The Willows | Page 9

to
and fro as the gusts smote them, but our little bit of green canvas lay
snugly safe in the hollow, for the wind passed over it without meeting
enough resistance to make 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 half-way 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
optical illusion. I searched everywhere for a proof of reality, when all
the while I understood quite well that the standard of reality had
changed. For the longer I looked the more certain I became that these
figures were real and living, though perhaps not according to the

standards that the camera and the biologist would insist upon.
Far from feeling fear, I was possessed with a sense of awe and wonder
such as I have never known. I seemed to be gazing at the personified
elemental forces of this haunted and primeval region. Our intrusion had
stirred the powers of the place into activity. It was we who were the
cause of the disturbance, and my brain filled to bursting with stories
and legends of the spirits and deities of places that have been
acknowledged and worshipped by men in all ages of the world's history.
But, before I could arrive at any possible explanation, something
impelled me to go farther out, and I crept forward on the sand and stood
upright. I felt the ground still warm under my bare feet; the wind tore at
my hair and face; and the sound of the river burst upon my ears with a
sudden roar. These things, I knew, were real, and proved that my senses
were acting normally. Yet the figures still rose from earth to heaven,
silent, majestically, in a great spiral of grace and strength that
overwhelmed me at length with a genuine deep emotion of worship. I
felt that I must fall down and worship--absolutely worship.
Perhaps in another minute I might have done so, when a gust of wind
swept against me with such force that it blew me sideways, and I nearly
stumbled and fell. It seemed to shake the dream violently out of me. At
least it gave me another point of view somehow. The figures still
remained, still ascended into heaven from the heart of the night, but my
reason at last began to assert itself. It must be a subjective experience, I
argued--none the less real for that,