With this general hush of the wind—­though it still indulged in occasional brief gusts—­the river seemed to me to grow blacker, the willows to stand more densely together.  The latter, too, kept up a sort of independent movement of their own, rustling among themselves when no wind stirred, and shaking oddly from the roots upwards.  When common objects in this way be come charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance; and these bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquerie of appearance that lent to them somehow the aspect of purposeful and living creatures.  Their very ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant and hostile to us.  The forces of the region drew nearer with the coming of night.  They were focusing upon our island, and more particularly upon ourselves.  For thus, somehow, in the terms of the imagination, did my really indescribable sensations in this extraordinary place present themselves.

I had slept a good deal in the early afternoon, and had thus recovered somewhat from the exhaustion of a disturbed night, but this only served apparently to render me more susceptible than before to the obsessing spell of the haunting.  I fought against it, laughing at my feelings as absurd and childish, with very obvious physiological explanations, yet, in spite of every effort, they gained in strength upon me so that I dreaded the night as a child lost in a forest must dread the approach of darkness.

The canoe we had carefully covered with a waterproof sheet during the day, and the one remaining paddle had been securely tied by the Swede to the base of a tree, lest the wind should rob us of that too.  From five o’clock onwards I busied myself with the stew-pot and preparations for dinner, it being my turn to cook that night.  We had potatoes, onions, bits of bacon fat to add flavor, and a general thick residue from former stews at the bottom of the pot; with black bread broken up into it the result was most excellent, and it was followed by a stew of plums with sugar and a brew of strong tea with dried milk.  A good pile of wood lay close at hand, and the absence of wind made my duties easy.  My companion sat lazily watching me, dividing his attentions between cleaning his pipe and giving useless advice—­an admitted privilege of the off-duty man.  He had been very quiet all the afternoon, engaged in re-caulking the canoe, strengthening the tent ropes, and fishing for driftwood while I slept.  No more talk about undesirable things had passed between us, and I think his only remarks had to do with the gradual destruction of the island, which he declared was not fully a third smaller than when we first landed.

The pot had just begun to bubble when I heard his voice calling to me from the bank, where he had wandered away without my noticing.  I ran up.

“Come and listen,” he said, “and see what you make of it.”  He held his hand cupwise to his ear, as so often before.