Algernon Blackwood Read Online Free PDF

question. The river I saw had risen further. Its thunder filled
the air, and a fine spray made itself felt through my thin sleeping shirt.
    Yet nowhere did I discover the slightest evidence of anything to cause
alarm. This deep, prolonged disturbance in my heart remained wholly
unaccounted for.
    My companion had not stirred when I called him, and there was no need to
waken him now. I looked about me carefully, noting everything; the
turned-over canoe; the yellow paddles—two of them, I'm certain; the
provision sack and the extra lantern hanging together from the tree; and,
crowding everywhere about me, enveloping all, the willows, those endless,
shaking willows. A bird uttered its morning cry, and a string of duck
passed with whirring flight overhead in the twilight. The sand whirled, dry
and stinging, about my bare feet in the wind.
    I walked round the tent and then went out a little way into the bush, so
that I could see across the river to the farther landscape, and the same
profound yet indefinable emotion of distress seized upon me again as I saw
the interminable sea of bushes stretching to the horizon, looking ghostly
and unreal in the wan light of dawn. I walked softly here and there, still
puzzling over that odd sound of infinite pattering, and of that pressure
upon the tent that had wakened me. It must have been the wind, I
reflected—the wind bearing upon the loose, hot sand, driving the dry
particles smartly against the taut canvas—the wind dropping heavily upon
our fragile roof.
    Yet all the time my nervousness and malaise increased appreciably.
    I crossed over to the farther shore and noted how the coast-line had
altered in the night, and what masses of sand the river had torn away. I
dipped my hands and feet into the cool current, and bathed my forehead.
Already there was a glow of sunrise in the sky and the exquisite freshness
of coming day. On my way back I passed purposely beneath the very bushes
where I had seen the column of figures rising into the air, and midway
among the clumps I suddenly found myself overtaken by a sense of vast
terror. From the shadows a large figure went swiftly by. Someone passed me,
as sure as ever man did....
    It was a great staggering blow from the wind that helped me forward again,
and once out in the more open space, the sense of terror diminished
strangely. The winds were about and walking, I remember saying to myself,
for the winds often move like great presences under the trees. And
altogether the fear that hovered about me was such an unknown and immense
kind of fear, so unlike anything I had ever felt before, that it woke a
sense of awe and wonder in me that did much to counteract its worst
effects; and when I reached a high point in the middle of the island from
which I could see the wide stretch of river, crimson in the sunrise, the
whole magical beauty of it all was so overpowering that a sort of wild
yearning woke in me and almost brought a cry up into the throat.
    But this cry found no expression, for as my eyes wandered from the plain
beyond to the island round me and noted our little tent half hidden among
the willows, a dreadful discovery leaped out at me, compared to which my
terror of the walking winds seemed as nothing at all.
    For a change, I thought, had somehow come about in the arrangement of the
landscape. It was not that my point of vantage gave me a different view,
but that an alteration had apparently been effected in the relation of the
tent to the willows, and of the willows to the tent. Surely the bushes now
crowded much closer—unnecessarily, unpleasantly close. They had moved
nearer.
    Creeping with silent feet over the shifting sands, drawing imperceptibly
nearer by soft, unhurried movements, the willows had come closer during the
night. But had the wind moved them, or had they moved of themselves? I
recalled the sound of infinite small patterings and the pressure upon the
tent and upon my own heart that caused me to wake in terror. I swayed for