Far from feeling fear, I was possessed with a sense of awe and wonder
such as I have never known. I seemed to be gazing at the personified
elemental forces of this haunted and primeval region. Our intrusion had
stirred the powers of the place into activity. It was we who were the
cause of the disturbance, and my brain filled to bursting with stories
and legends of the spirits and deities of places that have been
acknowledged and worshiped by men in all ages of the world's history.
But, before I could arrive at any possible explanation, something
impelled me to go farther out, and I crept forward on to the sand and
stood upright. I felt the ground still warm under my bare feet; the wind
tore at my hair and face; and the sound of the river burst upon my ears
with a sudden roar. These things, I knew, were real, and proved that my
senses were acting normally. Yet the figures still rose from earth to
heaven, silent, majestically, in a great spiral of grace and strength
that overwhelmed me at length with a genuine deep emotion of worship. I
felt that I must fall down and worship--absolutely worship.

Perhaps in another minute I might have done so, when a gust of wind
swept against me with such force that it blew me sideways, and I nearly
stumbled and fell. It seemed to shake the dream violently out of me. At
least it gave me another point of view somehow. The figures still
remained, still ascended into heaven from the heart of the night, but my
reason at last began to assert itself. It must be a subjective
experience, I argued--none the less real for that, but still subjective.
The moonlight and the branches combined to work out these pictures upon
the mirror of my imagination, and for some reason I projected them
outwards and made them appear objective. I knew this must be the case,
of course. I was the subject of a vivid and interesting hallucination. I
took courage, and began to move forward across the open patches of sand.
By Jove, though, was it all hallucination? Was it merely subjective? Did