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Title: The Willows

Author: Algernon Blackwood

Release Date: March 4, 2004 [EBook #11438]

Language: English


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THE WILLOWS

Algernon Blackwood
(1907)



I


After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, the Danube
enters a region of singular loneliness and desolation, where its waters
spread away on all sides regardless of a main channel, and the country
becomes a swamp for miles upon miles, covered by a vast sea of low
willow-bushes. On the big maps this deserted area is painted in a fluffy
blue, growing fainter in color as it leaves the banks, and across it may be
seen in large straggling letters the word Sumpfe, meaning marshes.

In high flood this great acreage of sand, shingle-beds, and willow-grown
islands is almost topped by the water, but in normal seasons the bushes
bend and rustle in the free winds, showing their silver leaves to the
sunshine in an ever-moving plain of bewildering beauty. These willows never
attain to the dignity of trees; they have no rigid trunks; they remain
humble bushes, with rounded tops and soft outline, swaying on slender stems
that answer to the least pressure of the wind; supple as grasses, and so
continually shifting that they somehow give the impression that the entire
plain is moving and alive. For the wind sends waves rising and falling over
the whole surface, waves of leaves instead of waves of water, green swells
like the sea, too, until the branches turn and lift, and then silvery white
as their underside turns to the sun.

Happy to slip beyond the control of the stern banks, the Danube here
wanders about at will among the intricate network of channels intersecting
the islands everywhere with broad avenues down which the waters pour with a
shouting sound; making whirlpools, eddies, and foaming rapids; tearing at
the sandy banks; carrying away masses of shore and willow-clumps; and
forming new islands innumerably which shift daily in size and shape and
possess at best an impermanent life, since the flood-time obliterates their
very existence.

Properly speaking, this fascinating part of the river's life begins soon
after leaving Pressburg, and we, in our Canadian canoe, with gipsy tent and
frying-pan on board, reached it on the crest of a rising flood about
mid-July. That very same morning, when the sky was reddening before
sunrise, we had slipped swiftly through still-sleeping Vienna, leaving it a
couple of hours later a mere patch of smoke against the blue hills of the
Wienerwald on the horizon; we had breakfasted below Fischeramend under a
grove of birch trees roaring in the wind; and had then swept on the tearing
current past Orth, Hainburg, Petronell (the old Roman Carnuntum of Marcus
Aurelius), and so under the frowning heights of Thelsen on a spur of the
Carpathians, where the March steals in quietly from the left and the
frontier is crossed between Austria and Hungary.

Racing along at twelve kilometers an hour soon took us well into Hungary,
and the muddy waters--sure sign of flood--sent us aground on many a
shingle-bed, and twisted us like a cork in many a sudden belching whirlpool
before the towers of Pressburg (Hungarian, Poszony) showed against the sky;
and then the canoe, leaping like a spirited horse, flew at top speed under
the grey walls, negotiated safely the sunken chain of the Fliegende Brucke
ferry, turned the corner sharply to the left, and plunged on yellow foam
into the wilderness of islands, sandbanks, and swamp-land beyond--the land
of the willows.

The change came suddenly, as when a series of bioscope pictures snaps down
on the streets of a town and shifts without warning into the scenery of
lake and forest. We entered the land of desolation on wings, and in less
than half an hour there was neither boat nor fishing-hut nor red roof, nor
any single sign of human habitation and civilization within sight. The
sense of remoteness from the world of humankind, the utter isolation, the
fascination of this singular world of willows, winds, and waters, instantly
laid its spell upon us both, so that we allowed laughingly to one another
that we ought by rights to have held some special kind of passport to admit
us, and that we had, somewhat audaciously, come without asking leave into a
separate little kingdom of wonder and magic--a kingdom that was reserved
for the use of others who had a right to it, with everywhere unwritten
warnings to trespassers for those who had the imagination to discover them.

Though still early in the afternoon, the ceaseless buffetings of a most
tempestuous wind made us feel weary, and we at once began casting about for
a suitable camping-ground for the night. But the bewildering character of
the islands made landing difficult; the swirling flood carried us in shore
and then swept us out again; the willow branches tore our hands as we
seized them to stop the canoe, and we pulled many a yard of sandy bank into
the water before at length we shot with a great sideways blow from the wind
into a backwater and managed to beach the bows in a cloud of spray. Then we
lay panting and laughing after our exertions on the hot yellow sand,
sheltered from the wind, and in the full blaze of a scorching sun, a
cloudless blue sky above, and an immense army of dancing, shouting willow
bushes, closing in from all sides, shining with spray and clapping their
thousand little hands as though to applaud the success of our efforts.

"What a river!" I said to my companion, thinking of all the way we had
traveled from the source in the Black Forest, and how he had often been
obliged to wade and push in the upper shallows at the beginning of June.

"Won't stand much nonsense now, will it?" he said, pulling the canoe a
little farther into safety up the sand, and then composing himself for a
nap.

I lay by his side, happy and peaceful in the bath of the elements--water,
wind, sand, and the great fire of the sun--thinking of the long journey
that lay behind us, and of the great stretch before us to the Black Sea,
and how lucky I was to have such a delightful and charming traveling
companion as my friend, the Swede.

We had made many similar journeys together, but the Danube, more than any
other river I knew, impressed us from the very beginning with its
aliveness. From its tiny bubbling entry into the world among the pinewood
gardens of Donaueschingen, until this moment when it began to play the
great river-game of losing itself among the deserted swamps, unobserved,
unrestrained, it had seemed to us like following the grown of some living
creature. Sleepy at first, but later developing violent desires as it
became conscious of its deep soul, it rolled, like some huge fluid being,
through all the countries we had passed, holding our little craft on its
mighty shoulders, playing roughly with us sometimes, yet always friendly
and well-meaning, till at length we had come inevitably to regard it as a
Great Personage.

How, indeed, could it be otherwise, since it told us so much of its secret
life? At night we heard it singing to the moon as we lay in our tent,
uttering that odd sibilant note peculiar to itself and said to be caused by
the rapid tearing of the pebbles along its bed, so great is its hurrying
speed. We knew, too, the voice of its gurgling whirlpools, suddenly
bubbling up on a surface previously quite calm; the roar of its shallows
and swift rapids; its constant steady thundering below all mere surface
sounds; and that ceaseless tearing of its icy waters at the banks. How it
stood up and shouted when the rains fell flat upon its face! And how its
laughter roared out when the wind blew up-stream and tried to stop its
growing speed! We knew all its sounds and voices, its tumblings and
foamings, its unnecessary splashing against the bridges; that
self-conscious chatter when there were hills to look on; the affected
dignity of its speech when it passed through the little towns, far too
important to laugh; and all these faint, sweet whisperings when the sun
caught it fairly in some slow curve and poured down upon it till the steam
rose.

It was full of tricks, too, in its early life before the great world knew
it. There were places in the upper reaches among the Swabian forests, when
yet the first whispers of its destiny had not reached it, where it elected
to disappear through holes in the ground, to appear again on the other side
of the porous limestone hills and start a new river with another name;
leaving, too, so little water in its own bed that we had to climb out and
wade and push the canoe through miles of shallows.

And a chief pleasure, in those early days of its irresponsible youth, was
to lie low, like Brer Fox, just before the little turbulent tributaries
came to join it from the Alps, and to refuse to acknowledge them when in,
but to run for miles side by side, the dividing line well marked, the very
levels different, the Danube utterly declining to recognize the newcomer.
Below Passau, however, it gave up this particular trick, for there the Inn
comes in with a thundering power impossible to ignore, and so pushes and
incommodes the parent river that there is hardly room for them in the long
twisting gorge that follows, and the Danube is shoved this way and that
against the cliffs, and forced to hurry itself with great waves and much
dashing to and fro in order to get through in time. And during the fight
our canoe slipped down from its shoulder to its breast, and had the time of
its life among the struggling waves. But the Inn taught the old river a
lesson, and after Passau it no longer pretended to ignore new arrivals.

This was many days back, of course, and since then we had come to know
other aspects of the great creature, and across the Bavarian wheat plain of
Straubing she wandered so slowly under the blazing June sun that we could
well imagine only the surface inches were water, while below there moved,
concealed as by a silken mantle, a whole army of Undines, passing silently
and unseen down to the sea, and very leisurely too, lest they be
discovered.

Much, too, we forgave her because of her friendliness to the birds and
animals that haunted the shores. Cormorants lined the banks in lonely
places in rows like short black palings; grey crows crowded the
shingle-beds; storks stood fishing in the vistas of shallower water that
opened up between the islands, and hawks, swans, and marsh birds of all
sorts filled the air with glinting wings and singing, petulant cries. It
was impossible to feel annoyed with the river's vagaries after seeing a
deer leap with a splash into the water at sunrise and swim past the bows of
the canoe; and often we saw fawns peering at us from the underbrush, or
looked straight into the brown eyes of a stag as we charged full tilt round
a corner and entered another reach of the river. Foxes, too, everywhere
haunted the banks, tripping daintily among the driftwood and disappearing
so suddenly that it was impossible to see how they managed it.

But now, after leaving Pressburg, everything changed a little, and the
Danube became more serious. It ceased trifling. It was half-way to the
Black Sea, within seeming distance almost of other, stranger countries
where no tricks would be permitted or understood. It became suddenly
grown-up, and claimed our respect and even our awe. It broke out into three
arms, for one thing, that only met again a hundred kilometers farther down,
and for a canoe there were no indications which one was intended to be
followed.

"If you take a side channel," said the Hungarian officer we met in the
Pressburg shop while buying provisions, "you may find yourselves, when the
flood subsides, forty miles from anywhere, high and dry, and you may easily
starve. There are no people, no farms, no fishermen. I warn you not to
continue. The river, too, is still rising, and this wind will increase."

The rising river did not alarm us in the least, but the matter of being
left high and dry by a sudden subsidence of the waters might be serious,
and we had consequently laid in an extra stock of provisions. For the rest,
the officer's prophecy held true, and the wind, blowing down a perfectly
clear sky, increased steadily till it reached the dignity of a westerly
gale.

It was earlier than usual when we camped, for the sun was a good hour or
two from the horizon, and leaving my friend still asleep on the hot sand, I
wandered about in desultory examination of our hotel. The island, I found,
was less than an acre in extent, a mere sandy bank standing some two or
three feet above the level of the river. The far end, pointing into the
sunset, was covered with flying spray which the tremendous wind drove off
the crests of the broken waves. It was triangular in shape, with the apex
up stream.

I stood there for several minutes, watching the impetuous crimson flood
bearing down with a shouting roar, dashing in waves against the bank as
though to sweep it bodily away, and then swirling by in two foaming streams
on either side. The ground seemed to shake with the shock and rush, while
the furious movement of the willow bushes as the wind poured over them
increased the curious illusion that the island itself actually moved.
Above, for a mile or two, I could see the great river descending upon me;
it was like looking up the slope of a sliding hill, white with foam, and
leaping up everywhere to show itself to the sun.

The rest of the island was too thickly grown with willows to make walking
pleasant, but I made the tour, nevertheless. From the lower end the light,
of course, changed, and the river looked dark and angry. Only the backs of
the flying waves were visible, streaked with foam, and pushed forcibly by
the great puffs of wind that fell upon them from behind. For a short mile
it was visible, pouring in and out among the islands, and then disappearing
with a huge sweep into the willows, which closed about it like a herd of
monstrous antediluvian creatures crowding down to drink. They made me think
of gigantic sponge-like growths that sucked the river up into themselves.
They caused it to vanish from sight. They herded there together in such
overpowering numbers.

Altogether it was an impressive scene, with its utter loneliness, its
bizarre suggestion; and as I gazed, long and curiously, a singular emotion
began to stir somewhere in the depths of me. Midway in my delight of the
wild beauty, there crept, unbidden and unexplained, a curious feeling of
disquietude, almost of alarm.

A rising river, perhaps, always suggests something of the ominous; many of
the little islands I saw before me would probably have been swept away by
the morning; this resistless, thundering flood of water touched the sense
of awe. Yet I was aware that my uneasiness lay deeper far than the emotions
of awe and wonder. It was not that I felt. Nor had it directly to do with
the power of the driving wind--this shouting hurricane that might almost
carry up a few acres of willows into the air and scatter them like so much
chaff over the landscape. The wind was simply enjoying itself, for nothing
rose out of the flat landscape to stop it, and I was conscious of sharing
its great game with a kind of pleasurable excitement. Yet this novel
emotion had nothing to do with the wind. Indeed, so vague was the sense of
distress I experienced, that it was impossible to trace it to its source
and deal with it accordingly, though I was aware somehow that it had to do
with my realization of our utter insignificance before this unrestrained
power of the elements about me. The huge-grown river had something to do
with it too--a vague, unpleasant idea that we had somehow trifled with
these great elemental forces in whose power we lay helpless every hour of
the day and night. For here, indeed, they were gigantically at play
together, and the sight appealed to the imagination.

But my emotion, so far as I could understand it, seemed to attach itself
more particularly to the willow bushes, to these acres and acres of
willows, crowding, so thickly growing there, swarming everywhere the eye
could reach, pressing upon the river as though to suffocate it, standing in
dense array mile after mile beneath the sky, watching, waiting, listening.
And, apart quite from the elements, the willows connected themselves subtly
with my malaise, attacking the mind insidiously somehow by reason of their
vast numbers, and contriving in some way or other to represent to the
imagination a new and mighty power, a power, moreover, not altogether
friendly to us.

Great revelations of nature, of course, never fail to impress in one way or
another, and I was no stranger to moods of the kind. Mountains overawe and
oceans terrify, while the mystery of great forests exercises a spell
peculiarly its own. But all these, at one point or another, somewhere link
on intimately with human life and human experience. They stir
comprehensible, even if alarming, emotions. They tend on the whole to
exalt.

With this multitude of willows, however, it was something far different, I
felt. Some essence emanated from them that besieged the heart. A sense of
awe awakened, true, but of awe touched somewhere by a vague terror. Their
serried ranks, growing everywhere darker about me as the shadows deepened,
moving furiously yet softly in the wind, woke in me the curious and
unwelcome suggestion that we had trespassed here upon the borders of an
alien world, a world where we were intruders, a world where we were not
wanted or invited to remain--where we ran grave risks perhaps!

The feeling, however, though it refused to yield its meaning entirely to
analysis, did not at the time trouble me by passing into menace. Yet it
never left me quite, even during the very practical business of putting up
the tent in a hurricane of wind and building a fire for the stew-pot. It
remained, just enough to bother and perplex, and to rob a most delightful
camping-ground of a good portion of its charm. To my companion, however, I
said nothing, for he was a man I considered devoid of imagination. In the
first place, I could never have explained to him what I meant, and in the
second, he would have laughed stupidly at me if I had.

There was a slight depression in the center of the island, and here we
pitched the tent. The surrounding willows broke the wind a bit.

"A poor camp," observed the imperturbable Swede when at last the tent stood
upright, "no stones and precious little firewood. I'm for moving on early
tomorrow--eh? This sand won't hold anything."

But the experience of a collapsing tent at midnight had taught us many
devices, and we made the cozy gipsy house as safe as possible, and then set
about collecting a store of wood to last till bed-time. Willow bushes drop
no branches, and driftwood was our only source of supply. We hunted the
shores pretty thoroughly. Everywhere the banks were crumbling as the rising
flood tore at them and carried away great portions with a splash and a
gurgle.

"The island's much smaller than when we landed," said the accurate Swede.
"It won't last long at this rate. We'd better drag the canoe close to the
tent, and be ready to start at a moment's notice. I shall sleep in my
clothes."

He was a little distance off, climbing along the bank, and I heard his
rather jolly laugh as he spoke.

"By Jove!" I heard him call, a moment later, and turned to see what had
caused his exclamation. But for the moment he was hidden by the willows,
and I could not find him.

"What in the world's this?" I heard him cry again, and this time his voice
had become serious.

I ran up quickly and joined him on the bank. He was looking over the river,
pointing at something in the water.

"Good heavens, it's a man's body!" he cried excitedly. "Look!"

A black thing, turning over and over in the foaming waves, swept rapidly
past. It kept disappearing and coming up to the surface again. It was about
twenty feet from the shore, and just as it was opposite to where we stood
it lurched round and looked straight at us. We saw its eyes reflecting the
sunset, and gleaming an odd yellow as the body turned over. Then it gave a
swift, gulping plunge, and dived out of sight in a flash.

"An otter, by gad!" we exclaimed in the same breath, laughing.

It was an otter, alive, and out on the hunt; yet it had looked exactly like
the body of a drowned man turning helplessly in the current. Far below it
came to the surface once again, and we saw its black skin, wet and shining
in the sunlight.

Then, too, just as we turned back, our arms full of driftwood, another
thing happened to recall us to the river bank. This time it really was a
man, and what was more, a man in a boat. Now a small boat on the Danube was
an unusual sight at any time, but here in this deserted region, and at
flood time, it was so unexpected as to constitute a real event. We stood
and stared.

Whether it was due to the slanting sunlight, or the refraction from the
wonderfully illumined water, I cannot say, but, whatever the cause, I found
it difficult to focus my sight properly upon the flying apparition. It
seemed, however, to be a man standing upright in a sort of flat-bottomed
boat, steering with a long oar, and being carried down the opposite shore
at a tremendous pace. He apparently was looking across in our direction,
but the distance was too great and the light too uncertain for us to make
out very plainly what he was about. It seemed to me that he was
gesticulating and making signs at us. His voice came across the water to us
shouting something furiously, but the wind drowned it so that no single
word was audible. There was something curious about the whole
appearance--man, boat, signs, voice--that made an impression on me out of
all proportion to its cause.

"He's crossing himself!" I cried. "Look, he's making the sign of the
Cross!"

"I believe you're right," the Swede said, shading his eyes with his hand
and watching the man out of sight. He seemed to be gone in a moment,
melting away down there into the sea of willows where the sun caught them
in the bend of the river and turned them into a great crimson wall of
beauty. Mist, too, had begun to ruse, so that the air was hazy.

"But what in the world is he doing at nightfall on this flooded river?" I
said, half to myself. "Where is he going at such a time, and what did he
mean by his signs and shouting? D'you think he wished to warn us about
something?"

"He saw our smoke, and thought we were spirits probably," laughed my
companion. "These Hungarians believe in all sorts of rubbish; you remember
the shopwoman at Pressburg warning us that no one ever landed here because
it belonged to some sort of beings outside man's world! I suppose they
believe in fairies and elementals, possibly demons, too. That peasant in
the boat saw people on the islands for the first time in his life," he
added, after a slight pause, "and it scared him, that's all."

The Swede's tone of voice was not convincing, and his manner lacked
something that was usually there. I noted the change instantly while he
talked, though without being able to label it precisely.

"If they had enough imagination," I laughed loudly--I remember trying to
make as much noise as I could--"they might well people a place like this
with the old gods of antiquity. The Romans must have haunted all this
region more or less with their shrines and sacred groves and elemental
deities."

The subject dropped and we returned to our stew-pot, for my friend was not
given to imaginative conversation as a rule. Moreover, just then I remember
feeling distinctly glad that he was not imaginative; his stolid, practical
nature suddenly seemed to me welcome and comforting. It was an admirable
temperament, I felt; he could steer down rapids like a red Indian, shoot
dangerous bridges and whirlpools better than any white man I ever saw in a
canoe. He was a grand fellow for an adventurous trip, a tower of strength
when untoward things happened. I looked at his strong face and light curly
hair as he staggered along under his pile of driftwood (twice the size of
mine!), and I experienced a feeling of relief. Yes, I was distinctly glad
just then that the Swede was--what he was, and that he never made remarks
that suggested more than they said.

"The river's still rising, though," he added, as if following out some
thoughts of his own, and dropping his load with a gasp. "This island will
be under water in two days if it goes on."

"I wish the wind would go down," I said. "I don't care a fig for the
river."

The flood, indeed, had no terrors for us; we could get off at ten minutes'
notice, and the more water the better we liked it. It meant an increasing
current and the obliteration of the treacherous shingle-beds that so often
threatened to tear the bottom out of our canoe.

Contrary to our expectations, the wind did not go down with the sun. It
seemed to increase with the darkness, howling overhead and shaking the
willows round us like straws. Curious sounds accompanied it sometimes, like
the explosion of heavy guns, and it fell upon the water and the island in
great flat blows of immense power. It made me think of the sounds a planet
must make, could we only hear it, driving along through space.

But the sky kept wholly clear of clouds, and soon after supper the full
moon rose up in the east and covered the river and the plain of shouting
willows with a light like the day.

We lay on the sandy patch beside the fire, smoking, listening to the noises
of the night round us, and talking happily of the journey we had already
made, and of our plans ahead. The map lay spread in the door of the tent,
but the high wind made it hard to study, and presently we lowered the
curtain and extinguished the lantern. The firelight was enough to smoke and
see each other's faces by, and the sparks flew about overhead like
fireworks. A few yards beyond, the river gurgled and hissed, and from time
to time a heavy splash announced the falling away of further portions of
the bank.

Our talk, I noticed, had to do with the faraway scenes and incidents of our
first camps in the Black Forest, or of other subjects altogether remote
from the present setting, for neither of us spoke of the actual moment more
than was necessary--almost as though we had agreed tacitly to avoid
discussion of the camp and its incidents. Neither the otter nor the
boatman, for instance, received the honor of a single mention, though
ordinarily these would have furnished discussion for the greater part of
the evening. They were, of course, distinct events in such a place.

The scarcity of wood made it a business to keep the fire going, for the
wind, that drove the smoke in our faces wherever we sat, helped at the same
time to make a forced draught. We took it in turn to make some foraging
expeditions into the darkness, and the quantity the Swede brought back
always made me feel that he took an absurdly long time finding it; for the
fact was I did not care much about being left alone, and yet it always
seemed to be my turn to grub about among the bushes or scramble along the
slippery banks in the moonlight. The long day's battle with wind and
water--such wind and such water!--had tired us both, and an early bed was
the obvious program. Yet neither of us made the move for the tent. We lay
there, tending the fire, talking in desultory fashion, peering about us
into the dense willow bushes, and listening to the thunder of wind and
river. The loneliness of the place had entered our very bones, and silence
seemed natural, for after a bit the sound of our voices became a trifle
unreal and forced; whispering would have been the fitting mode of
communication, I felt, and the human voice, always rather absurd amid the
roar of the elements, now carried with it something almost illegitimate. It
was like talking out loud in church, or in some place where it was not
lawful, perhaps not quite safe, to be overheard.

The eeriness of this lonely island, set among a million willows, swept by a
hurricane, and surrounded by hurrying deep waters, touched us both, I
fancy. Untrodden by man, almost unknown to man, it lay there beneath the
moon, remote from human influence, on the frontier of another world, an
alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows. And
we, in our rashness, had dared to invade it, even to make use of it!
Something more than the power of its mystery stirred in me as I lay on the
sand, feet to fire, and peered up through the leaves at the stars. For the
last time I rose to get firewood.

"When this has burnt up," I said firmly, "I shall turn in," and my
companion watched me lazily as I moved off into the surrounding shadows.

For an unimaginative man I thought he seemed unusually receptive that
night, unusually open to suggestion of things other than sensory. He too
was touched by the beauty and loneliness of the place. I was not altogether
pleased, I remember, to recognize this slight change in him, and instead of
immediately collecting sticks, I made my way to the far point of the island
where the moonlight on plain and river could be seen to better advantage.
The desire to be alone had come suddenly upon me; my former dread returned
in force; there was a vague feeling in me I wished to face and probe to the
bottom.

When I reached the point of sand jutting out among the waves, the spell of
the place descended upon me with a positive shock. No mere "scenery" could
have produced such an effect. There was something more here, something to
alarm.

I gazed across the waste of wild waters; I watched the whispering willows;
I heard the ceaseless beating of the tireless wind; and, one and all, each
in its own way, stirred in me this sensation of a strange distress. But the
willows especially; for ever they went on chattering and talking among
themselves, laughing a little, shrilly crying out, sometimes sighing--but
what it was they made so much to-do about belonged to the secret life of
the great plain they inhabited. And it was utterly alien to the world I
knew, or to that of the wild yet kindly elements. They made me think of a
host of beings from another plane of life, another evolution altogether,
perhaps, all discussing a mystery known only to themselves. I watched them
moving busily together, oddly shaking their big bushy heads, twirling their
myriad leaves even when there was no wind. They moved of their own will as
though alive, and they touched, by some incalculable method, my own keen
sense of the horrible.

There they stood in the moonlight, like a vast army surrounding our camp,
shaking their innumerable silver spears defiantly, formed all ready for an
attack.

The psychology of places, for some imaginations at least, is very vivid;
for the wanderer, especially, camps have their "note" either of welcome or
rejection. At first it may not always be apparent, because the busy
preparations of tent and cooking prevent, but with the first pause--after
supper usually--it comes and announces itself. And the note of this
willow-camp now became unmistakably plain to me; we were interlopers,
trespassers; we were not welcomed. The sense of unfamiliarity grew upon me
as I stood there watching. We touched the frontier of a region where our
presence was resented. For a night's lodging we might perhaps be tolerated;
but for a prolonged and inquisitive stay--No! by all the gods of the trees
and wilderness, no! We were the first human influences upon this island,
and we were not wanted. The willows were against us.

Strange thoughts like these, bizarre fancies, borne I know not whence,
found lodgment in my mind as I stood listening. What, I thought, if, after
all, these crouching willows proved to be alive; if suddenly they should
rise up, like a swarm of living creatures, marshaled by the gods whose
territory we had invaded, sweep towards us off the vast swamps, booming
overhead in the night--and then settle down! As I looked it was so easy to
imagine they actually moved, crept nearer, retreated a little, huddled
together in masses, hostile, waiting for the great wind that should finally
start them a-running. I could have sworn their aspect changed a little, and
their ranks deepened and pressed more closely together.

The melancholy shrill cry of a night-bird sounded overhead, and suddenly I
nearly lost my balance as the piece of bank I stood upon fell with a great
splash into the river, undermined by the flood. I stepped back just in
time, and went on hunting for firewood again, half laughing at the odd
fancies that crowded so thickly into my mind and cast their spell upon me.
I recalled the Swede's remark about moving on next day, and I was just
thinking that I fully agreed with him, when I turned with a start and saw
the subject of my thoughts standing immediately in front of me. He was
quite close. The roar of the elements had covered his approach.




II


"You've been gone so long," he shouted above the wind, "I thought something
must have happened to you."

But there was that in his tone, and a certain look in his face as well,
that conveyed to me more than his usual words, and in a flash I understood
the real reason for his coming. It was because the spell of the place had
entered his soul too, and he did not like being alone.

"River still rising," he cried, pointing to the flood in the moonlight,
"and the wind's simply awful."

He always said the same things, but it was the cry for companionship that
gave the real importance to his words.

"Lucky," I cried back, "our tent's in the hollow. I think it'll hold all
right." I added something about the difficulty of finding wood, in order to
explain my absence, but the wind caught my words and flung them across the
river, so that he did not hear, but just looked at me through the branches,
nodding his head.

"Lucky if we get away without disaster!" he shouted, or words to that
effect; and I remember feeling half angry with him for putting the thought
into words, for it was exactly what I felt myself. There was disaster
impending somewhere, and the sense of presentiment lay unpleasantly upon
me.

We went back to the fire and made a final blaze, poking it up with our
feet. We took a last look round. But for the wind the heat would have been
unpleasant. I put this thought into words, and I remember my friend's reply
struck me oddly: that he would rather have the heat, the ordinary July
weather, than this "diabolical wind."

Everything was snug for the night; the canoe lying turned over beside the
tent, with both yellow paddles beneath her; the provision sack hanging from
a willow-stem, and the washed-up dishes removed to a safe distance from the
fire, all ready for the morning meal.

We smothered the embers of the fire with sand, and then turned in. The flap
of the tent door was up, and I saw the branches and the stars and the white
moonlight. The shaking willows and the heavy buffetings of the wind against
our taut little house were the last things I remembered as sleep came down
and covered all with its soft and delicious forgetfulness.

Suddenly I found myself lying awake, peering from my sandy mattress through
the door of the tent. I looked at my watch pinned against the canvas, and
saw by the bright moonlight that it was past twelve o'clock--the threshold
of a new day--and I had therefore slept a couple of hours. The Swede was
asleep still beside me; the wind howled as before; something plucked at my
heart and made me feel afraid. There was a sense of disturbance in my
immediate neighborhood.

I sat up quickly and looked out. The trees were swaying violently to and
fro as the gusts smote them, but our little bit of green canvas lay snugly
safe in the hollow, for the wind passed over it without meeting enough
resistance to make it vicious. The feeling of disquietude did not pass,
however, and I crawled quietly out of the tent to see if our belongings
were safe. I moved carefully so as not to waken my companion. A curious
excitement was on me.

I was half-way out, kneeling on all fours, when my eye first took in that
the tops of the bushes opposite, with their moving tracery of leaves, made
shapes against the sky. I sat back on my haunches and stared. It was
incredible, surely, but there, opposite and slightly above me, were shapes
of some indeterminate sort among the willows, and as the branches swayed in
the wind they seemed to group themselves about these shapes, forming a
series of monstrous outlines that shifted rapidly beneath the moon. Close,
about fifty feet in front of me, I saw these things.

My first instinct was to waken my companion, that he too might see them,
but something made me hesitate--the sudden realization, probably, that I
should not welcome corroboration; and meanwhile I crouched there staring in
amazement with smarting eyes. I was wide awake. I remember saying to myself
that I was not dreaming.

They first became properly visible, these huge figures, just within the
tops of the bushes--immense, bronze-colored, moving, and wholly independent
of the swaying of the branches. I saw them plainly and noted, now I came to
examine them more calmly, that they were very much larger than human, and
indeed that something in their appearance proclaimed them to be not human
at all. Certainly they were not merely the moving tracery of the branches
against the moonlight. They shifted independently. They rose upwards in a
continuous stream from earth to sky, vanishing utterly as soon as they
reached the dark of the sky. They were interlaced one with another, making
a great column, and I saw their limbs and huge bodies melting in and out of
each other, forming this serpentine line that bent and swayed and twisted
spirally with the contortions of the wind-tossed trees. They were nude,
fluid shapes, passing up the bushes, within the leaves almost--rising up in
a living column into the heavens. Their faces I never could see.
Unceasingly they poured upwards, swaying in great bending curves, with a
hue of dull bronze upon their skins.

I stared, trying to force every atom of vision from my eyes. For a long
time I thought they must every moment disappear and resolve themselves into
the movements of the branches and prove to be an optical illusion. I
searched everywhere for a proof of reality, when all the while I understood
quite well that the standard of reality had changed. For the longer I
looked the more certain I became that these figures were real and living,
though perhaps not according to the standards that the camera and the
biologist would insist upon.

Far from feeling fear, I was possessed with a sense of awe and wonder such
as I have never known. I seemed to be gazing at the personified elemental
forces of this haunted and primeval region. Our intrusion had stirred the
powers of the place into activity. It was we who were the cause of the
disturbance, and my brain filled to bursting with stories and legends of
the spirits and deities of places that have been acknowledged and
worshipped by men in all ages of the world's history. But, before I could
arrive at any possible explanation, something impelled me to go farther
out, and I crept forward on the sand and stood upright. I felt the ground
still warm under my bare feet; the wind tore at my hair and face; and the
sound of the river burst upon my ears with a sudden roar. These things, I
knew, were real, and proved that my senses were acting normally. Yet the
figures still rose from earth to heaven, silent, majestically, in a great
spiral of grace and strength that overwhelmed me at length with a genuine
deep emotion of worship. I felt that I must fall down and
worship--absolutely worship.

Perhaps in another minute I might have done so, when a gust of wind swept
against me with such force that it blew me sideways, and I nearly stumbled
and fell. It seemed to shake the dream violently out of me. At least it
gave me another point of view somehow. The figures still remained, still
ascended into heaven from the heart of the night, but my reason at last
began to assert itself. It must be a subjective experience, I argued--none
the less real for that, but still subjective. The moonlight and the
branches combined to work out these pictures upon the mirror of my
imagination, and for some reason I projected them outwards and made them
appear objective. I knew this must be the case, of course. I took courage,
and began to move forward across the open patches of sand. By Jove, though,
was it all hallucination? Was it merely subjective? Did not my reason argue
in the old futile way from the little standard of the known?

I only know that great column of figures ascended darkly into the sky for
what seemed a very long period of time, and with a very complete measure of
reality as most men are accustomed to gauge reality. Then suddenly they
were gone!

And, once they were gone and the immediate wonder of their great presence
had passed, fear came down upon me with a cold rush. The esoteric meaning
of this lonely and haunted region suddenly flamed up within me, and I began
to tremble dreadfully. I took a quick look round--a look of horror that
came near to panic--calculating vainly ways of escape; and then, realizing
how helpless I was to achieve anything really effective, I crept back
silently into the tent and lay down again upon my sandy mattress, first
lowering the door-curtain to shut out the sight of the willows in the
moonlight, and then burying my head as deeply as possible beneath the
blankets to deaden the sound of the terrifying wind.

As though further to convince me that I had not been dreaming, I remember
that it was a long time before I fell again into a troubled and restless
sleep; and even then only the upper crust of me slept, and underneath there
was something that never quite lost consciousness, but lay alert and on the
watch.

But this second time I jumped up with a genuine start of terror. It was
neither the wind nor the river that woke me, but the slow approach of
something that caused the sleeping portion of me to grow smaller and
smaller till at last it vanished altogether, and I found myself sitting
bolt upright--listening.

Outside there was a sound of multitudinous little patterings. They had been
coming, I was aware, for a long time, and in my sleep they had first become
audible. I sat there nervously wide awake as though I had not slept at all.
It seemed to me that my breathing came with difficulty, and that there was
a great weight upon the surface of my body. In spite of the hot night, I
felt clammy with cold and shivered. Something surely was pressing steadily
against the sides of the tent and weighing down upon it from above. Was it
the body of the wind? Was this the pattering rain, the dripping of the
leaves? The spray blown from the river by the wind and gathering in big
drops? I thought quickly of a dozen things.

Then suddenly the explanation leaped into my mind: a bough from the poplar,
the only large tree on the island, had fallen with the wind. Still half
caught by the other branches, it would fall with the next gust and crush
us, and meanwhile its leaves brushed and tapped upon the tight canvas
surface of the tent. I raised a loose flap and rushed out, calling to the
Swede to follow.

But when I got out and stood upright I saw that the tent was free. There
was no hanging bough; there was no rain or spray; nothing approached.

A cold, grey light filtered down through the bushes and lay on the faintly
gleaming sand. Stars still crowded the sky directly overhead, and the wind
howled magnificently, but the fire no longer gave out any glow, and I saw
the east reddening in streaks through the trees. Several hours must have
passed since I stood there before watching the ascending figures, and the
memory of it now came back to me horribly, like an evil dream. Oh, how
tired it made me feel, that ceaseless raging wind! Yet, though the deep
lassitude of a sleepless night was on me, my nerves were tingling with the
activity of an equally tireless apprehension, and all idea of repose was
out of the question. The river I saw had risen further. Its thunder filled
the air, and a fine spray made itself felt through my thin sleeping shirt.

Yet nowhere did I discover the slightest evidence of anything to cause
alarm. This deep, prolonged disturbance in my heart remained wholly
unaccounted for.

My companion had not stirred when I called him, and there was no need to
waken him now. I looked about me carefully, noting everything; the
turned-over canoe; the yellow paddles--two of them, I'm certain; the
provision sack and the extra lantern hanging together from the tree; and,
crowding everywhere about me, enveloping all, the willows, those endless,
shaking willows. A bird uttered its morning cry, and a string of duck
passed with whirring flight overhead in the twilight. The sand whirled, dry
and stinging, about my bare feet in the wind.

I walked round the tent and then went out a little way into the bush, so
that I could see across the river to the farther landscape, and the same
profound yet indefinable emotion of distress seized upon me again as I saw
the interminable sea of bushes stretching to the horizon, looking ghostly
and unreal in the wan light of dawn. I walked softly here and there, still
puzzling over that odd sound of infinite pattering, and of that pressure
upon the tent that had wakened me. It must have been the wind, I
reflected--the wind bearing upon the loose, hot sand, driving the dry
particles smartly against the taut canvas--the wind dropping heavily upon
our fragile roof.

Yet all the time my nervousness and malaise increased appreciably.

I crossed over to the farther shore and noted how the coast-line had
altered in the night, and what masses of sand the river had torn away. I
dipped my hands and feet into the cool current, and bathed my forehead.
Already there was a glow of sunrise in the sky and the exquisite freshness
of coming day. On my way back I passed purposely beneath the very bushes
where I had seen the column of figures rising into the air, and midway
among the clumps I suddenly found myself overtaken by a sense of vast
terror. From the shadows a large figure went swiftly by. Someone passed me,
as sure as ever man did....

It was a great staggering blow from the wind that helped me forward again,
and once out in the more open space, the sense of terror diminished
strangely. The winds were about and walking, I remember saying to myself,
for the winds often move like great presences under the trees. And
altogether the fear that hovered about me was such an unknown and immense
kind of fear, so unlike anything I had ever felt before, that it woke a
sense of awe and wonder in me that did much to counteract its worst
effects; and when I reached a high point in the middle of the island from
which I could see the wide stretch of river, crimson in the sunrise, the
whole magical beauty of it all was so overpowering that a sort of wild
yearning woke in me and almost brought a cry up into the throat.

But this cry found no expression, for as my eyes wandered from the plain
beyond to the island round me and noted our little tent half hidden among
the willows, a dreadful discovery leaped out at me, compared to which my
terror of the walking winds seemed as nothing at all.

For a change, I thought, had somehow come about in the arrangement of the
landscape. It was not that my point of vantage gave me a different view,
but that an alteration had apparently been effected in the relation of the
tent to the willows, and of the willows to the tent. Surely the bushes now
crowded much closer--unnecessarily, unpleasantly close. They had moved
nearer.

Creeping with silent feet over the shifting sands, drawing imperceptibly
nearer by soft, unhurried movements, the willows had come closer during the
night. But had the wind moved them, or had they moved of themselves? I
recalled the sound of infinite small patterings and the pressure upon the
tent and upon my own heart that caused me to wake in terror. I swayed for a
moment in the wind like a tree, finding it hard to keep my upright position
on the sandy hillock. There was a suggestion here of personal agency, of
deliberate intention, of aggressive hostility, and it terrified me into a
sort of rigidity.

Then the reaction followed quickly. The idea was so bizarre, so absurd,
that I felt inclined to laugh. But the laughter came no more readily than
the cry, for the knowledge that my mind was so receptive to such dangerous
imaginings brought the additional terror that it was through our minds and
not through our physical bodies that the attack would come, and was coming.

The wind buffeted me about, and, very quickly it seemed, the sun came up
over the horizon, for it was after four o'clock, and I must have stood on
that little pinnacle of sand longer than I knew, afraid to come down to
close quarters with the willows. I returned quietly, creepily, to the tent,
first taking another exhaustive look round and--yes, I confess it--making a
few measurements. I paced out on the warm sand the distances between the
willows and the tent, making a note of the shortest distance particularly.

I crawled stealthily into my blankets. My companion, to all appearances,
still slept soundly, and I was glad that this was so. Provided my
experiences were not corroborated, I could find strength somehow to deny
them, perhaps. With the daylight I could persuade myself that it was all a
subjective hallucination, a fantasy of the night, a projection of the
excited imagination.

Nothing further came in to disturb me, and I fell asleep almost at once,
utterly exhausted, yet still in dread of hearing again that weird sound of
multitudinous pattering, or of feeling the pressure upon my heart that had
made it difficult to breathe.

The sun was high in the heavens when my companion woke me from a heavy
sleep and announced that the porridge was cooked and there was just time to
bathe. The grateful smell of frizzling bacon entered the tent door.

"River still rising," he said, "and several islands out in mid-stream have
disappeared altogether. Our own island's much smaller."

"Any wood left?" I asked sleepily.

"The wood and the island will finish tomorrow in a dead heat," he laughed,
"but there's enough to last us till then."

I plunged in from the point of the island, which had indeed altered a lot
in size and shape during the night, and was swept down in a moment to the
landing-place opposite the tent. The water was icy, and the banks flew by
like the country from an express train. Bathing under such conditions was
an exhilarating operation, and the terror of the night seemed cleansed out
of me by a process of evaporation in the brain. The sun was blazing hot;
not a cloud showed itself anywhere; the wind, however, had not abated one
little jot.

Quite suddenly then the implied meaning of the Swede's words flashed across
me, showing that he no longer wished to leave post-haste, and had changed
his mind. "Enough to last till tomorrow"--he assumed we should stay on the
island another night. It struck me as odd. The night before he was so
positive the other way. How had the change come about?

Great crumblings of the banks occurred at breakfast, with heavy splashings
and clouds of spray which the wind brought into our frying-pan, and my
fellow-traveler talked incessantly about the difficulty the Vienna-Pesth
steamers must have to find the channel in flood. But the state of his mind
interested and impressed me far more than the state of the river or the
difficulties of the steamers. He had changed somehow since the evening
before. His manner was different--a trifle excited, a trifle shy, with a
sort of suspicion about his voice and gestures. I hardly know how to
describe it now in cold blood, but at the time I remember being quite
certain of one thing--that he had become frightened?

He ate very little breakfast, and for once omitted to smoke his pipe. He
had the map spread open beside him, and kept studying its markings.

"We'd better get off sharp in an hour," I said presently, feeling for an
opening that must bring him indirectly to a partial confession at any rate.
And his answer puzzled me uncomfortably: "Rather! If they'll let us."

"Who'll let us? The elements?" I asked quickly, with affected indifference.

"The powers of this awful place, whoever they are," he replied, keeping his
eyes on the map. "The gods are here, if they are anywhere at all in the
world."

"The elements are always the true immortals," I replied, laughing as
naturally as I could manage, yet knowing quite well that my face reflected
my true feelings when he looked up gravely at me and spoke across the
smoke:

"We shall be fortunate if we get away without further disaster."

This was exactly what I had dreaded, and I screwed myself up to the point
of the direct question. It was like agreeing to allow the dentist to
extract the tooth; it had to come anyhow in the long run, and the rest was
all pretence.

"Further disaster! Why, what's happened?"

"For one thing--the steering paddle's gone," he said quietly.

"The steering paddle gone!" I repeated, greatly excited, for this was our
rudder, and the Danube in flood without a rudder was suicide. "But what--"

"And there's a tear in the bottom of the canoe," he added, with a genuine
little tremor in his voice.

I continued staring at him, able only to repeat the words in his face
somewhat foolishly. There, in the heat of the sun, and on this burning
sand, I was aware of a freezing atmosphere descending round us. I got up to
follow him, for he merely nodded his head gravely and led the way towards
the tent a few yards on the other side of the fireplace. The canoe still
lay there as I had last seen her in the night, ribs uppermost, the paddles,
or rather, the paddle, on the sand beside her.

"There's only one," he said, stooping to pick it up. "And here's the rent
in the base-board."

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that I had clearly noticed two
paddles a few hours before, but a second impulse made me think better of
it, and I said nothing. I approached to see.

There was a long, finely made tear in the bottom of the canoe where a
little slither of wood had been neatly taken clean out; it looked as if the
tooth of a sharp rock or snag had eaten down her length, and investigation
showed that the hole went through. Had we launched out in her without
observing it we must inevitably have foundered. At first the water would
have made the wood swell so as to close the hole, but once out in
mid-stream the water must have poured in, and the canoe, never more than
two inches above the surface, would have filled and sunk very rapidly.

"There, you see an attempt to prepare a victim for the sacrifice," I heard
him saying, more to himself than to me, "two victims rather," he added as
he bent over and ran his fingers along the slit.

I began to whistle--a thing I always do unconsciously when utterly
nonplussed--and purposely paid no attention to his words. I was determined
to consider them foolish.

"It wasn't there last night," he said presently, straightening up from his
examination and looking anywhere but at me.

"We must have scratched her in landing, of course," I stopped whistling to
say. "The stones are very sharp."

I stopped abruptly, for at that moment he turned round and met my eye
squarely. I knew just as well as he did how impossible my explanation was.
There were no stones, to begin with.

"And then there's this to explain too," he added quietly, handing me the
paddle and pointing to the blade.

A new and curious emotion spread freezingly over me as I took and examined
it. The blade was scraped down all over, beautifully scraped, as though
someone had sand-papered it with care, making it so thin that the first
vigorous stroke must have snapped it off at the elbow.

"One of us walked in his sleep and did this thing," I said feebly, "or--or
it has been filed by the constant stream of sand particles blown against it
by the wind, perhaps."

"Ah," said the Swede, turning away, laughing a little, "you can explain
everything."

"The same wind that caught the steering paddle and flung it so near the
bank that it fell in with the next lump that crumbled," I called out after
him, absolutely determined to find an explanation for everything he showed
me.

"I see," he shouted back, turning his head to look at me before
disappearing among the willow bushes.

Once alone with these perplexing evidences of personal agency, I think my
first thoughts took the form of "One of us must have done this thing, and
it certainly was not I." But my second thought decided how impossible it
was to suppose, under all the circumstances, that either of us had done it.
That my companion, the trusted friend of a dozen similar expeditions, could
have knowingly had a hand in it, was a suggestion not to be entertained for
a moment. Equally absurd seemed the explanation that this imperturbable and
densely practical nature had suddenly become insane and was busied with
insane purposes.

Yet the fact remained that what disturbed me most, and kept my fear
actively alive even in this blaze of sunshine and wild beauty, was the
clear certainty that some curious alteration had come about in his
mind--that he was nervous, timid, suspicious, aware of goings on he did not
speak about, watching a series of secret and hitherto unmentionable
events--waiting, in a word, for a climax that he expected, and, I thought,
expected very soon. This grew up in my mind intuitively--I hardly knew how.

I made a hurried examination of the tent and its surroundings, but the
measurements of the night remained the same. There were deep hollows formed
in the sand I now noticed for the first time, basin-shaped and of various
depths and sizes, varying from that of a tea-cup to a large bowl. The wind,
no doubt, was responsible for these miniature craters, just as it was for
lifting the paddle and tossing it towards the water. The rent in the canoe
was the only thing that seemed quite inexplicable; and, after all, it was
conceivable that a sharp point had caught it when we landed. The
examination I made of the shore did not assist this theory, but all the
same I clung to it with that diminishing portion of my intelligence which I
called my "reason." An explanation of some kind was an absolute necessity,
just as some working explanation of the universe is necessary--however
absurd--to the happiness of every individual who seeks to do his duty in
the world and face the problems of life. The simile seemed to me at the
time an exact parallel.

I at once set the pitch melting, and presently the Swede joined me at the
work, though under the best conditions in the world the canoe could not be
safe for traveling till the following day. I drew his attention casually to
the hollows in the sand.

"Yes," he said, "I know. They're all over the island. But you can explain
them, no doubt!"

"Wind, of course," I answered without hesitation. "Have you never watched
those little whirlwinds in the street that twist and twirl everything into
a circle? This sand's loose enough to yield, that's all."

He made no reply, and we worked on in silence for a bit. I watched him
surreptitiously all the time, and I had an idea he was watching me. He
seemed, too, to be always listening attentively to something I could not
hear, or perhaps for something that he expected to hear, for he kept
turning about and staring into the bushes, and up into the sky, and out
across the water where it was visible through the openings among the
willows. Sometimes he even put his hand to his ear and held it there for
several minutes. He said nothing to me, however, about it, and I asked no
questions. And meanwhile, as he mended that torn canoe with the skill and
address of a red Indian, I was glad to notice his absorption in the work,
for there was a vague dread in my heart that he would speak of the changed
aspect of the willows. And, if he had noticed that, my imagination could no
longer be held a sufficient explanation of it.




III


At length, after a long pause, he began to talk.

"Queer thing," he added in a hurried sort of voice, as though he wanted to
say something and get it over. "Queer thing. I mean, about that otter last
night."

I had expected something so totally different that he caught me with
surprise, and I looked up sharply.

"Shows how lonely this place is. Otters are awfully shy things--"

"I don't mean that, of course," he interrupted. "I mean--do you think--did
you think it really was an otter?"

"What else, in the name of Heaven, what else?"

"You know, I saw it before you did, and at first it seemed--so much bigger
than an otter."

"The sunset as you looked up-stream magnified it, or something," I replied.

He looked at me absently a moment, as though his mind were busy with other
thoughts.

"It had such extraordinary yellow eyes," he went on half to himself.

"That was the sun too," I laughed, a trifle boisterously. "I suppose you'll
wonder next if that fellow in the boat--"

I suddenly decided not to finish the sentence. He was in the act again of
listening, turning his head to the wind, and something in the expression of
his face made me halt. The subject dropped, and we went on with our
caulking. Apparently he had not noticed my unfinished sentence. Five
minutes later, however, he looked at me across the canoe, the smoking pitch
in his hand, his face exceedingly grave.

"I did rather wonder, if you want to know," he said slowly, "what that
thing in the boat was. I remember thinking at the time it was not a man.
The whole business seemed to rise quite suddenly out of the water."

I laughed again boisterously in his face, but this time there was
impatience, and a strain of anger too, in my feeling.

"Look here now," I cried, "this place is quite queer enough without going
out of our way to imagine things! That boat was an ordinary boat, and the
man in it was an ordinary man, and they were both going down-stream as fast
as they could lick. And that otter was an otter, so don't let's play the
fool about it!"

He looked steadily at me with the same grave expression. He was not in the
least annoyed. I took courage from his silence.

"And, for Heaven's sake," I went on, "don't keep pretending you hear
things, because it only gives me the jumps, and there's nothing to hear but
the river and this cursed old thundering wind."

"You fool!" he answered in a low, shocked voice, "you utter fool. That's
just the way all victims talk. As if you didn't understand just as well as
I do!" he sneered with scorn in his voice, and a sort of resignation. "The
best thing you can do is to keep quiet and try to hold your mind as firm as
possible. This feeble attempt at self-deception only makes the truth harder
when you're forced to meet it."

My little effort was over, and I found nothing more to say, for I knew
quite well his words were true, and that I was the fool, not he. Up to a
certain stage in the adventure he kept ahead of me easily, and I think I
felt annoyed to be out of it, to be thus proved less psychic, less
sensitive than himself to these extraordinary happenings, and half ignorant
all the time of what was going on under my very nose. He knew from the very
beginning, apparently. But at the moment I wholly missed the point of his
words about the necessity of there being a victim, and that we ourselves
were destined to satisfy the want. I dropped all pretence thenceforward,
but thenceforward likewise my fear increased steadily to the climax.

"But you're quite right about one thing," he added, before the subject
passed, "and that is that we're wiser not to talk about it, or even to
think about it, because what one thinks finds expression in words, and what
one says, happens."

That afternoon, while the canoe dried and hardened, we spent trying to
fish, testing the leak, collecting wood, and watching the enormous flood of
rising water. Masses of driftwood swept near our shores sometimes, and we
fished for them with long willow branches. The island grew perceptibly
smaller as the banks were torn away with great gulps and splashes. The
weather kept brilliantly fine till about four o'clock, and then for the
first time for three days the wind showed signs of abating. Clouds began to
gather in the south-west, spreading thence slowly over the sky.

This lessening of the wind came as a great relief, for the incessant
roaring, banging, and thundering had irritated our nerves. Yet the silence
that came about five o'clock with its sudden cessation was in a manner
quite as oppressive. The booming of the river had everything in its own way
then; it filled the air with deep murmurs, more musical than the wind
noises, but infinitely more monotonous. The wind held many notes, rising,
falling always beating out some sort of great elemental tune; whereas the
river's song lay between three notes at most--dull pedal notes, that held a
lugubrious quality foreign to the wind, and somehow seemed to me, in my
then nervous state, to sound wonderfully well the music of doom.

It was extraordinary, too, how the withdrawal suddenly of bright sunlight
took everything out of the landscape that made for cheerfulness; and since
this particular landscape had already managed to convey the suggestion of
something sinister, the change of course was all the more unwelcome and
noticeable. For me, I know, the darkening outlook became distinctly more
alarming, and I found myself more than once calculating how soon after
sunset the full moon would get up in the east, and whether the gathering
clouds would greatly interfere with her lighting of the little island.

With this general hush of the wind--though it still indulged in occasional
brief gusts--the river seemed to me to grow blacker, the willows to stand
more densely together. The latter, too, kept up a sort of independent
movement of their own, rustling among themselves when no wind stirred, and
shaking oddly from the roots upwards. When common objects in this way be
come charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination
far more than things of unusual appearance; and these bushes, crowding
huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquerie of
appearance that lent to them somehow the aspect of purposeful and living
creatures. Their very ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant and
hostile to us. The forces of the region drew nearer with the coming of
night. They were focusing upon our island, and more particularly upon
ourselves. For thus, somehow, in the terms of the imagination, did my
really indescribable sensations in this extraordinary place present
themselves.

I had slept a good deal in the early afternoon, and had thus recovered
somewhat from the exhaustion of a disturbed night, but this only served
apparently to render me more susceptible than before to the obsessing spell
of the haunting. I fought against it, laughing at my feelings as absurd and
childish, with very obvious physiological explanations, yet, in spite of
every effort, they gained in strength upon me so that I dreaded the night
as a child lost in a forest must dread the approach of darkness.

The canoe we had carefully covered with a waterproof sheet during the day,
and the one remaining paddle had been securely tied by the Swede to the
base of a tree, lest the wind should rob us of that too. From five o'clock
onwards I busied myself with the stew-pot and preparations for dinner, it
being my turn to cook that night. We had potatoes, onions, bits of bacon
fat to add flavor, and a general thick residue from former stews at the
bottom of the pot; with black bread broken up into it the result was most
excellent, and it was followed by a stew of plums with sugar and a brew of
strong tea with dried milk. A good pile of wood lay close at hand, and the
absence of wind made my duties easy. My companion sat lazily watching me,
dividing his attentions between cleaning his pipe and giving useless
advice--an admitted privilege of the off-duty man. He had been very quiet
all the afternoon, engaged in re-caulking the canoe, strengthening the tent
ropes, and fishing for driftwood while I slept. No more talk about
undesirable things had passed between us, and I think his only remarks had
to do with the gradual destruction of the island, which he declared was not
fully a third smaller than when we first landed.

The pot had just begun to bubble when I heard his voice calling to me from
the bank, where he had wandered away without my noticing. I ran up.

"Come and listen," he said, "and see what you make of it." He held his hand
cupwise to his ear, as so often before.

"Now do you hear anything?" he asked, watching me curiously.

We stood there, listening attentively together. At first I heard only the
deep note of the water and the hissings rising from its turbulent surface.
The willows, for once, were motionless and silent. Then a sound began to
reach my ears faintly, a peculiar sound--something like the humming of a
distant gong. It seemed to come across to us in the darkness from the waste
of swamps and willows opposite. It was repeated at regular intervals, but
it was certainly neither the sound of a bell nor the hooting of a distant
steamer. I can liken it to nothing so much as to the sound of an immense
gong, suspended far up in the sky, repeating incessantly its muffled
metallic note, soft and musical, as it was repeatedly struck. My heart
quickened as I listened.

"I've heard it all day," said my companion. "While you slept this afternoon
it came all round the island. I hunted it down, but could never get near
enough to see--to localize it correctly. Sometimes it was overhead, and
sometimes it seemed under the water. Once or twice, too, I could have sworn
it was not outside at all, but within myself--you know--the way a sound in
the fourth dimension is supposed to come."

I was too much puzzled to pay much attention to his words. I listened
carefully, striving to associate it with any known familiar sound I could
think of, but without success. It changed in the direction, too, coming
nearer, and then sinking utterly away into remote distance. I cannot say
that it was ominous in quality, because to me it seemed distinctly musical,
yet I must admit it set going a distressing feeling that made me wish I had
never heard it.

"The wind blowing in those sand-funnels," I said determined to find an
explanation, "or the bushes rubbing together after the storm perhaps."

"It comes off the whole swamp," my friend answered. "It comes from
everywhere at once." He ignored my explanations. "It comes from the willow
bushes somehow--"

"But now the wind has dropped," I objected. "The willows can hardly make a
noise by themselves, can they?"

His answer frightened me, first because I had dreaded it, and secondly,
because I knew intuitively it was true.

"It is because the wind has dropped we now hear it. It was drowned before.
It is the cry, I believe, of the--"

I dashed back to my fire, warned by the sound of bubbling that the stew was
in danger, but determined at the same time to escape further conversation.
I was resolute, if possible, to avoid the exchanging of views. I dreaded,
too, that he would begin about the gods, or the elemental forces, or
something else disquieting, and I wanted to keep myself well in hand for
what might happen later. There was another night to be faced before we
escaped from this distressing place, and there was no knowing yet what it
might bring forth.

"Come and cut up bread for the pot," I called to him, vigorously stirring
the appetizing mixture. That stew-pot held sanity for us both, and the
thought made me laugh.

He came over slowly and took the provision sack from the tree, fumbling in
its mysterious depths, and then emptying the entire contents upon the
ground-sheet at his feet.

"Hurry up!" I cried; "it's boiling."

The Swede burst out into a roar of laughter that startled me. It was forced
laughter, not artificial exactly, but mirthless.

"There's nothing here!" he shouted, holding his sides.

"Bread, I mean."

"It's gone. There is no bread. They've taken it!"

I dropped the long spoon and ran up. Everything the sack had contained lay
upon the ground-sheet, but there was no loaf.

The whole dead weight of my growing fear fell upon me and shook me. Then I
burst out laughing too. It was the only thing to do: and the sound of my
laughter also made me understand his. The stain of psychical pressure
caused it--this explosion of unnatural laughter in both of us; it was an
effort of repressed forces to seek relief; it was a temporary safety-valve.
And with both of us it ceased quite suddenly.

"How criminally stupid of me!" I cried, still determined to be consistent
and find an explanation. "I clean forgot to buy a loaf at Pressburg. That
chattering woman put everything out of my head, and I must have left it
lying on the counter or--"

"The oatmeal, too, is much less than it was this morning," the Swede
interrupted.

Why in the world need he draw attention to it? I thought angrily.

"There's enough for tomorrow," I said, stirring vigorously, "and we can get
lots more at Komorn or Gran. In twenty-four hours we shall be miles from
here."

"I hope so--to God," he muttered, putting the things back into the sack,
"unless we're claimed first as victims for the sacrifice," he added with a
foolish laugh. He dragged the sack into the tent, for safety's sake, I
suppose, and I heard him mumbling to himself, but so indistinctly that it
seemed quite natural for me to ignore his words.

Our meal was beyond question a gloomy one, and we ate it almost in silence,
avoiding one another's eyes, and keeping the fire bright. Then we washed up
and prepared for the night, and, once smoking, our minds unoccupied with
any definite duties, the apprehension I had felt all day long became more
and more acute. It was not then active fear, I think, but the very
vagueness of its origin distressed me far more that if I had been able to
ticket and face it squarely. The curious sound I have likened to the note
of a gong became now almost incessant, and filled the stillness of the
night with a faint, continuous ringing rather than a series of distinct
notes. At one time it was behind and at another time in front of us.
Sometimes I fancied it came from the bushes on our left, and then again
from the clumps on our right. More often it hovered directly overhead like
the whirring of wings. It was really everywhere at once, behind, in front,
at our sides and over our heads, completely surrounding us. The sound
really defies description. But nothing within my knowledge is like that
ceaseless muffled humming rising off the deserted world of swamps and
willows.

We sat smoking in comparative silence, the strain growing every minute
greater. The worst feature of the situation seemed to me that we did not
know what to expect, and could therefore make no sort of preparation by way
of defense. We could anticipate nothing. My explanations made in the
sunshine, moreover, now came to haunt me with their foolish and wholly
unsatisfactory nature, and it was more and more clear to us that some kind
of plain talk with my companion was inevitable, whether I liked it or not.
After all, we had to spend the night together, and to sleep in the same
tent side by side. I saw that I could not get along much longer without the
support of his mind, and for that, of course, plain talk was imperative. As
long as possible, however, I postponed this little climax, and tried to
ignore or laugh at the occasional sentences he flung into the emptiness.

Some of these sentences, moreover, were confoundedly disquieting to me,
coming as they did to corroborate much that I felt myself; corroboration,
too--which made it so much more convincing--from a totally different point
of view. He composed such curious sentences, and hurled them at me in such
an inconsequential sort of way, as though his main line of thought was
secret to himself, and these fragments were mere bits he found it
impossible to digest. He got rid of them by uttering them. Speech relieved
him. It was like being sick.

"There are things about us, I'm sure, that make for disorder,
disintegration, destruction, our destruction," he said once, while the fire
blazed between us. "We've strayed out of a safe line somewhere."

And, another time, when the gong sounds had come nearer, ringing much
louder than before, and directly over our heads, he said as though talking
to himself:

"I don't think a gramophone would show any record of that. The sound
doesn't come to me by the ears at all. The vibrations reach me in another
manner altogether, and seem to be within me, which is precisely how a
fourth dimensional sound might be supposed to make itself heard."

I purposely made no reply to this, but I sat up a little closer to the fire
and peered about me into the darkness. The clouds were massed all over the
sky, and no trace of moonlight came through. Very still, too, everything
was, so that the river and the frogs had things all their own way.

"It has that about it," he went on, "which is utterly out of common
experience. It is unknown. Only one thing describes it really; it is a
non-human sound; I mean a sound outside humanity."

Having rid himself of this indigestible morsel, he lay quiet for a time,
but he had so admirably expressed my own feeling that it was a relief to
have the thought out, and to have confined it by the limitation of words
from dangerous wandering to and fro in the mind.

The solitude of that Danube camping-place, can I ever forget it? The
feeling of being utterly alone on an empty planet! My thoughts ran
incessantly upon cities and the haunts of men. I would have given my soul,
as the saying is, for the "feel" of those Bavarian villages we had passed
through by the score; for the normal, human commonplaces; peasants drinking
beer, tables beneath the trees, hot sunshine, and a ruined castle on the
rocks behind the red-roofed church. Even the tourists would have been
welcome.

Yet what I felt of dread was no ordinary ghostly fear. It was infinitely
greater, stranger, and seemed to arise from some dim ancestral sense of
terror more profoundly disturbing than anything I had known or dreamed of.
We had "strayed," as the Swede put it, into some region or some set of
conditions where the risks were great, yet unintelligible to us; where the
frontiers of some unknown world lay close about us. It was a spot held by
the dwellers in some outer space, a sort of peep-hole whence they could spy
upon the earth, themselves unseen, a point where the veil between had worn
a little thin. As the final result of too long a sojourn here, we should be
carried over the border and deprived of what we called "our lives," yet by
mental, not physical, processes. In that sense, as he said, we should be
the victims of our adventure--a sacrifice.

It took us in different fashion, each according to the measure of his
sensitiveness and powers of resistance. I translated it vaguely into a
personification of the mightily disturbed elements, investing them with the
horror of a deliberate and malefic purpose, resentful of our audacious
intrusion into their breeding-place; whereas my friend threw it into the
unoriginal form at first of a trespass on some ancient shrine, some place
where the old gods still held sway, where the emotional forces of former
worshippers still clung, and the ancestral portion of him yielded to the
old pagan spell.

At any rate, here was a place unpolluted by men, kept clean by the winds
from coarsening human influences, a place where spiritual agencies were
within reach and aggressive. Never, before or since, have I been so
attacked by indescribable suggestions of a "beyond region," of another
scheme of life, another revolution not parallel to the human. And in the
end our minds would succumb under the weight of the awful spell, and we
should be drawn across the frontier into their world.

Small things testified to the amazing influence of the place, and now in
the silence round the fire they allowed themselves to be noted by the mind.
The very atmosphere had proved itself a magnifying medium to distort every
indication: the otter rolling in the current, the hurrying boatman making
signs, the shifting willows, one and all had been robbed of its natural
character, and revealed in something of its other aspect--as it existed
across the border to that other region. And this changed aspect I felt was
now not merely to me, but to the race. The whole experience whose verge we
touched was unknown to humanity at all. It was a new order of experience,
and in the true sense of the word unearthly.

"It's the deliberate, calculating purpose that reduces one's courage to
zero," the Swede said suddenly, as if he had been actually following my
thoughts. "Otherwise imagination might count for much. But the paddle, the
canoe, the lessening food--"

"Haven't I explained all that once?" I interrupted viciously.

"You have," he answered dryly; "you have indeed."

He made other remarks too, as usual, about what he called the "plain
determination to provide a victim"; but, having now arranged my thoughts
better, I recognized that this was simply the cry of his frightened soul
against the knowledge that he was being attacked in a vital part, and that
he would be somehow taken or destroyed. The situation called for a courage
and calmness of reasoning that neither of us could compass, and I have
never before been so clearly conscious of two persons in me--the one that
explained everything, and the other that laughed at such foolish
explanations, yet was horribly afraid.

Meanwhile, in the pitchy night the fire died down and the wood pile grew
small. Neither of us moved to replenish the stock, and the darkness
consequently came up very close to our faces. A few feet beyond the circle
of firelight it was inky black. Occasionally a stray puff of wind set the
willows shivering about us, but apart from this not very welcome sound a
deep and depressing silence reigned, broken only by the gurgling of the
river and the humming in the air overhead.

We both missed, I think, the shouting company of the winds.

At length, at a moment when a stray puff prolonged itself as though the
wind were about to rise again, I reached the point for me of saturation,
the point where it was absolutely necessary to find relief in plain speech,
or else to betray myself by some hysterical extravagance that must have
been far worse in its effect upon both of us. I kicked the fire into a
blaze, and turned to my companion abruptly. He looked up with a start.

"I can't disguise it any longer," I said; "I don't like this place, and the
darkness, and the noises, and the awful feelings I get. There's something
here that beats me utterly. I'm in a blue funk, and that's the plain truth.
If the other shore was--different, I swear I'd be inclined to swim for it!"

The Swede's face turned very white beneath the deep tan of sun and wind. He
stared straight at me and answered quietly, but his voice betrayed his huge
excitement by its unnatural calmness. For the moment, at any rate, he was
the strong man of the two. He was more phlegmatic, for one thing.

"It's not a physical condition we can escape from by running away," he
replied, in the tone of a doctor diagnosing some grave disease; "we must
sit tight and wait. There are forces close here that could kill a herd of
elephants in a second as easily as you or I could squash a fly. Our only
chance is to keep perfectly still. Our insignificance perhaps may save us."

I put a dozen questions into my expression of face, but found no words. It
was precisely like listening to an accurate description of a disease whose
symptoms had puzzled me.

"I mean that so far, although aware of our disturbing presence, they have
not found us--not 'located' us, as the Americans say," he went on. "They're
blundering about like men hunting for a leak of gas. The paddle and canoe
and provisions prove that. I think they feel us, but cannot actually see
us. We must keep our minds quiet--it's our minds they feel. We must control
our thoughts, or it's all up with us."

"Death, you mean?" I stammered, icy with the horror of his suggestion.

"Worse--by far," he said. "Death, according to one's belief, means either
annihilation or release from the limitations of the senses, but it involves
no change of character. You don't suddenly alter just because the body's
gone. But this means a radical alteration, a complete change, a horrible
loss of oneself by substitution--far worse than death, and not even
annihilation. We happen to have camped in a spot where their region touches
ours, where the veil between has worn thin"--horrors! he was using my very
own phrase, my actual words--"so that they are aware of our being in their
neighborhood."

"But who are aware?" I asked.

I forgot the shaking of the willows in the windless calm, the humming
overhead, everything except that I was waiting for an answer that I dreaded
more than I can possibly explain.

He lowered his voice at once to reply, leaning forward a little over the
fire, an indefinable change in his face that made me avoid his eyes and
look down upon the ground.

"All my life," he said, "I have been strangely, vividly conscious of
another region--not far removed from our own world in one sense, yet wholly
different in kind--where great things go on unceasingly, where immense and
terrible personalities hurry by, intent on vast purposes compared to which
earthly affairs, the rise and fall of nations, the destinies of empires,
the fate of armies and continents, are all as dust in the balance; vast
purposes, I mean, that deal directly with the soul, and not indirectly with
more expressions of the soul--"

"I suggest just now--" I began, seeking to stop him, feeling as though I
was face to face with a madman. But he instantly overbore me with his
torrent that had to come.

"You think," he said, "it is the spirit of the elements, and I thought
perhaps it was the old gods. But I tell you now it is--neither. These would
be comprehensible entities, for they have relations with men, depending
upon them for worship or sacrifice, whereas these beings who are now about
us have absolutely nothing to do with mankind, and it is mere chance that
their space happens just at this spot to touch our own."

The mere conception, which his words somehow made so convincing, as I
listened to them there in the dark stillness of that lonely island, set me
shaking a little all over. I found it impossible to control my movements.

"And what do you propose?" I began again.

"A sacrifice, a victim, might save us by distracting them until we could
get away," he went on, "just as the wolves stop to devour the dogs and give
the sleigh another start. But--I see no chance of any other victim now."

I stared blankly at him. The gleam in his eye was dreadful. Presently he
continued.




IV


"It's the willows, of course. The willows mask the others, but the others
are feeling about for us. If we let our minds betray our fear, we're lost,
lost utterly." He looked at me with an expression so calm, so determined,
so sincere, that I no longer had any doubts as to his sanity. He was as
sane as any man ever was. "If we can hold out through the night," he added,
"we may get off in the daylight unnoticed, or rather, undiscovered."

"But you really think a sacrifice would--"

That gong-like humming came down very close over our heads as I spoke, but
it was my friend's scared face that really stopped my mouth.

"Hush!" he whispered, holding up his hand. "Do not mention them more than
you can help. Do not refer to them by name. To name is to reveal; it is the
inevitable clue, and our only hope lies in ignoring them, in order that
they may ignore us."

"Even in thought?" He was extraordinarily agitated.

"Especially in thought. Our thoughts make spirals in their world. We must
keep them out of our minds at all costs if possible."

I raked the fire together to prevent the darkness having everything its own
way. I never longed for the sun as I longed for it then in the awful
blackness of that summer night.

"Were you awake all last night?" he went on suddenly.

"I slept badly a little after dawn," I replied evasively, trying to follow
his instructions, which I knew instinctively were true, "but the wind, of
course--"

"I know. But the wind won't account for all the noises."

"Then you heard it too?"

"The multiplying countless little footsteps I heard," he said, adding,
after a moment's hesitation, "and that other sound--"

"You mean above the tent, and the pressing down upon us of something
tremendous, gigantic?"

He nodded significantly.

"It was like the beginning of a sort of inner suffocation?" I said.

"Partly, yes. It seemed to me that the weight of the atmosphere had been
altered--had increased enormously, so that we should have been crushed."

"And that," I went on, determined to have it all out, pointing upwards
where the gong-like note hummed ceaselessly, rising and falling like wind.
"What do you make of that?"

"It's their sound," he whispered gravely. "It's the sound of their world,
the humming in their region. The division here is so thin that it leaks
through somehow. But, if you listen carefully, you'll find it's not above
so much as around us. It's in the willows. It's the willows themselves
humming, because here the willows have been made symbols of the forces that
are against us."

I could not follow exactly what he meant by this, yet the thought and idea
in my mind were beyond question the thought and idea in his. I realized
what he realized, only with less power of analysis than his. It was on the
tip of my tongue to tell him at last about my hallucination of the
ascending figures and the moving bushes, when he suddenly thrust his face
again close into mine across the firelight and began to speak in a very
earnest whisper. He amazed me by his calmness and pluck, his apparent
control of the situation. This man I had for years deemed unimaginative,
stolid!

"Now listen," he said. "The only thing for us to do is to go on as though
nothing had happened, follow our usual habits, go to bed, and so forth;
pretend we feel nothing and notice nothing. It is a question wholly of the
mind, and the less we think about them the better our chance of escape.
Above all, don't think, for what you think happens!"

"All right," I managed to reply, simply breathless with his words and the
strangeness of it all; "all right, I'll try, but tell me one more thing
first. Tell me what you make of those hollows in the ground all about us,
those sand-funnels?"

"No!" he cried, forgetting to whisper in his excitement. "I dare not,
simply dare not, put the thought into words. If you have not guessed I am
glad. Don't try to. They have put it into my mind; try your hardest to
prevent their putting it into yours."

He sank his voice again to a whisper before he finished, and I did not
press him to explain. There was already just about as much horror in me as
I could hold. The conversation came to an end, and we smoked our pipes
busily in silence.

Then something happened, something unimportant apparently, as the way is
when the nerves are in a very great state of tension, and this small thing
for a brief space gave me an entirely different point of view. I chanced to
look down at my sand-shoe--the sort we used for the canoe--and something to
do with the hole at the toe suddenly recalled to me the London shop where I
had bought them, the difficulty the man had in fitting me, and other
details of the uninteresting but practical operation. At once, in its
train, followed a wholesome view of the modern skeptical world I was
accustomed to move in at home. I thought of roast beef, and ale,
motor-cars, policemen, brass bands, and a dozen other things that
proclaimed the soul of ordinariness or utility. The effect was immediate
and astonishing even to myself. Psychologically, I suppose, it was simply a
sudden and violent reaction after the strain of living in an atmosphere of
things that to the normal consciousness must seem impossible and
incredible. But, whatever the cause, it momentarily lifted the spell from
my heart, and left me for the short space of a minute feeling free and
utterly unafraid. I looked up at my friend opposite.

"You damned old pagan!" I cried, laughing aloud in his face. "You
imaginative idiot! You superstitious idolater! You--"

I stopped in the middle, seized anew by the old horror. I tried to smother
the sound of my voice as something sacrilegious. The Swede, of course,
heard it too--the strange cry overhead in the darkness--and that sudden
drop in the air as though something had come nearer.

He had turned ashen white under the tan. He stood bolt upright in front of
the fire, stiff as a rod, staring at me.

"After that," he said in a sort of helpless, frantic way, "we must go! We
can't stay now; we must strike camp this very instant and go on--down the
river."

He was talking, I saw, quite wildly, his words dictated by abject
terror--the terror he had resisted so long, but which had caught him at
last.

"In the dark?" I exclaimed, shaking with fear after my hysterical outburst,
but still realizing our position better than he did. "Sheer madness! The
river's in flood, and we've only got a single paddle. Besides, we only go
deeper into their country! There's nothing ahead for fifty miles but
willows, willows, willows!"

He sat down again in a state of semi-collapse. The positions, by one of
those kaleidoscopic changes nature loves, were suddenly reversed, and the
control of our forces passed over into my hands. His mind at last had
reached the point where it was beginning to weaken.

"What on earth possessed you to do such a thing?" he whispered with the awe
of genuine terror in his voice and face.

I crossed round to his side of the fire. I took both his hands in mine,
kneeling down beside him and looking straight into his frightened eyes.

"We'll make one more blaze," I said firmly, "and then turn in for the
night. At sunrise we'll be off full speed for Komorn. Now, pull yourself
together a bit, and remember your own advice about not thinking fear!"

He said no more, and I saw that he would agree and obey. In some measure,
too, it was a sort of relief to get up and make an excursion into the
darkness for more wood. We kept close together, almost touching, groping
among the bushes and along the bank. The humming overhead never ceased, but
seemed to me to grow louder as we increased our distance from the fire. It
was shivery work!

We were grubbing away in the middle of a thickish clump of willows where
some driftwood from a former flood had caught high among the branches, when
my body was seized in a grip that made me half drop upon the sand. It was
the Swede. He had fallen against me, and was clutching me for support. I
heard his breath coming and going in short gasps.

"Look! By my soul!" he whispered, and for the first time in my experience I
knew what it was to hear tears of terror in a human voice. He was pointing
to the fire, some fifty feet away. I followed the direction of his finger,
and I swear my heart missed a beat.

There, in front of the dim glow, something was moving.

I saw it through a veil that hung before my eyes like the gauze
drop-curtain used at the back of a theater--hazily a little. It was neither
a human figure nor an animal. To me it gave the strange impression of being
as large as several animals grouped together, like horses, two or three,
moving slowly. The Swede, too, got a similar result, though expressing it
differently, for he thought it was shaped and sized like a clump of willow
bushes, rounded at the top, and moving all over upon its surface--"coiling
upon itself like smoke," he said afterwards.

"I watched it settle downwards through the bushes," he sobbed at me. "Look,
by God! It's coming this way! Oh, oh!"--he gave a kind of whistling cry.
"They've found us."

I gave one terrified glance, which just enabled me to see that the shadowy
form was swinging towards us through the bushes, and then I collapsed
backwards with a crash into the branches. These failed, of course, to
support my weight, so that with the Swede on top of me we fell in a
struggling heap upon the sand. I really hardly knew what was happening. I
was conscious only of a sort of enveloping sensation of icy fear that
plucked the nerves out of their fleshly covering, twisted them this way and
that, and replaced them quivering. My eyes were tightly shut; something in
my throat choked me; a feeling that my consciousness was expanding,
extending out into space, swiftly gave way to another feeling that I was
losing it altogether, and about to die.

An acute spasm of pain passed through me, and I was aware that the Swede
had hold of me in such a way that he hurt me abominably. It was the way he
caught at me in falling.

But it was the pain, he declared afterwards, that saved me; it caused me to
forget them and think of something else at the very instant when they were
about to find me. It concealed my mind from them at the moment of
discovery, yet just in time to evade their terrible seizing of me. He
himself, he says, actually swooned at the same moment, and that was what
saved him.

I only know that at a later date, how long or short is impossible to say, I
found myself scrambling up out of the slippery network of willow branches,
and saw my companion standing in front of me holding out a hand to assist
me. I stared at him in a dazed way, rubbing the arm he had twisted for me.
Nothing came to me to say, somehow.

"I lost consciousness for a moment or two," I heard him say. "That's what
saved me. It made me stop thinking about them."

"You nearly broke my arm in two," I said, uttering my only connected
thought at the moment. A numbness came over me.

"That's what saved you!" he replied. "Between us, we've managed to set them
off on a false tack somewhere. The humming has ceased. It's gone--for the
moment at any rate!"

A wave of hysterical laughter seized me again, and this time spread to my
friend too--great healing gusts of shaking laughter that brought a
tremendous sense of relief in their train. We made our way back to the fire
and put the wood on so that it blazed at once. Then we saw that the tent
had fallen over and lay in a tangled heap upon the ground.

We picked it up, and during the process tripped more than once and caught
our feet in sand.

"It's those sand-funnels," exclaimed the Swede, when the tent was up again
and the firelight lit up the ground for several yards about us. "And look
at the size of them!"

All round the tent and about the fireplace where we had seen the moving
shadows there were deep funnel-shaped hollows in the sand, exactly similar
to the ones we had already found over the island, only far bigger and
deeper, beautifully formed, and wide enough in some instances to admit the
whole of my foot and leg.

Neither of us said a word. We both knew that sleep was the safest thing we
could do, and to bed we went accordingly without further delay, having
first thrown sand on the fire and taken the provision sack and the paddle
inside the tent with us. The canoe, too, we propped in such a way at the
end of the tent that our feet touched it, and the least motion would
disturb and wake us.

In case of emergency, too, we again went to bed in our clothes, ready for a
sudden start.

It was my firm intention to lie awake all night and watch, but the
exhaustion of nerves and body decreed otherwise, and sleep after a while
came over me with a welcome blanket of oblivion. The fact that my companion
also slept quickened its approach. At first he fidgeted and constantly sat
up, asking me if I "heard this" or "heard that." He tossed about on his
cork mattress, and said the tent was moving and the river had risen over
the point of the island, but each time I went out to look I returned with
the report that all was well, and finally he grew calmer and lay still.
Then at length his breathing became regular and I heard unmistakable sounds
of snoring--the first and only time in my life when snoring has been a
welcome and calming influence.

This, I remember, was the last thought in my mind before dozing off.

A difficulty in breathing woke me, and I found the blanket over my face.
But something else besides the blanket was pressing upon me, and my first
thought was that my companion had rolled off his mattress on to my own in
his sleep. I called to him and sat up, and at the same moment it came to me
that the tent was surrounded. That sound of multitudinous soft pattering
was again audible outside, filling the night with horror.

I called again to him, louder than before. He did not answer, but I missed
the sound of his snoring, and also noticed that the flap of the tent was
down. This was the unpardonable sin. I crawled out in the darkness to hook
it back securely, and it was then for the first time I realized positively
that the Swede was not here. He had gone.

I dashed out in a mad run, seized by a dreadful agitation, and the moment I
was out I plunged into a sort of torrent of humming that surrounded me
completely and came out of every quarter of the heavens at once. It was
that same familiar humming--gone mad! A swarm of great invisible bees might
have been about me in the air. The sound seemed to thicken the very
atmosphere, and I felt that my lungs worked with difficulty.

But my friend was in danger, and I could not hesitate.

The dawn was just about to break, and a faint whitish light spread upwards
over the clouds from a thin strip of clear horizon. No wind stirred. I
could just make out the bushes and river beyond, and the pale sandy
patches. In my excitement I ran frantically to and fro about the island,
calling him by name, shouting at the top of my voice the first words that
came into my head. But the willows smothered my voice, and the humming
muffled it, so that the sound only traveled a few feet round me. I plunged
among the bushes, tripping headlong, tumbling over roots, and scraping my
face as I tore this way and that among the preventing branches.

Then, quite unexpectedly, I came out upon the island's point and saw a dark
figure outlined between the water and the sky. It was the Swede. And
already he had one foot in the river! A moment more and he would have taken
the plunge.

I threw myself upon him, flinging my arms about his waist and dragging him
shorewards with all my strength. Of course he struggled furiously, making a
noise all the time just like that cursed humming, and using the most
outlandish phrases in his anger about "going inside to Them," and "taking
the way of the water and the wind," and God only knows what more besides,
that I tried in vain to recall afterwards, but which turned me sick with
horror and amazement as I listened. But in the end I managed to get him
into the comparative safety of the tent, and flung him breathless and
cursing upon the mattress where I held him until the fit had passed.

I think the suddenness with which it all went and he grew calm, coinciding
as it did with the equally abrupt cessation of the humming and pattering
outside--I think this was almost the strangest part of the whole business
perhaps. For he had just opened his eyes and turned his tired face up to me
so that the dawn threw a pale light upon it through the doorway, and said,
for all the world just like a frightened child:

"My life, old man--it's my life I owe you. But it's all over now anyhow.
They've found a victim in our place!"

Then he dropped back upon his blankets and went to sleep literally under my
eyes. He simply collapsed, and began to snore again as healthily as though
nothing had happened and he had never tried to offer his own life as a
sacrifice by drowning. And when the sunlight woke him three hours
later--hours of ceaseless vigil for me--it became so clear to me that he
remembered absolutely nothing of what he had attempted to do, that I deemed
it wise to hold my peace and ask no dangerous questions.

He woke naturally and easily, as I have said, when the sun was already high
in a windless hot sky, and he at once got up and set about the preparation
of the fire for breakfast. I followed him anxiously at bathing, but he did
not attempt to plunge in, merely dipping his head and making some remark
about the extra coldness of the water.

"River's falling at last," he said, "and I'm glad of it."

"The humming has stopped too," I said.

He looked up at me quietly with his normal expression. Evidently he
remembered everything except his own attempt at suicide.

"Everything has stopped," he said, "because--"

He hesitated. But I knew some reference to that remark he had made just
before he fainted was in his mind, and I was determined to know it.

"Because 'They've found another victim'?" I said, forcing a little laugh.

"Exactly," he answered, "exactly! I feel as positive of it as though--as
though--I feel quite safe again, I mean," he finished.

He began to look curiously about him. The sunlight lay in hot patches on
the sand. There was no wind. The willows were motionless. He slowly rose to
feet.

"Come," he said; "I think if we look, we shall find it."

He started off on a run, and I followed him. He kept to the banks, poking
with a stick among the sandy bays and caves and little back-waters, myself
always close on his heels.

"Ah!" he exclaimed presently, "ah!"

The tone of his voice somehow brought back to me a vivid sense of the
horror of the last twenty-four hours, and I hurried up to join him. He was
pointing with his stick at a large black object that lay half in the water
and half on the sand. It appeared to be caught by some twisted willow roots
so that the river could not sweep it away. A few hours before the spot must
have been under water.

"See," he said quietly, "the victim that made our escape possible!"

And when I peered across his shoulder I saw that his stick rested on the
body of a man. He turned it over. It was the corpse of a peasant, and the
face was hidden in the sand. Clearly the man had been drowned, but a few
hours before, and his body must have been swept down upon our island
somewhere about the hour of the dawn--at the very time the fit had passed.

"We must give it a decent burial, you know."

"I suppose so," I replied. I shuddered a little in spite of myself, for
there was something about the appearance of that poor drowned man that
turned me cold.

The Swede glanced up sharply at me, an undecipherable expression on his
face, and began clambering down the bank. I followed him more leisurely.
The current, I noticed, had torn away much of the clothing from the body,
so that the neck and part of the chest lay bare.

Halfway down the bank my companion suddenly stopped and held up his hand in
warning; but either my foot slipped, or I had gained too much momentum to
bring myself quickly to a halt, for I bumped into him and sent him forward
with a sort of leap to save himself. We tumbled together on to the hard
sand so that our feet splashed into the water. And, before anything could
be done, we had collided a little heavily against the corpse.

The Swede uttered a sharp cry. And I sprang back as if I had been shot.

At the moment we touched the body there rose from its surface the loud
sound of humming--the sound of several hummings--which passed with a vast
commotion as of winged things in the air about us and disappeared upwards
into the sky, growing fainter and fainter till they finally ceased in the
distance. It was exactly as though we had disturbed some living yet
invisible creatures at work.

My companion clutched me, and I think I clutched him, but before either of
us had time properly to recover from the unexpected shock, we saw that a
movement of the current was turning the corpse round so that it became
released from the grip of the willow roots. A moment later it had turned
completely over, the dead face uppermost, staring at the sky. It lay on the
edge of the main stream. In another moment it would be swept away.

The Swede started to save it, shouting again something I did not catch
about a "proper burial"--and then abruptly dropped upon his knees on the
sand and covered his eyes with his hands. I was beside him in an instant.

I saw what he had seen.

For just as the body swung round to the current the face and the exposed
chest turned full towards us, and showed plainly how the skin and flesh
were indented with small hollows, beautifully formed, and exactly similar
in shape and kind to the sand-funnels that we had found all over the
island.

"Their mark!" I heard my companion mutter under his breath. "Their awful
mark!"

And when I turned my eyes again from his ghastly face to the river, the
current had done its work, and the body had been swept away into mid-stream
and was already beyond our reach and almost out of sight, turning over and
over on the waves like an otter.





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