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In a little while he came to a great, smooth, flat stone that looked like a floor in a room, and was about forty yards wide: nothing grew on it except some small tufts of grey lichen; but on the further side, at the foot of a steep, rocky precipice, there was a thick bed of tall green and yellow ferns, and among the ferns he hoped to find a place to lie down in.
Painted by the frosts, some a uniform clear bright yellow, or red, or crimson, as if their spheres had regularly revolved, and enjoyed the influence of the sun on all sides alike, some with the faintest pink blush imaginable, some brindled with deep red streaks like a cow, or with hundreds of fine blood-red rays running regularly from the stem-dimple to the blossom-end, like meridional lines, on a straw-colored ground, some touched with a greenish rust, like a fine lichen, here and there, with crimson blotches or eyes more or less confluent and fiery when wet, and others gnarly, and freckled or peppered all over on the stem side with fine crimson spots on a white ground, as if accidentally sprinkled from the brush of Him who paints the autumn leaves.
He clung to them as closely as a lichen to a rock, putting his little toes into every crack and holding fast to the bits of cement that jutted out here and there from the bricks. If he rustled a wing he brought down a shower of soot upon himself, and when at last he stood in the Giant's room, he was as black as any goblin.
"I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me; I tried to dispel them, but sorrow only increased with knowledge. Oh, that I had forever remained in my native wood, nor known nor felt beyond the sensations of hunger, thirst, and heat! "Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on the rock.
She saw and felt, but had no thrill, except now and then a thrill of alarm when Spades slid to his haunches down some steep, damp, piny declivity. All the woodland, up and down, appeared to be richer greener as they traveled farther west. Grass grew thick and heavy. Water ran in all ravines. The rocks were bronze and copper and russet, and some had green patches of lichen.
The trees, with their different kinds of foliage, rise up straight and tall, fantastically colored by patches of lichen, forming magnificent colonnades, with a line of straggling hedgerow of guelder rose, briar rose, box and arbutus above and below the roadway at their feet.
This section contains some of the finest trees in the forest, with plenty of dense holly and an occasional yew. The ground discloses the bracken fern, and gray lichen clings thickly to the trunks and branches of the trees. The woodland views along this road are splendid, and only need the wild animals of a former era to bring back the forest-life of mediæval times.
As there are gradations in height from the plains to the outlying spurs of the Himalaya, and from these again to the higher ridges, and from these on to the great mountains, and finally to Kinchinjunga and Mount Everest; and as there are gradations in size from tiny plants to the giant trees; so there are gradations in worth and value from the simple lichen or moss to the highly complex orchid; from the microscopic animalculae of a stagnant pond to monkeys and men; from simple primitive men to the highly cultured Bengali; and from the simple Bengali villager to the poet Rabindranath Tagore.
Their churches, with red roofs all subdued with lichen into the softest browns, rise above the cottages or farm buildings that surround them in the ideal fashion that is finally repeated at Ouistreham where locks impound the waters of the canal, and a great lighthouse stands out more conspicuously than the church tower.
The mountain summits around him were things of light and fire, and the little things in the rocks near at hand were drenched with light and beauty, a vein of green mineral piercing the grey, a flash of small crystal here and there, a minute, minutely-beautiful orange lichen close beside his face.
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