Such a sight may be seen in Europe, among the high Silver-fir forests of the Pyrenees.

How is it not so here?
How indeed?
And how comes it--if you will look again--that there are few or no fallen leaves, and actually no leaf-mould?
In an English wood there would be a foot-- perhaps two feet--of black soil, renewed by every autumn leaf fall.

Two feet?
One has heard often enough of bison-hunting in Himalayan forests among Deodaras one hundred and fifty feet high, and scarlet Rhododendrons thirty feet high, growing in fifteen or twenty feet of leaf-and-timber mould.

And here, in a forest equally ancient, every plant is growing out of the bare yellow loam, as it might in a well- hoed garden bed.

Is it not strange?
Most strange; till you remember where you are--in one of Nature's hottest and dampest laboratories.