with the painted scene. The whole effect is eerie and unsettling. Lillian feels unbalanced, no longer sure what is real and what is not. It is like that book she read to Albie once- the one where the boy walks through the wardrobe into another world. That's what it feels like, she realizes: as if she has stepped into another realm, a place both fantastical and otherworldly. It's not just the peacock-feather eyes that are staring at her. Her gaze finds other details: a shy muntjac deer peering out from the undergrowth, a squirrel, sitting high up in a tree holding a green nut between its paws, small birds flitting here and there. The tiniest details have been captured by Jack's brush: a silver spider's web, a creeping ladybird, a puffy white toadstool. The only thing missing is the sound of the leaf canopy rustling and the soft scuttle of insects moving across the forest floor.

A beautiful child sat playing in the sand And finger-writing: Who? Where from? Where to? I answered, O beautiful child, tell me, is Interrupting me: I am two children, hand in hand, I wanted to know: O beautiful child who finds it so easy to talk, tell me, where does the grass-tree grow, where does the grass flower, the wind and the breath of the wind, the strawberry, the leaf of grass, the rose? Again, it broke in: I am not at one with myself, I am full of contraries, I talk about anything, I am a boy and a girl, one and two, and you, are you night and day? I said: I am a poor robber, a productive consumer looking for honest labour, I want to go back to where I was born, either/or or and/or the board-panelling of the outside walls either horizontal or vertical or/or not, I want to be silent, there. It shouted: But first you have to calm down the wind, the walking wind, the dense tree-growing wind! And l: O syntax, that has only a few exceptions. You, slyness of sincerity, you rule. It wanted to know: Why are you praising the language that rules? I would like to teach this poem a lesson, I said, I can' t get rid of it, this breath has grown trees. . . I came from there, I took the road through the forest, but oh, it was stormy weather, autumn weather... That child then said: But, if it gives way why shouldn't you try to be free, to walk through the night. and look for someone whom it would fit, . that uninhabited breath?

Dolphins felt top-heavy, that year, most of the time, and wanted to lie down. When their heads weren’t on top they still felt top-heavy, but metaphysically. In public places they felt sad. They went into restrooms, hugged themselves, and quietly went, ‘Eeeee eee eeee.’ Weekends they went to playgrounds alone. They sat in the top of slides—the enclosed part, where it glowed a little because of the colored plastic—and felt very alert and awake but also very sad and immature. Sometimes they fell asleep and a boy’s mother would prod the dolphin with a broom and the dolphin would go down the slide while still asleep. At the bottom they would feel ashamed and go home and lie in bed. They felt so sad that they believed a little that it was their year to be sad, which made them feel better in a devastated, hollowed-out way. Life was too sad and it was beautiful to really feel it for once; to be allowed to feel it, for one year. When dolphins had these thoughts, usually on weekends at night, it was like dreaming, like a pink flower in a soft breeze on a field was lightly dreaming them. The sadness was like a pink forest that got less dense as you went in and then changed into a field, which the dolphins walked into alone. Sometimes the sadness was like a knife against the face. It made the dolphins cry and not want to move. But sometimes a young dolphin would feel very lonely and ugly and it was beautiful how alone it felt, and it would become restless with how perfect and elegant its sadness was and go away for a long time and then return and sit in its room and feel very alone and beautiful.

ASITA AWOKE in the forest thinking about demons. He hadn’t for many years. He could remember glimpsing one or two in the past, on the fringes of a famine or a battle, wherever bodies were being harvested. He knew the misery they caused, but misery was no longer Asita’s concern. He had been a forest hermit for fifty years. The affairs of the world had been kept far away, and he passed whole days in a hidden cave when he retreated even from the affairs of animals, much less those of men. Now Asita knelt by a stream and considered. He distinctly saw demons in his mind’s eye. They had first appeared in the dappled sunlight that fell on his eyelids at dawn. Asita slept on boughs strewn over the bare ground, and he liked the play of light and shadow across his eyes in the early morning. His imagination freely saw shapes that reminded him of the market village where he grew up. He could see hawking merchants, women balancing water jugs on their heads, camels and cara-vans—anything, really—on the screen of his closed eyes. But never demons, not before this morning. Asita walked into the nearly freezing mountain stream, his body naked except for a loincloth. As an ascetic, he did not wear clothes, not even the robes of a monastic order. Lately he had felt an impulse to travel very high, nearly in sight of the snowcapped peaks on the north-ern border of the Sakya kingdom. Which put him close to other lokas,worlds apart from Earth. Every mortal is confined to the Earth plane, but like the dense air of the jungle tapering gradually into the thin atmosphere of the mountains, the material world ta-pered off into subtler and subtler worlds. Devas had their own lokas, as did the gods and demons. Ancestors dwelt in a loka set apart for spirits in transition from one lifetime to the next.

The fact that no one made demands on her knowledge in her special field was lucky for Simochka. Not only she but many of her girlfriends had graduated from the institute without any such knowledge. There were many reasons for this. The young girls had come from high schools with very little grounding in mathematics and physics. They had learned in the upper grades that at faculty council meetings the school director had scolded the teachers for giving out failing marks, and that even if a pupil didn't study at all he received a diploma. In the institute, when they found time to sit down to study, they made their way through the mathematics and radio-technology as through a dense pine forest. But more often there was no time at all. Every fall for a month or more the students were taken to collective farms to harvest potatoes. For this reason, they had to attend lectures for eight and ten hours a day all the rest of the year, leaving no time to study their course work. On Monday evenings there was political indoctrination. Once a week a meeting of some kind was obligatory. Then one had to do socially useful work, too: issue bulletins, organize concerts, and it was also necessary to help at home, to shop, to wash, to dress. And what about the movies? And the theater? And the club? If a girl didn't have some fun and dance a bit during her student years, when would she do so afterward? For their examinations Simochka and her girlfriends wrote many cribs, which they hid in those sections of female clothing denied to males, and at the exams they pulled out the one the needed, smoothed it out, and turned it in as a work sheet. The examiners, of course, could have easily discovered the women students' ignorance, but they themselves were overburdened with committee meetings, assemblies, a variety of plans and reports to the dean's office and to the rector. It was hard on them to have to give an examination a second time. Besides, when their students failed, the examiners were reprimanded as if the failures were spoiled goods in a production process—according to the well-known theory that there are no bad pupils, only bad teachers. Therefore the examiners did not try to trip the students up but, in fact, attempted to get them through the examination with as good results as possible.

The masses of dense foliage all round became prison walls, impassable circular green ice-walls, surging towards her; just before they closed in, I caught the terrified glint of her eyes. On a winter day she was in the studio, posing for him in the nude, her arms raised in a graceful position. To hold it for any length of time must have been a strain, I wondered how she managed to keep so still; until I saw the cords attached to her wrists and ankles. Instead of the darkness, she faced a stupendous sky-conflagration, an incredible glacial dream-scene. Cold coruscations of rainbow fire pulsed overhead, shot through by shafts of pure incandescence thrown out by mountains of solid ice towering all round. Closer, the trees round the house, sheathed in ice, dripped and sparkled with weird prismatic jewels, reflecting the vivid changing cascades above. Instead of the familiar night sky, the aurora borealis formed a blazing, vibrating roof of intense cold and colour, beneath which the earth was trapped with all its inhabitants, walled in by those impassable glittering ice-cliffs. The world had become an arctic prison from which no escape was possible, all its creatures trapped as securely as were the trees, already lifeless inside their deadly resplendent armour. Frozen by the deathly cold emanating from the ice, dazzled by the blaze of crystalline ice-light, she felt herself becoming part of the polar vision, her structure becoming one with the structure of ice and snow. As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead; she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of her world. Fear was the climate she lived in; if she had ever known kindness it would have been different. The trees seemed to obstruct her with deliberate malice. All her life she had thought of herself as a foredoomed victim, and now the forest had become the malign force that would destroy her. In desperation she tried to run, but a hidden root tripped her, she almost fell. Branches caught in her hair, tugged her back, lashed out viciously when they were disentangled. The silver hairs torn from her head glittered among black needles; they were the clues her pursuers would follow, leading them to their victim. She escaped from the forest at length only to see the fjord waiting for her. An evil effluence rose from the water, something primitive, savage, demanding victims, hungry for a human victim. It had been night overhead all along, but below it was still daylight. There were no clouds. I saw islands scattered over the sea, a normal aerial view. Then something extraordinary, out of this world: a wall of rainbow ice jutting up from the sea, cutting right across, pushing a ridge of water ahead of it as it moved, as if the flat pale surface of sea was a carpet being rolled up. It was a sinister, fascinating sight, which did not seem intended for human eyes. I stared down at it, seeing other things at the same time. The ice world spreading over our world. Mountainous walls of ice surrounding the girl. Her moonwhite skin, her hair sparkling with diamond prisms under the moon. The moon’s dead eye watching the death of our world.

I walked to the painting on the easel. It was an impression, not a lifelike rendering. 'I wanted you to see this one,' I said, pointing to the smear of green and gold and silver and blue. 'It's for you. A gift. For everything you've done.' Heat flared in my cheeks, my neck, my ears, as he silently approached the painting. 'It's the glen- with the pool of starlight,' I said quickly. 'I know what it is,' he murmured, studying the painting. I backed away a step, unable to bear watching him look at it, wishing I hadn't brought him in here, blaming it on the wine I'd had at dinner, on the stupid dress. He examined the painting for a miserable eternity, then looked away- to the nearest painting leaning against the wall. My gut tightened. A hazy landscape of snow and skeletal trees and nothing else. It looked like.... like nothing, I supposed, to anyone but me. I opened my mouth to explain, wishing I'd turned the others away from view, but he spoke. 'That was your forest. Where you hunted.' He came close to the painting, gazing at the bleak, empty cold, the white and grey and brown and black. 'This was your life,' he clarified. I was too mortified, too stunned, to reply. He walked to the next painting I'd left against the wall. Darkness and dense brown, flickers of ruby red and orange squeezing between them. 'Your cottage at night.' I tried to move, to tell him to stop looking at those ones and look at the others I'd laid out, but I couldn't- couldn't even breathe properly as he moved to the next painting. A tanned, sturdy male hand fisted in the hay, the pale pieces of it entwined among strands of brown coated with gold- my hair. My gut twisted. 'The man you used to see- in your village.' He cocked his head again as he studied the picture, and a low growl slipped out. 'While you made love.' He stepped back, looking at the row of pictures. 'This is the only one with brightness.' Was that... jealousy? 'It was the only escape I had.' Truth. I wouldn't apologise for Issac. Not when Tamlin had just been in the Great Rite. I didn't hold that against him- but if he was going to be jealous of Issac- Tamlin must have realised it, too, for he loosed a long, controlled breath before moving to the next painting. Tall shadows of men, bright red dripping off their fists, off their wooden clubs, hovering and filling the edges of the painting as they towered over the curled figure on the floor, the blood leaking from him, the leg at a wrong angle. Tamlin swore. 'You were there when they wrecked your father's leg.' 'Someone had to beg them to stop.' Tamlin threw a too-knowing glance in my direction and turned to look at the rest of the paintings. There they were, all the wounds I'd slowly been leeching these few months. I blinked. A few months. Did my family believe that I would be forever away with this so-called dying aunt? At last, Tamlin looked at the painting of the glen and the starlight. He nodded in appreciation. But he pointed to the painting of the snow-veiled woods. 'That one. I want that one.' 'It's cold and melancholy,' I said, hiding my wince. 'It doesn't suit this place at all.' He went up to it, and the smile he gave me was more beautiful than any enchanted meadow or pool of stars. 'I want it nonetheless,' he said softly.

Remarkably, we still have a ‘wild’ Indian’s account of his capture and incarceration. In 1878, when he was an old man, a Kamia called Janitin told an interviewer: I and two of my relatives went down ... to the beach ... we did no harm to anyone on the road, and ... we thought of nothing more than catching and drying clams in order to carry them to our village. While we were doing this, we saw two men on horseback coming rapidly towards us; my relatives were immediately afraid and they fled with all speed, hiding themselves in a very dense willow grove ... As soon as I saw myself alone, I also became afraid ... and ran to the forest ... but already it was too late, because in a moment they overtook me and lassoed and dragged me for a long distance, wounding me much with the branches over which they dragged me, pulling me lassoed as I was with their horses running; after this they roped me with my arms behind and carried me off to the Mission of San Miguel, making me travel almost at a run in order to keep up with their horses, and when I stopped a little to catch my wind, they lashed me with the lariats that they carried, making me understand by signs that I should hurry; after much travelling in this manner, they diminished the pace and lashed me in order that I would always travel at the pace of the horses. When we arrived at the mission, they locked me in a room for a week; the father [a Dominican priest] made me go to his habitation and he talked to me by means of an interpreter, telling me that he would make me a Christian, and he told me many things that I did not understand, and Cunnur, the interpreter, told me that I should do as the father told me, because now I was not going to be set free, and it would go very bad with me if I did not consent in it. They gave me atole de mayz[corn gruel] to eat which I did not like because I was not accustomed to that food; but there was nothing else to eat. One day they threw water on my head and gave me salt to eat, and with this the interpreter told me that I was now Christian and that I was called Jesús: I knew nothing of this, and I tolerated it all because in the end I was a poor Indian and did not have recourse but to conform myself and tolerate the things they did with me. The following day after my baptism, they took me to work with the other Indians, and they put me to cleaning a milpa [cornfield] of maize; since I did not know how to manage the hoe that they gave me, after hoeing a little, I cut my foot and could not continue working with it, but I was put to pulling out the weeds by hand, and in this manner I did not finish the task that they gave me. In the afternoon they lashed me for not finishing the job, and the following day the same thing happened as on the previous day. Every day they lashed me unjustly because I did not finish what I did not know how to do, and thus I existed for many days until I found a way to escape; but I was tracked and they caught me like a fox; there they seized me by lasso as on the first occasion, and they carried me off to the mission torturing me on the road. After we arrived, the father passed along the corridor of the house, and he ordered that they fasten me to the stake and castigate me; they lashed me until I lost consciousness, and I did not regain consciousness for many hours afterwards. For several days I could not raise myself from the floor where they had laid me, and I still have on my shoulders the marks of the lashes which they gave me then.

His friend had the capacity to refer to anything from majestic ghost gum forest in the Snowy Mountains to the sticky, dense rainforest of North Queensland as ‘Bush’. If it wasn’t a desert, a town or a city, then to Gary it was ‘the Bush’.

The family is like the forest: if you are outside it is dense; if you are inside you see that each tree has its own position. —AKAN PROVERB

At last I came upon the hedge maze. Far from the warm circles of light cast by torch and lamp, the leaves and twigs here were wedged in a silver lacework of starlight and shadow. The entrance was framed by two large trees, their branches still bare of any new growth. In the darkness, they seemed less like garden posts marking the way into the labyrinth than two silent sentinels guarding the doorway to the underworld. Shapes writhed in the shadows beyond the archway of bramble and vine, both inviting and intimidating. Yet I was not frightened. The hedge maze smelled like the forest outside the inn, a deep green scent of growth and decay, where life and death were intermingled. A familiar scent. A welcoming scent. The scent of home. Removing my mask, I crossed the threshold, letting darkness swallow me whole. There were no torches or candles lit upon the paths, and neither moonlight nor starlight penetrated the dense bramble. Yet my footing along these paths was sure, every part of me attuned to the wildness around me. Unlike the maze of Schönbrunn Palace, a meticulously manicured and man-made construction, this labyrinth breathed. Nature creeped in along the edges, reclaiming groomed, orderly, and civilized corridors into a twisting tangle of tunnels and tracks, weeds and wildflowers. Paths grew vague, roots unruly, branches untamed. Somewhere deep in the labyrinth, I could hear the giggles and gasps of illicit encounters in the shrubbery. I was careful of my step, lest I trip over a pair of trysting lovers, but when I came upon no one else, I let myself fall into a meditative state of mind. I wandered the recursive spirals of the hedge maze, turn after turn after turn, feeling a measure of calm for the first time in a long time.

Are we fruit of the same tree? No — Angela is everything I wanted to be and never was. What is she? She’s the waves of the sea. While I’m the dense and gloomy forest. I’m in the depths. Angela scatters in sparkling fragments. Angela is my vertigo.

Few modern social infrastructures are natural, however, and in densely populated areas even beaches and forests require careful engineering and management to meet human needs. This means that all social infrastructures require investment, whether for development or upkeep, and when we fail to build and maintain it, the material foundations of our social and civic life erode.

ALADYN and Devno! — those green stretching meadows, those rich dense forests, catching the golden glow of the sunshine of the East — those sloping hill-sides, with the clematis, and acacia, and wild vine clinging to them, and the laughing waters of lake and stream sleeping at their base — who could believe that horrible pestilential vapour stole up from them, like a murderer in the dark, and breathing fever, ague, and dysentery into the tents of a slumbering Army, stabbed the sleepers while they lay, unconscious of the assassin’s hand that was draining away their life and strength!

Then we left it behind and entered another world. Steep, densely forested slopes closed in around us, plunging us into shadow as the road wound through them. Part of the huge Appalachian Mountains chain, the Smokies covered eight hundred square miles and spanned the border between Tennessee and North Carolina. They'd been declared a National Park, although looking out of the car window I thought that nature was blithely unaware of such distinctions. This was a wilderness that man had even now barely scratched. Coming from a crowded island like the UK, it was impossible not to be humbled by their sheer scale. There

Although the Indian government claims that the country’s forest cover has increased by 5,081 square kilometres between 2013 and 2015, beyond the statistics is the stark reality: around 2,510 square kilometres of very dense and moderately dense forests have been wiped out during that very period. And 2,254 square kilometres of moderately dense forest have now turned into non-forest lands.

Dakar with a population of over a million people is the capital and largest city of Senegal. Counting the surrounding area the population would go well over 2,000,000. This would be our last landing for fuel, before our arrival in Liberia. We took a long turn over the Atlantic and made a slow decent to the runway of the “Aéroport international de Dakar” just north of Dakar. The Portuguese founded Dakar in 1444, as a base for the export of slaves. Dakar came under French rule in 1872 and was the capital of the Mali Federation for a year after 1959. On August 20, 1960, it became the capital of Senegal. It is here that the sand dunes of the North African desert, gives way to the dense tropical rain forests of Equatorial Africa. On a map of Africa, Liberia is on the western bulge, just 5 degrees north of the equator. This is where, during the blisteringly hot summer months it constantly rains, and just south of where the tropical depressions become the fierce hurricanes that threaten the Caribbean Islands and North America. The impenetrable jungle of Liberia is euphemistically called “The Bush.” This hell hot, humid, Garden of Eden, was to become my home for the next eighteen months.

It's barely 8:00 a.m., but my train mates waste little time in breaking out the picnic material. But this isn't standard Japanese picnic fare: not a grain of rice or a pickled plum in sight. Instead, they fill the varnished wooden tables with thick slices of crusty bread, wedges of weeping cheese, batons of hard salamis, and slices of cured ham. To drink, bottles of local white wine, covered in condensation, and high-alcohol microbews rich in hops and local iconography. From the coastline we begin our slow, dramatic ascent into the mountains of Hokkaido. The colors bleed from broccoli to banana to butternut to beet as we climb, inching ever closer to the heart of autumn. My neighbors, an increasingly jovial group of thirtysomethings with a few words of English to spare, pass me a glass of wine and a plate of cheese, and I begin to feel the fog dissipate. We stop at a small train station in the foothills outside of Ginzan, and my entire car suddenly empties. A husband-and-wife team has set up a small stand on the train platform, selling warm apple hand pies made with layers of flaky pastry and apples from their orchard just outside of town. I buy one, take a bite, then immediately buy three more. Back on the train, young uniformed women flood the cars with samples of Hokkaido ice cream. The group behind me breaks out in song, a ballad, I'm later told, dedicated to the beauty of the season. Everywhere we go, from the golden fields of empty cornstalks to the dense forest thickets to the rushing rivers that carve up this land like the fat of a Wagyu steak, groups of camouflaged photographers lie in wait, tripods and shutter releases ready, hoping to capture the perfect photo of the SL Niseko steaming its way through the hills of Hokkaido.

Soon after the Gordons left, Frank and Joe gave Aunt Gertrude a final hug and set off for the airport with their father. Their route included Toronto, then over a vast, lonely, region, splashed with lakes and carpeted with spruce. The plane landed briefly at Sudbury, where the boys glimpsed the white domes of a radar station standing out against the night sky. Two hours after leaving Toronto, they set down near the rugged mining town of Timmins. They registered at a hotel for the night and arranged by telephone for a bush pilot to fly them on to Lake Okemow. At daybreak the two sleuths were up and breakfasting on a hearty meal of Canadian bacon, eggs, and fried potatoes. Then they taxied off in a four-seater amphibian. The flight proved to be bumpy. Below lay a dense wilderness of black spruce, poplar, birch, and tamarack. Glittering lakes and snakelike streams slashed the forest. Farther north came barren patches, frosted white with snow. Then again they were flying over heavy timber. “Here we are!” the pilot said at last. He brought the plane down to a choppy landing on the not-yet-frozen lake and taxied to a wooden pier. On the shore lay the stout log hunting lodge. Smoke feathered from its chimney.

On both sides of them lay a dense forest of towering evergreens. Ice was forming along the banks, which in places were strewn with rugged boulders or rose in steep, rocky upthrusts. As the afternoon wore on, the wind grew stronger and more bitter. Dark clouds closed in from the northwest. René muttered, “The snow, she come soon, I think.

He looked at her, his expression suddenly softened, and he sighed: “However, you did save my life… If it weren’t for you, I would have died in the Abyss of Cangwu that time.” She didn’t expect him to say these words, she was stunned for a moment with tears on her face. Five years ago, when she pulled the unconscious Master out of the Cangwu Abyss, she was shocked and frightened, and her face was full of tears like now. The 13-year-old girl was carrying him on her back shivering, running through the deep forest, falling down and getting up again and again. They got lost in the dense forest as he was in a coma the entire time. It took her a month to walk through the Nightmare Forest and drag him back to the Jiuyi Temple, taking care of him as he was dying. It’s hard to say a word about the indescribable hardships she went through, but she, who was so young at that time, never gave up on him, even when she was on the brink of death. After that, he gifted her the Jade Bone.

Pale rings were from spring growth, whereas dark ones were from late summer. Skinny rings were indicative of drought or other environmental impacts such as insects or too-densely-populated forests. Fat lines told the tale of an abundant growing season. I’d

if we let ourselves be guided by the atonal musician we walk as it were through a dense forest. The strangest flowers and plants attract our attention by the side of the path. But we do not know where we are going nor whence we have come. The listener is seized by a feeling of being lost, of being at the mercy of the forces of primeval existence. It seems as though the atonal musician had not paid attention to the listener as an independent personality: the listener is faced with an all-powerful world of chaos. But of course it must be admitted that this strikes a chord in the apprehensions of modern man!

The daily thunderstorms had stopped, and without the storms, the elk stopped sheltering in the dense forest. They went up the slopes, and we followed them. We had to leave the lake behind, but it was fine because I had my family, and family was more important than fish.

The forest was dense, and filled with all manner of vines and rank undergrowth; the road was a vague opening, where obstructing trees had been felled, the stumps and rotten trunks remaining. Across actual quags a track of logs and saplings had been laid, but long ago, now rotten and in broken patches. As far as the eye could reach, muddy water, sent back by a south wind from the gulf, extended over the vast flat before us, to a depth of from two to six feet, as per immediate personal measurement. We spurred in. One foot: Two feet, with hard bottom: Belly-deep, hard bottom: Shoulder-deep, soft bottom: Shoulder-deep, with a sucking mire: The same, with a network of roots, in which a part of the legs are entangled, while the rest are plunging. The same, with a middle ground of loose poles; a rotten log, on which we rise dripping, to slip forward next moment, head under, haunches in air. It is evident we have reached one of the spots it would have been better to avoid.

Norman slid down a 30 cm (12 inches) wide bench of snow beside the creek on his hip until he reached a rock bowl. At the far side, the stream emptied over an icy waterfall on to sharp rocks 15 m (50 ft) below. Somehow he used cracks to worm his way down from rocky crease to icy blister. The slope wasn’t steep here, but Norman had to traverse giant shale boulders. His stomach was chewing itself and exhaustion tore at him like an animal. He staggered woozily on until looked up and saw the meadow of snow 180 m (600 ft) down slope. But the mountain still wasn’t done with him. Now the enemy was a snarling mass of buckthorn, which lurked below a thin layer of snow. He dropped into it and stuck deep in the well formed by the jagged branches, unable to climb out. A plane passed high above. He yelled and waved. It circled. It had seen him. No. It sailed over the massive ridgeline. ‘I never gave up. My dad taught me to never give up.’ From Crazy for the Storm by Norman Ollestad. With the last ounces of his strength, Norman scrabbled and slithered out of the nest of buckthorn. With a flush of euphoria he found he had made it to the oasis of the snow meadow. It was tempting to sit down and celebrate, but he knew he might never get up again. He had to push on. But how would he get out? The vines wove a dense forest on the other side of the meadow. Then, he found some footprints. They were fresh. Norman followed them. After a few minutes, he realized the boot tracks made a circle. Was he delirious? Panic flooded his system. Then: ‘Hello! Anybody there?’ Norman screamed his lungs out. A teenage boy and his dog appeared out of the thickening gloom. ‘You from the crash?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Anyone else?

As increasing human population and fires from the savannah are continuously eating into the forest belt, it seems likely that the distribution of the forest members of the fusca group will continue to retract. In 1912 Simpson described how G. Fusca was found in Sierra Leone along a certain 37-mile stretch of road which ran through thickly wooded country skirting mountains densely clothed in thick forest; in 1946 I visited the area to find no fusca, but bare mountains, grassland, and only a few patches of low secondary thicket.

Since the 1950s, on average, wild animal populations have more than halved. When I look back at my earlier films now, I realise that, although I felt I was out there in the wild, wandering through a pristine natural world, that was an illusion. Those forests and plains and seas were already emptying. Many of the larger animals were already rare. A shifting baseline has distorted our perception of all life on Earth. We have forgotten that once there were temperate forests that would take days to traverse, herds of bison that would take four hours to pass, and flocks of birds so vast and dense that they darkened the skies. Those things were normal only a few lifetimes ago. Not any more. We have become accustomed to an impoverished planet. We have replaced the wild with the tame. We regard the Earth as our planet, run by humankind for humankind. There is little left for the rest of the living world. The truly wild world–that non-human world–has gone. We have overrun the Earth.

When I look back at my earlier films now, I realise that, although I felt I was out there in the wild, wandering through a pristine natural world, that was an illusion. Those forests and plains and seas were already emptying. Many of the larger animals were already rare. A shifting baseline has distorted our perception of all life on Earth. We have forgotten that once there were temperate forests that would take days to traverse, herds of bison that would take four hours to pass, and flocks of birds so vast and dense that they darkened the skies. Those things were normal only a few lifetimes ago. Not any more. We have become accustomed to an impoverished planet.

You like it? Got you a necklace to match.” His hand leaves my leg and, for a split second, I’m longing for him to put it back. He shifts so the glow of a distant pole light catches, and I can see what he’s trying to show me. Below the dense forest of black ink trees sprawling up his forearm, there’s a tattoo along the back of his hand, running from thumb to index finger. Barbed wire. Before I can question what he means, his hand slips around my neck like a collar. A barbed wire necklace. “Fits perfectly, Cass. Looks sexy as hell, too.

And those who know how to listen with a keen ear will discover a dialogue between sky and earth, a language without words, but dense and immense.

James Earl Jones was surely one of the finest thespians ever. A sequoia in the dense forests of Hollywood, he acted with superlative deportment, increasing the cadence of histrionics with an uncommon flair. His voice, guttural and distinctive, hung freely on the atmosphere of decorous grace.