le, however, I postponed this little climax, and tried to
ignore or laugh at the occasional sentences he flung into the emptiness.

Some of these sentences, moreover, were confoundedly disquieting to me,
coming as they did to corroborate much that I felt myself; corroboration,
too--which made it so much more convincing--from a totally different point
of view. He composed such curious sentences, and hurled them at me in such
an inconsequential sort of way, as though his main line of thought was
secret to himself, and these fragments were mere bits he found it
impossible to digest. He got rid of them by uttering them. Speech relieved
him. It was like being sick.

"There are things about us, I'm sure, that make for disorder,
disintegration, destruction, our destruction," he said once, while the fire
blazed between us. "We've strayed out of a safe line somewhere."

And, another time, when the gong sounds had come nearer, ringing much
louder than before, and directly over our heads, he said as though talking
to himself:

"I don't think a gramophone would show any record of that. The sound
doesn't come to me by the ears at all. The vibrations reach me in another
manner altogether, and seem to be within me, which is precisely how a
fourth dimensional sound might be supposed to make itself heard."

I purposely made no reply to this, but I sat up a little closer to the fire
and peered about me into the darkness. The clouds were massed all over the
sky, and no trace of moonlight came through. Very still, too, everything
was, so that the river and the frogs had things all their own way.

"It has that about it," he went on, "which is utterly out of common
experience. It is unknown. Only one thing describes it really; it is a
non-human sound; I mean a sound outside humanity."

Having rid himself of this indigestible morsel, he lay quiet for a time,
but he had so admirably expressed my own feeling that it was a relief to
have the thought out, and to have confined it by the limitation of words
from dangerous wandering to and fro in the mind.

The solitude of that Danube camping-place, can I ever forget it? The
feeling of being utterly alone on an empty planet! My thoughts ran
incessantly upon cities and the haunts of men. I would have given my soul,
as the saying is, for the "feel" of those Bavarian villages we had passed
through by the score; for the normal, human commonplaces; peasants drinking
beer, tables beneath the trees,