The natives of these countries, when they are
compelled to pass through these dense forests, often take to the
small streams and wade along in the water, which is sometimes up to
their shoulders, occasionally finding shallower places, or a little
space on the banks where they can pick their way along for a few
hundred yards before they are obliged to take to the stream again.
[Illustration: GIANT TREES OF CALIFORNIA.]
Everything is lovely and luxuriant here, but it will not do to stay
too long. There are fevers and snakes.
Let us now go to the greatest woods in the whole world. I do not mean
the most extensive forest, but that one where the trees are the
grandest. This is the region where the giant trees of California grow.
Nowhere on the face of the earth are there such trees as these. Some
of them stand over four hundred feet high, and are thirty feet in
diameter!
Their age is believed to be about eighteen hundred years. Think of it!
They have been growing there during the whole of the Christian era!
One of them, the very largest of all, has been lying on the ground for
about one hundred and fifty years. When it was standing its diameter
was about forty feet.
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