It was a great staggering blow from the wind that helped me forward again, and once out in the more open space, the sense of terror diminished strangely.  The winds were about and walking, I remember saying to myself; for the winds often move like great presences under the trees.  And altogether the fear that hovered about me was such an unknown and immense kind of fear, so unlike anything I had ever felt before, that it woke a sense of awe and wonder in me that did much to counteract its worst effects; and when I reached a high point in the middle of the island from which I could see the wide stretch of river, crimson in the sunrise, the whole magical beauty of it all was so overpowering that a sort of wild yearning woke in me and almost brought a cry up into the throat.

But this cry found no expression, for as my eyes wandered from the plain beyond to the island round me and noted our little tent half hidden among the willows, a dreadful discovery leaped out at me, compared to which my terror of the walking winds seemed as nothing at all.

For a change, I thought, had somehow come about in the arrangement of the landscape.  It was not that my point of vantage gave me a different view, but that an alteration had apparently been effected in the relation of the tent to the willows, and of the willows to the tent.  Surely the bushes now crowded much closer—­unnecessarily, unpleasantly close. They had moved nearer.

Creeping with silent feet over the shifting sands, drawing imperceptibly nearer by soft, unhurried movements, the willows had come closer during the night.  But had the wind moved them, or had they moved of themselves?  I recalled the sound of infinite small patterings and the pressure upon the tent and upon my own heart that caused me to wake in terror.  I swayed for a moment in the wind like a tree, finding it hard to keep my upright position on the sandy hillock.  There was a suggestion here of personal agency, of deliberate intention, of aggressive hostility, and it terrified me into a sort of rigidity.

Then the reaction followed quickly.  The idea was so bizarre, so absurd, that I felt inclined to laugh.  But the laughter came no more readily than the cry, for the knowledge that my mind was so receptive to such dangerous imaginings brought the additional terror that it was through our minds and not through our physical bodies that the attack would come, and was coming.

The wind buffeted me about, and, very quickly it seemed, the sun came up over the horizon, for it was after four o’clock, and I must have stood on that little pinnacle of sand longer than I knew, afraid to come down at close quarters with the willows.  I returned quietly, creepily, to the tent, first taking another exhaustive look round and—­yes, I confess it—­making a few measurements.  I paced out on the warm sand the distances between the willows and the tent, making a note of the shortest distance particularly.