The Willows
by Algernon Blackwood
I
After leaving Vienna, and long before you come
to Budapest, the Danube enters a region of singular
loneliness and desolation, where its waters spread
away on all sides regardless of a main channel, and
the country becomes a swamp for miles upon miles,
covered by a vast sea of low willow-bushes. On the
big maps this deserted area is painted in a fluffy blue,
growing fainter in color as it leaves the banks, and
across it may be seen in large straggling letters the
word Sumpfe, meaning marshes.
In high flood this great acreage of sand, shinglebeds,
and willow-grown islands is almost topped by
the water, but in normal seasons the bushes bend
and rustle in the free winds, showing their silver
leaves to the sunshine in an ever-moving plain of
bewildering beauty. These willows never attain to the
dignity of trees; they have no rigid trunks; they
remain humble bushes, with rounded tops and soft
outline, swaying on slender stems that answer to the
least pressure of the wind; supple as grasses, and so
continually shifting that they somehow give the
impression that the entire plain is moving and alive.
For the wind sends waves rising and falling over the
whole surface, waves of leaves instead of waves of
water, green swells like the sea, too, until the
branches turn and lift, and then silvery white as their
underside turns to the sun.
Happy to slip beyond the control of the stern
banks, the Danube here wanders about at will among
the intricate network of channels intersecting the
islands everywhere with broad avenues down which
the waters pour with a shouting sound; making
whirlpools, eddies, and foaming rapids; tearing at the
sandy banks; carrying away masses of shore and willow-
clumps; and forming new islands innumerably
which shift daily in size and shape and possess at best
an impermanent life, since the flood-time obliterates
their very existence.
Properly speaking, this fascinating part of the
river’s life begins soon after leaving Pressburg, and
we, in our Canadian canoe, with gipsy tent and frying-
pan on board, reached it on the crest of a rising
flood about mid-July. That very same morning, when
the sky was reddening before sunrise, we had slipped
swiftly through still-sleeping Vienna, leaving it a
couple of hours later a mere patch of smoke against
the blue hills of the Wienerwald on the horizon; we
had breakfasted below Fischeramend under a grove
of birch trees roaring in the wind; and had then
swept on the tearing current past Orth, Hainburg,
Petronell (the old Roman Carnuntum of Marcus
Aurelius), and so under the frowning heights of
Thelsen on a spur of the Carpathians, where the
March steals in quietly from the left and the frontier
is crossed between Austria and Hungary.
Racing along at twelve kilometers an hour soon
took us well into Hungary, and the muddy waters—
sure sign of flood—sent us aground on many a
shingle-bed, and twisted us like a cork in many a sudden
belching whirlpool before the towers of Pressburg
(Hungarian, Poszony) showed against the sky;
and then the canoe, leaping like a spirited horse, flew
at top speed under the grey walls, negotiated safely
the sunken chain of the Fliegende Brucke ferry,
turned the corner sharply to the left, and plunged on
yellow foam into the wilderness of islands, sandbanks,
and swamp-land beyond—the land of the willows.
The change came suddenly, as when a series of
bioscope pictures snaps down on the streets of a
town and shifts without warning into the scenery of
lake and forest. We entered the land of desolation on
wings, and in less than half an hour there was neither
boat nor fishing-hut nor red roof, nor any single sign
of human habitation and civilization within sight.
The sense of remoteness from the world of humankind,
the utter isolation, the fascination of this singular
world of willows, winds, and waters, instantly laid
its spell upon us both, so that we allowed laughingly
to one another that we ought by rights to have held
some special kind of passport to admit us, and that
we had, somewhat audaciously, come without asking
leave into a separate little kingdom of wonder and
magic—a kingdom that was reserved for the use of
others who had a right to it, with everywhere unwritten
warnings to trespassers for those who had the
imagination to discover them.
Though still early in the afternoon, the ceaseless
buffetings of a most tempestuous wind made us feel
weary, and we at once began casting about for a suitable
camping-ground for the night. But the bewildering
character of the islands made landing difficult;
the swirling flood carried us in shore and then swept

THE WILLOWS — 1 OF 23

us out again; the willow branches tore our hands as
we seized them to stop the canoe, and we pulled
many a yard of sandy bank into the water before at
length we shot with a great sideways blow from the
wind into a backwater and managed to beach the
bows in a cloud of spray. Then we lay panting and
laughing after our exertions on the hot yellow sand,
sheltered from the wind, and in the full blaze of a
scorching sun, a cloudless blue sky above, and an
immense army of dancing, shouting willow bushes,
closing in from all sides, shining with spray and clapping
their thousand little hands as though to applaud
the success of our efforts.
“What a river!” I said to my companion, thinking
of all the way we had traveled from the source in the
Black Forest, and how he had often been obliged to
wade and push in the upper shallows at the beginning
of June.
“Won’t stand much nonsense now, will it?” he
said, pulling the canoe a little farther into safety up
the sand, and then composing himself for a nap.
I lay by his side, happy and peaceful in the bath of
the elements—water, wind, sand, and the great fire of
the sun—thinking of the long journey that lay behind
us, and of the great stretch before us to the Black Sea,
and how lucky I was to have such a delightful and
charming traveling companion as my friend, the
Swede.
We had made many similar journeys together,
but the Danube, more than any other river I knew,
impressed us from the very beginning with its aliveness.
From its tiny bubbling entry into the world
among the pinewood gardens of Donaueschingen,
until this moment when it began to play the great
river-game of losing itself among the deserted
swamps, unobserved, unrestrained, it had seemed to
us like following the grown of some living creature.
Sleepy at first, but later developing violent desires as
it became conscious of its deep soul, it rolled, like
some huge fluid being, through all the countries we
had passed, holding our little craft on its mighty
shoulders, playing roughly with us sometimes, yet
always friendly and well-meaning, till at length we
had come inevitably to regard it as a Great Personage.
How, indeed, could it be otherwise, since it told
us so much of its secret life? At night we heard it
singing to the moon as we lay in our tent, uttering
that odd sibilant note peculiar to itself and said to be
caused by the rapid tearing of the pebbles along its
bed, so great is its hurrying speed. We knew, too, the
voice of its gurgling whirlpools, suddenly bubbling
up on a surface previously quite calm; the roar of its
shallows and swift rapids; its constant steady thundering
below all mere surface sounds; and that ceaseless
tearing of its icy waters at the banks. How it
stood up and shouted when the rains fell flat upon its
face! And how its laughter roared out when the wind
blew up-stream and tried to stop its growing speed!
We knew all its sounds and voices, its tumblings and
foamings, its unnecessary splashing against the
bridges; that self-conscious chatter when there were
hills to look on; the affected dignity of its speech
when it passed through the little towns, far too
important to laugh; and all these faint, sweet whisperings
when the sun caught it fairly in some slow
curve and poured down upon it till the steam rose.
It was full of tricks, too, in its early life before the
great world knew it. There were places in the upper
reaches among the Swabian forests, when yet the first
whispers of its destiny had not reached it, where it
elected to disappear through holes in the ground, to
appear again on the other side of the porous limestone
hills and start a new river with another name;
leaving, too, so little water in its own bed that we had
to climb out and wade and push the canoe through
miles of shallows.
And a chief pleasure, in those early days of its
irresponsible youth, was to lie low, like Brer Fox, just
before the little turbulent tributaries came to join it
from the Alps, and to refuse to acknowledge them
when in, but to run for miles side by side, the dividing
line well marked, the very levels different, the
Danube utterly declining to recognize the newcomer.
Below Passau, however, it gave up this particular
trick, for there the Inn comes in with a thundering
power impossible to ignore, and so pushes and
incommodes the parent river that there is hardly
room for them in the long twisting gorge that follows,
and the Danube is shoved this way and that
against the cliffs, and forced to hurry itself with great
waves and much dashing to and fro in order to get
through in time. And during the fight our canoe
slipped down from its shoulder to its breast, and had
the time of its life among the struggling waves. But
the Inn taught the old river a lesson, and after Passau
it no longer pretended to ignore new arrivals.
This was many days back, of course, and since
then we had come to know other aspects of the great
creature, and across the Bavarian wheat plain of
Straubing she wandered so slowly under the blazing
June sun that we could well imagine only the surface
inches were water, while below there moved, con-

THE WILLOWS — 2 OF 23

cealed as by a silken mantle, a whole army of
Undines, passing silently and unseen down to the
sea, and very leisurely too, lest they be discovered.
Much, too, we forgave her because of her friendliness
to the birds and animals that haunted the
shores. Cormorants lined the banks in lonely places
in rows like short black palings; grey crows crowded
the shingle-beds; storks stood fishing in the vistas of
shallower water that opened up between the islands,
and hawks, swans, and marsh birds of all sorts filled
the air with glinting wings and singing, petulant
cries. It was impossible to feel annoyed with the
river’s vagaries after seeing a deer leap with a splash
into the water at sunrise and swim past the bows of
the canoe; and often we saw fawns peering at us from
the underbrush, or looked straight into the brown
eyes of a stag as we charged full tilt round a corner
and entered another reach of the river. Foxes, too,
everywhere haunted the banks, tripping daintily
among the driftwood and disappearing so suddenly
that it was impossible to see how they managed it.
But now, after leaving Pressburg, everything
changed a little, and the Danube became more serious.
It ceased trifling. It was half-way to the Black
Sea, within seeming distance almost of other,
stranger countries where no tricks would be permitted
or understood. It became suddenly grown-up,
and claimed our respect and even our awe. It broke
out into three arms, for one thing, that only met
again a hundred kilometers farther down, and for a
canoe there were no indications which one was
intended to be followed.
“If you take a side channel,” said the Hungarian
officer we met in the Pressburg shop while buying
provisions, “you may find yourselves, when the flood
subsides, forty miles from anywhere, high and dry,
and you may easily starve. There are no people, no
farms, no fishermen. I warn you not to continue. The
river, too, is still rising, and this wind 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

THE WILLOWS — 3 OF 23

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

THE WILLOWS — 4 OF 23

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 ruse, 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 stolid, practical nature suddenly seemed to
me welcome and comforting. It was an admirable
temperament, I felt; he could steer down rapids like a
red Indian, shoot dangerous bridges and whirlpools
better than any white man I ever saw in a canoe. He
was a grand fellow for an adventurous trip, a tower of
strength when untoward things happened. I looked
at his strong face and light curly hair as he staggered
along under his pile of driftwood (twice the size of
mine!), and I experienced a feeling of relief. Yes, I was
distinctly glad just then that the Swede was—what he
was, and that he never made remarks that suggested
more than they said.
“The river’s still rising, though,” he added, as if
following out some thoughts of his own, and dropping
his load with a gasp. “This island will be under
water in two days if it goes on.”
“I wish the wind would go down,” I said. “I don’t
care a fig for the river.”
The flood, indeed, had no terrors for us; we could
get off at ten minutes’ notice, and the more water the
better we liked it. It meant an increasing current and
the obliteration of the treacherous shingle-beds that
so often threatened to tear the bottom out of our
canoe.

THE WILLOWS — 5 OF 23

Contrary to our expectations, the wind did not go
down with the sun. It seemed to increase with the
darkness, howling overhead and shaking the willows
round us like straws. Curious sounds accompanied it
sometimes, like the explosion of heavy guns, and it
fell upon the water and the island in great flat blows
of immense power. It made me think of the sounds a
planet must make, could we only hear it, driving
along through space.
But the sky kept wholly clear of clouds, and soon
after supper the full moon rose up in the east and
covered the river and the plain of shouting willows
with a light like the day.
We lay on the sandy patch beside the fire,
smoking, listening to the noises of the night round
us, and talking happily of the journey we had already
made, and of our plans ahead. The map lay spread in
the door of the tent, but the high wind made it hard
to study, and presently we lowered the curtain and
extinguished the lantern. The firelight was enough to
smoke and see each other’s faces by, and the sparks
flew about overhead like fireworks. A few yards beyond,
the river gurgled and hissed, and from time to
time a heavy splash announced the falling away of
further portions of the bank.
Our talk, I noticed, had to do with the faraway
scenes and incidents of our first camps in the Black
Forest, or of other subjects altogether remote from
the present setting, for neither of us spoke of the
actual moment more than was necessary—almost as
though we had agreed tacitly to avoid discussion of
the camp and its incidents. Neither the otter nor the
boatman, for instance, received the honor of a single
mention, though ordinarily these would have furnished
discussion for the greater part of the evening.
They were, of course, distinct events in such a place.
The scarcity of wood made it a business to keep
the fire going, for the wind, that drove the smoke in
our faces wherever we sat, helped at the same time to
make a forced draught. We took it in turn to make
some foraging expeditions into the darkness, and the
quantity the Swede brought back always made me
feel that he took an absurdly long time finding it; for
the fact was I did not care much about being left
alone, and yet it always seemed to be my turn to grub
about among the bushes or scramble along the slippery
banks in the moonlight. The long day’s battle
with wind and water—such wind and such water!—
had tired us both, and an early bed was the obvious
program. Yet neither of us made the move for the
tent. We lay there, tending the fire, talking in desultory
fashion, peering about us into the dense willow
bushes, and listening to the thunder of wind and
river. The loneliness of the place had entered our
very bones, and silence seemed natural, for after a bit
the sound of our voices became a trifle unreal and
forced; whispering would have been the fitting mode
of communication, I felt, and the human voice,
always rather absurd amid the roar of the elements,
now carried with it something almost illegitimate. It
was like talking out loud in church, or in some place
where it was not lawful, perhaps not quite safe, to be
overheard.
The eeriness of this lonely island, set among a
million willows, swept by a hurricane, and surrounded
by hurrying deep waters, touched us both, I
fancy. Untrodden by man, almost unknown to man,
it lay there beneath the moon, remote from human
influence, on the frontier of another world, an alien
world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls
of willows. And we, in our rashness, had dared to
invade it, even to make use of it! Something more
than the power of its mystery stirred in me as I lay on
the sand, feet to fire, and peered up through the
leaves at the stars. For the last time I rose to get firewood.
“When this has burnt up,” I said firmly, “I shall
turn in,” and my companion watched me lazily as I
moved off into the surrounding shadows.
For an unimaginative man I thought he seemed
unusually receptive that night, unusually open to
suggestion of things other than sensory. He too was
touched by the beauty and loneliness of the place. I
was not altogether pleased, I remember, to recognize
this slight change in him, and instead of immediately
collecting sticks, I made my way to the far point of
the island where the moonlight on plain and river
could be seen to better advantage. The desire to be
alone had come suddenly upon me; my former dread
returned in force; there was a vague feeling in me I
wished to face and probe to the bottom.
When I reached the point of sand jutting out
among the waves, the spell of the place descended
upon me with a positive shock. No mere “scenery”
could have produced such an effect. There was
something more here, something to alarm.
I gazed across the waste of wild waters; I watched
the whispering willows; I heard the ceaseless beating
of the tireless wind; and, one and all, each in its own
way, stirred in me this sensation of a strange distress.
But the willows especially; for ever they went on
chattering and talking among themselves, laughing a

THE WILLOWS — 6 OF 23

little, shrilly crying out, sometimes sighing—but
what it was they made so much to-do about belonged
to the secret life of the great plain they inhabited.
And it was utterly alien to the world I knew, or to
that of the wild yet kindly elements. They made me
think of a host of beings from another plane of life,
another evolution altogether, perhaps, all discussing
a mystery known only to themselves. I watched them
moving busily together, oddly shaking their big
bushy heads, twirling their myriad leaves even when
there was no wind. They moved of their own will as
though alive, and they touched, by some incalculable
method, my own keen sense of the horrible.
There they stood in the moonlight, like a vast
army surrounding our camp, shaking their innumerable
silver spears defiantly, formed all ready for an
attack.
The psychology of places, for some imaginations
at least, is very vivid; for the wanderer, especially,
camps have their “note” either of welcome or rejection.
At first it may not always be apparent, because
the busy preparations of tent and cooking prevent,
but with the first pause—after supper usually—it
comes and announces itself. And the note of this willow-
camp now became unmistakably plain to me; we
were interlopers, trespassers; we were not welcomed.
The sense of unfamiliarity grew upon me as I stood
there watching. We touched the frontier of a region
where our presence was resented. For a night’s
lodging we might perhaps be tolerated; but for a prolonged
and inquisitive stay—No! By all the gods of
the trees and wilderness, no! We were the first
human influences upon this island, and we were not
wanted. The willows were against us.
Strange thoughts like these, bizarre fancies, borne
I know not whence, found lodgment in my mind as I
stood listening. What, I thought, if, after all, these
crouching willows proved to be alive; if suddenly they
should rise up, like a swarm of living creatures, marshaled
by the gods whose territory we had invaded,
sweep towards us off the vast swamps, booming overhead
in the night—and then settle down! As I looked
it was so easy to imagine they actually moved, crept
nearer, retreated a little, huddled together in masses,
hostile, waiting for the great wind that should finally
start them a-running. I could have sworn their aspect
changed a little, and their ranks deepened and
pressed more closely together.
The melancholy shrill cry of a night-bird sounded
overhead, and suddenly I nearly lost my balance as
the piece of bank I stood upon fell with a great splash
into the river, undermined by the flood. I stepped
back just in time, and went on hunting for firewood
again, half laughing at the odd fancies that crowded
so thickly into my mind and cast their spell upon me.
I recalled the Swede’s remark about moving on next
day, and I was just thinking that I fully agreed with
him, when I turned with a start and saw the subject
of my thoughts standing immediately in front of me.
He was quite close. The roar of the elements had
covered his approach.

II
“You’ve been gone so long,” he shouted above the
wind, “I thought something must have happened to
you.”
But there was that in his tone, and a certain look
in his face as well, that conveyed to me more than his
usual words, and in a flash I understood the real
reason for his coming. It was because the spell of the
place had entered his soul too, and he did not like
being alone.
“River still rising,” he cried, pointing to the flood
in the moonlight, “and the wind’s simply awful.”
He always said the same things, but it was the cry
for companionship that gave the real importance to
his words.
“Lucky,” I cried back, “our tent’s in the hollow. I
think it’ll hold all right.” I added something about the
difficulty of finding wood, in order to explain my
absence, but the wind caught my words and flung
them across the river, so that he did not hear, but
just looked at me through the branches, nodding his
head.
“Lucky if we get away without disaster!” he
shouted, or words to that effect; and I remember feeling
half angry with him for putting the thought into
words, for it was exactly what I felt myself. There was
disaster impending somewhere, and the sense of
presentiment lay unpleasantly upon me.
We went back to the fire and made a final blaze,
poking it up with our feet. We took a last look round.
But for the wind the heat would have been unpleasant.
I put this thought into words, and I remember
my friend’s reply struck me oddly: that he would
rather have the heat, the ordinary July weather, than
this “diabolical wind.”
Everything was snug for the night; the canoe
lying turned over beside the tent, with both yellow
paddles beneath her; the provision sack hanging from
a willow-stem, and the washed-up dishes removed to

THE WILLOWS — 7 OF 23

a safe distance from the fire, all ready for the morning
meal.
We smothered the embers of the fire with sand,
and then turned in. The flap of the tent door was up,
and I saw the branches and the stars and the white
moonlight. The shaking willows and the heavy buffetings
of the wind against our taut little house were
the last things I remembered as sleep came down and
covered all with its soft and delicious forgetfulness.
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 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 wor-

THE WILLOWS — 8 OF 23

ship. 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.
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 turnedover
canoe; the yellow paddles—two of them, I’m

THE WILLOWS — 9 OF 23

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 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 to 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 hallucina-

THE WILLOWS — 10 OF 23

tion, a fantasy of the night, a projection of the excited
imagination.
Nothing further came in 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.
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 fellowtraveler
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
THE WILLOWS — 11 OF 23
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, basinshaped
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!”

THE WILLOWS — 12 OF 23

“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.

III
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.

THE WILLOWS — 13 OF 23

“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 recaulking
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.

THE WILLOWS — 14 OF 23

“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 groundsheet
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.

THE WILLOWS — 15 OF 23

“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.

THE WILLOWS — 16 OF 23

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

THE WILLOWS — 17 OF 23

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 more
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.

IV
“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.

THE WILLOWS — 18 OF 23

“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

THE WILLOWS — 19 OF 23

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

THE WILLOWS — 20 OF 23

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.
It was my firm intention to lie awake all night
and watch, but the exhaustion of nerves and body
decreed otherwise, and sleep after a while came over
me with a welcome blanket of oblivion. The fact that
my companion also slept quickened its approach. At
first he fidgeted and constantly sat up, asking me if I
“heard this” or “heard that.” He tossed about on his
cork mattress, and said the tent was moving and the
river had risen over the point of the island, but each
time I went out to look I returned with the report
that all was well, and finally he grew calmer and lay
still.
Then at length his breathing became regular and
I heard unmistakable sounds of snoring—the first
and only time in my life when snoring has been a
welcome and calming influence.
This, I remember, was the last thought in my
mind before dozing off.
A difficulty in breathing woke me, and I found
the blanket over my face. But something else besides
the blanket was pressing upon me, and my first
thought was that my companion had rolled off his
mattress on to my own in his sleep. I called to him
and sat up, and at the same moment it came to me
that the tent was surrounded. That sound of multitudinous
soft pattering was again audible outside,
filling the night with horror.
I called again to him, louder than before. He did
not answer, but I missed the sound of his snoring,
and also noticed that the flap of the tent was down.
This was the unpardonable sin. I crawled out in the
darkness to hook it back securely, and it was then for
the first time I realized positively that the Swede was
not here. He had gone.
I dashed out in a mad run, seized by a dreadful
agitation, and the moment I was out I plunged into a
sort of torrent of humming that surrounded me completely
and came out of every quarter of the heavens
at once. It was that same familiar humming—gone
mad! A swarm of great invisible bees might have
been about me in the air. The sound seemed to
thicken the very atmosphere, and I felt that my lungs
worked with difficulty.
But my friend was in danger, and I could not hesitate.
The dawn was just about to break, and a faint
whitish light spread upwards over the clouds from a
thin strip of clear horizon. No wind stirred. I could
just make out the bushes and river beyond, and the
pale sandy patches. In my excitement I ran frantically
to and fro about the island, calling him by name,

THE WILLOWS — 21 OF 23

shouting at the top of my voice the first words that
came into my head. But the willows smothered my
voice, and the humming muffled it, so that the sound
only traveled a few feet round me. I plunged among
the bushes, tripping headlong, tumbling over roots,
and scraping my face as I tore this way and that
among the preventing branches.
Then, quite unexpectedly, I came out upon the
island’s point and saw a dark figure outlined between
the water and the sky. It was the Swede. And already
he had one foot in the river! A moment more and he
would have taken the plunge.
I threw myself upon him, flinging my arms about
his waist and dragging him shorewards with all my
strength. Of course he struggled furiously, making a
noise all the time just like that cursed humming, and
using the most outlandish phrases in his anger about
“going inside to Them,” and “taking the way of the
water and the wind,” and God only knows what more
besides, that I tried in vain to recall afterwards, but
which turned me sick with horror and amazement as
I listened. But in the end I managed to get him into
the comparative safety of the tent, and flung him
breathless and cursing upon the mattress where I
held him until the fit had passed.
I think the suddenness with which it all went and
he grew calm, coinciding as it did with the equally
abrupt cessation of the humming and pattering outside—
I think this was almost the strangest part of the
whole business perhaps. For he had just opened his
eyes and turned his tired face up to me so that the
dawn threw a pale light upon it through the doorway,
and said, for all the world just like a frightened child:
“My life, old man—it’s my life I owe you. But it’s
all over now anyhow. They’ve found a victim in our
place!”
Then he dropped back upon his blankets and
went to sleep literally under my eyes. He simply collapsed,
and began to snore again as healthily as
though nothing had happened and he had never tried
to offer his own life as a sacrifice by drowning. And
when the sunlight woke him three hours later—
hours of ceaseless vigil for me—it became so clear to
me that he remembered absolutely nothing of what
he had attempted to do, that I deemed it wise to hold
my peace and ask no dangerous questions.
He woke naturally and easily, as I have said, when
the sun was already high in a windless hot sky, and
he at once got up and set about the preparation of
the fire for breakfast. I followed him anxiously at
bathing, but he did not attempt to plunge in, merely
dipping his head and making some remark about the
extra coldness of the water.
“River’s falling at last,” he said, “and I’m glad of
it.”
“The humming has stopped too,” I said.
He looked up at me quietly with his normal
expression. Evidently he remembered everything
except his own attempt at suicide.
“Everything has stopped,” he said, “because—”
He hesitated. But I knew some reference to that
remark he had made just before he fainted was in his
mind, and I was determined to know it.
“Because ‘They’ve found another victim’?” I said,
forcing a little laugh.
“Exactly,” he answered, “exactly! I feel as positive
of it as though—as though—I feel quite safe again, I
mean,” he finished.
He began to look curiously about him. The sunlight
lay in hot patches on the sand. There was no
wind. The willows were motionless. He slowly rose to
feet.
“Come,” he said; “I think if we look, we shall find
it.” He started off on a run, and I followed him. He
kept to the banks, poking with a stick among the
sandy bays and caves and little back-waters, myself
always close on his heels.
“Ah!” he exclaimed presently, “ah!”
The tone of his voice somehow brought back to
me a vivid sense of the horror of the last twenty-four
hours, and I hurried up to join him. He was pointing
with his stick at a large black object that lay half in
the water and half on the sand. It appeared to be
caught by some twisted willow roots so that the river
could not sweep it away. A few hours before the spot
must have been under water.
“See,” he said quietly, “the victim that made our
escape possible!” And when I peered across his
shoulder I saw that his stick rested on the body of a
man. He turned it over. It was the corpse of a peasant,
and the face was hidden in the sand. Clearly the
man had been drowned, but a few hours before, and
his body must have been swept down upon our island
somewhere about the hour of the dawn—at the very
time the fit had passed.
“We must give it a decent burial, you know.”
“I suppose so,” I replied. I shuddered a little in
spite of myself, for there was something about the
appearance of that poor drowned man that turned
me cold.

THE WILLOWS — 22 OF 23

The Swede glanced up sharply at me, an undecipherable
expression on his face, and began clambering
down the bank. I followed him more leisurely.
The current, I noticed, had torn away much of the
clothing from the body, so that the neck and part of
the chest lay bare.
Halfway down the bank my companion suddenly
stopped and held up his hand in warning; but either
my foot slipped, or I had gained too much
momentum to bring myself quickly to a halt, for I
bumped into him and sent him forward with a sort of
leap to save himself. We tumbled together on to the
hard sand so that our feet splashed into the water.
And, before anything could be done, we had collided
a little heavily against the corpse.
The Swede uttered a sharp cry. And I sprang back
as if I had been shot.
At the moment we touched the body there rose
from its surface the loud sound of humming—the
sound of several hummings—which passed with a
vast commotion as of winged things in the air about
us and disappeared upwards into the sky, growing
fainter and fainter till they finally ceased in the distance.
It was exactly as though we had disturbed
some living yet invisible creatures at work.
My companion clutched me, and I think I
clutched him, but before either of us had time properly
to recover from the unexpected shock, we saw
that a movement of the current was turning the
corpse round so that it became released from the grip
of the willow roots. A moment later it had turned
completely over, the dead face uppermost, staring at
the sky. It lay on the edge of the main stream. In
another moment it would be swept away.
The Swede started to save it, shouting again
something I did not catch about a “proper burial”—
and then abruptly dropped upon his knees on the
sand and covered his eyes with his hands. I was
beside him in an instant.
I saw what he had seen.
For just as the body swung round to the current
the face and the exposed chest turned full towards us,
and showed plainly how the skin and flesh were
indented with small hollows, beautifully formed, and
exactly similar in shape and kind to the sand-funnels
that we had found all over the island.
“Their mark!” I heard my companion mutter
under his breath. “Their awful mark!”
And when I turned my eyes again from his
ghastly face to the river, the current had done its
work, and the body had been swept away into midstream
and was already beyond our reach and almost
out of sight, turning over and over on the waves like
an otter.