Where rich and fertile soil is the reward for the desperate battle with an iron forest, I can comprehend the clearing of a wilderness, and admire the transformation into gentle hills clothed in green, meadows, alder-bordered waters, acres of grain, and dainty young orchards; but here, in this land, only the flats along the river-courses are worthy of cultivation; the rest is sand and rock deeply covered with the forest mast, and fertile only while that lasts. And the forest once gone, land and water shrivel, unnourished, leaving a desert amid charred stumps and the white phantoms of dead pines. I was ever averse to the cutting of the forests here, except for selected crops of ripened timber to be replaced by natural growth ere the next crop had ripened; and Sir William Johnson, who was wise in such matters, set us a wholesome example which our yeomen have not followed. And already lands cleared fifty years since have run out to the sandy subsoil; yet still the axes flash, still the great trees groan and fall, crashing through and smashing their helpless fellows; and in God's own garden waters shrink, and fire passes, and the deer flee away, and rain fails, because man passes in his folly, and the path of the fool is destruction.
Where Thendara was, green trees flourish to the glory of the Holder of Heaven.
Where the forest whitens with men, the earth mourns in ashes for the lost Thendara--Thendara! Thendara no more!