The underdwelling

Maki just didn’t get it, though. “How does a tree turn to rock?”

Breed said, “It’s like out in Arizona, the Petrified Forest. I been there. Ain’t you ever heard of that, Maki?”

“Oh yeah, sure.”

McNair told them that the trees in the Petrified Forest in Arizona were from the Triassic, but what they had here was much older. Much, much older. In Arizona, some of the trees were still rooted as these, but many had been washed by prehistoric seasonal floods into sandy river channels where they were buried in gravel and sand rich in volcanic ash.

“The process is called permineralization,” McNair explained. “I imagine this entire area was in some sort of lowland swamp or valley during the Permian. A flash flood probably turned that valley into a bog or a muddy lake. Hence, oxygen which causes oxidation and rot, was kept away. These trees were buried in water and sediment. What happens next is that the trees either disintegrate or are compressed into coal over a period of millions of years, or, in this case, they permineralize. Minerals gradually replace the woody tissues and you have petrified trees.”

Breed said, “Yeah, but this is better than the Petrified Forest. A lot better.”

“Yes. Yes, it is. This entire forest must have been locked in that bog and the entire thing, through the passage of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years must have dried up, but the sediment that enclosed it turned to stone, capturing our forest as we now see it. Nearly intact.”

McNair said that much later, whatever geologic upheaval swallowed up the Permian strata and sank it deep into Precambrian rock, brought the forest here as well. Through the ages, waters must have eroded the rocks away and exposed what they were seeing now.

Maki was interested. “There’s nothing like this anywhere? Not even Arizona?”

McNair shook his head. “A few years ago, a nice stand of petrified Permian trees were discovered near the Beardmore Glacier in Antarctica. But nothing like this.”

Some of them rose up out of the rock on spidery tangles of fossilized roots and others had trunks so huge that three men could not have circled them with their arms. McNair said there were both conifers and deciduous trees in this forest. They were looking at cycads and gymnosperms and seed ferns, an amazing variety. He pointed out short trees with fern-like fronds that were called Archaeopteris, the progenitors of modern pines. Something called a Dicroidium that looked more like a large houseplant than a tree. There were primitive Ginkgoes with broad, fanlike leaves, cycads that looked much like palm trees, and Glossopteris, another seed fern, but very treelike in appearance. This species had a massive trunk that tapered gradually upward maybe fifty or sixty feet where a cluster of whipping branches sprouted. The huge, broad leaves in the rock were Glossopteris leaves, McNair said.

He squatted next to a wide stump, examining the rings within which were bright and sparkling with mineral deposits of many colors. “Look here,” he said. “If I had a mass spectrometer, I could identify these minerals, but I’m prepared to make a guess. Much of this is quartz, but the various trace elements give the petrified wood its color. Copper and chrome oxide create greens and blues, iron oxide gives us reds and browns and yellows, aluminum silicates produce whites, etc. etc.”

Boyd, for one, was ignoring the lecture.

It was interesting stuff and any other time he might have listened intently, but not down here. Not in the bowels of the earth in the enshrouding darkness with nothing but the sound of dripping water and echoing voices to break that heavy, almost humming silence. This place was like some graveyard and he honestly did not like it. It was meant to stay buried and he wished to God it had. He panned his light around, all those fossilized tree trunks leaning and canting this way and that, clustered together, crowded like the spokes of bike tires. The flashlight beam created sliding, distorted shadows and made the trees look like they were in motion. More than once, he was certain that something had moved out there in that cemetery of pillars and monuments.

It was imagination. It just had to be.

Yet, that feeling in his guts was expanding, filling him with an oily blackness, drowning him in his own mounting claustrophobia and paranoia. This place had not known light or air in eons and the idea of that disturbed him in ways he could not adequately catalog. Like maybe this hermetically sealed graveyard might start waking up at any moment, unleashing all its terrible secrets after 250 million years.

That was crazy, of course.

But as he wiped sweaty dew from his brow, he could not dismiss it entirely. Because ever since they’d reached the petrified forest he’d had the feeling that they were being watched.

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