“This vision of a living nature in which man is nothing is at once strange and sad. Here, in a fertile land, in an eternal greenness, one seeks in vain for traces of man; one has the feeling of being transported into a world different from the one in which one was born.”
Alexander von Humboldt, excerpt from Jaguars and Electric Eels
The silence had not disappeared, but it had changed in quality. It was no longer the vegetal oppression of the undergrowth, nor the buried buzzing of invisible insects. It was a high, vast silence, almost luminous. The ground beneath my feet was strangely smooth, covered with a rich, low grass that grew nowhere else on the island. And I do say “the island,” for suddenly, I remembered…
I remembered — something that, the instant before, had seemed impossible — that I was not in a forest. That this vegetation should never have existed. That this place was not a jungle, nor even a tropical archipelago. I was on a volcanic island, harsh, black, beaten by wind and salt. An island that naturalists had described as sterile, barely covered with ashen mosses and lichens clinging to the rocks.
I saw again the notebooks, the sketches, the fragmentary descriptions of those rocky masses standing in the ocean like stranded ships. One found there only the bare minimum of vegetation, scattered traces of fragile life. Then how?
How could we have walked for so long within a forest that did not exist?
How had I not been surprised to see so much greenery, so many trunks, so much shadow, where there should have been only cooled lava and mineral silence? Why had it not struck me?
And yet, that was not what filled me with dread.
What stopped me, what paralyzed my thoughts and made my heart beat in an irregular tempo, was the tree. There, at the exact center of the clearing — so perfect, so round that it seemed drawn rather than born — stood a tree of inhuman size. It resembled no known species… its branches rose not like the arms of a living being, but like columns. Its trunk, as wide as a tower, was covered with patterns one might have thought carved, had they not seemed… to move. And its leaves, oh, its leaves, of a green too dark, too dense, gleamed like the surface of an eye.
It did nothing. It did not move. And yet, it was waiting. I felt it. There was no wind, yet its branches pulsed imperceptibly, as though responding to a presence. Mine, perhaps. Or to something else.
A word came to my mind, without my knowing from where… “primordial.”
It was not a tree. It was like something from before the vegetal world, something that had grown where nothing should grow, through will alone, or through a phenomenon no human language could account for.
I stepped backward, and the ground seemed to hold me… Not physically… but through the dissolution of the very idea of return… it acted within my mind like a harmful vapor…
