e 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 to-morrow--eh? This sand won't hold anything."

But the experience of a collapsing tent at midnight had taught us many
devices, and we ma