still indulged in occasional
brief gusts--the river seemed to me to grow blacker, the willows to stand
more densely together. The latter, too, kept up a sort of independent
movement of their own, rustling among themselves when no wind stirred, and
shaking oddly from the roots upwards. When common objects in this way be
come charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination
far more than things of unusual appearance; and these bushes, crowding
huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquerie of
appearance that lent to them somehow the aspect of purposeful and living
creatures. Their very ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant and
hostile to us. The forces of the region drew nearer with the coming of
night. They were focusing upon our island, and more particularly upon
ourselves. For thus, somehow, in the terms of the imagination, did my
really indescribable sensations in this extraordinary place present
themselves.

I had slept a good deal in the early afternoon, and had thus recovered
somewhat from the exhaustion of a disturbed night, but this only served
apparently to render me more susceptible than before to the obsessing spell
of the haunting. I fought against it, laughing at my feelings as absurd and
childish, with very obvious physiological explanations, yet, in spite of
every effort, they gained in strength upon me so that I dreaded the night
as a child lost in a forest must dread the approach of darkness.

The canoe we had carefully covered with a waterproof sheet during the day,
and the one remaining paddle had been securely tied by the Swede to the
base of a tree, lest the wind should rob us of that too. From five o'clock
onwards I busied myself with the stew-pot and preparations for dinner, it
being my turn to cook that night. We had potatoes, onions, bits of bacon
fat to add flavor, and a general thick residue from former stews at the
bottom of the pot; with black bread broken up into it the result was most
excellent, and it was followed by a stew of plums with sugar and a brew of
strong tea with dried milk. A good pile of wood lay close at hand, and the
absence of wind made my duties easy. My companion sat lazily watching me,
dividing his attentions between cleaning his pipe and giving useless
advice--an admitted privilege of the off-duty man. He had been very quiet
all the afternoon, engaged in re-caulking the canoe, strengthening the tent
ropes, and fishi