“Even in thought?” He was extraordinarily agitated.

“Especially in thought.  Our thoughts make spirals in their world.  We must keep them out of our minds at all costs if possible.”

I raked the fire together to prevent the darkness having everything its own way.  I never longed for the sun as I longed for it then in the awful blackness of that summer night.

“Were you awake all last night?” he went on suddenly.

“I slept badly a little after dawn,” I replied evasively, trying to follow his instructions, which I knew instinctively were true, “but the wind, of course—­”

“I know.  But the wind won’t account for all the noises.”

“Then you heard it too?”

“The multiplying countless little footsteps I heard,” he said, adding, after a moment’s hesitation, “and that other sound—­”

“You mean above the tent, and the pressing down upon us of something tremendous, gigantic?”

He nodded significantly.

“It was like the beginning of a sort of inner suffocation?” I said.

“Partly, yes.  It seemed to me that the weight of the atmosphere had been altered—­had increased enormously, so that we should be crushed.”

“And that,” I went on, determined to have it all out, pointing upwards where the gong-like note hummed ceaselessly, rising and falling like wind.  “What do you make of that?”

“It’s their sound,” he whispered gravely.  “It’s the sound of their world, the humming in their region.  The division here is so thin that it leaks through somehow.  But, if you listen carefully, you’ll find it’s not above so much as around us.  It’s in the willows.  It’s the willows themselves humming, because here the willows have been made symbols of the forces that are against us.”

I could not follow exactly what he meant by this, yet the thought and idea in my mind were beyond question the thought and idea in his.  I realized what he realized, only with less power of analysis than his.  It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him at last about my hallucination of the ascending figures and the moving bushes, when he suddenly thrust his face again close into mine across the firelight and began to speak in a very earnest whisper.  He amazed me by his calmness and pluck, his apparent control of the situation.  This man I had for years deemed unimaginative, stolid!

“Now listen,” he said.  “The only thing for us to do is to go on as though nothing had happened, follow our usual habits, go to bed, and so forth; pretend we feel nothing and notice nothing.  It is a question wholly of the mind, and the less we think about them the better our chance of escape.  Above all, don’t think, for what you think happens!”

“All right,” I managed to reply, simply breathless with his words and the strangeness of it all; “all right, I’ll try, but tell me one thing more first.  Tell me what you make of those hollows in the ground all about us, those sand-funnels?”