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, hot sunshine, and a
ruined castle on the rocks behind the red-roofed church. Even the
tourists would have been welcome.

Yet what I felt of dread was no ordinary ghostly fear. It was infinitely
greater, stranger, and seemed to arise from some dim ancestral sense of
terror more profoundly disturbing than anything I had known or dreamed
of. We had "strayed," as the Swede put it, into some region or some set
of conditions where the risks were great, yet unintelligible to us;
where the frontiers of some unknown world lay close about us. It was a
spot held by the dwellers in some outer space, a sort of peephole whence
they could spy upon the earth, themselves unseen, a point where the veil
between had worn a little thin. As the final result of too long a
sojourn here, we should be carried over the border and deprived of what
we called "our lives," yet by mental, not physical, processes. In that
sense, as he said, we should be the victims of our adventure--a
sacrifice.

It took us in different fashion, each according to the measure of his
sensitiveness and powers of resistance. I translated it vaguely into a
personification of the mightily disturbed elements, investing them with
the horror of a deliberate and malefic purpose, resentful of our
audacious intrusion into their breeding-place; whereas my friend threw
it into the unoriginal form at first of a trespass on some ancient
shrine, some place where the old gods still held sway, where the
emotional forces of former worshipers still clung, and the ancestral
portion of him yielded to the old pagan spell.

At any rate, here was a place unpolluted by men, kept clean by the winds
from coarsening human influences, a place where spiritual agenci