He started off on a run, and I followed him.  He kept to the banks, poking with a stick among the sandy bays and caves and little back-waters, myself always close on his heels.

“Ah!” he exclaimed presently, “ah!”

The tone of his voice somehow brought back to me a vivid sense of the horror of the last twenty-four hours, and I hurried up to join him.  He was pointing with his stick at a large black object that lay half in the water and half on the sand.  It appeared to be caught by some twisted willow roots so that the river could not sweep it away.  A few hours before the spot must have been under water.

“See,” he said quietly, “the victim that made our escape possible!”

And when I peered across his shoulder I saw that his stick rested on the body of a man.  He turned it over.  It was the corpse of a peasant, and the face was hidden in the sand.  Clearly the man had been drowned but a few hours before, and his body must have been swept down upon our island somewhere about the hour of the dawn—­at the very time the fit had passed.

“We must give it a decent burial, you know.”

“I suppose so,” I replied.  I shuddered a little in spite of myself, for there was something about the appearance of that poor drowned man that turned me cold.

The Swede glanced up sharply at me, and began clambering down the bank.  I followed him more leisurely.  The current, I noticed, had torn away much of the clothing from the body, so that the neck and part of the chest lay bare.

Halfway down the bank my companion suddenly stopped and held up his hand in warning; but either my foot slipped, or I had gained too much momentum to bring myself quickly to a halt, for I bumped into him and sent him forward with a sort of leap to save himself.  We tumbled together on to the hard sand so that our feet splashed into the water.  And, before anything could be done, we had collided a little heavily against the corpse.

The Swede uttered a sharp cry.  And I sprang back as if I had been shot.

At the moment we touched the body there arose from its surface the loud sound of humming—­the sound of several hummings—­which passed with a vast commotion as of winged things in the air about us and disappeared upwards into the sky, growing fainter and fainter till they finally ceased in the distance.  It was exactly as though we had disturbed some living yet invisible creatures at work.

My companion clutched me, and I think I clutched him, but before either of us had time properly to recover from the unexpected shock, we saw that a movement of the current was turning the corpse round so that it became released from the grip of the willow roots.  A moment later it had turned completely over, the dead face uppermost, staring at the sky.  It lay on the edge of the main stream.  In another moment it would be swept away.

The Swede started to save it, shouting again something I did not catch about a “proper burial” and then abruptly dropped upon his knees on the sand and covered his eyes with his hands.  I was beside him in an instant.