There lay the giant trees, straight and tapering--no branching as
in our trees of to-day. The trunks are often flattened, as though
they had been under great pressure, often the very bark seemed to
be on them (though it was petrified bark), and on some we saw marks
of insect tracery like those made by the borers of to-day. Some of
the trunks were more than one hundred and fifty feet long, and five
to seven feet in diameter, prostrate but intact, looking as though
uprooted where they lay. Others were broken at regular intervals,
as though sawed into stove lengths. In places the ground looks
like a chip-yard, the chips dry and white as though bleached by
the sun. The eye is deceived; chips these surely are, you think,
but the ear corrects this impression, for as your feet strike
the fragments, the clinking sound proves that they are stone.
In some of the other forests, visited later, the chips and larger
fragments, and the interior of the trunks, are gorgeously colored,
so that we walked on a natural mosaic of jasper, chalcedony, onyx,
and agate. In many fragments the cell-structure of the wood is
still visible, but in others nature has carried the process
further, and crystallization has transformed the wood of these
old, old trees into the brilliant fragments we can have for the
carrying--"beautiful wood replaced by beautiful stone," as Mr.
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