We dug a hole under the main trunk and filled it with wood and for good measure poured a can of paraffin over it and the trunk. All that happened was that the ivory turned black from the smoke. We dug holes in the ground, but even 10 feet out from the trunk, the roots were twisted with a solid ivory core, seared and yellow.
Those were the days before power-driven tools, and so we tried ax and saw, sledgehammer and a wedge, between the great knots. That was how it began, and it was to last a week. Such hard wood really would burn like coal, I thought, and what else was coal but petrified wood? The heat and the dry air of those sun-smitten heights must have turned the trunk into coal as it stood. The blade bounded back and I stopped in surprise. I might as well have tried to sink it into one of the ironstone boulders on the hill.
There is in a farmer's life not much time for sentiment, and so inevitably the day came when I thought of how much wood there was in that dried trunk, and with no more than that thought in my head I tried, in passing, to sink the blade of the ax into its knotted trunk. Wood was scarce on the high African plateau, and so each year the dead branches were cut off for the winter fires and the old trees became more and more gaunt as the young trees, planted to replace them, grew firmer into the earth and taller into the air under the overpowering heights of the old giants.But for some reason no one ever thought of the dried old trunk as firewood, though in its twenty foot height and its girth of some eight feet across there must have been enough wood to keep the house fires going through one whole winter. Year by year, at silkworm time, the mulberry buds broke small and green with renewed life out of the sere bent branches, so that in contrast the dried trunk stood like Lot's wife, petrified not in salt at a moment of looking back but as if twisted round and round through a century of indomitable growing. Year by year the old almonds burst into blossom, some 50 feet of frail white petals that seemed to light up the whole garden and set the pattern for apple, pear, and peach, all of them also wrung and twisted by the years. It was gnarled and twisted, iron-hard in that barren and bitter land of ironstone boulders and the black lavas in the craters of volcanoes long extinct. I was never able to decide if it was the trunk of an ironwood from which assagais are made and which had grown there when the garden was planted, or if it was what was left of a bitter almond. Between the giant mulberry and the bitter almond in the old garden stood the dried trunk of what must once have been a noble tree.
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