The Martian in the Wood

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I never saw Holmburgh Wood before it was destroyed.

To help me imagine it, I have only the descriptions of Walter Jenkins, that notoriously unreliable narrator of the First Martian War, and Zena Gardner, who was at least an eyewitness to the events that led to the Wood’s burning.

Holmburgh is in Sussex, in the south of England. This is old country, older in a sense even than the rest of our venerable island nation. For, you see, it always lay beyond the reach of the glaciers. Even at the height of the Ice Ages past, these southernmost counties were spared the grinding and bedrock-scraping suffered by more northern terrains. Holmburgh Wood in modern times was a tangle of tree species, of deciduous and evergreen mixed in together, that could not, of course, have survived in that form since the last warm interval between the returns of the ice. In the frozen desert south of the glaciers, at the site of Holmburgh, there might have been a tangle of Arctic willows, their roots clinging to rocky ground, bent over by the unceasing wind. Yet the Wood itself survived – with seeds and spores, perhaps, sleeping in the ground until the warmth returned. Survived, with something of its dark character.

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