against the taut canvas--the wind dropping
heavily upon our fragile roof.

Yet all the time my nervousness and malaise increased appreciably.

I crossed over to the farther shore and noted how the coast line had
altered in the night, and what masses of sand the river had torn away. I
dipped my hands and feet into the cool current, and bathed my forehead.
Already there was a glow of sunrise in the sky and the exquisite
freshness of coming day. On my way back I passed purposely beneath the
very bushes where I had seen the column of figures rising into the air,
and midway among the clumps I suddenly found myself overtaken by a sense
of vast terror. From the shadows a large figure went swiftly by. Some
one passed me, as sure as ever man did....

It was a great staggering blow from the wind that helped me forward
again, and once out in the more open space, the sense of terror
diminished strangely. The winds were about and walking, I remember
saying to myself; for the winds often move like great presences under
the trees. And altogether the fear that hovered about me was such an
unknown and immense kind of fear, so unlike anything I had ever felt
before, that it woke a sense of awe and wonder in me that did much to
counteract its worst effects; and when I reached a high point in the
middle of the island from which I could see the wide stretch of river,
crimson in the sunrise, the whole magical beauty of it all was so
overpowering that a sort of wild yearning woke in me and almost brought
a cry up into the throat.

But this cry found no expression, for as my eyes wandered from the plain
beyond to the island round me and noted our little tent half hidden
among the willows, a dreadful discovery leaped out at me, compared to
which my terror of the walking winds seemed as nothing at all.

For a change, I thought, had somehow come about in the arrangement of
the landscape. It was not that my point of vantage gave me a different
view, but that an alteration had apparently been effected in the
relation of the tent to the willows, and of the willows to the tent.
Surely the bushes now crowded much closer--unnecessarily, unpleasantly
close. _They had moved nearer_.

Creeping with silent feet over the shifting sands, drawing imperceptibly
nearer by soft, unhurried movements, the willows had come closer during
the night. But had the wind moved them, or had they moved of themselves?
I recalled the sound of infinite small patterings a