Algernon Blackwood (3 page)

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 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.

"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 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 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?