Read Online Algernon Blackwood by The Willows - Free Book Online Page B

moving all over upon its surface—"coiling
upon itself like smoke," he said afterwards.
    "I watched it settle downwards through the bushes," he sobbed at me. "Look,
by God! It's coming this way! Oh, oh!"—he gave a kind of whistling cry.
"They've found us."
    I gave one terrified glance, which just enabled me to see that the shadowy
form was swinging towards us through the bushes, and then I collapsed
backwards with a crash into the branches. These failed, of course, to
support my weight, so that with the Swede on top of me we fell in a
struggling heap upon the sand. I really hardly knew what was happening. I
was conscious only of a sort of enveloping sensation of icy fear that
plucked the nerves out of their fleshly covering, twisted them this way and
that, and replaced them quivering. My eyes were tightly shut; something in
my throat choked me; a feeling that my consciousness was expanding,
extending out into space, swiftly gave way to another feeling that I was
losing it altogether, and about to die.
    An acute spasm of pain passed through me, and I was aware that the Swede
had hold of me in such a way that he hurt me abominably. It was the way he
caught at me in falling.
    But it was the pain, he declared afterwards, that saved me; it caused me to
forget them and think of something else at the very instant when they were
about to find me. It concealed my mind from them at the moment of
discovery, yet just in time to evade their terrible seizing of me. He
himself, he says, actually swooned at the same moment, and that was what
saved him.
    I only know that at a later date, how long or short is impossible to say, I
found myself scrambling up out of the slippery network of willow branches,
and saw my companion standing in front of me holding out a hand to assist
me. I stared at him in a dazed way, rubbing the arm he had twisted for me.
Nothing came to me to say, somehow.
    "I lost consciousness for a moment or two," I heard him say. "That's what
saved me. It made me stop thinking about them."
    "You nearly broke my arm in two," I said, uttering my only connected
thought at the moment. A numbness came over me.
    "That's what saved you!" he replied. "Between us, we've managed to set them
off on a false tack somewhere. The humming has ceased. It's gone—for the
moment at any rate!"
    A wave of hysterical laughter seized me again, and this time spread to my
friend too—great healing gusts of shaking laughter that brought a
tremendous sense of relief in their train. We made our way back to the fire
and put the wood on so that it blazed at once. Then we saw that the tent
had fallen over and lay in a tangled heap upon the ground.
    We picked it up, and during the process tripped more than once and caught
our feet in sand.
    "It's those sand-funnels," exclaimed the Swede, when the tent was up again
and the firelight lit up the ground for several yards about us. "And look
at the size of them!"
    All round the tent and about the fireplace where we had seen the moving
shadows there were deep funnel-shaped hollows in the sand, exactly similar
to the ones we had already found over the island, only far bigger and
deeper, beautifully formed, and wide enough in some instances to admit the
whole of my foot and leg.
    Neither of us said a word. We both knew that sleep was the safest thing we
could do, and to bed we went accordingly without further delay, having
first thrown sand on the fire and taken the provision sack and the paddle
inside the tent with us. The canoe, too, we propped in such a way at the
end of the tent that our feet touched it, and the least motion would
disturb and wake us.
    In case of emergency, too, we again went to bed in our clothes, ready for a
sudden start.
    It was my firm intention to lie awake all night and watch, but the
exhaustion of nerves and body decreed otherwise, and sleep after a while
came over me with a welcome blanket of oblivion. The fact that my companion
also slept quickened its approach. At first he fidgeted