in amazement with smarting eyes. I was wide awake. I remember saying to
myself that I was _not_ dreaming.

They first became properly visible, these huge figures, just within the
tops of the bushes--immense bronze-colored, moving, and wholly
independent of the swaying of the branches. I saw them plainly and
noted, now I came to examine them more calmly, that they were very much
larger than human, and indeed that something in their appearance
proclaimed them to be _not human_ at all. Certainly they were not merely
the moving tracery of the branches against the moonlight. They shifted
independently. They rose upwards in a continuous stream from earth to
sky, vanishing utterly as soon as they reached the dark of the sky. They
were interlaced one with another, making a great column, and I saw their
limbs and huge bodies melting in and out of each other, forming this
serpentine line that bent and swayed and twisted spirally with the
contortions of the wind-tossed trees. They were nude, fluid shapes,
passing up the bushes, _within_ the leaves almost--rising up in a living
column into the heavens. Their faces I never could see. Unceasingly they
poured upwards, swaying in great bending curves, with a hue of dull
bronze upon their skins.

I stared, trying to force every atom of vision from my eyes. For a long
time I thought they _must_ every moment disappear and resolve themselves
into the movements of the branches and prove to be an optical illusion.
I searched everywhere for a proof of reality, when all the while I
understood quite well that the standard of reality had changed. For the
longer I looked the more certain I became that these figures were real
and living, though perhaps not according to the standards that the
camera and the biologist would insist upon.