The Last Hopi Elder Who Remembered the Old Forest — What He Said the Trees Really Were (1889)

[00:00:00]In the autumn of 1889, on a mesa in the high desert of what is now northern Arizona, an old man sat in the doorway of a stone house and told a visitor from the east that everything he was looking at was wrong.

[00:00:13]The rock was not rock.

[00:00:15]The towers of stone standing out on the plain were not stone. The whole country, the old man said, had once been something else, something living, and what the young stranger saw around him was only the bones of it.

[00:00:29]The visitor wrote the words down in a small notebook and then, like so many notebooks from those years, the notebook went into a drawer and stayed there.

[00:00:39]What the old man said that afternoon has never sat comfortably beside anything we are taught about the land.

[00:00:45]And yet, he was not raving, and he was not alone.

[00:00:49]He was the last of a line of people who claimed to remember the old forest, and he said the trees had not been trees at all.

[00:00:56]To understand why anyone wrote his words down, you have to understand who he was.

[00:01:02]The Hopi are among the oldest continuously living communities anywhere on the continent. Their village of Old Oraibi has been inhabited without a break since roughly the year 1100, which makes it older than most cathedrals in Europe and older than nearly every city in the country that now surrounds it.

[00:01:20]These are not people who arrived recently and invented a story to fit the scenery.

[00:01:24]They were already here, farming corn on dry stone terraces, when the first ships crossed the ocean toward this hemisphere.

[00:01:32]Their memory runs deep, and it runs in a straight, unbroken line from mouth to ear across more centuries than written history can easily hold.

[00:01:41]By the year 1889, that memory was under a kind of quiet siege.

[00:01:46]The government in Washington had established a bureau devoted to recording the ways of the native peoples before those ways vanished.

[00:01:56]Men with notebooks and glass photographic plates rode out to the pueblos and the mesas and sat with the old people writing down songs and prayers and the names of things.

[00:02:08]The men who did this work believed they were preserving a record of cultures they assumed were dying.

[00:02:14]In their hurry to capture everything, they sometimes wrote down things they did not understand and could not place.

[00:02:20]Things that did not fit the tidy picture of myth and legend they had come to collect.

[00:02:26]The account of the old man on the mesa is one of those things. It helps to understand the mood of those years.

[00:02:33]The men who ran the new bureau in Washington were convinced that they were racing a clock.

[00:02:38]The old people who carried the deep memory were dying one by one and every death took a library with it because none of it had ever been written down.

[00:02:46]So, the collectors worked in a fever filling notebook after notebook pressing the elders to speak while they still could.

[00:02:53]They were not gentle scholars with unlimited time. They were more like men bailing a sinking boat grabbing whatever they could reach before it went under.

[00:03:02]And because they were grabbing everything, they grabbed things they had no box to put them in.

[00:03:07]A song about corn went into the folder marked agriculture.

[00:03:11]A prayer for rain went into the folder marked religion.

[00:03:15]But a flat statement from an old man that the mountains were the stumps of trees from a drowned world fit into no folder at all.

[00:03:23]And so it drifted unfiled and unexplained into the back pages where the strange leftovers went.

[00:03:31]That is very often where the truest things end up. In the leftovers, in the parts no one knew how to use.

[00:03:38]The visitor had come to record the ordinary business of a vanishing world.

[00:03:42]The planting songs and the clan names and the order of the ceremonies.

[00:03:47]What he got instead on that one afternoon was a a of the world before this one.

[00:03:53]The old man was among the last who claimed a direct chain of memory back to what the Hopi called the earlier worlds.

[00:04:00]In the tradition, this is not the first world we live in. It is the fourth.

[00:04:04]Three worlds came before and each was brought to an end when the people living in it forgot themselves and fell into ruin.

[00:04:11]The first world ended in fire. The second ended in ice when the axis of everything rolled over and the warm places froze.

[00:04:20]The third ended in water, in a flood that swallowed the cities and drowned the proud towers of a civilization that had grown too clever and too cold.

[00:04:29]The survivors climbed up into this world through an opening in the ground and here they were told to live simply and to remember.

[00:04:38]Remembering for the Hopi was never a loose or casual thing.

[00:04:42]It was a duty carved into stone.

[00:04:45]After the emergence into this world, the clans were sent out to walk the land in every direction, north and south and east and west, to the far edges of the continent and back before they were permitted to settle at the center where they now live.

[00:05:00]The proof of those migrations was left behind them on rock faces across the whole of the southwest and beyond in the spirals and the handprints and the clan symbols pecked into the desert varnish, a written record in a language of pictures that the people can still read.

[00:05:17]A spiral meant a migration, a journey out and a winding return.

[00:05:22]And everywhere they walked, the people were expected to observe the land and to carry the account of it home so that the memory of the world and the memory of its shaping would never be allowed to lapse.

[00:05:35]When an old man in 1889 spoke I have to pause here for a second because what I just described, that is one case from a much larger pattern.

[00:05:45]There are 35 documented cases in a document I put together.

[00:05:49]Different cities, different decades, different types of evidence. Every single one follows the same sequence: discovered, documented, acquired, disappeared.

[00:05:57]I could not fit all of it into a video.

[00:05:59]It's in the pinned comment below.

[00:06:02]Find it before we continue. Look about the shape of the land as though he were reading a document.

[00:06:07]He was doing exactly what his tradition demanded of him.

[00:06:11]He was reporting.

[00:06:13]The land to him was not scenery. It was a text and he had been trained since boyhood to read it. And he was telling the visitor what it said. That much is written in many books and any reader can find it.

[00:06:26]What the old man added was stranger and more specific and it is the part that did not make it into the books.

[00:06:32]He said that the third world, the drowned one, had been a green world. He said it had been covered from edge to edge in forest and that the forest had not been made of ordinary trees.

[00:06:44]The trees of the old world, he said, were mountains. They were as wide at the base as a village and so tall that a man standing beneath one could not see the top. And their bark was stone and their veins ran with something that hardened into the bright metals the people later dug out of the ground.

[00:07:03]When that world ended, the great trees were thrown down and buried and turned to rock. And their stumps still stand across the land where anyone can walk up and touch them.

[00:07:14]The mesas, he said, were stumps. The spires and the buttes and the flat red tables of rock that ring the horizon in that country were not hills.

[00:07:24]They were the broken remains of the forest that grew in the world before this one.

[00:07:28]The young man from the east wrote this down and, one imagines, did not know what to make of it.

[00:07:35]He was there to collect folklore and he may have filed it away as exactly that, a A way of speaking about a landscape the old people loved.

[00:07:45]But the old man was not speaking poetically.

[00:07:48]He walked the visitor out to the edge of the mesa and pointed at the land. And he named the parts of the fallen forest the way a man might name the parts of a body.

[00:07:58]This ridge was a root. That standing tower was a trunk snapped off at the height where the water had reached.

[00:08:05]The long flat mesa was a single great limb laid down and covered over.

[00:08:11]He was not comparing the land to a forest. He was saying the land was a forest killed and buried and gone to stone.

[00:08:17]And that his people had watched it happen. And had never been allowed to forget.

[00:08:23]Now, a modern person hears this. And reaches immediately for the obvious explanation.

[00:08:30]The mind of a people surrounded by strange rock formations invents a story to explain them.

[00:08:36]And the story reflects the things they know. Which are trees and floods and the ending of worlds.

[00:08:43]That is a reasonable thing to think.

[00:08:45]And it may be the whole of the matter.

[00:08:47]But before you settle on it, there is something you should know about that particular country.

[00:08:52]Because the land itself has a habit of refusing to behave the way it should.

[00:08:58]Not far from where the old man sat, there is a place where the ground is littered for miles with the fallen trunks of enormous trees. Turned entirely to stone.

[00:09:09]This is not legend. It is a real place and you can visit it today. The trees lie where they fell. Some of them well over a 100 ft long. Their trunks broken into segments as cleanly as if they had been sawn. The wood replaced grain for grain by hard bright quartz that takes a polish like a jewel.

[00:09:27]The official account is that these were living conifers more than 200 million years ago. That they were buried in mud and ash.

[00:09:34]And that over an time the wood was replaced molecule by molecule with mineral until every ring and every knot was preserved in stone.

[00:09:43]That is the science, and the science is sound as far as it goes.

[00:09:48]But stand among those stone logs, some of them wider than a wagon, and try to hold in your mind the ordinary claim that the world was once covered in trees like these.

[00:09:57]And then look up at the mesas standing on the horizon, and you begin to feel the pull of what the old man was saying.

[00:10:05]He was not inventing the idea of a forest turned to stone. He was standing in the middle of the proof of it, and he was asking a larger question.

[00:10:14]If the small trees turned to stone and still lie here for anyone to count, what happened to the big ones?

[00:10:21]In the very years the old man was speaking, that field of stone logs was under assault.

[00:10:26]Word had gotten out that the petrified wood was shot through with amethyst and clear quartz, and men came with wagons and with dynamite and blew the great trunks apart to get at the crystal inside them.

[00:10:38]Whole trees that had lain intact for an age beyond counting were reduced to gravel and carted east to be sold as curiosities and ground into abrasive.

[00:10:48]A gem company built a mill nearby to crush the ancient wood into grit.

[00:10:53]The destruction was so rapid and so total that within a few years people who had seen the place began to sound an alarm, and eventually the government stepped in and set the ground aside to stop the plunder.

[00:11:05]But a great deal was already gone, blasted and hauled off and lost, and no one will ever count how many of those stone trees vanished into wagons in the decade when the old man sat on his mesa and tried to tell a stranger what the land really was.

[00:11:21]There is a bitter symmetry in it.

[00:11:23]At the exact moment one old man was insisting that the country was a forest turned to stone, other men were dynamiting the plainest evidence of a forest turned to stone and selling it by the ton. And no one connected the two things because no one was listening to the old man. And no one thought the stone trees were anything but a geological oddity to be mined.

[00:11:43]Stand in that place and the scale begins to work on you. The trunks are not slender. Some are broad enough that a grown man cannot reach around them.

[00:11:52]And they lie in such numbers that the ground in places is paved with them. A fallen forest laid flat and turned to jasper and agate in every color the earth can make. The official age given to them runs to more than 200 million years, a span so vast the mind simply refuses it and slides off.

[00:12:10]And these, remember, are the small trees. These are the ordinary ones, the ones the old man did not even bother to point at because to him they were beside the point. The trees he wanted the visitor to understand were the ones still standing.

[00:12:24]The ones a person walks past every day and calls a mountain.

[00:12:28]The big ones are the ones the old man pointed at.

[00:12:31]And here the story leaves the mesa country and reaches out to touch something that troubles people all over the world in places the old Hopi man could never have seen or heard of.

[00:12:41]Across the earth there are formations of rock made of tall vertical columns packed together. Many of them six-sided, rising in bundles like the pipes of an organ or the fibers of something torn apart along its grain.

[00:12:54]There is a famous one on the coast of the northern British Isles, a great causeway of stepped columns marching down into the sea.

[00:13:02]There is another rising out of the plains far to the north of the mesa country. A single enormous stump of banded rock nearly 900 ft tall, standing alone above the surrounding grass with vertical grooves running up its sides from bottom to top.

[00:13:17]The people native to that northern place did not call it a butte or a tower. They called it the lodge of the bear. And in some of their tellings a great bear had raked its claws down the sides, which is why the grooves run the way they do.

[00:13:31]To the eye of anyone willing to look without the textbook open in front of them, the resemblance is hard to unsee.

[00:13:37]It looks like a stump. The vertical columns look like the grain of wood. The whole shape looks like what remains after something colossal has been cut or snapped off near the ground. Look closer at that northern tower and the resemblance deepens rather than fading.

[00:13:52]The top of it is flat, sheared off level as though the trunk broke clean at a height and the upper reaches fell away and rotted or washed off in the flood.

[00:14:02]The columns are not perfectly straight, but flare and lean and twist a little near the base the way the grain of a real trunk splays out toward the roots.

[00:14:10]Between the columns run horizontal bands like the growth rings a saw reveals when it cuts across a log.

[00:14:17]People have stood at the foot of that rock for generations and felt the same thing without a word passing between them.

[00:14:23]That they were looking at wood and not at stone, at a stump and not at a hill.

[00:14:28]The famous causeway on the far northern coast across the ocean produces the identical feeling in the people who visit it. Tens of thousands of stepped columns fitted together like the bundled fibers of a tree that has been snapped and its cross-section laid bare marching in ranks down into the gray sea.

[00:14:46]The local people there did not in their oldest tellings call it volcanic rock.

[00:14:51]They spoke of a giant who built it, a being of a size to match the scale of the thing.

[00:14:56]And while a modern ear files that under fairy tale, it is worth Before I go further, that that document in the pinned comment. If you have not found it yet, go there now because everything I cover in these videos is one piece of a pattern that only becomes visible when you see all 35 cases together.

[00:15:14]The document shows you the full pattern.

[00:15:17]What I can show you here is the surface.

[00:15:19]What is down there is everything underneath it.

[00:15:22]Pinned comment now, then come back.

[00:15:25]Worth noticing that the folk memory reached for a giant, for something enormous and living, rather than for a puddle of cooling lava.

[00:15:34]And there is a detail in the rock itself that the giant tree idea seizes upon.

[00:15:39]Some of these columns, when broken and examined, are not made of ordinary dull basalt at all, but are rich in silica, the same hard glassy mineral that fills the petrified logs and turns wood to jasper.

[00:15:52]The people who believe the trees were real point at this and ask why the substance of the great stumps should so often be the very substance that ancient wood becomes when it fossilizes.

[00:16:04]To the geologist, this is a coincidence of chemistry, silica being common in the crust and prone to filling cracks and cavities wherever it can.

[00:16:13]To the believer, it is one more thread tying the standing towers to the fallen logs, one more hint that the mountain and the petrified trunk are the same kind of thing at different scales.

[00:16:24]The small dead tree you can hold in your hand and the vast dead tree you have to crane your neck to see the top of.

[00:16:30]The official explanation for these column formations is that they are volcanic.

[00:16:35]Molten rock cooled slowly and evenly.

[00:16:38]And as it shrank, it cracked into regular columns, the way mud cracks into plates as it dries. This is well understood, and it is demonstrated, and no honest telling of the story can leave it out.

[00:16:51]Columns of this kind form in cooling lava, and geologists can point to places where it is happening in slow motion in the record of the rocks. That is the answer, and for most of the people who study these things, it is a settled and satisfying answer. But it did not settle in the mind of the old Hopi man who had never read a geology text and who was working only from what his people had carried down to him.

[00:17:14]And it has not settled in the minds of a great many ordinary people since who look at a 900-ft column of grooved rock standing alone on a plane and feel in their chest that they are looking at the stump of a tree so large it beggars the imagination.

[00:17:31]This is where the old man's account joins a much larger current of thought, one that has grown loud in recent years and that gathers under an old and strange name.

[00:17:41]The name is Tartaria.

[00:17:43]For centuries, the maps of the world carried a vast label across the whole northern interior of Asia, a single word covering an area larger than any empire anyone will admit existed.

[00:17:54]Grand Tartary, the old maps said, in letters stretched across thousands of miles of what the map makers otherwise left blank.

[00:18:03]And then, over the course of the 19th century, the label quietly disappeared from the maps and the memory of what it named disappeared with it until today the word means nothing to almost anyone who hears it.

[00:18:18]The people who have taken up this thread believe that the vanishing of Tartaria from the maps was not an accident of shifting borders.

[00:18:25]They believe it was the erasure of a whole world, a previous civilization that covered the globe, that built the great stone buildings we now credit to much smaller and poorer societies, and that was wiped out and written over within the last few hundred years by a catastrophe and a cover-up working hand in hand.

[00:18:45]The catastrophe they describe has a name, too.

[00:18:48]They call it the mud flood.

[00:18:51]In city after city around the world, they point out, there are old buildings whose ground floors sit below the current level of the street, whose ornate windows are half buried, whose front doors now open onto packed earth.

[00:19:04]The official account calls this ordinary settling and the raising of streets over time.

[00:19:09]The people who follow the mud flood idea say it is the buried evidence of a global inundation of mud and water that swallowed the lower stories of an older and grander world all at once.

[00:19:20]And that the survivors simply built on top of the wreckage and forgot.

[00:19:26]Whole cities, they say, were dug back out of the ground within living memory and the diggers were told a story about improving the drains.

[00:19:34]And when you set the old Hopi man's account beside the mud flood idea, the two things lock together with a click that is difficult to ignore.

[00:19:42]He was describing exactly this, a green and living world of impossible scale thrown down and drowned and buried in mud hardened into the stone we now walk over and quarry and photograph.

[00:19:54]Its true nature forgotten by everyone except a handful of old people on a high mesa who were told never to let the memory die.

[00:20:03]The old man's forest of giants also does not stand alone in the memory of the human race.

[00:20:08]And this is the part that unsettles people most once they notice it.

[00:20:13]Nearly every ancient people on earth kept, somewhere in its oldest layer of story, the memory of a single enormous tree at the center of the world. A tree whose roots held the underworld and whose crown held the sky and whose trunk was the axis around which everything turned.

[00:20:30]The northern peoples of the old world called it the world tree and said the whole of creation hung upon its branches.

[00:20:37]Other traditions from lands that had no contact with one another told of a cosmic tree of impossible size joining the earth to the heavens felled or threatened at the ending of an age. Scholars who study such things call it a common symbol and let it go at that, a natural image for people to reach for. But the old man on the mesa would not have called it a symbol. He would have called it a memory worn down and scattered and half forgotten as it passed from people to people.

[00:21:05]But a memory all the same of a time when trees really were the size of the sky and when the ending of the world meant the felling of the forest that held the world up.

[00:21:16]Set his account beside the world tree of a dozen unconnected peoples and a strange possibility opens.

[00:21:24]Perhaps they were all remembering the same thing.

[00:21:26]There is more and it is stranger still.

[00:21:30]The Hopi tradition does not merely say the old world ended, it says why.

[00:21:35]The people of the third world grew powerful and made flying shields that they used to make war on one another, city against city, and they grew proud and forgot the being who had made them and set them there.

[00:21:48]This is not a modern gloss. It is written in the tellings that were recorded from Hopi elders across the last century and more, the flying shields and the great cities and the war in the sky before the water came.

[00:22:00]The old man on the mesa in 1889 belonged to the generation that still spoke of these things as memory rather than myth. And when he said the trees were mountains and the mountains were the stumps of trees, he was not offering a charming fable about the shapes of rocks, he was giving testimony. He was one of the last witnesses in a chain of witnesses and he seems to have understood that the chain was about to break because the young were being sent away to schools where the old memory was beaten out of them and there would soon be no one left who had heard it from someone who had heard it from someone who was there.

[00:22:35]Consider what it would mean if even a fraction of this were true.

[00:22:39]Consider standing at the base of that 900-ft column of grooved stone on the northern plain and understanding that you were standing at the foot of a stump, that the tree it belonged to rose miles into a sky that no living thing has seen, that the forest of such trees once covered the earth from pole to pole and that the metals we mine and the coal we burn and the oil we pump are the crushed and cooked and mineralized remains of that forest, a forest of a scale that makes our own trees look like moss growing at its feet.

[00:23:11]The people who follow this line of thinking point out that we already half believe it.

[00:23:15]We already teach children that coal is made of ancient forests and that oil is made of ancient life buried and pressed and transformed under the weight of ages.

[00:23:25]Every lump of coal is a piece of a drowned forest compressed and blackened and dug back up to be burned. And no one thinks this strange because we learned it young and stopped feeling the weight of it.

[00:23:37]We heat our houses with the crushed bodies of trees from a world that ended and we call it fuel and think no more about it.

[00:23:46]The old man was pointing at the same buried forest the coal comes from and saying only that it was larger than we admit and nearer in time than we are told.

[00:23:55]The difference between his account and the one in the school book is only one of scale and of nearness in time.

[00:24:02]The old man was saying the forest was far larger than we admit and that its ending was far more recent than we are allowed to say and that the proof is not hidden at all.

[00:24:11]The proof is the scenery. The proof is every mesa and every butte and every columned cliff standing in plain sight mislabeled.

[00:24:20]And there is the matter of the metals which is the detail in the old man's account that is easiest to overlook and hardest to explain away.

[00:24:28]He said the veins of the great trees ran with something that hardened into the bright metals the people later dug from the ground.

[00:24:36]Now set that beside a plain fact of the mesa country and the mountains beyond it.

[00:24:41]That land is threaded with copper and silver and gold running in veins through the rock following the cracks and the seams the way sap follows the grain of wood. The miners who came into that country in the decades after the old man spoke followed those veins into the mountains and pulled fortunes out of them.

[00:25:01]To the trained eye of a modern geologist, the veins are mineral deposits laid down by hot fluids moving through fractures in the crust over vast spans of time.

[00:25:12]To the old man, they were the last of the lifeblood of the forest, the sap of the great trees turned to metal when the trees turned to stone.

[00:25:21]He was not guessing at the presence of the metal.

[00:25:24]He knew it was there.

[00:25:26]His people had always known it was there.

[00:25:29]And he had an account of why it was there that connected it directly to the trees, an account that no one from the east had taught him, and that he had no reason to invent. It is worth pausing on how easily all of this was lost.

[00:25:43]The visitor of 1889 was one man with one notebook, and he was there for other reasons. And whatever he wrote of the old man's words was a fragment, filtered through a translator, jotted in haste, filed away, and half forgotten.

[00:25:59]In the same years, the children of that mesa and a hundred mesas and reservations like it were being loaded onto wagons and trains and sent to distant boarding schools, where they were forbidden to speak their own language, where the old stories were treated as devil worship to be scrubbed out, where a boy who spoke of flying shields and drowned worlds and trees the size of mountains would have been punished until he learned to stop.

[00:26:26]The chain of memory that reached back through the old man to the ending of the third world was cut deliberately and by policy within a single generation.

[00:26:35]The people who wanted the old world forgotten, if there were such people, did not need to burn a single book.

[00:26:43]They only needed to take the children and wait.

[00:26:47]What survived survived by accident in the margins of notebooks kept by men who did not believe a word of it, in fragments recorded by ethnographers who thought they were preserving quaint mythology, in the memories of a few who slipped through the schools with their grandparents' voices still intact.

[00:27:07]From these scraps a picture can be assembled, and the picture is consistent across sources that had no contact with one another.

[00:27:14]It tells of trees the size of mountains and a green world drowned in mud, of a war among proud cities before the water came, and of survivors who climbed up into a new world and were charged with remembering all of it.

[00:27:29]And everywhere in that picture, forming the very ground underfoot, lie the fossilized and mineralized and mislabeled remains of the world that was.

[00:27:39]The careful and honest thing to say is that none of this is proven, and that every piece of it has an ordinary explanation that the people who study the earth accept without difficulty.

[00:27:52]The petrified logs really are the fossilized wood of ancient conifers, and the science that describes how wood turns to stone is careful and well-tested.

[00:28:03]The columns of stepped rock really do form when thick sheets of lava cool and contract, and the process has been observed and measured and understood.

[00:28:13]The mesas and buttes really were carved by wind and water cutting down through layers of sediment over millions of years, and the layers can be read like the pages of a book. The Hopi worlds and their endings can be understood as one of the great spiritual traditions of the continent, a way of speaking about renewal and moral order that was never meant to be read as a report on geology. All of that is true, and a fair telling has to hold it up alongside the rest.

[00:28:42]But a fair telling also has to admit what the ordinary explanations leave standing. They leave standing the fact that an old man in 1889, working only from what his people had carried down to him, looked at that landscape and described it as the corpse of a forest of giants.

[00:28:59]And then a modern world spent the next century confirming in its own careful language that the land is indeed full of trees turned to stone, that it is indeed threaded with metal running in veins like sap, that the great columns of the world do indeed form in shapes the eye insists on reading as timber, and that a whole world does indeed lie buried beneath the one we walk on.

[00:29:23]Made of the pressed remains of ancient forests, we burn for light and heat.

[00:29:29]The old man got the facts right. The only thing in dispute is the scale and the timing, and whether the ending happened in the slow grinding deep time of the textbook or in the sudden drowning catastrophe of the memory.

[00:29:44]The old man died not long after the visitor came, and the visitor moved on to other mesas and other work, and the notebook went into its drawer.

[00:29:54]There is no photograph of the old man that anyone can point to, no name attached to the account that historians will vouch for, only the shape of a story that keeps surfacing in the fragments, that a witness lived, that he spoke, that he was among the last, and that what he said has never been squarely answered.

[00:30:13]He said the trees were mountains, and the mountains were the stumps of trees.

[00:30:18]He said the world we live in is built on the grave of a greener and larger one.

[00:30:22]He said his people had watched it fall and had been told to remember, and that the memory was almost gone.

[00:30:29]And then he was gone, too, and the mesas kept standing on the horizon exactly as he had described them, silent, enormous, and if he was right, mislabeled from the first day a stranger ever wrote a word about them down.

[00:30:45]Look at that country now, in a photograph or with your own eyes if you ever pass through it.

[00:30:51]Look at the flat red tables of rock standing out on the plain and the broken spires and the long buried limbs of stone and the far columns rising in bundles like the grain of something torn.

[00:31:04]The land will not tell you which story is true. It holds perfectly still and lets you decide.

[00:31:10]But once you have heard what the old man said, you cannot look at it the same way again. And you cannot entirely shake the feeling that you are standing not in a desert but in a forest. A forest so old and so vast and so long dead that we forgot it was ever alive and mistook the last of its great trees for hills.