The Willows
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 half-way 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 worshipped 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 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 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.
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 a 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, grey 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 evidence 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 bearing 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. Someone 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