curious sentences, and hurled them at me in such
an inconsequential sort of way, as though his main line of thought was
secret to himself, and these fragments were mere bits he found it
impossible to digest. He got rid of them by uttering them. Speech relieved
him. It was like being sick.
"There are things about us, I'm sure, that make for disorder,
disintegration, destruction, our destruction," he said once, while the fire
blazed between us. "We've strayed out of a safe line somewhere."
And, another time, when the gong sounds had come nearer, ringing much
louder than before, and directly over our heads, he said as though talking
to himself:
"I don't think a gramophone would show any record of that. The sound
doesn't come to me by the ears at all. The vibrations reach me in another
manner altogether, and seem to be within me, which is precisely how a
fourth dimensional sound might be supposed to make itself heard."
I purposely made no reply to this, but I sat up a little closer to the fire
and peered about me into the darkness. The clouds were massed all over the
sky, and no trace of moonlight came through. Very still, too, everything
was, so that the river and the frogs had things all their own way.
"It has that about it," he went on, "which is utterly out of common
experience. It is unknown. Only one thing describes it really; it is a
non-human sound; I mean a sound outside humanity."
Having rid himself of this indigestible morsel, he lay quiet for a time,
but he had so admirably expressed my own feeling that it was a relief to
have the thought out, and to have confined it by the limitation of words
from dangerous wandering to and fro in the mind.
The solitude of that Danube camping-place, can I ever forget it? The
feeling of being utterly alone on an empty planet! My thoughts ran
incessantly upon cities and the haunts of men. I would have given my soul,
as the saying is, for the "feel" of those Bavarian villages we had passed
through by the score; for the normal, human commonplaces; peasants drinking
beer, tables beneath the trees, hot sunshine, and a ruined castle on the
rocks behind the red-roofed church. Even the tourists would have been
welcome.
Yet what I felt of dread was no ordinary ghostly fear. It was infinitely
greater, stranger, and seemed to arise from some dim ancestral sense of
terror more profoundly disturbing than anything I had known or dreamed of.
We had "strayed," as the Swede put it, into some region or some set of
conditions where the risks were great, yet unintelligible to us; where the
frontiers of some unknown world lay close about us. It was a spot held by
the dwellers in some outer space, a sort of peep-hole whence they could spy
upon the earth, themselves unseen, a point where the veil between had worn
a little thin. As the final result of too long a sojourn here, we should be
carried over the border and deprived of what we called "our lives," yet by
mental, not physical, processes. In that sense, as he said, we should be
the victims of our adventure—a sacrifice.
It took us in different fashion, each according to the measure of his
sensitiveness and powers of resistance. I translated it vaguely into a
personification of the mightily disturbed elements, investing them with the
horror of a deliberate and malefic purpose, resentful of our audacious
intrusion into their breeding-place; whereas my friend threw it into the
unoriginal form at first of a trespass on some ancient shrine, some place
where the old gods still held sway, where the emotional forces of former
worshippers still clung, and the ancestral portion of him yielded to the
old pagan spell.
At any rate, here was a place unpolluted by men, kept clean by the winds
from coarsening human influences, a place where spiritual agencies were
within reach and aggressive. Never, before or since, have I been so
attacked by indescribable suggestions of a "beyond region," of another
scheme of life, another revolution not parallel to the
an inconsequential sort of way, as though his main line of thought was
secret to himself, and these fragments were mere bits he found it
impossible to digest. He got rid of them by uttering them. Speech relieved
him. It was like being sick.
"There are things about us, I'm sure, that make for disorder,
disintegration, destruction, our destruction," he said once, while the fire
blazed between us. "We've strayed out of a safe line somewhere."
And, another time, when the gong sounds had come nearer, ringing much
louder than before, and directly over our heads, he said as though talking
to himself:
"I don't think a gramophone would show any record of that. The sound
doesn't come to me by the ears at all. The vibrations reach me in another
manner altogether, and seem to be within me, which is precisely how a
fourth dimensional sound might be supposed to make itself heard."
I purposely made no reply to this, but I sat up a little closer to the fire
and peered about me into the darkness. The clouds were massed all over the
sky, and no trace of moonlight came through. Very still, too, everything
was, so that the river and the frogs had things all their own way.
"It has that about it," he went on, "which is utterly out of common
experience. It is unknown. Only one thing describes it really; it is a
non-human sound; I mean a sound outside humanity."
Having rid himself of this indigestible morsel, he lay quiet for a time,
but he had so admirably expressed my own feeling that it was a relief to
have the thought out, and to have confined it by the limitation of words
from dangerous wandering to and fro in the mind.
The solitude of that Danube camping-place, can I ever forget it? The
feeling of being utterly alone on an empty planet! My thoughts ran
incessantly upon cities and the haunts of men. I would have given my soul,
as the saying is, for the "feel" of those Bavarian villages we had passed
through by the score; for the normal, human commonplaces; peasants drinking
beer, tables beneath the trees, hot sunshine, and a ruined castle on the
rocks behind the red-roofed church. Even the tourists would have been
welcome.
Yet what I felt of dread was no ordinary ghostly fear. It was infinitely
greater, stranger, and seemed to arise from some dim ancestral sense of
terror more profoundly disturbing than anything I had known or dreamed of.
We had "strayed," as the Swede put it, into some region or some set of
conditions where the risks were great, yet unintelligible to us; where the
frontiers of some unknown world lay close about us. It was a spot held by
the dwellers in some outer space, a sort of peep-hole whence they could spy
upon the earth, themselves unseen, a point where the veil between had worn
a little thin. As the final result of too long a sojourn here, we should be
carried over the border and deprived of what we called "our lives," yet by
mental, not physical, processes. In that sense, as he said, we should be
the victims of our adventure—a sacrifice.
It took us in different fashion, each according to the measure of his
sensitiveness and powers of resistance. I translated it vaguely into a
personification of the mightily disturbed elements, investing them with the
horror of a deliberate and malefic purpose, resentful of our audacious
intrusion into their breeding-place; whereas my friend threw it into the
unoriginal form at first of a trespass on some ancient shrine, some place
where the old gods still held sway, where the emotional forces of former
worshippers still clung, and the ancestral portion of him yielded to the
old pagan spell.
At any rate, here was a place unpolluted by men, kept clean by the winds
from coarsening human influences, a place where spiritual agencies were
within reach and aggressive. Never, before or since, have I been so
attacked by indescribable suggestions of a "beyond region," of another
scheme of life, another revolution not parallel to the
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