orest took on a peculiar look.
It had been partly burnt over, leaving the ground black, and some of the
trees gaunt, upbristling, and sentinel-like. The place, even in broad
daylight, would have had a night-struck appearance. At this hour, when
the sudden forest darkness had just fallen, there was a sense of unusual
gloom, easily connecting itself with strange forebodings.

Perhaps it had been five minutes, when Auber said, "I am conscious that
I cannot take my hands out of the grass."

As I said, it was a simple thing. With an odd impulse, I groped back
toward him till I found his wrists, and then shook them violently above
his head. We stood there for several moments performing this absurd
pantomime in the darkness. His arms, with the sleeves rolled up, felt
heavy with flesh in my grip. I seemed to be handling things of dead,
cold flesh.

Then Auber said, "I can still feel my hands down in the grass."

I drew back in a strange horror; but, at the same moment, we both stood
stock-still to listen: from some distance to the right came the
trickling sound of water. It was barely perceptible, and we listened
hard, indefinitely, while the silence congealed in our ears, and the
darkness condensed about our eyes, filling up space, and stopping
thought save just for the sound of the brook. It seemed a sort of
growing immobility, eternal, like after death.

At last Auber spoke, laying a hand on my shoulder: "It is over; let us
go ahead."

After a while we talked about it. There was little to "go" on. You see,
nothing happens, and, as Auber expressed it, "the psychological data are
ineffective for lack of an event." But though the whole thing remained
then a purely psychical experience, and did not "break through," yet it
had something of the fulness of fate. Auber, as usual, had a theory: in
the dream some manifestation was undoubtedly striving to break through,
but he had been unable to facilitate the process. The present
experience, he decided, was immature, a mere coincidence. The outcome
might yet, however, be foreseen through the dream, if the creative
perception of "white sleep" could be attained.

That is the affair which started the whole thing. Auber must have taken
the suggestion it contained much more seriously than any of us for
several years imagined; nor did we connect the long contemplativeness of
the man with any definite purpose. The thing was too vague and illusive
to become a purpose at all.

Before