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 mere 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. “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. “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.