The Willows | Page 2

kingdom
of wonder and magic--a kingdom that was reserved for the use of
others who had a right to it, with everywhere unwritten warnings to
trespassers for those who had the imagination to discover them.

Though still early in the afternoon, the ceaseless buffetings of a most
tempestuous wind made us feel weary, and we at once began casting
about for a suitable camping-ground for the night. But the bewildering
character of the islands made landing difficult; the swirling flood
carried us in shore and then swept us out again; the willow branches
tore our hands as we seized them to stop the canoe, and we pulled many
a yard of sandy bank into the water before at length we shot with a
great sideways blow from the wind into a backwater and managed to
beach the bows in a cloud of spray. Then we lay panting and laughing
after our exertions on the hot yellow sand, sheltered from the wind, and
in the full blaze of a scorching sun, a cloudless blue sky above, and an
immense army of dancing, shouting willow bushes, closing in from all
sides, shining with spray and clapping their thousand little hands as
though to applaud the success of our efforts.
"What a river!" I said to my companion, thinking of all the way we had
traveled from the source in the Black Forest, and how he had often
been obliged to wade and push in the upper shallows at the beginning
of June.
"Won't stand much nonsense now, will it?" he said, pulling the canoe a
little farther into safety up the sand, and then composing himself for a
nap.
I lay by his side, happy and peaceful in the bath of the elements--water,
wind, sand, and the great fire of the sun--thinking of the long journey
that lay behind us, and of the great stretch before us to the Black Sea,
and how lucky I was to have such a delightful and charming traveling
companion as my friend, the Swede.
We had made many similar journeys together, but the Danube, more
than any other river I knew, impressed us from the very beginning with
its aliveness. From its tiny bubbling entry into the world among the
pinewood gardens of Donaueschingen, until this moment when it began
to play the great river-game of losing itself among the deserted swamps,
unobserved, unrestrained, it had seemed to us like following the grown
of some living creature. Sleepy at first, but later developing violent
desires as it became conscious of its deep soul, it rolled, like some huge

fluid being, through all the countries we had passed, holding our little
craft on its mighty shoulders, playing roughly with us sometimes, yet
always friendly and well-meaning, till at length we had come inevitably
to regard it as a Great Personage.
How, indeed, could it be otherwise, since it told us so much of its secret
life? At night we heard it singing to the moon as we lay in our tent,
uttering that odd sibilant note peculiar to itself and said to be caused by
the rapid tearing of the pebbles along its bed, so great is its hurrying
speed. We knew, too, the voice of its gurgling whirlpools, suddenly
bubbling up on a surface previously quite calm; the roar of its shallows
and swift rapids; its constant steady thundering below all mere surface
sounds; and that ceaseless tearing of its icy waters at the banks. How it
stood up and shouted when the rains fell flat upon its face! And how its
laughter roared out when the wind blew up-stream and tried to stop its
growing speed! We knew all its sounds and voices, its tumblings and
foamings, its unnecessary splashing against the bridges; that
self-conscious chatter when there were hills to look on; the affected
dignity of its speech when it passed through the little towns, far too
important to laugh; and all these faint, sweet whisperings when the sun
caught it fairly in some slow curve and poured down upon it till the
steam rose.
It was full of tricks, too, in its early life before the great world knew it.
There were places in the upper reaches among the Swabian forests,
when yet the first whispers of its destiny had not reached it, where it
elected to disappear through holes in the ground, to appear again on the
other side of the porous limestone hills and start a new river with
another name; leaving, too, so little water in its own bed that we had to
climb out and wade and push the canoe through miles of shallows.
And a chief pleasure, in those early days of its irresponsible youth, was
to lie low, like Brer Fox, just before the little turbulent tributaries came
to