The Willows
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 rise, 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