A rising river, perhaps, always suggests something of the ominous; many of
the little islands I saw before me would probably have been swept away by
the morning; this resistless, thundering flood of water touched the sense
of awe. Yet I was aware that my uneasiness lay deeper far than the emotions
of awe and wonder. It was not that I felt. Nor had it directly to do with
the power of the driving wind--this shouting hurricane that might almost
carry up a few acres of willows into the air and scatter them like so much
chaff over the landscape. The wind was simply enjoying itself, for nothing
rose out of the flat landscape to stop it, and I was conscious of sharing
its great game with a kind of pleasurable excitement. Yet this novel
emotion had nothing to do with the wind. Indeed, so vague was the sense of
distress I experienced, that it was impossible to trace it to its source
and deal with it accordingly, though I was aware somehow that it had to do
with my realization of our utter insignificance before this unrestrained
power of the elements about me. The huge-grown river had something to do
with it too--a vague, unpleasant idea that we had somehow trifled with
these great elemental forces in whose power we lay helpless every hour of
the day and night. For here, indeed, they were gigantically at play
together, and the sight appealed to the imagination.

But my emotion, so far as I could understand it, seemed to attach itself
more particularly to the willow bushes, to these acres and acres of
willows, crowding, so thickly growing there, swarming everywhere the eye
could reach, pressing upon the river as though to suffocate it, standing in
dense array mile after mile beneath the sky, watching, waiting, listening.
And, apart quite from the elements, the willows connected themselves subtly
with my malaise, attacking the mind insidiously somehow by reason of their
vast numbers, and contriving in some way or other to represent to the
imagination a new and mighty power, a power, moreover, not altogether
friendly to us.