ke it vicious. The feeling of disquietude did not
pass however, and I crawled quietly out of the tent to see if our
belongings were safe. I moved carefully so as not to waken my companion.
A curious excitement was on me.

I was halfway out, kneeling on all fours, when my eye first took in that
the tops of the bushes opposite, with their moving tracery of leaves,
made shapes against the sky. I sat back on my haunches and stared. It
was incredible, surely, but there, opposite and slightly above me, were
shapes of some indeterminate sort among the willows, and as the branches
swayed in the wind they seemed to group themselves about these shapes,
forming a series of monstrous outlines that shifted rapidly beneath the
moon. Close, about fifty feet in front of me, I saw these things.

My first instinct was to waken my companion that he too might see them,
but something made me hesitate--the sudden realization, probably, that I
should not welcome corroboration; and meanwhile I crouched there staring
in amazement with smarting eyes. I was wide awake. I remember saying to
myself that I was _not_ dreaming.

They first became properly visible, these huge figures, just within the
tops of the bushes--immense bronze-colored, moving, and wholly
independent of the swaying of the branches. I saw them plainly and
noted, now I came to examine them more calmly, that they were very much
larger than human, and indeed that something in their appearance
proclaimed them to be _not human_ at all. Certainly they were not merely
the moving tracery of the branches against the moonlight. They shifted
independently. They rose upwards in a continuous stream from earth to
sky, vanishing utterly as soon as they reached the dark of the sky. They
were interlaced one with another, making a great column, and I saw their
limbs and huge bodies melting in and out of each other, forming this
serpentine line that bent and swayed and twisted spirally with the
contortions of the wind-tossed trees. They were nude, fluid shapes,
passing up the bushes, _within_ the leaves almost--rising up in a living
column into the heavens. Their faces I never could see. Unceasingly they
poured upwards, swaying in great bending curves, with a hue of dull
bronze upon their skins.

I stared, trying to force every atom of vision from my eyes. For a long
time I thought they _must_ every moment disappear and resolve themselves
into the movements of the branches and prove to be an opt