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 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.