Title: The Willows
Author: Blackwood, Algernon
Language: English
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The Willows

by Algernon Blackwood

(1907)


Contents

 I.
 II.
 III.
 IV.
 V.



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 _Sümpfe_,
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, Poszóny)
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 growth
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.

“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.



II.


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.



III.


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.



IV.

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.

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 mere 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.

“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.



V.


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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