blue funk, and that's the plain truth.
If the other shore was--different, I swear I'd be inclined to swim for it!"

The Swede's face turned very white beneath the deep tan of sun and wind. He
stared straight at me and answered quietly, but his voice betrayed his huge
excitement by its unnatural calmness. For the moment, at any rate, he was
the strong man of the two. He was more phlegmatic, for one thing.

"It's not a physical condition we can escape from by running away," he
replied, in the tone of a doctor diagnosing some grave disease; "we must
sit tight and wait. There are forces close here that could kill a herd of
elephants in a second as easily as you or I could squash a fly. Our only
chance is to keep perfectly still. Our insignificance perhaps may save us."

I put a dozen questions into my expression of face, but found no words. It
was precisely like listening to an accurate description of a disease whose
symptoms had puzzled me.

"I mean that so far, although aware of our disturbing presence, they have
not found us--not 'located' us, as the Americans say," he went on. "They're
blundering about like men hunting for a leak of gas. The paddle and canoe
and provisions prove that. I think they feel us, but cannot actually see
us. We must keep our minds quiet--it's our minds they feel. We must control
our thoughts, or it's all up with us."

"Death, you mean?" I stammered, icy with the horror of his suggestion.

"Worse--by far," he said. "Death, according to one's belief, means either
annihilation or release from the limitations of the senses, but it involves
no change of character. You don't suddenly alter just because the body's
gone. But this means a radical alteration, a complete change, a horrible
loss of oneself by substitution--far worse than death, and not even
annihilation. We happen to have camped in a spot where their region touches
ours, where the veil between has worn thin"--horrors! he was using my very
own phrase, my actual words--"so that they are aware of our being in their
neighborhood."

"But who are aware?" I asked.

I forgot the shaking of the willows in the windless calm, the humming
overhead, everything except that I was waiting for an answer that I dreaded
more than I can possibly explain.

He lowered his voice at once to reply, leaning forward a little over the
fire, an indefinable change in his face that made me avoid his eyes and
look down upon the ground.

"All my life," he said,