Algernon Blackwood (2 page)

The rising river did not alarm us in the least, but the matter of being
left high and dry by a sudden subsidence of the waters might be serious,
and we had consequently laid in an extra stock of provisions. For the rest,
the officer's prophecy held true, and the wind, blowing down a perfectly
clear sky, increased steadily till it reached the dignity of a westerly
gale.

It was earlier than usual when we camped, for the sun was a good hour or
two from the horizon, and leaving my friend still asleep on the hot sand, I
wandered about in desultory examination of our hotel. The island, I found,
was less than an acre in extent, a mere sandy bank standing some two or
three feet above the level of the river. The far end, pointing into the
sunset, was covered with flying spray which the tremendous wind drove off
the crests of the broken waves. It was triangular in shape, with the apex
up stream.

I stood there for several minutes, watching the impetuous crimson flood
bearing down with a shouting roar, dashing in waves against the bank as
though to sweep it bodily away, and then swirling by in two foaming streams
on either side. The ground seemed to shake with the shock and rush, while
the furious movement of the willow bushes as the wind poured over them
increased the curious illusion that the island itself actually moved.
Above, for a mile or two, I 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 enough to bother and perplex, and to rob a most delightful
camping-ground of a good portion of its charm. To my companion, however, I
said nothing, for he was a man I considered devoid of imagination. In the
first place, I could never have explained to him what I meant, and in the
second, he would have laughed stupidly at me if I had.

There was a slight depression in the center of the island, and here we
pitched the tent. The surrounding willows broke the wind a bit.

"A poor camp," observed the imperturbable Swede when at last the tent stood
upright, "no stones and precious little firewood. I'm for moving on early
tomorrow—eh? This sand won't hold anything."

But the experience of a collapsing tent at midnight had taught us many
devices, and we made the cozy gipsy house as safe as possible, and then set
about collecting a store of wood to last till bed-time. Willow bushes drop
no branches, and driftwood was our only source of supply. We hunted the
shores pretty thoroughly. Everywhere the banks were crumbling as the rising
flood tore at them and carried away great portions with a splash and a
gurgle.

"The island's much smaller than when we landed," said the accurate Swede.
"It won't last long at this rate. We'd better drag the canoe close to the
tent, and be ready to start at a moment's notice. I shall sleep in my
clothes."

He was a little distance off, climbing along the bank, and I heard his
rather jolly laugh as he spoke.

"By Jove!" I heard him call, a moment later, and turned to see what had
caused his exclamation. But for the moment he was hidden by the willows,
and I could not find him.

"What in the world's this?" I heard him cry again, and this time his voice
had become serious.

I ran up quickly and joined him on the bank. He was looking over the river,
pointing at something in the water.

"Good heavens, it's a man's body!" he cried excitedly. "Look!"

A black thing, turning over and over in the foaming waves, swept rapidly
past. It kept disappearing and coming up to the surface again. It was about
twenty feet from the shore, and just as it was opposite to where we stood
it lurched round and looked straight at us. We saw its eyes reflecting the
sunset, and gleaming an odd yellow as the body turned over. Then it gave a
swift, gulping plunge, and dived out of sight in a flash.

"An otter, by gad!" we exclaimed in the same breath, laughing.

It was an otter, alive, and out on the hunt; yet it had looked exactly like
the body of a drowned man turning helplessly in the current. Far below it
came to the surface once again, and we saw its black skin, wet and shining
in the sunlight.

Then, too, just as we turned back, our arms full of driftwood, another
thing happened to recall us to the river bank. This time it really was a
man, and what was more, a man in a boat. Now a small boat on the Danube was
an unusual sight at any time, but here in this deserted region, and at
flood time, it was so unexpected as to constitute a real event. We stood
and stared.

Whether it was due to the slanting sunlight, or the refraction from the
wonderfully illumined water, I cannot say, but, whatever the cause, I found
it difficult to focus my sight properly upon the flying apparition. It
seemed, however, to be a man standing upright in a sort of flat-bottomed
boat, steering with a long oar, and being carried down the opposite shore
at a tremendous pace. He apparently was looking across in our direction,
but the distance was too great and the light too uncertain for us to make
out very plainly what he was about. It seemed to me that he was
gesticulating and making signs at us. His voice came across the water to us
shouting something furiously, but the wind drowned it so that no single
word was audible. There was something curious about the whole
appearance—man, boat, signs, voice—that made an impression on me out of
all proportion to its cause.

"He's crossing himself!" I cried. "Look, he's making the sign of the
Cross!"

"I believe you're right," the Swede said, shading his eyes with his hand
and watching the man out of sight. He seemed to be gone in a moment,
melting away down there into the sea of willows where the sun caught them
in the bend of the river and turned them into a great crimson wall of
beauty. Mist, too, had begun to ruse, so that the air was hazy.

"But what in the world is he doing at nightfall on this flooded river?" I
said, half to myself. "Where is he going at such a time, and what did he
mean by his signs and shouting? D'you think he wished to warn us about
something?"

"He saw our smoke, and thought we were spirits probably," laughed my
companion. "These Hungarians believe in all sorts of rubbish; you remember
the shopwoman at Pressburg warning us that no one ever landed here because
it belonged to some sort of beings outside man's world! I suppose they
believe in fairies and elementals, possibly demons, too. That peasant in
the boat saw people on the islands for the first time in his life," he
added, after a slight pause, "and it scared him, that's all."

The Swede's tone of voice was not convincing, and his manner lacked
something that was usually there. I noted the change instantly while he
talked, though without being able to label it precisely.

"If they had enough imagination," I laughed loudly—I remember trying to
make as much noise as I could—"they might well people a place like this
with the old gods of antiquity. The Romans must have haunted all this
region more or less with their shrines and sacred groves and elemental
deities."

The subject dropped and we returned to our stew-pot, for my friend was not
given to imaginative conversation as a rule. Moreover, just then I remember
feeling distinctly glad that he was not imaginative; his stolid, practical
nature suddenly seemed to me welcome and comforting. It was an admirable
temperament, I felt; he could steer down rapids like a red Indian, shoot
dangerous bridges and whirlpools better than any white man I ever saw in a
canoe. He was a grand fellow for an adventurous trip, a tower of strength
when untoward things happened. I looked at his strong face and light curly
hair as he staggered along under his pile of driftwood (twice the size of
mine!), and I experienced a feeling of relief. Yes, I was distinctly glad
just then that the Swede was—what he was, and that he never made remarks
that suggested more than they said.

"The river's still rising, though," he added, as if following out some
thoughts of his own, and dropping his load with a gasp. "This island will
be under water in two days if it goes on."

"I wish the wind would go down," I said. "I don't care a fig for the
river."

The flood, indeed, had no terrors for us; we could get off at ten minutes'
notice, and the more water the better we liked it. It meant an increasing
current and the obliteration of the treacherous shingle-beds that so often
threatened to tear the bottom out of our canoe.

Contrary to our expectations, the wind did not go down with the sun. It
seemed to increase with the darkness, howling overhead and shaking the
willows round us like straws. Curious sounds accompanied it sometimes, like
the explosion of heavy guns, and it fell upon the water and the island in
great flat blows of immense power. It made me think of the sounds a planet
must make, could we only hear it, driving along through space.

But the sky kept wholly clear of clouds, and soon after supper the full
moon rose up in the east and covered the river and the plain of shouting
willows with a light like the day.

We lay on the sandy patch beside the fire, smoking, listening to the noises
of the night round us, and talking happily of the journey we had already
made, and of our plans ahead. The map lay spread in the door of the tent,
but the high wind made it hard to study, and presently we lowered the
curtain and extinguished the lantern. The firelight was enough to smoke and
see each other's faces by, and the sparks flew about overhead like
fireworks. A few yards beyond, the river gurgled and hissed, and from time
to time a heavy splash announced the falling away of further portions of
the bank.