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 the 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, gray 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 evidences 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 beating 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. Some

one 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

at 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 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.