THE WILLOWS

Algernon Blackwood
(1907)



I


After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, the Danube
enters a region of singular loneliness and desolation, where its waters
spread away on all sides regardless of a main channel, and the country
becomes a swamp for miles upon miles, covered by a vast sea of low
willow-bushes. On the big maps this deserted area is painted in a fluffy
blue, growing fainter in color as it leaves the banks, and across it may be
seen in large straggling letters the word Sumpfe, meaning marshes.

In high flood this great acreage of sand, shingle-beds, and willow-grown
islands is almost topped by the water, but in normal seasons the bushes
bend and rustle in the free winds, showing their silver leaves to the
sunshine in an ever-moving plain of bewildering beauty. These willows never
attain to the dignity of trees; they have no rigid trunks; they remain
humble bushes, with rounded tops and soft outline, swaying on slender stems
that answer to the least pressure of the wind; supple as grasses, and so
continually shifting that they somehow give the impression that the entire
plain is moving and alive. For the wind sends waves rising and falling over
the whole surface, waves of leaves instead of waves of water, green swells
like the sea, too, until the branches turn and lift, and then silvery white
as their underside turns to the sun.