n I
tripped; but, as I rose, I saw that she had lingered for me; her long
sliding eyes were full, it seemed to me, of pity, as if she would have
liked for me to have enjoyed the sight of her. I stood still,
breathless, thinking that at last she would consent; but flinging back,
up into the air, one dark-ivory arm, she sighed and vanished. And the
breath of her sigh stirred all the birch-tree twigs just coloured with
the dawn. Long I stood in that thicket gazing at the spot where she had
leapt from me over the edge of the world-my heart quivering.

III.

We embarked on the estuary steamer that winter morning just as daylight
came full. The sun was on the wing scattering little white clouds, as an
eagle might scatter doves. They scurried up before him with their broken
feathers tipped and tinged with gold. In the air was a touch of frost,
and a smoky mist-drift clung here and there above the reeds, blurring the
shores of the lagoon so that we seemed to be steaming across boundless
water, till some clump of trees would fling its top out of the fog, then
fall back into whiteness.

And then, in that thick vapour, rounding I suppose some curve, we came
suddenly into we knew not what--all white and moving it was, as if the
mist were crazed; murmuring, too, with a sort of restless beating. We
seemed to be passing through a ghost--the ghost of all the life that had
sprung from this water and its shores; we seemed to have left reality,
to be travelling through live wonder.

And the fantastic thought sprang into my mind: I have died. This is the
voyage of my soul in the wild. I am in the final wilderness of
spirits--lost in the ghost robe that wraps the earth. There seemed in
all this white murmuration to be millions of tiny hands stretching out to
me, millions of whispering voices, of wistful eyes. I had no fear, but a
curious baked eagerness, the strangest feeling of having lost myself and
become part of this around me; exactly as if my own hands and voice and
eyes had left me and were groping, and whispering, and gazing out there
in the eeriness. I was no longer a man on an estuary steamer, but part
of sentient ghostliness. Nor did I feel unhappy; it seemed as though I
had never been anything but this Bedouin spirit wandering.

We passed through again into the stillness of plain mist, and all those
eerie sensations went, leaving nothing but curiosity to know what this
was that we had traversed. Then sudden