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 become 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.