"You mean above the tent, and the pressing down upon us of something
tremendous, gigantic?"

He nodded significantly.

"It was like the beginning of a sort of inner suffocation?" I said.

"Partly, yes. It seemed to me that the weight of the atmosphere had been
altered--had increased enormously, so that we should be crushed."

"And _that_," I went on, determined to have it all out, pointing upwards
where the gong-like note hummed ceaselessly, rising and falling like
wind. "What do you make of that?"

"It's _their_ sound," he whispered gravely. "It's the sound of their
world, the humming in their region. The division here is so thin that it
leaks through somehow. But, if you listen carefully, you'll find it's
not above so much as around us. It's in the willows. It's the willows
themselves humming, because here the willows have been made symbols of
the forces that are against us."

I could not follow exactly what he meant by this, yet the thought and
idea in my mind were beyond question the thought and idea in his. I
realized what he realized, only with less power of analysis than his. It
was on the tip of my tongue to tell him at last about my hallucination
of the ascending figures and the moving bushes, when he suddenly thrust
his face again close into mine across the firelight and began to speak
in a very earnest whisper. He amazed me by his calmness and pluck, his
apparent control of the situation. This man I had for years deemed