Meanwhile, in the pitchy night the fire died down and the woodpile grew small.  Neither of us moved to replenish the stock, and the darkness consequently came up very close to our faces.  A few feet beyond the circle of firelight it was inky black.  Occasionally a stray puff of wind set the billows shivering about us, but apart from this not very welcome sound a deep and depressing silence reigned, broken only by the gurgling of the river and the humming in the air overhead.

We both missed, I think, the shouting company of the winds.

At length, at a moment when a stray puff prolonged itself as though the wind were about to rise again, I reached the point for me of saturation, the point where it was absolutely necessary to find relief in plain speech, or else to betray myself by some hysterical extravagance that must have been far worse in its effect upon both of us.  I kicked the fire into a blaze, and turned to my companion abruptly.  He looked up with a start.

“I can’t disguise it any longer,” I said; “I don’t like this place, and the darkness, and the noises, and the awful feelings I get.  There’s something here that beats me utterly.  I’m in a blue funk, and that’s the plain truth.  If the other shore was—­different, I swear I’d be inclined to swim for it!”

The Swede’s face turned very white beneath the deep tan of sun and wind.  He stared straight at me and answered quietly, but his voice betrayed his huge excitement by its unnatural calmness.  For the moment, at any rate, he was the strong man of the two.  He was more phlegmatic, for one thing.

“It’s not a physical condition we can escape from by running away,” he replied, in the tone of a doctor diagnosing some grave disease; “we must sit tight and wait.  There are forces close here that could kill a herd of elephants in a second as easily as you or I could squash a fly.  Our only chance is to keep perfectly still.  Our insignificance perhaps may save us.”

I put a dozen questions into my expression of face, but found no words.  It was precisely like listening to an accurate description of a disease whose symptoms had puzzled me.

“I mean that so far, although aware of our disturbing presence, they have not found us—­not ‘located’ us, as the Americans say,” he went on.  “They’re blundering about like men hunting for a leak of gas.  The paddle and canoe and provisions prove that.  I think they feel us, but cannot actually see us.  We must keep our minds quiet—­it’s our minds they feel.  We must control our thoughts, or it’s all up with us.”

“Death you mean?” I stammered, icy with the horror of his suggestion.

“Worse—­by far,” he said.  “Death, according to one’s belief, means either annihilation or release from the limitations of the senses, but it involves no change of character. You don’t suddenly alter just because the body’s gone.  But this means a radical alteration, a complete change, a horrible loss of oneself by substitution—­far worse than death, and not even annihilation.  We happen to have camped in a spot where their region touches ours where the veil between has worn thin”—­horrors! he was using my very own phrase, my actual words—­“so that they are aware of our being in their neighborhood.”