When Alice opened the front door, she was amazed to see a giant sequoia looking impassively back at her. The tree engulfed her view, so dwarfed her egress that she had to tiptoe and shimmy sideways to get out the door.

Outside, she stepped back and back to take more of it in. And as her eyes climbed up the thick trunk like ants scurrying along a rough-hewn table, she was taken and taken up by the sky. It was as though she were looking into a concave-shaped cosmos: a deep bowl of passing clouds held in place by tree limbs all around the sides. (But what, she thought, held the bottom in place? Would not the passing clouds leak out?) Watching the clouds sweep from side to side, Alice soon forgot her tiny feet as well as her craning neck. Soon she forgot her thoughts and soon after that herself.