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 halfway 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 worshiped 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 to 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 was the subject of a vivid and interesting hallucination. 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.