And once a gentleman
who was a stranger and had ridden a long way, lost his path at night,
and his horse took him into the very middle of the wild country, where
everything was upside down, and there were dreadful marshes and great
stones everywhere, and holes underfoot, and the trees looked like
gibbet-posts, because they had great black arms that stretched out
across the way. And this strange gentleman was very frightened, and his
horse began to shiver all over, and at last it stopped and wouldn't go
any farther, and the gentleman got down and tried to lead the horse, but
it wouldn't move, and it was all covered with a sweat, like death. So
the gentleman went on all alone, going farther and farther into the wild
country, till at last he came to a dark place, where he heard shouting
and singing and crying, like nothing he had ever heard before. It all
sounded quite close to him, but he couldn't get in, and so he began to
call, and while he was calling, something came behind him, and in a
minute his mouth and arms and legs were all bound up, and he fell into a
swoon. And when he came to himself, he was lying by the roadside, just
where he had first lost his way, under a blasted oak with a black trunk,
and his horse was tied beside him. So he rode on to the town and told
the people there what had happened, and some of them were amazed; but
others knew. So when once everybody had come, there was no door at all
for anybody else to pass in by. And when they were all inside, round in
a ring, touching each other, some one began to sing in the darkness, and
some one else would make a noise like thunder with a thing they had on
purpose, and on still nights people would hear the thundering noise far,
far away beyond the wild land, and some of them, who thought they knew
what it was, used to make a sign on their breasts when they woke up in
their beds at dead of night and heard that terrible deep noise, like
thunder on the mountains. And the noise and the singing would go on and
on for a long time, and the people who were in a ring swayed a little to
and fro; and the song was in an old, old language that nobody knows now,
and the tune was queer. Nurse said her great-grandmother had known some
one who remembered a little of it, when she was quite a little girl, and
nurse tried to sing some of it to me, and it was so strange a tune that
I turned all cold and my flesh crept as if I had put my hand on
something dead. Sometimes it was