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. II. 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
worship. I felt that I must fall down and worship—absolutely worship. Perhaps in another minute I might have done so, when a gust of wind
swept against me with such force that it blew me sideways, and I nearly
stumbled and fell. It seemed to shake the dream violently out of me. At
least it gave me another point of view somehow. The figures still
remained, still ascended into heaven from the heart of the night, but
my reason at last began to assert itself. It must be a subjective
experience, I argued—none the less real for that, but still subjective. The moonlight and the branches combined to work out these pictures upon
the mirror of my imagination, and for some reason I projected them
outwards and made them appear objective. I knew this must be the case,
of course. I took courage, and began to move forward across the open
patches of sand. By Jove, though, was it all hallucination? Was it
merely subjective? Did not my reason argue in the old futile way from
the little standard of the known? I only know that great column of figures ascended darkly into the sky
for what seemed a very long period of time, and with a very complete
measure of reality as most men are accustomed to gauge reality. Then
suddenly they were gone! And, once they were gone and the immediate wonder of their great
presence had passed, fear came down upon me with a cold rush. The
esoteric meaning of this lonely and haunted region suddenly flamed up
within me, and I began to tremble dreadfully. I took a quick look
round—a look of horror that came near to panic—calculating vainly ways
of escape; and then, realizing how helpless I was to achieve anything
really effective, I crept back silently into the tent and lay down
again upon my sandy mattress, first lowering the door-curtain to shut
out the sight of the willows in the moonlight, and then burying my head
as deeply as possible beneath the blankets to deaden the sound of the
terrifying wind. III.