ience I
knew what it was to hear tears of terror in a human voice. He was pointing
to the fire, some fifty feet away. I followed the direction of his finger,
and I swear my heart missed a beat.

There, in front of the dim glow, something was moving.

I saw it through a veil that hung before my eyes like the gauze
drop-curtain used at the back of a theater--hazily a little. It was neither
a human figure nor an animal. To me it gave the strange impression of being
as large as several animals grouped together, like horses, two or three,
moving slowly. The Swede, too, got a similar result, though expressing it
differently, for he thought it was shaped and sized like a clump of willow
bushes, rounded at the top, and moving all over upon its surface--"coiling
upon itself like smoke," he said afterwards.

"I watched it settle downwards through the bushes," he sobbed at me. "Look,
by God! It's coming this way! Oh, oh!"--he gave a kind of whistling cry.
"They've found us."

I gave one terrified glance, which just enabled me to see that the shadowy
form was swinging towards us through the bushes, and then I collapsed
backwards with a crash into the branches. These failed, of course, to
support my weight, so that with the Swede on top of me we fell in a
struggling heap upon the sand. I really hardly knew what was happening. I
was conscious only of a sort of enveloping sensation of icy fear that
plucked the nerves out of their fleshly covering, twisted them this way and
that, and replaced them quivering. My eyes were tightly shut; something in
my throat choked me; a feeling that my consciousness was expanding,
extending out into space, swiftly gave way to another feeling that I was
losing it altogether, and about to die.

An acute spasm of pain passed through me, and I was aware that the Swede
had hold of me in such a way that he hurt me abominably. It was the way he
caught at me in falling.

But it was the pain, he declared afterwards, that saved me; it caused me to
forget them and think of something else at the very instant when they were
about to find me. It concealed my mind from them at the moment of
discovery, yet just in time to evade their terrible seizing of me. He
himself, he says, actually swooned at the same moment, and that was what
saved him.

I only know that at a later date, how long or short is impossible to say, I
found myself scrambling up out of the slippery network of willow branches,
and saw my compani