We sat smoking in comparative silence, the strain growing every minute greater.  The worst feature of the situation seemed to me that we did not know what to expect, and could therefore make no sort of preparation by way of defense.  We could anticipate nothing.  My explanations made in the sunshine, moreover, now came to haunt me with their foolish and wholly unsatisfactory nature, and it was more and more clear to us that some kind of plain talk with my companion was inevitable, whether I liked it or not.  After all, we had to spend the night together, and to sleep in the same tent side by side.  I saw that I could not get along much longer without the support of his mind, and for that, of course, plain talk was imperative.  As long as possible, however, I postponed this little climax, and tried to ignore or laugh at the occasional sentences he flung into the emptiness.

Some of these sentences, moreover, were confoundedly disquieting to me, coming as they did to corroborate much that I felt myself; corroboration, too—­which made it so much more convincing—­from a totally different point of view.  He composed such 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.