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Updated: May 15, 2025
In the lulling of the wind the breath of the woods was everywhere; even the aroma of swelling sap as if the ghastly stumps on the deforested slope behind the hotel were bleeding afresh in the dewless night stung the eyes and nostrils of the sleepers. It was, perhaps, from such cause as this that Barker was awakened suddenly by the voice of the boy from the crib beside him, crying, "Mamma! mamma!"
Many are Ilokano imported originally by the tobacco companies to carry on the large tobacco plantations of the valley, and the others are the native Cagayan. The table-lands were once generally forested, but to-day many are deforested, undulating, beautiful pastures.
There was a speculative tinge in the operations of this landed aristocracy. Like the old tobacco raising aristocracy of Virginia and Maryland, they were inclined to go from tract to tract, skinning what they could from a piece of deforested land and then seeking another virgin tract.
And the surroundings of the place are nowise representative of the Sila in a good sense. The land has been so ruthlessly deforested that it has become a desert of naked granite rocks; even now, in midsummer, the citizens are already collecting fuel for their long winter from enormous distances.
We have already had occasion to observe that from the very beginning life adapts the environment to its uses; that is, gives to matter and to mechanical processes a new form in which these fulfil interest. Thus an area of land deforested and cultivated, or two stones so hewn and fitted as to afford a grinding surface, take on the imprint of the human need for food.
The mixture of spying and propaganda with banking, with export, with manufacture, seems so foreign to Anglo-Saxon ways as to be almost inconceivable. The French and Belgian coalfields are being worked to the utmost, together with the iron mines at Longwy and Brieux. Poland is being deforested to such an extent that the climate is actually altering.
In consequence, instead of the regular and plentiful rains which existed in these regions of China when the forests were still in evidence, the unfortunate inhabitants of the deforested lands now see their crops wither for lack of rainfall, while the seasons grow more and more irregular; and as the air becomes dryer certain crops refuse longer to grow at all.
For centuries forest fires have burned through the Western mountains, and much land thus deforested is scattered throughout the National Forests awaiting reforestation. This land is not valuable for agriculture, and will contribute more to the general welfare under forest than in any other way.
Spindler's house, or "Spindler's Splurge," as Rough and Ready chose to call it, stood above the settlement, on a deforested hillside, which, however, revenged itself by producing not enough vegetation to cover even the few stumps that were ineradicable.
Nothing could be more striking than the contrast between the raw, crumbling, deforested portions of the mountain, looking like a quarry that was being worked, and the forested part with its rich, shaggy beds of cassiope and bryanthus in full bloom, and its sumptuous cushions of flower-enameled mosses.
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