For many city dwellers, forest fires - colorful, malevolent conflagrations that consume trees so obviously intended by nature to decorate our national parks - are confined to television screens.

The Sundergarh branch of the community was once possessed by a rapacious goddess named Kankala Devi, who consumed trees, soil and everything else.

IT is among nature's most dramatic scenes: fire that sounds like a jumbo jetliner, yellow, red and blue flames soaring hundreds of feet into the air, lighting the night sky for miles, throwing leg-sized embers hundreds of yards ahead and consuming all the cabins, cars and towering trees in its path.

Pulverized rock formed ebon and stormy clouds that hid the face of the sun; glowing lava spewed and flowed down, feeding upon and consuming giant trees flattened for two days' march in any direction from the wounded mountain.

In addition to consuming trees, more intense wildfires tend to produce substantial amounts of smoke by consuming flammable material located on the ground.

But, he pointed out, termites are useful in nature, consuming fallen trees and brush.

That hearth was big enough to consume entire trees but, like most fires on the rolling grasslands of the Wind Plain, it burned coal, not wood.

A fire last July in Harriman State Park, though smaller at 5,000 acres, was actually far more severe because it consumed trees and moved underground, making it difficult for firefighters to track its path.

The controlled burn consumed brush, low-lying branches and smaller trees, taking away the fuel for a larger fire.

Thread could eat anything, herdbeasts, hu-mans, vegetation-it could even consume huge trees in the time it took a man to blink.