There was something ominous about Cumberland: the thousand-year-old oak trees, their thick branches twenty feet in circumference, knots the size of jagged boulders, curling and bending down toward the grass, hovering inches above in suspended animation. Witness trees, they call them, so old that they had lived through history, great and terrible. Ancient Spanish moss one hundred feet high, draping either side of the pathway to Greyfield Inn, two weblike, gothic green curtains daring visitors to pass through.
