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 a
moment in the wind like a tree, finding it hard to keep my upright position
on the sandy hillock. There was a suggestion here of personal agency, of
deliberate intention, of aggressive hostility, and it terrified me into a
sort of rigidity.

Then the reaction followed quickly. The idea was so bizarre, so absurd,
that I felt inclined to laugh. But the laughter came no more readily than
the cry, for the knowledge that my mind was so receptive to such dangerous
imaginings brought the additional terror that it was through our minds and
not through our physical bodies that