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. 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 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.