d 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 activi