When he spoke the heath boer listened, for he had learned
to look upon him as one of them. He wore no gold lace. A plain man
in every-day gray tweeds, with his trousers tucked into his boots,
he spoke to plain people of things that concerned them vitally, and
in a way they could understand. So when he told them that the heath
had once been forest-clad, at least a large part of it, and pointed
them to the proofs, and that the woods could be made to grow again
to give them timber and shelter and crops, they gave heed. It was
worth trying at any rate. The shelter was the immediate thing. They
began planting hedges about their homesteads; not always wisely, for
it is not every tree that will grow in the heath. The wind whipped
and wore them, the ahl cramped their roots, and they died. The ahl
is the rusty-red crust that forms under the heather in the course of
the ages where the desert rules. Sometimes it is a loose sandstone
formation; sometimes it carries as much as twenty per cent of iron
that is absorbed from the upper layers of the sand. In any case, it
must be broken through; no tree root can do it. The ahl, the poverty
of the sand, and the wind, together make the "evil genius" of the
heath that had won until then in the century-old fight with man.
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