Those who have seen mammoth trees at least once, these giants leave their mark, and the memory of them is not erased all his life. No one has yet succeeded in giving a good sketch or photograph of a sequoia. The feeling they generate in you is difficult to convey to another. Awe-inspiring silence is their halo. They stagger not only with their incredible height and not only with the color of the bark, as if floating and changing before your eyes. No, sequoias are simply not like all the trees we know, they are messengers of other times. They know the secret of the ferns that became coal a million years ago, in the Carboniferous period. They have their own light, their own shadow. People the most vain, the most lightweight and cheeky see the marvel in mammoth trees and are imbued with reverence for them. Revered is no better word. I just want to bow my head before the sovereigns, whose power is indisputable. I know these giants from early childhood, I lived among them, pitched tents, slept near their warm powerful trunks, but even the closest acquaintance does not cause disdain for them. In this I vouch not only for myself, but also for others.
…
We drove through several relict groves without stopping, for they were not quite what we needed, and suddenly, on a flat lawn in front of me, a grandfather, standing alone, three hundred feet high, and in a girth with a small apartment building, appeared. Its flat paws with bright green needles began about a hundred and fifty feet from the ground. And under this greenery a straight, slightly conical column rose, shimmering from red to purple, from purple to blue. Its noble peak was split by lightning in a thunderstorm that raged here in time immemorial. As I drove off the road, I stopped about fifty feet away from this godlike creature, and I had to lift my head up and look vertically to see its branches.
…
We were surrounded by a cathedral silence - perhaps because the thick soft bark of the redwoods absorbs sounds and creates silence. The trunks of these giants rise straight into the zenith; the horizon is not visible here. Dawn comes early and remains dawn until the sun rises very high. Then the green, fern-like paws - up there - filter its rays through the needles and scatter them with golden-green bunches of arrows, or rather, stripes of light and shadow. When the sun passes its zenith, the day is already on the slope, and soon evening comes with a rustle of twilight, no less long than morning.
Thus, the time and division of the day that we are accustomed to in the relict grove are completely different. For me, dawn and evening twilight are a time of peace, but here, among the mammoth trees, peace is inviolable even in the daytime. Birds flit from place to place in the twilight light or sparkle, falling into the streaks of the sun, but all this is almost silent. Underfoot is a litter of needles that has covered the ground for two thousand years. On such a thick carpet, footsteps cannot be heard. Solitude and everything is far, far away from you - but what exactly? From early childhood, I have known the feeling that where the sequoias stand, something is happening to which I am completely outside. And if even in the first minutes this feeling was not remembered, it was not long for him to return.
At night, the darkness here thickens to blackness, only in the heights, above the head itself, something turns gray and occasionally a star flashes. But the blackness of the night breathes, for these giants, subjugating the day and dwelling in the night, are living creatures, you feel their presence every minute; maybe, somewhere in the depths of their minds, and maybe they are able to feel and even transmit their feelings outside. I have been in contact with these creatures all my life. (Oddly enough, the word "trees" does not apply to them at all.) I take sequoias, their power and antiquity, for granted, because life has long brought me to them. But people, deprived of my life experience, feel uncomfortable in the redwood groves, it seems to them that they are surrounded, locked here, they are oppressed by the feeling of some kind of danger.Not only the size, but also the alienation of these giants frightens. What's so surprising about that? After all, sequoias are the last surviving representatives of the tribe that flourished on four continents in the Upper Jurassic Period according to geological chronology. The fossilized wood of these patriarchs dates back to the Cretaceous period, and during the Eocene and Miocene they grew in England, and on the European continent, and in America. And then the glaciers moved from their places and irrevocably erased the titans from the face of the planet. They remained, only counted, here, as overwhelming with their greatness evidence of what the world was in ancient times. It may be that we are unhappy with reminders that we are still quite young and immature and that we live in a world that was old when we first appeared in it. Or maybe the human mind is rebelling against the indisputable truth that the world will live and follow its path with the same majestic gait, when there are no traces of ours left here?
...
These aborigines were already quite mature trees at the time when the political assassination was committed on Calvary. And when Caesar, saving the Roman Republic, brought it into decline, they were still only middle age. For the sequoias, we are all strangers, we are all barbarians.
