have been acknowledged and worshipped by men in all ages of the world’s history.  But, before I could arrive at any possible explanation, something impelled me to go farther out, and I crept forward on the sand and stood upright.  I felt the ground still warm under my bare feet; the wind tore at my hair and face; and the sound of the river burst upon my ears with a sudden roar.  These things, I knew, were real, and proved that my senses were acting normally.  Yet the figures still rose from earth to heaven, silent, majestically, in a great spiral of grace and strength that overwhelmed me at length with a genuine deep emotion of worship.  I felt that I must fall down and worship—­absolutely worship.

Perhaps in another minute I might have done so, when a gust of wind swept against me with such force that it blew me sideways, and I nearly stumbled and fell.  It seemed to shake the dream violently out of me.  At least it gave me another point of view somehow.  The figures still remained, still ascended into heaven from the heart of the night, but my reason at last began to assert itself.  It must be a subjective experience, I argued—­none the less real for that, but still subjective.  The moonlight and the branches combined to work out these pictures upon the mirror of my imagination, and for some reason I projected them outwards and made them appear objective.  I knew this must be the case, of course.  I took courage, and began to move forward across the open patches of sand.  By Jove, though, was it all hallucination?  Was it merely subjective?  Did not my reason argue in the old futile way from the little standard of the known?

I only know that great column of figures ascended darkly into the sky for what seemed a very long period of time, and with a very complete measure of reality as most men are accustomed to gauge reality.  Then suddenly they were gone!

And, once they were gone and the immediate wonder of their great presence had passed, fear came down upon me with a cold rush.  The esoteric meaning of this lonely and haunted region suddenly flamed up within me, and I began to tremble dreadfully.  I took a quick look round—­a look of horror that came near to panic—­calculating vainly ways of escape; and then, realizing how helpless I was to achieve anything really effective, I crept back silently into the tent and lay down again upon my sandy mattress, first lowering the door-curtain to shut out the sight of the willows in the moonlight, and then burying my head as deeply as possible beneath the blankets to deaden the sound of the terrifying wind.

As though further to convince me that I had not been dreaming, I remember that it was a long time before I fell again into a troubled and restless sleep; and even then only the upper crust of me slept, and underneath there was something that never quite lost consciousness, but lay alert and on the watch.

But this second time I jumped up with a genuine start of terror.  It was neither the wind nor the river that woke me, but the slow approach of something that caused the sleeping portion of me to grow smaller and smaller till at last it vanished altogether, and I found myself sitting bolt upright—­listening.