is to reveal; it is the
inevitable clue, and our only hope lies in ignoring them, in order that
they may ignore us."

"Even in thought?" He was extraordinarily agitated.

"Especially in thought. Our thoughts make spirals in their world. We must
keep them out of our minds at all costs if possible."

I raked the fire together to prevent the darkness having everything its own
way. I never longed for the sun as I longed for it then in the awful
blackness of that summer night.

"Were you awake all last night?" he went on suddenly.

"I slept badly a little after dawn," I replied evasively, trying to follow
his instructions, which I knew instinctively were true, "but the wind, of
course--"

"I know. But the wind won't account for all the noises."

"Then you heard it too?"

"The multiplying countless little footsteps I heard," he said, adding,
after a moment's hesitation, "and that other sound--"

"You mean above the tent, and the pressing down upon us of something
tremendous, gigantic?"

He nodded significantly.

"It was like the beginning of a sort of inner suffocation?" I said.

"Partly, yes. It seemed to me that the weight of the atmosphere had been
altered--had increased enormously, so that we should have been crushed."

"And that," I went on, determined to have it all out, pointing upwards
where the gong-like note hummed ceaselessly, rising and falling like wind.
"What do you make of that?"

"It's their sound," he whispered gravely. "It's the sound of their world,
the humming in their region. The division here is so thin that it leaks
through somehow. But, if you listen carefully, you'll find it's not above
so much as around us. It's in the willows. It's the willows themselves
humming, because here the willows have been made symbols of the forces that
are against us."

I could not follow exactly what he meant by this, yet the thought and idea
in my mind were beyond question the thought and idea in his. I realized
what he realized, only with less power of analysis than his. It was on the
tip of my tongue to tell him at last about my hallucination of the
ascending figures and the moving bushes, when he suddenly thrust his face
again close into mine across the firelight and began to speak in a very
earnest whisper. He amazed me by his calmness and pluck, his apparent
control of the situation. This man I had for years deemed unimaginative,
stolid!

"Now listen," he said. "The only thing for us to do is to