In the Deep Dark Forest

“So fierce is the passion that burns within my heart, a raging forest fire, unstoppable and consuming.”

“From the vast, invisible ocean of moonlight overhead fell,

here and there, a slender, broken stream that seemed to plash against the intercepting branches and trickle to earth, forming small white pools among the clumps of laurel. But these leaks were few and served only to accentuate the blackness of his environment, which his imagination found it easy to people with all manner of unfamiliar shapes, menacing, uncanny, or merely grotesque.

He to whom the portentous conspiracy of night and solitude and silence in the heart of a great forest is not an unknown experience needs not to be told what another world it all is – how even the most commonplace and familiar objects take on another character. The trees group themselves differently; they draw closer together, as if in fear. The very silence has another quality than the silence of the day. And it is full of half-heard whispers, whispers that startle – ghosts of sounds long dead. There are living sounds, too, such as are never heard under other conditions: notes of strange night birds, the cries of small animals in sudden encounters with stealthy foes, or in their dreams, a rustling in the dead leaves – it may be the leap of a wood rat, it may be the footstep of a panther. What caused the breaking of that twig? What the low, alarmed twittering in that bushful of birds? There are sounds without a name, forms without substance, translations in space of objects which have not been seen to move, movements wherein nothing is observed to change its place. Ah, children of the sunlight and the gaslight, how little you know of the world in which you live!

“Can a person who has been brought up in the heart of a thick dark forest, where one has to beat a path through multiple layers of trees just to take a letter to the post office, have any conception of what it’s like to spend one’s entire childhood waiting for a single tree to grow?”

“As soon as the torch went out, the atmosphere of the forest intensified. As her eyes slowly became accustomed to the darkness she started to notice the outlines of canopies above them where trees were silhouetted against the pale moonlight.

The sounds around them became more noticeable; the shuffling of an animal through the undergrowth, the whistling of the wind through the trees, and now and then the cry of some creature being captured in the darkness. As they sat quietly, the noises seemed to become louder until they both felt absorbed into the forest world.”

“The unknown grayish mystifying forest was benumbed into frost-covered cold, and the tremendous pines towering above the dark marshy soil resembled a gathering of severe mute brothers from a forbidden ancient order worshiping forgotten gods no one had ever heard of outside of the world of secret occult visions.”

“You grow up readin’ about pirates and cowboys and spacemen and stuff, and jus’ when you think the world’s full of amazin’ things, they tell you it’s really all dead whales, greed, chopped-down forests, and nucular waste hangin’ about for millions of years. Growin’ up ain’t worth it, if you ask my opinion.”