hat great column of figures ascended darkly into the sky
for what seemed a very long period of time, and with a very complete
measure of reality as most men are accustomed to gauge reality. Then
suddenly they were gone!

And, once they were gone and the immediate wonder of their great
presence had passed, fear came down upon me with a cold rush. The
esoteric meaning of this lonely and haunted region suddenly flamed up
within me and I began to tremble dreadfully. I took a quick look
round--a look of horror that came near to panic--calculating vainly ways
of escape; and then, realizing how helpless I was to achieve anything
really effective, I crept back silently into the tent and lay down again
upon my sandy mattress, first lowering the door-curtain to shut out the
sight of the willows in the moonlight, and then burying my head as
deeply as possible beneath the blankets to deaden the sound of the
terrifying wind.

III

As though further to convince me that I had not been dreaming, I
remember that it was a long time before I fell again into a troubled and
restless sleep; and even then only the upper crust of me slept, and
underneath there was something that never quite lost consciousness, but
lay alert and on the watch.

But this second time I jumped up with a genuine start of terror. It was
neither the wind nor the river that woke me, but the slow approach of
something that caused the sleeping portion of me to grow smaller and
smaller till at last it vanished altogether, and I found myself sitting
bolt upright--listening.

Outside there was a sound of multitudinous little patterings. They had
been coming, I was aware, for a long time, and in my sleep they had
first become audible. I sat there nervously wide awake as though I had
not slept at all. It seemed to me that my breathing came with
difficulty, and that there was a great weight upon the surface of my
body. In spite of the hot night, I felt clammy with cold and shivered.
Something surely was pressing steadily against the sides of the tent and
weighing down upon it from above. Was it the body of the wind? Was this
the pattering rain, the dripping of the leaves? The spray blown from
the river by the wind and gathering in big drops? I thought quickly of a
dozen things.

Then suddenly the explanation leaped into my mind: a bough from the
poplar, the only large tree on the island, had fallen with the wind.
Still half caught by the other branches, it would fall