II
"You've been gone so long," he shouted above the wind, "I thought somethingmust 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 understoodthe real reason for his coming. It was because the spell of the place hadentered 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 thatgave the real importance to his words.
"Lucky," I cried back, "our tent's in the hollow. I think it'll hold allright." I added something about the difficulty of finding wood, in order toexplain my absence, but the wind caught my words and flung them across theriver, 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 thateffect; and I remember feeling half angry with him for putting the thoughtinto words, for it was exactly what I felt myself. There was disasterimpending somewhere, and the sense of presentiment lay unpleasantly uponme.
We went back to the fire and made a final blaze, poking it up with ourfeet. We took a last look round. But for the wind the heat would have beenunpleasant. I put this thought into words, and I remember my friend's replystruck me oddly: that he would rather have the heat, the ordinary Julyweather, than this "diabolical wind."
Everything was snug for the night; the canoe lying turned over beside thetent, with both yellow paddles beneath her; the provision sack hanging froma willow-stem, and the washed-up dishes removed to a safe distance from thefire, all ready for the morning meal.
We smothered the embers of the fire with sand, and then turned in. The flapof the tent door was up, and I saw the branches and the stars and the whitemoonlight. The shaking willows and the heavy buffetings of the wind againstour taut little house were the last things I remembered as sleep came downand covered all with its soft and delicious forgetfulness.
Suddenly I found myself lying awake, peering from my sandy mattress throughthe door of the tent. I looked at my watch pinned against the canvas, andsaw by the bright moonlight that it was past twelve o'clock--the thresholdof a new day--and I had therefore slept a couple of hours. The Swede wasasleep still beside me; the wind howled as before; something plucked at myheart and made me feel afraid. There was a sense of disturbance in myimmediate neighborhood.
I sat up quickly and looked out. The trees were swaying violently to andfro as the gusts smote them, but our little bit of green canvas lay snuglysafe in the hollow, for the wind passed over it without meeting enoughresistance to make it vicious. The feeling of disquietude did not pass,however, and I crawled quietly out of the tent to see if our belongingswere safe. I moved carefully so as not to waken my companion. A curiousexcitement was on me.
I was half-way out, kneeling on all fours, when my eye first took in thatthe tops of the bushes opposite, with their moving tracery of leaves, madeshapes against the sky. I sat back on my haunches and stared. It wasincredible, surely, but there, opposite and slightly above me, were shapesof some indeterminate sort among the willows, and as the branches swayed inthe wind they seemed to group themselves about these shapes, forming aseries 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 Ishould not welcome corroboration; and meanwhile I crouched there staring inamazement with smarting eyes. I was wide awake. I remember saying to myselfthat I was not dreaming.
They first became properly visible, these huge figures, just within thetops of the bushes--immense, bronze-colored, moving, and wholly independentof the swaying of the branches. I saw them plainly and noted, now I came toexamine them more calmly, that they were very much larger than human, andindeed that something in their appearance proclaimed them to be not humanat all. Certainly they were not merely the moving tracery of the branchesagainst the moonlight. They shifted independently. They rose upwards in acontinuous stream from earth to sky, vanishing utterly as soon as theyreached the dark of the sky. They were interlaced one with another, makinga great column, and I saw their limbs and huge bodies melting in and out ofeach other, forming this serpentine line that bent and swayed and twistedspirally with the contortions of the wind-tossed trees. They were nude,fluid shapes, passing up the bushes, within the leaves almost--rising up ina living column into the heavens. Their faces I never could see.Unceasingly they poured upwards, swaying in great bending curves, with ahue of dull bronze upon their skins.
I stared, trying to force every atom of vision from my eyes. For a longtime I thought they must every moment disappear and resolve themselves intothe movements of the branches and prove to be an optical illusion. Isearched everywhere for a proof of reality, when all the while I understoodquite well that the standard of reality had changed. For the longer Ilooked the more certain I became that these figures were real and living,though perhaps not according to the standards that the camera and thebiologist would insist upon.
Far from feeling fear, I was possessed with a sense of awe and wonder suchas I have never known. I seemed to be gazing at the personified elementalforces of this haunted and primeval region. Our intrusion had stirred thepowers of the place into activity. It was we who were the cause of thedisturbance, and my brain filled to bursting with stories and legends ofthe spirits and deities of places that have been acknowledged andworshipped by men in all ages of the world's history. But, before I couldarrive at any possible explanation, something impelled me to go fartherout, and I crept forward on the sand and stood upright. I felt the groundstill warm under my bare feet; the wind tore at my hair and face; and thesound of the river burst upon my ears with a sudden roar. These things, Iknew, were real, and proved that my senses were acting normally. Yet thefigures still rose from earth to heaven, silent, majestically, in a greatspiral of grace and strength that overwhelmed me at length with a genuinedeep emotion of worship. I felt that I must fall down andworship--absolutely worship.
Perhaps in another minute I might have done so, when a gust of wind sweptagainst me with such force that it blew me sideways, and I nearly stumbledand fell. It seemed to shake the dream violently out of me. At least itgave me another point of view somehow. The figures still remained, stillascended into heaven from the heart of the night, but my reason at lastbegan to assert itself. It must be a subjective experience, I argued--nonethe less real for that, but still subjective. The moonlight and thebranches combined to work out these pictures upon the mirror of myimagination, and for some reason I projected them outwards and made themappear 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 arguein the old futile way from the little standard of the known?
I only know that great column of figures ascended darkly into the sky forwhat seemed a very long period of time, and with a very complete measure ofreality as most men are accustomed to gauge reality. Then suddenly theywere gone!
And, once they were gone and the immediate wonder of their great presencehad passed, fear came down upon me with a cold rush. The esoteric meaningof this lonely and haunted region suddenly flamed up within me, and I beganto tremble dreadfully. I took a quick look round--a look of horror thatcame near to panic--calculating vainly ways of escape; and then, realizinghow helpless I was to achieve anything really effective, I crept backsilently into the tent and lay down again upon my sandy mattress, firstlowering the door-curtain to shut out the sight of the willows in themoonlight, and then burying my head as deeply as possible beneath theblankets to deaden the sound of the terrifying wind.
As though further to convince me that I had not been dreaming, I rem
emberthat it was a long time before I fell again into a troubled and restlesssleep; and even then only the upper crust of me slept, and underneath therewas something that never quite lost consciousness, but lay alert and on thewatch.
But this second time I jumped up with a genuine start of terror. It wasneither the wind nor the river that woke me, but the slow approach ofsomething that caused the sleeping portion of me to grow smaller andsmaller till at last it vanished altogether, and I found myself sittingbolt upright--listening.
Outside there was a sound of multitudinous little patterings. They had beencoming, I was aware, for a long time, and in my sleep they had first becomeaudible. 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 wasa great weight upon the surface of my body. In spite of the hot night, Ifelt clammy with cold and shivered. Something surely was pressing steadilyagainst the