The Willows | Page 4

could see the great
river descending upon me; it was like looking up the slope of a sliding
hill, white with foam, and leaping up everywhere to show itself to the
sun.

The rest of the island was too thickly grown with willows to make
walking pleasant, but I made the tour, nevertheless. From the lower end
the light, of course, changed, and the river looked dark and angry. Only
the backs of the flying waves were visible, streaked with foam, and
pushed forcibly by the great puffs of wind that fell upon them from
behind. For a short mile it was visible, pouring in and out among the
islands, and then disappearing with a huge sweep into the willows,
which closed about it like a herd of monstrous antediluvian creatures
crowding down to drink. They made me think of gigantic sponge-like
growths that sucked the river up into themselves. They caused it to
vanish from sight. They herded there together in such overpowering
numbers.
Altogether it was an impressive scene, with its utter loneliness, its
bizarre suggestion; and as I gazed, long and curiously, a singular
emotion began to stir somewhere in the depths of me. Midway in my
delight of the wild beauty, there crept, unbidden and unexplained, a
curious feeling of disquietude, almost of alarm.
A rising river, perhaps, always suggests something of the ominous;
many of the little islands I saw before me would probably have been
swept away by the morning; this resistless, thundering flood of water
touched the sense of awe. Yet I was aware that my uneasiness lay
deeper far than the emotions of awe and wonder. It was not that I felt.
Nor had it directly to do with the power of the driving wind--this
shouting hurricane that might almost carry up a few acres of willows
into the air and scatter them like so much chaff over the landscape. The
wind was simply enjoying itself, for nothing rose out of the flat
landscape to stop it, and I was conscious of sharing its great game with
a kind of pleasurable excitement. Yet this novel emotion had nothing to
do with the wind. Indeed, so vague was the sense of distress I
experienced, that it was impossible to trace it to its source and deal with
it accordingly, though I was aware somehow that it had to do with my
realization of our utter insignificance before this unrestrained power of
the elements about me. The huge-grown river had something to do with
it too--a vague, unpleasant idea that we had somehow trifled with these
great elemental forces in whose power we lay helpless every hour of

the day and night. For here, indeed, they were gigantically at play
together, and the sight appealed to the imagination.
But my emotion, so far as I could understand it, seemed to attach itself
more particularly to the willow bushes, to these acres and acres of
willows, crowding, so thickly growing there, swarming everywhere the
eye could reach, pressing upon the river as though to suffocate it,
standing in dense array mile after mile beneath the sky, watching,
waiting, listening. And, apart quite from the elements, the willows
connected themselves subtly with my malaise, attacking the mind
insidiously somehow by reason of their vast numbers, and contriving in
some way or other to represent to the imagination a new and mighty
power, a power, moreover, not altogether friendly to us.
Great revelations of nature, of course, never fail to impress in one way
or another, and I was no stranger to moods of the kind. Mountains
overawe and oceans terrify, while the mystery of great forests exercises
a spell peculiarly its own. But all these, at one point or another,
somewhere link on intimately with human life and human experience.
They stir comprehensible, even if alarming, emotions. They tend on the
whole to exalt.
With this multitude of willows, however, it was something far different,
I felt. Some essence emanated from them that besieged the heart. A
sense of awe awakened, true, but of awe touched somewhere by a
vague terror. Their serried ranks, growing everywhere darker about me
as the shadows deepened, moving furiously yet softly in the wind,
woke in me the curious and unwelcome suggestion that we had
trespassed here upon the borders of an alien world, a world where we
were intruders, a world where we were not wanted or invited to
remain--where we ran grave risks perhaps!
The feeling, however, though it refused to yield its meaning entirely to
analysis, did not at the time trouble me by passing into menace. Yet it
never left me quite, even during the very practical business of putting
up the tent in a hurricane of wind and building a fire for the stew-pot. It
remained, just