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Show 309. alone and rescued himself by finding the Magic, "where the crowns of five or six t r e e s come together is the spot for a camp bed," he wrote. As he began to feel once again a part of the flow, he began to ask about the uses of the woods. Were they made for healing and consolation? No, he realized, "The woods are made for the wise and strong. In t h e i r very essence they are the counterpart of man." They represented perfectly the freedom c i v i l i z e d Man vaguely remembered. The forest buried her own in peace, while "We read our Bibles and remain fearful and uncomfortable amid Nature's loving destructions, her beautiful deaths." "In contemplating some lovely grove, I have wondered how i f t h i s dead stump or white mast were removed, would i t be b e t t e r e d . But I never could see room for even such p a l t r y improvement. . . . Pollution, defilement, squalor are words t h a t never would have been created had man lived conformably to Nature." Even the death of trees by f i r e seemed surpassingly b e a u t i f u l . "Sequoia fire is more beautiful in color than that of any other species I ever noticed;" in his journal he wrote of ". . . old prostrate trunks glowing l i k e red-hot bars . . . r i l l s of v i o l e t fire running up the furrows swiftly, l i g h t i n g huge torches flaming overhead two hundred feet, on tops of p i l l a r s dried and fractured by lightening s t r o k e s . . . . Smoke fragrant like incense." He witnessed the death of gods. Sequoia f i r e was the same stuff from which Buddha's Fire Sermon was made. Jf i t was set by human hand, though, i t was more deplorable than the torching of fine buildings, for these forests were |