louder than before, and directly over our heads, he said, as though
talking to himself:

"I don't think a phonograph would show any record of that. The sound
doesn't come to me by the ears at all. The vibrations reach me in
another manner altogether, and seem to be within me, which is precisely
how a fourth dimension sound might be supposed to make itself heard."

I purposely made no reply to this, but I sat up a little closer to the
fire and peered about me into the darkness. The clouds were massed all
over the sky and no trace of moonlight came through. Very still, too,
everything was, so that the river and the frogs had things all their own
way.

"It has that about it," he went on, "which is utterly out of common
experience. It is _unknown_. Only one thing describes it really: it is a
non-human sound; I mean a sound outside humanity."

Having rid himself of this indigestible morsel, he lay quiet for a time;
but he had so admirably expressed my own feeling that it was a relief to
have the thought out, and to have confined it by the limitation of words
from dangerous wandering to and fro in the mind.

The solitude of that Danube camping-place, can I ever forget it? The
feeling of being utterly alone on an empty planet! My thoughts ran
incessantly upon cities and the haunts of men. I would have given my
soul, as the saying is, for the "feel" of those Bavarian villages we had
passed through by the score; for the normal, human commonplaces,
peasants drinking beer, tables beneath the trees, hot sunshine, and a
ruined castle on the rocks behind the red-roofed church. Even the