#(( DASH GAMES - Leisure at Camp ))

[wingsofilia]

What brand of stupid are you?

Fiora

Smart until infected with stupid

You think you're safe don't you? You are probably the responsible one in the group, perhaps even the mom friend. You are relatively smart but all it takes is one little thing to suck all your braincells out. It could be hanging around your fellow stupid friends, it could be being left alone, it could be having a bit too much fun. The stupid lives inside you and it just takes the right environment for it to show.

Farina

BASTARD stupid

Swears are your language and crime is your profession. Your reason for doing just about anything is because you could, no matter how stupid it was. Why did you set that fence on fire? To watch it burn. Why did you put that bug in your mouth? To see what it tastes like. Why did you teach that kid to say fuck? Its funny. Keeping you around is like housing a cartoon villain but at least you know how to pick locks so that's a reason to let you stay

Florina

Himbo stupid

You're just an all around kind person who's a little too gullible. You are knowledgeable on weirdly specific trivia but a lot of common knowledge seems to have slipped you. You probably aren't the best at math but by god can you fix a flat tire. Everyone remembers you as a friendly person, you just might need to brush up on your reading comprehension again

“Hey! It’s kinda accurate, though.”

“Farina, please don’t encourage them.”

“Umm... Himbo?”

“Yeah, pay that no mind. And don’t ask your sister about it, either.”

#(( DASH GAMES - Leisure at Camp )) #(( FIORA - Wings of Honor )) #(( FARINA - Wings of Power )) #(( FLORINA - Wings of Perseverance )) #// Kinda... Kinda right tho

[athena1138]

Character Study: Pre-Inquisition

ah shit aight lets do this. i was tagged by @gaymingbinosaur​

#1: Alena Fanellis-Lavellan 

Note: Her answers are based while she’s with the Lavellan clan, so only 3ish years before Inquisition. 

Layer 01: The Outside

Eye Colour: Silver

Hair Style / Colour: White and crazy curly

Height: 5′5

Clothing Style: Very basic. Usually leather pants and a tunic. Robes only if she’s practicing magic. 

Best Physical Feature:  Her nose. She’s grown into it by now and it suits her so uniquely well. 

Layer 02: The Inside

Fears: Capture

Guilty Pleasure: Sneaking away from camp to take naps uninterrupted. She’s very tired. 

Biggest Pet Peeve:  Thievery. She fought very hard for the things she has. 

Ambitions For The Future:  Living the life she dreamed of in the circle. Free, unrestrained, unafraid. 

Layer 03: Thoughts

First Thoughts Waking Up: “Gods not again.”

What They Think About Most: What comes next. What will she do today, what will she do tomorrow, where will she be in a year? Things like that. 

What They Think About Before Bed: Nothing. Or at the very least, that’s what she strives for. Often it’s bad memories. 

What They Think Their Best Quality Is: She doesn’t think about it much, but she knows she’s brave. 

Layer 04: Either Or…

Single Or Group Dates:

Group. She’s too shy/scared to be alone with someone like that for a while. Growing up surrounded by people will do that to you. 

To Be Loved Or Respected:

Loved. To be seen and known is a beautiful thing. 

Beauty Or Brains:

Brains. She’s not shallow, and she’s very well educated. 

Dogs Or Cats:

Cats.

Layer 05: Do They…

Lie: Not often. She’s usually very direct, unless she’s afraid of something. (Like, she’ll lie to Templars, for sure.) 

Believe In Themselves: Yes and no. She’s overcome so much in her life but she isn’t sure she can handle much more, especially without the help she had before. 

Believe In Love:.  In theory. Familial and platonic love, absolutely. But romantic? She’s only ever seen it or read about it. 

Want Someone: Not necessarily. People are risky. They come and go so often and many times they’re not good people. If she were to live her life alone, she thinks she’d be ok with that. 

Layer 06: Have They…

Been On Stage: Once. The Circle had a little fun night once a year for the mages, and one year they put on a play. She had one line and she fucked it up. 

Done Drugs: Yes. 

Changed Who They Were To Fit In: No, not really. She’s always been weird. She doesn’t even think she could change if she wanted to. 

Layer 07: Whats Their…

Favourite Colours: Orange. The color of the sun setting on the ocean. 

Favourite Animal: She thinks nugs are the bees knees. 

Favourite Book: Anything but a spell tome. Maker, she’s had enough of tomes in her life. She likes funny books, things that can make her laugh and forget herself. 

Favourite Game: Chess. 

Layer 08: Age

Day Their Next Birthday Will Be: The 2nd of Umbralis

How old will they be: Ah shit. Um. We’ll say the year before the Conclave which means 9:40. She’ll be............. 27. Yeah.  

Layer 09: I…

I Love: Being in high places.  I Feel: Worried. I Hide: All the time. I Miss: Anders. I Wish: So many things. 

Vikara Lavellan

Layer 01: The Outside

Eye Colour: Green

Hair Style / Colour: Straight, black, mid-back length

Height: 5′3

Clothing Style: She’s both very fancy and very plain. She wears mostly black but it’s cut very finely to her body. 

Best Physical Feature:  Eyes for sure. 

Layer 02: The Inside

Fears: Losing herself

Guilty Pleasure: Sneaking desserts and sweets when nobody is looking. 

Biggest Pet Peeve:  Superiority complexes. Which is ironic for multiple reasons. 

Ambitions For The Future:  To become her clan’s Keeper. 

Layer 03: Thoughts

First Thoughts Waking Up: “Listen to those birds <3 “ 

What They Think About Most: Her training. 

What They Think About Before Bed: She usually reads before bed, so that, but also she’ll think about her day and if she was happy with how it went or not. 

What They Think Their Best Quality Is: She’s very good at drawing. 

Layer 04: Either Or…

Single Or Group Dates: Single. 

To Be Loved Or Respected: Respected. Nobody ever got anywhere being loved. 

Beauty Or Brains: Yes. She appreciates beauty and she appreciates brains, but one without the other is pointless. 

Dogs Or Cats: Dogs. 

Layer 05: Do They…

Lie: Frequently. Gotta keep people on their toes. 

Believe In Themselves: Absolutely. She’s badass and she knows it. 

Believe In Love:.  Not really. She has more important things to think about. 

Want Someone: Not really. It’d be nice, but again, she’s got more important things. 

Layer 06: Have They…

Been On Stage: Nah. Not for her. 

Done Drugs: Once. She liked it very much but she’s worried about it becoming a habit. 

Changed Who They Were To Fit In: No. The world can adapt to her. 

Layer 07: Whats Their…

Favourite Colours: Yellow. 

Favourite Animal: Harts

Favourite Book: She’s very fond of nonfiction and educational books. Her favorites are books that explain the other religions in the world. 

Favourite Game: Hide and seek

Layer 08: Age- Also when I do Evie I’ll skip this since twins

Day Their Next Birthday Will Be: ah shit. I know I’ve said it before. Um, we’ll say the 1st of Nubulis, the first day of spring. 

How old will they be: 30

Layer 09: I…

I Love: my clan I Feel: anxious I Hide: personal things I Miss: the ocean I Wish: i were more powerful

Asena “Not Actually the Inquisitor” Adaar

Layer 01: The Outside

Eye Colour: Bluegreen

Hair Style / Colour: Long, black, a mix between coiled and curly

Height: 6′5 without the horns

Clothing Style: If she’s at work, dapper. She dresses up and dresses neatly. If she’s at home, she’s more laid back, just comfortable and casual. 

Best Physical Feature:  Her mascles

Layer 02: The Inside

Fears: Nothing. She’s not afraid of anything. 

Guilty Pleasure: She doesn’t have any. Pleasure is pleasure, there’s no sense in feeling guilty about it. 

Biggest Pet Peeve:  Rudeness, both to her and other people. 

Ambitions For The Future:  Take over the business. 

Layer 03: Thoughts

First Thoughts Waking Up: Just that she’s gotta get up and get busy. 

What They Think About Most: Her job 

What They Think About Before Bed: Plans for tomorrow, important things that will need doing soon, she should really write to Gemma. 

What They Think Their Best Quality Is: She’s fearless. 

Layer 04: Either Or…

Single Or Group Dates: She doesn’t date. She fucks. Groups are welcome. 

To Be Loved Or Respected: Feared. Which is respected+ in her mind. 

Beauty Or Brains: Beauty. She doesn’t think she’d ever get attached enough to care about brains. It’s a lot of one night stands for her. That’s not to say she doesn’t care about the women she sleeps with, she just doesn’t get close. 

Dogs Or Cats: Neither, they’re just collateral. 

Layer 05: Do They…

Lie: You’d have a harder time picking the truths out of her words than the lies. 

Believe In Themselves: Yes? It’s weird. She doesn’t really... think of herself. She just does. So far she hasn’t failed, so I guess you could say she believes in herself. 

Believe In Love:.  No. 

Want Someone: No. All she needs is good people at her back and Gemma and TIB to be safe and sound. 

Layer 06: Have They…

Been On Stage: Literally, no. But every interaction in her life is one big show, so metaphorically, always. 

Done Drugs: No. She’s seen what that shit does to people. 

Changed Who They Were To Fit In: Pfft. No. In her line of work? People adapt to HER to fit in. 

Layer 07: Whats Their…

Favourite Colours: Purple. 

Favourite Animal: She doesn’t really have one. Sharks are cool, she guesses. 

Favourite Book: She doesn’t have much time for leisure reading but she has a soft spot for dashing lesbian romances. 

Favourite Game: Darts

Layer 08: Age- Also when I do Evie I’ll skip this since twins

Day Their Next Birthday Will Be: She isn’t sure. 

How old will they be: Again, not sure, but she’s around 28 she reckons. 

Layer 09: I…

I Love: Money I Feel: Disillusioned  I Hide: As much as I have to I Miss: Gemma I Wish: For the safety of my friends

Gemma Cadash

Layer 01: The Outside

Eye Colour: Purple and blue

Hair Style / Colour: Short bob, straight, deep red

Height: 4′5

Clothing Style: Low-key things. Lots of darker fabrics, hoods, leather armor. 

Best Physical Feature:  Her tattoos are neat. 

Layer 02: The Inside

Fears: Being forced into things. 

Guilty Pleasure: Every time she breaks into a house, she steals every left shoe she can find. Just because. 

Biggest Pet Peeve:  Being talked down to. 

Ambitions For The Future:  She’d like to be able to retire from her life. She loves her job, but she wants to die living comfortably in the countryside somewhere. 

Layer 03: Thoughts

First Thoughts Waking Up: “Fuck over” 

What They Think About Most: Gemma? Think? Nah babe, that head’s as empty as a politician’s. She’s very impetuous. 

What They Think About Before Bed: Not much. She falls asleep fairly easily every night. 

What They Think Their Best Quality Is: Her impetuousness often goes in her favor. 

Layer 04: Either Or…

Single Or Group Dates: Single. 

To Be Loved Or Respected: Loved. 

Beauty Or Brains: Brains.

Dogs Or Cats: GIVE THEM TO HER

Layer 05: Do They…

Lie: Yeah, in her line of work it’s hard not to. 

Believe In Themselves:  Sure? She hasn’t fucked up too badly yet so 

Believe In Love:.  She’d like to, but whether or not it’ll come to her, she doesn’t know. 

Want Someone: Most days, yeah. She’s kind of a romantic.

Layer 06: Have They…

Been On Stage: No

Done Drugs: A few. She’s not a fan. 

Changed Who They Were To Fit In: No, she’s pretty stalwart in who she is. 

Layer 07: Whats Their…

Favourite Colours: Blue

Favourite Animal: Dragons. Dragons are so fucking cool. 

Favourite Book: She’s not a big reader, but she loves Varric’s cheesy shit. 

Favourite Game: She loves a good drinking game. 

Layer 08: Age- Also when I do Evie I’ll skip this since twins

Day Their Next Birthday Will Be: She doesn’t know. 

How old will they be: Again, doesn’t know. Early 30s she thinks. 

Layer 09: I…

I Love: the sky I Feel: tired I Hide: nothing I Miss: Asena, Orzammar I Wish: i had a pet dragon 

Madeira Cadash

Layer 01: The Outside

Eye Colour: Gold/yellow

Hair Style / Colour: Ashy grey cropped short 

Height: 4′8

Clothing Style: Whatever she can find. Often oversized, worn down clothes. She’s not fancy. 

Best Physical Feature:  Those lips though 

Layer 02: The Inside

Fears: Being alone

Guilty Pleasure: She likes sneaking out at night to drink with the lads 

Biggest Pet Peeve:  Unexpected, loud noises.

Ambitions For The Future:  Survive. She doesn’t have plans for anything 

Layer 03: Thoughts

First Thoughts Waking Up: “Who the fuck is bothering me?” 

What They Think About Most: Food, honestly. She loves to eat. 

What They Think About Before Bed: She likes to pretend she lives different lives. One night she’s a princess, another she’s a dashing thief, another she has an entire harem of people to love her. Just silly, fanciful ideations. 

What They Think Their Best Quality Is: She’s pretty funny when she wants to be 

Layer 04: Either Or…

Single Or Group Dates: Group. You can learn a lot about a person based on how they interact with others. 

To Be Loved Or Respected: Loved, but that’s also very scary for her. 

Beauty Or Brains: Brawns. She likes toughness. 

Dogs Or Cats: Dogs. The bigger the better. She loves mabaris especially because they can grow to be as tall as she is 

Layer 05: Do They…

Lie: When necessary. 

Believe In Themselves: Not really. She dislikes herself more than anything. 

Believe In Love:.  Nah. Love is just a daydream.

Want Someone: Frequently, yes. 

Layer 06: Have They…

Been On Stage: Yeah. She used to work in an acting troupe once upon a time. 

Done Drugs: Nope.

Changed Who They Were To Fit In: When necessary. 

Layer 07: Whats Their…

Favourite Colours: Red. 

Favourite Animal: Druffalos. 

Favourite Book: She likes books of a more..... questionable nature. If they have pictures, well all the better. 

Favourite Game: Wicked Grace. 

Layer 08: Age- Also when I do Evie I’ll skip this since twins

Day Their Next Birthday Will Be: The 21 of Matrinalis. 

How old will they be: 35 (the oldest of them all.) 

Layer 09: I…

I Love: my parents I Feel: bored I Hide: myself I Miss: home I Wish: i had some booze. 

#shut up becca #my ocs #my inquisitors #alena fanelis-lavellan #vikara lavellan #asena adaar #gemma cadash #madeira cadash

[breadknight-likes-things]

“Red Dead Redemption 2″ or “Deliberate Actions: The Game”

You can’t do anything in Red Dead Redemption 2 without it feeling like it takes days for Arthur to get it over with, and that’s one of my favorite parts of the game so far.  Games today are snappy and quick for a reason, we often have a ton of game to get through for the $60 or so we paid.  Red Dead Redemption 2 thus far has disregarded that need to get us through content and expects players to just admire a horse ride, enjoy the sunset or thoroughly riddle that witness with bullets so he doesn’t go telling the law about the time I stole a pocket watch off a guy who totally shot at me first.

I adore everything about this honestly, it’s been a really long time since I’ve played a video game that’s encouraged me to slow down, even recent Bethesda open worlds have felt like a dash towards something, always another location to loot or quest to start just over the next hill.  Sure Red Dead has a lot of that same DNA, there’s always someone getting into a fight, or some poor passerby needing help(Or again, a murdering) and some Bandit thinking he can fool me into following him to a broken wagon instead of just shooting him in the head unprovoked(Okay look, this is a game about Outlaws, let me have this uncharacteristic murder streak alright?) but it isn’t what defines the experience.  It’s the times around the events that really brings you the player a memorable time.

When this game is over I’m not sure I’ll remember every twist and turn of the plot, guy I murdered in cold blood for a watch or epic set piece mission, but you can be damn sure I’ll remember everything around or between those things. Drifting lazily across the plains, slowly setting up camp under the stars to cook some dinner and strolling at that iconic Rockstar leisurely pace down a towns main street looking for trouble and or a place to sell all my stolen watches.  It’s all so slow and deliberate, it’s such a hard left from what we’ve become used to from our video games today, especially the big open world content fests we’ve become accustomed to, but even still, it’s all something I welcome with open arms.

All this being said, I don’t want this slow pace to become the new norm, I could easily see this getting old fast if the next Assassins Creed expects me to sit down and manually sharpen my weapons, but in this game it feels right and like a needed slowing down of video games, at least for a little while.  So rest your weary head a spell at my camp an-, say....nice watch you got there.

#red dead 2 #red dead redemption 2 #red dead redemption #video games #arthur morgan #rockstar games #ps3 #xbox one #xbox one x #ps4 pro #cowboys #home on the range #killing people for watches for money to pay off bounties in other states #it's a vicious cycle #ps4 #slow games #slow gameplay #appreciation

[belzinone]

Hobbies

Repost & Bold whichever applies to your Muse ! 

tagged by @hunting-songs and tagging the dash~<3

HOBBIES: fishing | camping | sewing | singing | dancing | drawing | painting | baking | cooking | making music | gardening | mixology | playing sports | beekeeping | knitting | chess | video games | working out | doing yoga | playing an instrument | collecting things | hiking | parkour | kite flying | making bread | origami | wood carving | trivia | board games | jigsaw puzzles | juggling | swimming | creative writing | journaling | scrapbooking | thrifting | doing makeup | working on cars | cosplaying | wikipedia editing | genealogy | book club | table tennis | calligraphy | meteorology | astronomy | larping | geocaching | photography | reading | litter picking | scrolling through social media | watching movies / shows | witchcraft | pottery | lego building | ghost hunting | graffiti | poker | people watching | birdwatching

dancing: no secret she loves bellydancing (though she hides it ic) she also likes poledancing~ drawing: she’s not all that great but leisurely sketches portraits of other soldiers in her notebook gardening: bitch goes ham on her jasmine flowers~ sometimes she gifts them as products video games: for modern aus, she’s a fan of fps games (makes her feel closer to her brother) working out: weightlifting ftw~ (she could hella carry erwin and bench levi) doing yoga: i never thought of it until now but i see her enjoying this, especially in the early morning origami: something she’d enjoy. fun with tinkering minus the grease and oil journaling/scrapbooking: highkey does working on cars: she prefers her motorcycle in modern aus but if she worked in a garage hella scrolling through social media: i have a feeling she’d have a lingerie-focused insta and post thirst traps. birdwatching: she fuckin loves birds. she’d put feeders out with her jasmines.

#// working on building muse and casting off the depression #// *apologizes to the dash real quicklike* #RINGS A BEL . trivia #RED FLARE . titan spotted ; responding // tag games

[unsettlingshortstories]

The Willows

Algernon Blackwood (1907)

I

After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, the Danube enters a region of singular loneliness and desolation, where its waters spread away on all sides regardless of a main channel, and the country becomes a swamp for miles upon miles, covered by a vast sea of low willow-bushes. On the big maps this deserted area is painted in a fluffy blue, growing fainter in color as it leaves the banks, and across it may be seen in large straggling letters the word Sumpfe, meaning marshes.

In high flood this great acreage of sand, shingle-beds, and willow-grown islands is almost topped by the water, but in normal seasons the bushes bend and rustle in the free winds, showing their silver leaves to the sunshine in an ever-moving plain of bewildering beauty. These willows never attain to the dignity of trees; they have no rigid trunks; they remain humble bushes, with rounded tops and soft outline, swaying on slender stems that answer to the least pressure of the wind; supple as grasses, and so continually shifting that they somehow give the impression that the entire plain is moving and alive. For the wind sends waves rising and falling over the whole surface, waves of leaves instead of waves of water, green swells like the sea, too, until the branches turn and lift, and then silvery white as their underside turns to the sun.

Happy to slip beyond the control of the stern banks, the Danube here wanders about at will among the intricate network of channels intersecting the islands everywhere with broad avenues down which the waters pour with a shouting sound; making whirlpools, eddies, and foaming rapids; tearing at the sandy banks; carrying away masses of shore and willow-clumps; and forming new islands innumerably which shift daily in size and shape and possess at best an impermanent life, since the flood-time obliterates their very existence.

Properly speaking, this fascinating part of the river's life begins soon after leaving Pressburg, and we, in our Canadian canoe, with gipsy tent and frying-pan on board, reached it on the crest of a rising flood about mid-July. That very same morning, when the sky was reddening before sunrise, we had slipped swiftly through still-sleeping Vienna, leaving it a couple of hours later a mere patch of smoke against the blue hills of the Wienerwald on the horizon; we had breakfasted below Fischeramend under a grove of birch trees roaring in the wind; and had then swept on the tearing current past Orth, Hainburg, Petronell (the old Roman Carnuntum of Marcus Aurelius), and so under the frowning heights of Thelsen on a spur of the Carpathians, where the March steals in quietly from the left and the frontier is crossed between Austria and Hungary.

Racing along at twelve kilometers an hour soon took us well into Hungary, and the muddy waters—sure sign of flood—sent us aground on many a shingle-bed, and twisted us like a cork in many a sudden belching whirlpool before the towers of Pressburg (Hungarian, Poszony) showed against the sky; and then the canoe, leaping like a spirited horse, flew at top speed under the grey walls, negotiated safely the sunken chain of the Fliegende Brucke ferry, turned the corner sharply to the left, and plunged on yellow foam into the wilderness of islands, sandbanks, and swamp-land beyond—the land of the willows.

The change came suddenly, as when a series of bioscope pictures snaps down on the streets of a town and shifts without warning into the scenery of lake and forest. We entered the land of desolation on wings, and in less than half an hour there was neither boat nor fishing-hut nor red roof, nor any single sign of human habitation and civilization within sight. The sense of remoteness from the world of humankind, the utter isolation, the fascination of this singular world of willows, winds, and waters, instantly laid its spell upon us both, so that we allowed laughingly to one another that we ought by rights to have held some special kind of passport to admit us, and that we had, somewhat audaciously, come without asking leave into a separate little kingdom of wonder and magic—a kingdom that was reserved for the use of others who had a right to it, with everywhere unwritten warnings to trespassers for those who had the imagination to discover them.

Though still early in the afternoon, the ceaseless buffetings of a most tempestuous wind made us feel weary, and we at once began casting about for a suitable camping-ground for the night. But the bewildering character of the islands made landing difficult; the swirling flood carried us in shore and then swept us out again; the willow branches tore our hands as we seized them to stop the canoe, and we pulled many a yard of sandy bank into the water before at length we shot with a great sideways blow from the wind into a backwater and managed to beach the bows in a cloud of spray. Then we lay panting and laughing after our exertions on the hot yellow sand, sheltered from the wind, and in the full blaze of a scorching sun, a cloudless blue sky above, and an immense army of dancing, shouting willow bushes, closing in from all sides, shining with spray and clapping their thousand little hands as though to applaud the success of our efforts.

"What a river!" I said to my companion, thinking of all the way we had traveled from the source in the Black Forest, and how he had often been obliged to wade and push in the upper shallows at the beginning of June.

"Won't stand much nonsense now, will it?" he said, pulling the canoe a little farther into safety up the sand, and then composing himself for a nap.

I lay by his side, happy and peaceful in the bath of the elements—water, wind, sand, and the great fire of the sun—thinking of the long journey that lay behind us, and of the great stretch before us to the Black Sea, and how lucky I was to have such a delightful and charming traveling companion as my friend, the Swede.

We had made many similar journeys together, but the Danube, more than any other river I knew, impressed us from the very beginning with its aliveness. From its tiny bubbling entry into the world among the pinewood gardens of Donaueschingen, until this moment when it began to play the great river-game of losing itself among the deserted swamps, unobserved, unrestrained, it had seemed to us like following the grown of some living creature. Sleepy at first, but later developing violent desires as it became conscious of its deep soul, it rolled, like some huge fluid being, through all the countries we had passed, holding our little craft on its mighty shoulders, playing roughly with us sometimes, yet always friendly and well-meaning, till at length we had come inevitably to regard it as a Great Personage.

How, indeed, could it be otherwise, since it told us so much of its secret life? At night we heard it singing to the moon as we lay in our tent, uttering that odd sibilant note peculiar to itself and said to be caused by the rapid tearing of the pebbles along its bed, so great is its hurrying speed. We knew, too, the voice of its gurgling whirlpools, suddenly bubbling up on a surface previously quite calm; the roar of its shallows and swift rapids; its constant steady thundering below all mere surface sounds; and that ceaseless tearing of its icy waters at the banks. How it stood up and shouted when the rains fell flat upon its face! And how its laughter roared out when the wind blew up-stream and tried to stop its growing speed! We knew all its sounds and voices, its tumblings and foamings, its unnecessary splashing against the bridges; that self-conscious chatter when there were hills to look on; the affected dignity of its speech when it passed through the little towns, far too important to laugh; and all these faint, sweet whisperings when the sun caught it fairly in some slow curve and poured down upon it till the steam rose.

It was full of tricks, too, in its early life before the great world knew it. There were places in the upper reaches among the Swabian forests, when yet the first whispers of its destiny had not reached it, where it elected to disappear through holes in the ground, to appear again on the other side of the porous limestone hills and start a new river with another name; leaving, too, so little water in its own bed that we had to climb out and wade and push the canoe through miles of shallows.

And a chief pleasure, in those early days of its irresponsible youth, was to lie low, like Brer Fox, just before the little turbulent tributaries came to join it from the Alps, and to refuse to acknowledge them when in, but to run for miles side by side, the dividing line well marked, the very levels different, the Danube utterly declining to recognize the newcomer. Below Passau, however, it gave up this particular trick, for there the Inn comes in with a thundering power impossible to ignore, and so pushes and incommodes the parent river that there is hardly room for them in the long twisting gorge that follows, and the Danube is shoved this way and that against the cliffs, and forced to hurry itself with great waves and much dashing to and fro in order to get through in time. And during the fight our canoe slipped down from its shoulder to its breast, and had the time of its life among the struggling waves. But the Inn taught the old river a lesson, and after Passau it no longer pretended to ignore new arrivals.

This was many days back, of course, and since then we had come to know other aspects of the great creature, and across the Bavarian wheat plain of Straubing she wandered so slowly under the blazing June sun that we could well imagine only the surface inches were water, while below there moved, concealed as by a silken mantle, a whole army of Undines, passing silently and unseen down to the sea, and very leisurely too, lest they be discovered.

Much, too, we forgave her because of her friendliness to the birds and animals that haunted the shores. Cormorants lined the banks in lonely places in rows like short black palings; grey crows crowded the shingle-beds; storks stood fishing in the vistas of shallower water that opened up between the islands, and hawks, swans, and marsh birds of all sorts filled the air with glinting wings and singing, petulant cries. It was impossible to feel annoyed with the river's vagaries after seeing a deer leap with a splash into the water at sunrise and swim past the bows of the canoe; and often we saw fawns peering at us from the underbrush, or looked straight into the brown eyes of a stag as we charged full tilt round a corner and entered another reach of the river. Foxes, too, everywhere haunted the banks, tripping daintily among the driftwood and disappearing so suddenly that it was impossible to see how they managed it.

But now, after leaving Pressburg, everything changed a little, and the Danube became more serious. It ceased trifling. It was half-way to the Black Sea, within seeming distance almost of other, stranger countries where no tricks would be permitted or understood. It became suddenly grown-up, and claimed our respect and even our awe. It broke out into three arms, for one thing, that only met again a hundred kilometers farther down, and for a canoe there were no indications which one was intended to be followed.

"If you take a side channel," said the Hungarian officer we met in the Pressburg shop while buying provisions, "you may find yourselves, when the flood subsides, forty miles from anywhere, high and dry, and you may easily starve. There are no people, no farms, no fishermen. I warn you not to continue. The river, too, is still rising, and this wind will increase."

The rising river did not alarm us in the least, but the matter of being left high and dry by a sudden subsidence of the waters might be serious, and we had consequently laid in an extra stock of provisions. For the rest, the officer's prophecy held true, and the wind, blowing down a perfectly clear sky, increased steadily till it reached the dignity of a westerly gale.

It was earlier than usual when we camped, for the sun was a good hour or two from the horizon, and leaving my friend still asleep on the hot sand, I wandered about in desultory examination of our hotel. The island, I found, was less than an acre in extent, a mere sandy bank standing some two or three feet above the level of the river. The far end, pointing into the sunset, was covered with flying spray which the tremendous wind drove off the crests of the broken waves. It was triangular in shape, with the apex up stream.

I stood there for several minutes, watching the impetuous crimson flood bearing down with a shouting roar, dashing in waves against the bank as though to sweep it bodily away, and then swirling by in two foaming streams on either side. The ground seemed to shake with the shock and rush, while the furious movement of the willow bushes as the wind poured over them increased the curious illusion that the island itself actually moved. Above, for a mile or two, I could see the great river descending upon me; it was like looking up the slope of a sliding hill, white with foam, and leaping up everywhere to show itself to the sun.

The rest of the island was too thickly grown with willows to make walking pleasant, but I made the tour, nevertheless. From the lower end the light, of course, changed, and the river looked dark and angry. Only the backs of the flying waves were visible, streaked with foam, and pushed forcibly by the great puffs of wind that fell upon them from behind. For a short mile it was visible, pouring in and out among the islands, and then disappearing with a huge sweep into the willows, which closed about it like a herd of monstrous antediluvian creatures crowding down to drink. They made me think of gigantic sponge-like growths that sucked the river up into themselves. They caused it to vanish from sight. They herded there together in such overpowering numbers.

Altogether it was an impressive scene, with its utter loneliness, its bizarre suggestion; and as I gazed, long and curiously, a singular emotion began to stir somewhere in the depths of me. Midway in my delight of the wild beauty, there crept, unbidden and unexplained, a curious feeling of disquietude, almost of alarm.

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.

Great revelations of nature, of course, never fail to impress in one way or another, and I was no stranger to moods of the kind. Mountains overawe and oceans terrify, while the mystery of great forests exercises a spell peculiarly its own. But all these, at one point or another, somewhere link on intimately with human life and human experience. They stir comprehensible, even if alarming, emotions. They tend on the whole to exalt.

With this multitude of willows, however, it was something far different, I felt. Some essence emanated from them that besieged the heart. A sense of awe awakened, true, but of awe touched somewhere by a vague terror. Their serried ranks, growing everywhere darker about me as the shadows deepened, moving furiously yet softly in the wind, woke in me the curious and unwelcome suggestion that we had trespassed here upon the borders of an alien world, a world where we were intruders, a world where we were not wanted or invited to remain—where we ran grave risks perhaps!

The feeling, however, though it refused to yield its meaning entirely to analysis, did not at the time trouble me by passing into menace. Yet it never left me quite, even during the very practical business of putting up the tent in a hurricane of wind and building a fire for the stew-pot. It remained, just enough to bother and perplex, and to rob a most delightful camping-ground of a good portion of its charm. To my companion, however, I said nothing, for he was a man I considered devoid of imagination. In the first place, I could never have explained to him what I meant, and in the second, he would have laughed stupidly at me if I had.

There was a slight depression in the center of the island, and here we pitched the tent. The surrounding willows broke the wind a bit.

"A poor camp," observed the imperturbable Swede when at last the tent stood upright, "no stones and precious little firewood. I'm for moving on early tomorrow—eh? This sand won't hold anything."

But the experience of a collapsing tent at midnight had taught us many devices, and we made the cozy gipsy house as safe as possible, and then set about collecting a store of wood to last till bed-time. Willow bushes drop no branches, and driftwood was our only source of supply. We hunted the shores pretty thoroughly. Everywhere the banks were crumbling as the rising flood tore at them and carried away great portions with a splash and a gurgle.

"The island's much smaller than when we landed," said the accurate Swede. "It won't last long at this rate. We'd better drag the canoe close to the tent, and be ready to start at a moment's notice. I shall sleep in my clothes."

He was a little distance off, climbing along the bank, and I heard his rather jolly laugh as he spoke.

"By Jove!" I heard him call, a moment later, and turned to see what had caused his exclamation. But for the moment he was hidden by the willows, and I could not find him.

"What in the world's this?" I heard him cry again, and this time his voice had become serious.

I ran up quickly and joined him on the bank. He was looking over the river, pointing at something in the water.

"Good heavens, it's a man's body!" he cried excitedly. "Look!"

A black thing, turning over and over in the foaming waves, swept rapidly past. It kept disappearing and coming up to the surface again. It was about twenty feet from the shore, and just as it was opposite to where we stood it lurched round and looked straight at us. We saw its eyes reflecting the sunset, and gleaming an odd yellow as the body turned over. Then it gave a swift, gulping plunge, and dived out of sight in a flash.

"An otter, by gad!" we exclaimed in the same breath, laughing.

It was an otter, alive, and out on the hunt; yet it had looked exactly like the body of a drowned man turning helplessly in the current. Far below it came to the surface once again, and we saw its black skin, wet and shining in the sunlight.

Then, too, just as we turned back, our arms full of driftwood, another thing happened to recall us to the river bank. This time it really was a man, and what was more, a man in a boat. Now a small boat on the Danube was an unusual sight at any time, but here in this deserted region, and at flood time, it was so unexpected as to constitute a real event. We stood and stared.

Whether it was due to the slanting sunlight, or the refraction from the wonderfully illumined water, I cannot say, but, whatever the cause, I found it difficult to focus my sight properly upon the flying apparition. It seemed, however, to be a man standing upright in a sort of flat-bottomed boat, steering with a long oar, and being carried down the opposite shore at a tremendous pace. He apparently was looking across in our direction, but the distance was too great and the light too uncertain for us to make out very plainly what he was about. It seemed to me that he was gesticulating and making signs at us. His voice came across the water to us shouting something furiously, but the wind drowned it so that no single word was audible. There was something curious about the whole appearance—man, boat, signs, voice—that made an impression on me out of all proportion to its cause.

"He's crossing himself!" I cried. "Look, he's making the sign of the Cross!"

"I believe you're right," the Swede said, shading his eyes with his hand and watching the man out of sight. He seemed to be gone in a moment, melting away down there into the sea of willows where the sun caught them in the bend of the river and turned them into a great crimson wall of beauty. Mist, too, had begun to ruse, so that the air was hazy.

"But what in the world is he doing at nightfall on this flooded river?" I said, half to myself. "Where is he going at such a time, and what did he mean by his signs and shouting? D'you think he wished to warn us about something?"

"He saw our smoke, and thought we were spirits probably," laughed my companion. "These Hungarians believe in all sorts of rubbish; you remember the shopwoman at Pressburg warning us that no one ever landed here because it belonged to some sort of beings outside man's world! I suppose they believe in fairies and elementals, possibly demons, too. That peasant in the boat saw people on the islands for the first time in his life," he added, after a slight pause, "and it scared him, that's all."

The Swede's tone of voice was not convincing, and his manner lacked something that was usually there. I noted the change instantly while he talked, though without being able to label it precisely.

"If they had enough imagination," I laughed loudly—I remember trying to make as much noise as I could—"they might well people a place like this with the old gods of antiquity. The Romans must have haunted all this region more or less with their shrines and sacred groves and elemental deities."

The subject dropped and we returned to our stew-pot, for my friend was not given to imaginative conversation as a rule. Moreover, just then I remember feeling distinctly glad that he was not imaginative; his stolid, practical nature suddenly seemed to me welcome and comforting. It was an admirable temperament, I felt; he could steer down rapids like a red Indian, shoot dangerous bridges and whirlpools better than any white man I ever saw in a canoe. He was a grand fellow for an adventurous trip, a tower of strength when untoward things happened. I looked at his strong face and light curly hair as he staggered along under his pile of driftwood (twice the size of mine!), and I experienced a feeling of relief. Yes, I was distinctly glad just then that the Swede was—what he was, and that he never made remarks that suggested more than they said.

"The river's still rising, though," he added, as if following out some thoughts of his own, and dropping his load with a gasp. "This island will be under water in two days if it goes on."

"I wish the wind would go down," I said. "I don't care a fig for the river."

The flood, indeed, had no terrors for us; we could get off at ten minutes' notice, and the more water the better we liked it. It meant an increasing current and the obliteration of the treacherous shingle-beds that so often threatened to tear the bottom out of our canoe.

Contrary to our expectations, the wind did not go down with the sun. It seemed to increase with the darkness, howling overhead and shaking the willows round us like straws. Curious sounds accompanied it sometimes, like the explosion of heavy guns, and it fell upon the water and the island in great flat blows of immense power. It made me think of the sounds a planet must make, could we only hear it, driving along through space.

But the sky kept wholly clear of clouds, and soon after supper the full moon rose up in the east and covered the river and the plain of shouting willows with a light like the day.

We lay on the sandy patch beside the fire, smoking, listening to the noises of the night round us, and talking happily of the journey we had already made, and of our plans ahead. The map lay spread in the door of the tent, but the high wind made it hard to study, and presently we lowered the curtain and extinguished the lantern. The firelight was enough to smoke and see each other's faces by, and the sparks flew about overhead like fireworks. A few yards beyond, the river gurgled and hissed, and from time to time a heavy splash announced the falling away of further portions of the bank.

Our talk, I noticed, had to do with the faraway scenes and incidents of our first camps in the Black Forest, or of other subjects altogether remote from the present setting, for neither of us spoke of the actual moment more than was necessary—almost as though we had agreed tacitly to avoid discussion of the camp and its incidents. Neither the otter nor the boatman, for instance, received the honor of a single mention, though ordinarily these would have furnished discussion for the greater part of the evening. They were, of course, distinct events in such a place.

The scarcity of wood made it a business to keep the fire going, for the wind, that drove the smoke in our faces wherever we sat, helped at the same time to make a forced draught. We took it in turn to make some foraging expeditions into the darkness, and the quantity the Swede brought back always made me feel that he took an absurdly long time finding it; for the fact was I did not care much about being left alone, and yet it always seemed to be my turn to grub about among the bushes or scramble along the slippery banks in the moonlight. The long day's battle with wind and water—such wind and such water!—had tired us both, and an early bed was the obvious program. Yet neither of us made the move for the tent. We lay there, tending the fire, talking in desultory fashion, peering about us into the dense willow bushes, and listening to the thunder of wind and river. The loneliness of the place had entered our very bones, and silence seemed natural, for after a bit the sound of our voices became a trifle unreal and forced; whispering would have been the fitting mode of communication, I felt, and the human voice, always rather absurd amid the roar of the elements, now carried with it something almost illegitimate. It was like talking out loud in church, or in some place where it was not lawful, perhaps not quite safe, to be overheard.

The eeriness of this lonely island, set among a million willows, swept by a hurricane, and surrounded by hurrying deep waters, touched us both, I fancy. Untrodden by man, almost unknown to man, it lay there beneath the moon, remote from human influence, on the frontier of another world, an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows. And we, in our rashness, had dared to invade it, even to make use of it! Something more than the power of its mystery stirred in me as I lay on the sand, feet to fire, and peered up through the leaves at the stars. For the last time I rose to get firewood.

"When this has burnt up," I said firmly, "I shall turn in," and my companion watched me lazily as I moved off into the surrounding shadows.

For an unimaginative man I thought he seemed unusually receptive that night, unusually open to suggestion of things other than sensory. He too was touched by the beauty and loneliness of the place. I was not altogether pleased, I remember, to recognize this slight change in him, and instead of immediately collecting sticks, I made my way to the far point of the island where the moonlight on plain and river could be seen to better advantage. The desire to be alone had come suddenly upon me; my former dread returned in force; there was a vague feeling in me I wished to face and probe to the bottom.

When I reached the point of sand jutting out among the waves, the spell of the place descended upon me with a positive shock. No mere "scenery" could have produced such an effect. There was something more here, something to alarm.

I gazed across the waste of wild waters; I watched the whispering willows; I heard the ceaseless beating of the tireless wind; and, one and all, each in its own way, stirred in me this sensation of a strange distress. But the willows especially; for ever they went on chattering and talking among themselves, laughing a little, shrilly crying out, sometimes sighing—but what it was they made so much to-do about belonged to the secret life of the great plain they inhabited. And it was utterly alien to the world I knew, or to that of the wild yet kindly elements. They made me think of a host of beings from another plane of life, another evolution altogether, perhaps, all discussing a mystery known only to themselves. I watched them moving busily together, oddly shaking their big bushy heads, twirling their myriad leaves even when there was no wind. They moved of their own will as though alive, and they touched, by some incalculable method, my own keen sense of the horrible.

There they stood in the moonlight, like a vast army surrounding our camp, shaking their innumerable silver spears defiantly, formed all ready for an attack.

The psychology of places, for some imaginations at least, is very vivid; for the wanderer, especially, camps have their "note" either of welcome or rejection. At first it may not always be apparent, because the busy preparations of tent and cooking prevent, but with the first pause—after supper usually—it comes and announces itself. And the note of this willow-camp now became unmistakably plain to me; we were interlopers, trespassers; we were not welcomed. The sense of unfamiliarity grew upon me as I stood there watching. We touched the frontier of a region where our presence was resented. For a night's lodging we might perhaps be tolerated; but for a prolonged and inquisitive stay—No! by all the gods of the trees and wilderness, no! We were the first human influences upon this island, and we were not wanted. The willows were against us.

Strange thoughts like these, bizarre fancies, borne I know not whence, found lodgment in my mind as I stood listening. What, I thought, if, after all, these crouching willows proved to be alive; if suddenly they should rise up, like a swarm of living creatures, marshaled by the gods whose territory we had invaded, sweep towards us off the vast swamps, booming overhead in the night—and then settle down! As I looked it was so easy to imagine they actually moved, crept nearer, retreated a little, huddled together in masses, hostile, waiting for the great wind that should finally start them a-running. I could have sworn their aspect changed a little, and their ranks deepened and pressed more closely together.

The melancholy shrill cry of a night-bird sounded overhead, and suddenly I nearly lost my balance as the piece of bank I stood upon fell with a great splash into the river, undermined by the flood. I stepped back just in time, and went on hunting for firewood again, half laughing at the odd fancies that crowded so thickly into my mind and cast their spell upon me. I recalled the Swede's remark about moving on next day, and I was just thinking that I fully agreed with him, when I turned with a start and saw the subject of my thoughts standing immediately in front of me. He was quite close. The roar of the elements had covered his approach.

II

"You've been gone so long," he shouted above the wind, "I thought something must have happened to you."

But there was that in his tone, and a certain look in his face as well, that conveyed to me more than his usual words, and in a flash I understood the real reason for his coming. It was because the spell of the place had entered his soul too, and he did not like being alone.

"River still rising," he cried, pointing to the flood in the moonlight, "and the wind's simply awful."

He always said the same things, but it was the cry for companionship that gave the real importance to his words.

"Lucky," I cried back, "our tent's in the hollow. I think it'll hold all right." I added something about the difficulty of finding wood, in order to explain my absence, but the wind caught my words and flung them across the river, so that he did not hear, but just looked at me through the branches, nodding his head.

"Lucky if we get away without disaster!" he shouted, or words to that effect; and I remember feeling half angry with him for putting the thought into words, for it was exactly what I felt myself. There was disaster impending somewhere, and the sense of presentiment lay unpleasantly upon me.

We went back to the fire and made a final blaze, poking it up with our feet. We took a last look round. But for the wind the heat would have been unpleasant. I put this thought into words, and I remember my friend's reply struck me oddly: that he would rather have the heat, the ordinary July weather, than this "diabolical wind."

Everything was snug for the night; the canoe lying turned over beside the tent, with both yellow paddles beneath her; the provision sack hanging from a willow-stem, and the washed-up dishes removed to a safe distance from the fire, all ready for the morning meal.

We smothered the embers of the fire with sand, and then turned in. The flap of the tent door was up, and I saw the branches and the stars and the white moonlight. The shaking willows and the heavy buffetings of the wind against our taut little house were the last things I remembered as sleep came down and covered all with its soft and delicious forgetfulness.

Suddenly I found myself lying awake, peering from my sandy mattress through the door of the tent. I looked at my watch pinned against the canvas, and saw by the bright moonlight that it was past twelve o'clock—the threshold of a new day—and I had therefore slept a couple of hours. The Swede was asleep still beside me; the wind howled as before; something plucked at my heart and made me feel afraid. There was a sense of disturbance in my immediate neighborhood.

I sat up quickly and looked out. The trees were swaying violently to and fro as the gusts smote them, but our little bit of green canvas lay snugly safe in the hollow, for the wind passed over it without meeting enough resistance to make it vicious. The feeling of disquietude did not pass, however, and I crawled quietly out of the tent to see if our belongings were safe. I moved carefully so as not to waken my companion. A curious excitement was on me.

I was half-way out, kneeling on all fours, when my eye first took in that the tops of the bushes opposite, with their moving tracery of leaves, made shapes against the sky. I sat back on my haunches and stared. It was incredible, surely, but there, opposite and slightly above me, were shapes of some indeterminate sort among the willows, and as the branches swayed in the wind they seemed to group themselves about these shapes, forming a series of monstrous outlines that shifted rapidly beneath the moon. Close, about fifty feet in front of me, I saw these things.

My first instinct was to waken my companion, that he too might see them, but something made me hesitate—the sudden realization, probably, that I should not welcome corroboration; and meanwhile I crouched there staring 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.

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 worshipped 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 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 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 not my reason argue in the old futile way from the little standard of the known?

I only know that great column of figures ascended darkly into the sky for what seemed a very long period of time, and with a very complete measure of reality as most men are accustomed to gauge reality. Then suddenly they were gone!

And, once they were gone and the immediate wonder of their great presence had passed, fear came down upon me with a cold rush. The esoteric meaning of this lonely and haunted region suddenly flamed up within me, and I began to tremble dreadfully. I took a quick look round—a look of horror that came near to panic—calculating vainly ways of escape; and then, realizing how helpless I was to achieve anything really effective, I crept back silently into the tent and lay down again upon my sandy mattress, first lowering the door-curtain to shut out the sight of the willows in the moonlight, and then burying my head as deeply as possible beneath the blankets to deaden the sound of the terrifying wind.

As though further to convince me that I had not been dreaming, I remember that it was a long time before I fell again into a troubled and restless sleep; and even then only the upper crust of me slept, and underneath there was something that never quite lost consciousness, but lay alert and on the watch.

But this second time I jumped up with a genuine start of terror. It was neither the wind nor the river that woke me, but the slow approach of something that caused the sleeping portion of me to grow smaller and smaller till at last it vanished altogether, and I found myself sitting bolt upright—listening.

Outside there was a sound of multitudinous little patterings. They had been coming, I was aware, for a long time, and in my sleep they had first become audible. I sat there nervously wide awake as though I had not slept at all. It seemed to me that my breathing came with difficulty, and that there was a great weight upon the surface of my body. In spite of the hot night, I felt clammy with cold and shivered. Something surely was pressing steadily against the sides of the tent and weighing down upon it from above. Was it the body of the wind? Was this the pattering rain, the dripping of the leaves? The spray blown from the river by the wind and gathering in big drops? I thought quickly of a dozen things.

Then suddenly the explanation leaped into my mind: a bough from the poplar, the only large tree on the island, had fallen with the wind. Still half caught by the other branches, it would fall with the next gust and crush us, and meanwhile its leaves brushed and tapped upon the tight canvas surface of the tent. I raised a loose flap and rushed out, calling to the Swede to follow.

But when I got out and stood upright I saw that the tent was free. There was no hanging bough; there was no rain or spray; nothing approached.

A cold, grey light filtered down through the bushes and lay on the faintly gleaming sand. Stars still crowded the sky directly overhead, and the wind howled magnificently, but the fire no longer gave out any glow, and I saw the east reddening in streaks through the trees. Several hours must have passed since I stood there before watching the ascending figures, and the memory of it now came back to me horribly, like an evil dream. Oh, how tired it made me feel, that ceaseless raging wind! Yet, though the deep lassitude of a sleepless night was on me, my nerves were tingling with the activity of an equally tireless apprehension, and all idea of repose was out of the question. The river I saw had risen further. Its thunder filled the air, and a fine spray made itself felt through my thin sleeping shirt.

Yet nowhere did I discover the slightest evidence of anything to cause alarm. This deep, prolonged disturbance in my heart remained wholly unaccounted for.

My companion had not stirred when I called him, and there was no need to waken him now. I looked about me carefully, noting everything; the turned-over canoe; the yellow paddles—two of them, I'm certain; the provision sack and the extra lantern hanging together from the tree; and, crowding everywhere about me, enveloping all, the willows, those endless, shaking willows. A bird uttered its morning cry, and a string of duck passed with whirring flight overhead in the twilight. The sand whirled, dry and stinging, about my bare feet in the wind.

I walked round the tent and then went out a little way into the bush, so that I could see across the river to the farther landscape, and the same profound yet indefinable emotion of distress seized upon me again as I saw the interminable sea of bushes stretching to the horizon, looking ghostly and unreal in the wan light of dawn. I walked softly here and there, still puzzling over that odd sound of infinite pattering, and of that pressure upon the tent that had wakened me. It must have been the wind, I reflected—the wind bearing upon the loose, hot sand, driving the dry particles smartly against the taut canvas—the wind dropping heavily upon our fragile roof.

Yet all the time my nervousness and malaise increased appreciably.

I crossed over to the farther shore and noted how the coast-line had altered in the night, and what masses of sand the river had torn away. I dipped my hands and feet into the cool current, and bathed my forehead. Already there was a glow of sunrise in the sky and the exquisite freshness of coming day. On my way back I passed purposely beneath the very bushes where I had seen the column of figures rising into the air, and midway among the clumps I suddenly found myself overtaken by a sense of vast terror. From the shadows a large figure went swiftly by. Someone passed me, as sure as ever man did….

It was a great staggering blow from the wind that helped me forward again, and once out in the more open space, the sense of terror diminished strangely. The winds were about and walking, I remember saying to myself, for the winds often move like great presences under the trees. And altogether the fear that hovered about me was such an unknown and immense kind of fear, so unlike anything I had ever felt before, that it woke a sense of awe and wonder in me that did much to counteract its worst effects; and when I reached a high point in the middle of the island from which I could see the wide stretch of river, crimson in the sunrise, the whole magical beauty of it all was so overpowering that a sort of wild yearning woke in me and almost brought a cry up into the throat.

But this cry found no expression, for as my eyes wandered from the plain beyond to the island round me and noted our little tent half hidden among the willows, a dreadful discovery leaped out at me, compared to which my terror of the walking winds seemed as nothing at all.

For a change, I thought, had somehow come about in the arrangement of the landscape. It was not that my point of vantage gave me a different view, but that an alteration had apparently been effected in the relation of the tent to the willows, and of the willows to the tent. Surely the bushes now crowded much closer—unnecessarily, unpleasantly close. They had moved nearer.

Creeping with silent feet over the shifting sands, drawing imperceptibly nearer by soft, unhurried movements, the willows had come closer during the night. But had the wind moved them, or had they moved of themselves? I recalled the sound of infinite small patterings and the pressure upon the tent and upon my own heart that caused me to wake in terror. I swayed for a moment in the wind like a tree, finding it hard to keep my upright position on the sandy hillock. There was a suggestion here of personal agency, of deliberate intention, of aggressive hostility, and it terrified me into a sort of rigidity.

Then the reaction followed quickly. The idea was so bizarre, so absurd, that I felt inclined to laugh. But the laughter came no more readily than the cry, for the knowledge that my mind was so receptive to such dangerous imaginings brought the additional terror that it was through our minds and not through our physical bodies that the attack would come, and was coming.

The wind buffeted me about, and, very quickly it seemed, the sun came up over the horizon, for it was after four o'clock, and I must have stood on that little pinnacle of sand longer than I knew, afraid to come down to close quarters with the willows. I returned quietly, creepily, to the tent, first taking another exhaustive look round and—yes, I confess it—making a few measurements. I paced out on the warm sand the distances between the willows and the tent, making a note of the shortest distance particularly.

I crawled stealthily into my blankets. My companion, to all appearances, still slept soundly, and I was glad that this was so. Provided my experiences were not corroborated, I could find strength somehow to deny them, perhaps. With the daylight I could persuade myself that it was all a subjective hallucination, a fantasy of the night, a projection of the excited imagination.

Nothing further came in to disturb me, and I fell asleep almost at once, utterly exhausted, yet still in dread of hearing again that weird sound of multitudinous pattering, or of feeling the pressure upon my heart that had made it difficult to breathe.

The sun was high in the heavens when my companion woke me from a heavy sleep and announced that the porridge was cooked and there was just time to bathe. The grateful smell of frizzling bacon entered the tent door.

"River still rising," he said, "and several islands out in mid-stream have disappeared altogether. Our own island's much smaller."

"Any wood left?" I asked sleepily.

"The wood and the island will finish tomorrow in a dead heat," he laughed, "but there's enough to last us till then."

I plunged in from the point of the island, which had indeed altered a lot in size and shape during the night, and was swept down in a moment to the landing-place opposite the tent. The water was icy, and the banks flew by like the country from an express train. Bathing under such conditions was an exhilarating operation, and the terror of the night seemed cleansed out of me by a process of evaporation in the brain. The sun was blazing hot; not a cloud showed itself anywhere; the wind, however, had not abated one little jot.

Quite suddenly then the implied meaning of the Swede's words flashed across me, showing that he no longer wished to leave post-haste, and had changed his mind. "Enough to last till tomorrow"—he assumed we should stay on the island another night. It struck me as odd. The night before he was so positive the other way. How had the change come about?

Great crumblings of the banks occurred at breakfast, with heavy splashings and clouds of spray which the wind brought into our frying-pan, and my fellow-traveler talked incessantly about the difficulty the Vienna-Pesth steamers must have to find the channel in flood. But the state of his mind interested and impressed me far more than the state of the river or the difficulties of the steamers. He had changed somehow since the evening before. His manner was different—a trifle excited, a trifle shy, with a sort of suspicion about his voice and gestures. I hardly know how to describe it now in cold blood, but at the time I remember being quite certain of one thing—that he had become frightened?

He ate very little breakfast, and for once omitted to smoke his pipe. He had the map spread open beside him, and kept studying its markings.

"We'd better get off sharp in an hour," I said presently, feeling for an opening that must bring him indirectly to a partial confession at any rate. And his answer puzzled me uncomfortably: "Rather! If they'll let us."

"Who'll let us? The elements?" I asked quickly, with affected indifference.

"The powers of this awful place, whoever they are," he replied, keeping his eyes on the map. "The gods are here, if they are anywhere at all in the world."

"The elements are always the true immortals," I replied, laughing as naturally as I could manage, yet knowing quite well that my face reflected my true feelings when he looked up gravely at me and spoke across the smoke:

"We shall be fortunate if we get away without further disaster."

This was exactly what I had dreaded, and I screwed myself up to the point of the direct question. It was like agreeing to allow the dentist to extract the tooth; it had to come anyhow in the long run, and the rest was all pretence.

"Further disaster! Why, what's happened?"

"For one thing—the steering paddle's gone," he said quietly.

"The steering paddle gone!" I repeated, greatly excited, for this was our rudder, and the Danube in flood without a rudder was suicide. "But what—"

"And there's a tear in the bottom of the canoe," he added, with a genuine little tremor in his voice.

I continued staring at him, able only to repeat the words in his face somewhat foolishly. There, in the heat of the sun, and on this burning sand, I was aware of a freezing atmosphere descending round us. I got up to follow him, for he merely nodded his head gravely and led the way towards the tent a few yards on the other side of the fireplace. The canoe still lay there as I had last seen her in the night, ribs uppermost, the paddles, or rather, the paddle, on the sand beside her.

"There's only one," he said, stooping to pick it up. "And here's the rent in the base-board."

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that I had clearly noticed two paddles a few hours before, but a second impulse made me think better of it, and I said nothing. I approached to see.

There was a long, finely made tear in the bottom of the canoe where a little slither of wood had been neatly taken clean out; it looked as if the tooth of a sharp rock or snag had eaten down her length, and investigation showed that the hole went through. Had we launched out in her without observing it we must inevitably have foundered. At first the water would have made the wood swell so as to close the hole, but once out in mid-stream the water must have poured in, and the canoe, never more than two inches above the surface, would have filled and sunk very rapidly.

"There, you see an attempt to prepare a victim for the sacrifice," I heard him saying, more to himself than to me, "two victims rather," he added as he bent over and ran his fingers along the slit.

I began to whistle—a thing I always do unconsciously when utterly nonplussed—and purposely paid no attention to his words. I was determined to consider them foolish.

"It wasn't there last night," he said presently, straightening up from his examination and looking anywhere but at me.

"We must have scratched her in landing, of course," I stopped whistling to say. "The stones are very sharp."

I stopped abruptly, for at that moment he turned round and met my eye squarely. I knew just as well as he did how impossible my explanation was. There were no stones, to begin with.

"And then there's this to explain too," he added quietly, handing me the paddle and pointing to the blade.

A new and curious emotion spread freezingly over me as I took and examined it. The blade was scraped down all over, beautifully scraped, as though someone had sand-papered it with care, making it so thin that the first vigorous stroke must have snapped it off at the elbow.

"One of us walked in his sleep and did this thing," I said feebly, "or—or it has been filed by the constant stream of sand particles blown against it by the wind, perhaps."

"Ah," said the Swede, turning away, laughing a little, "you can explain everything."

"The same wind that caught the steering paddle and flung it so near the bank that it fell in with the next lump that crumbled," I called out after him, absolutely determined to find an explanation for everything he showed me.

"I see," he shouted back, turning his head to look at me before disappearing among the willow bushes.

Once alone with these perplexing evidences of personal agency, I think my first thoughts took the form of "One of us must have done this thing, and it certainly was not I." But my second thought decided how impossible it was to suppose, under all the circumstances, that either of us had done it. That my companion, the trusted friend of a dozen similar expeditions, could have knowingly had a hand in it, was a suggestion not to be entertained for a moment. Equally absurd seemed the explanation that this imperturbable and densely practical nature had suddenly become insane and was busied with insane purposes.

Yet the fact remained that what disturbed me most, and kept my fear actively alive even in this blaze of sunshine and wild beauty, was the clear certainty that some curious alteration had come about in his mind—that he was nervous, timid, suspicious, aware of goings on he did not speak about, watching a series of secret and hitherto unmentionable events—waiting, in a word, for a climax that he expected, and, I thought, expected very soon. This grew up in my mind intuitively—I hardly knew how.

I made a hurried examination of the tent and its surroundings, but the measurements of the night remained the same. There were deep hollows formed in the sand I now noticed for the first time, basin-shaped and of various depths and sizes, varying from that of a tea-cup to a large bowl. The wind, no doubt, was responsible for these miniature craters, just as it was for lifting the paddle and tossing it towards the water. The rent in the canoe was the only thing that seemed quite inexplicable; and, after all, it was conceivable that a sharp point had caught it when we landed. The examination I made of the shore did not assist this theory, but all the same I clung to it with that diminishing portion of my intelligence which I called my "reason." An explanation of some kind was an absolute necessity, just as some working explanation of the universe is necessary—however absurd—to the happiness of every individual who seeks to do his duty in the world and face the problems of life. The simile seemed to me at the time an exact parallel.

I at once set the pitch melting, and presently the Swede joined me at the work, though under the best conditions in the world the canoe could not be safe for traveling till the following day. I drew his attention casually to the hollows in the sand.

"Yes," he said, "I know. They're all over the island. But you can explain them, no doubt!"

"Wind, of course," I answered without hesitation. "Have you never watched those little whirlwinds in the street that twist and twirl everything into a circle? This sand's loose enough to yield, that's all."

He made no reply, and we worked on in silence for a bit. I watched him surreptitiously all the time, and I had an idea he was watching me. He seemed, too, to be always listening attentively to something I could not hear, or perhaps for something that he expected to hear, for he kept turning about and staring into the bushes, and up into the sky, and out across the water where it was visible through the openings among the willows. Sometimes he even put his hand to his ear and held it there for several minutes. He said nothing to me, however, about it, and I asked no questions. And meanwhile, as he mended that torn canoe with the skill and address of a red Indian, I was glad to notice his absorption in the work, for there was a vague dread in my heart that he would speak of the changed aspect of the willows. And, if he had noticed that, my imagination could no longer be held a sufficient explanation of it.

III

At length, after a long pause, he began to talk.

"Queer thing," he added in a hurried sort of voice, as though he wanted to say something and get it over. "Queer thing. I mean, about that otter last night."

I had expected something so totally different that he caught me with surprise, and I looked up sharply.

"Shows how lonely this place is. Otters are awfully shy things—"

"I don't mean that, of course," he interrupted. "I mean—do you think—did you think it really was an otter?"

"What else, in the name of Heaven, what else?"

"You know, I saw it before you did, and at first it seemed—so much bigger than an otter."

"The sunset as you looked up-stream magnified it, or something," I replied.

He looked at me absently a moment, as though his mind were busy with other thoughts.

"It had such extraordinary yellow eyes," he went on half to himself.

"That was the sun too," I laughed, a trifle boisterously. "I suppose you'll wonder next if that fellow in the boat—"

I suddenly decided not to finish the sentence. He was in the act again of listening, turning his head to the wind, and something in the expression of his face made me halt. The subject dropped, and we went on with our caulking. Apparently he had not noticed my unfinished sentence. Five minutes later, however, he looked at me across the canoe, the smoking pitch in his hand, his face exceedingly grave.

"I did rather wonder, if you want to know," he said slowly, "what that thing in the boat was. I remember thinking at the time it was not a man. The whole business seemed to rise quite suddenly out of the water."

I laughed again boisterously in his face, but this time there was impatience, and a strain of anger too, in my feeling.

"Look here now," I cried, "this place is quite queer enough without going out of our way to imagine things! That boat was an ordinary boat, and the man in it was an ordinary man, and they were both going down-stream as fast as they could lick. And that otter was an otter, so don't let's play the fool about it!"

He looked steadily at me with the same grave expression. He was not in the least annoyed. I took courage from his silence.

"And, for Heaven's sake," I went on, "don't keep pretending you hear things, because it only gives me the jumps, and there's nothing to hear but the river and this cursed old thundering wind."

"You fool!" he answered in a low, shocked voice, "you utter fool. That's just the way all victims talk. As if you didn't understand just as well as I do!" he sneered with scorn in his voice, and a sort of resignation. "The best thing you can do is to keep quiet and try to hold your mind as firm as possible. This feeble attempt at self-deception only makes the truth harder when you're forced to meet it."

My little effort was over, and I found nothing more to say, for I knew quite well his words were true, and that I was the fool, not he. Up to a certain stage in the adventure he kept ahead of me easily, and I think I felt annoyed to be out of it, to be thus proved less psychic, less sensitive than himself to these extraordinary happenings, and half ignorant all the time of what was going on under my very nose. He knew from the very beginning, apparently. But at the moment I wholly missed the point of his words about the necessity of there being a victim, and that we ourselves were destined to satisfy the want. I dropped all pretence thenceforward, but thenceforward likewise my fear increased steadily to the climax.

"But you're quite right about one thing," he added, before the subject passed, "and that is that we're wiser not to talk about it, or even to think about it, because what one thinks finds expression in words, and what one says, happens."

That afternoon, while the canoe dried and hardened, we spent trying to fish, testing the leak, collecting wood, and watching the enormous flood of rising water. Masses of driftwood swept near our shores sometimes, and we fished for them with long willow branches. The island grew perceptibly smaller as the banks were torn away with great gulps and splashes. The weather kept brilliantly fine till about four o'clock, and then for the first time for three days the wind showed signs of abating. Clouds began to gather in the south-west, spreading thence slowly over the sky.

This lessening of the wind came as a great relief, for the incessant roaring, banging, and thundering had irritated our nerves. Yet the silence that came about five o'clock with its sudden cessation was in a manner quite as oppressive. The booming of the river had everything in its own way then; it filled the air with deep murmurs, more musical than the wind noises, but infinitely more monotonous. The wind held many notes, rising, falling always beating out some sort of great elemental tune; whereas the river's song lay between three notes at most—dull pedal notes, that held a lugubrious quality foreign to the wind, and somehow seemed to me, in my then nervous state, to sound wonderfully well the music of doom.

It was extraordinary, too, how the withdrawal suddenly of bright sunlight took everything out of the landscape that made for cheerfulness; and since this particular landscape had already managed to convey the suggestion of something sinister, the change of course was all the more unwelcome and noticeable. For me, I know, the darkening outlook became distinctly more alarming, and I found myself more than once calculating how soon after sunset the full moon would get up in the east, and whether the gathering clouds would greatly interfere with her lighting of the little island.

With this general hush of the wind—though it still indulged in occasional brief gusts—the river seemed to me to grow blacker, the willows to stand more densely together. The latter, too, kept up a sort of independent movement of their own, rustling among themselves when no wind stirred, and shaking oddly from the roots upwards. When common objects in this way be come charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance; and these bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquerie of appearance that lent to them somehow the aspect of purposeful and living creatures. Their very ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant and hostile to us. The forces of the region drew nearer with the coming of night. They were focusing upon our island, and more particularly upon ourselves. For thus, somehow, in the terms of the imagination, did my really indescribable sensations in this extraordinary place present themselves.

I had slept a good deal in the early afternoon, and had thus recovered somewhat from the exhaustion of a disturbed night, but this only served apparently to render me more susceptible than before to the obsessing spell of the haunting. I fought against it, laughing at my feelings as absurd and childish, with very obvious physiological explanations, yet, in spite of every effort, they gained in strength upon me so that I dreaded the night as a child lost in a forest must dread the approach of darkness.

The canoe we had carefully covered with a waterproof sheet during the day, and the one remaining paddle had been securely tied by the Swede to the base of a tree, lest the wind should rob us of that too. From five o'clock onwards I busied myself with the stew-pot and preparations for dinner, it being my turn to cook that night. We had potatoes, onions, bits of bacon fat to add flavor, and a general thick residue from former stews at the bottom of the pot; with black bread broken up into it the result was most excellent, and it was followed by a stew of plums with sugar and a brew of strong tea with dried milk. A good pile of wood lay close at hand, and the absence of wind made my duties easy. My companion sat lazily watching me, dividing his attentions between cleaning his pipe and giving useless advice—an admitted privilege of the off-duty man. He had been very quiet all the afternoon, engaged in re-caulking the canoe, strengthening the tent ropes, and fishing for driftwood while I slept. No more talk about undesirable things had passed between us, and I think his only remarks had to do with the gradual destruction of the island, which he declared was not fully a third smaller than when we first landed.

The pot had just begun to bubble when I heard his voice calling to me from the bank, where he had wandered away without my noticing. I ran up.

"Come and listen," he said, "and see what you make of it." He held his hand cupwise to his ear, as so often before.

"Now do you hear anything?" he asked, watching me curiously.

We stood there, listening attentively together. At first I heard only the deep note of the water and the hissings rising from its turbulent surface. The willows, for once, were motionless and silent. Then a sound began to reach my ears faintly, a peculiar sound—something like the humming of a distant gong. It seemed to come across to us in the darkness from the waste of swamps and willows opposite. It was repeated at regular intervals, but it was certainly neither the sound of a bell nor the hooting of a distant steamer. I can liken it to nothing so much as to the sound of an immense gong, suspended far up in the sky, repeating incessantly its muffled metallic note, soft and musical, as it was repeatedly struck. My heart quickened as I listened.

"I've heard it all day," said my companion. "While you slept this afternoon it came all round the island. I hunted it down, but could never get near enough to see—to localize it correctly. Sometimes it was overhead, and sometimes it seemed under the water. Once or twice, too, I could have sworn it was not outside at all, but within myself—you know—the way a sound in the fourth dimension is supposed to come."

I was too much puzzled to pay much attention to his words. I listened carefully, striving to associate it with any known familiar sound I could think of, but without success. It changed in the direction, too, coming nearer, and then sinking utterly away into remote distance. I cannot say that it was ominous in quality, because to me it seemed distinctly musical, yet I must admit it set going a distressing feeling that made me wish I had never heard it.

"The wind blowing in those sand-funnels," I said determined to find an explanation, "or the bushes rubbing together after the storm perhaps."

"It comes off the whole swamp," my friend answered. "It comes from everywhere at once." He ignored my explanations. "It comes from the willow bushes somehow—"

"But now the wind has dropped," I objected. "The willows can hardly make a noise by themselves, can they?"

His answer frightened me, first because I had dreaded it, and secondly, because I knew intuitively it was true.

"It is because the wind has dropped we now hear it. It was drowned before. It is the cry, I believe, of the—"

I dashed back to my fire, warned by the sound of bubbling that the stew was in danger, but determined at the same time to escape further conversation. I was resolute, if possible, to avoid the exchanging of views. I dreaded, too, that he would begin about the gods, or the elemental forces, or something else disquieting, and I wanted to keep myself well in hand for what might happen later. There was another night to be faced before we escaped from this distressing place, and there was no knowing yet what it might bring forth.

"Come and cut up bread for the pot," I called to him, vigorously stirring the appetizing mixture. That stew-pot held sanity for us both, and the thought made me laugh.

He came over slowly and took the provision sack from the tree, fumbling in its mysterious depths, and then emptying the entire contents upon the ground-sheet at his feet.

"Hurry up!" I cried; "it's boiling."

The Swede burst out into a roar of laughter that startled me. It was forced laughter, not artificial exactly, but mirthless.

"There's nothing here!" he shouted, holding his sides.

"Bread, I mean."

"It's gone. There is no bread. They've taken it!"

I dropped the long spoon and ran up. Everything the sack had contained lay upon the ground-sheet, but there was no loaf.

The whole dead weight of my growing fear fell upon me and shook me. Then I burst out laughing too. It was the only thing to do: and the sound of my laughter also made me understand his. The stain of psychical pressure caused it—this explosion of unnatural laughter in both of us; it was an effort of repressed forces to seek relief; it was a temporary safety-valve. And with both of us it ceased quite suddenly.

"How criminally stupid of me!" I cried, still determined to be consistent and find an explanation. "I clean forgot to buy a loaf at Pressburg. That chattering woman put everything out of my head, and I must have left it lying on the counter or—"

"The oatmeal, too, is much less than it was this morning," the Swede interrupted.

Why in the world need he draw attention to it? I thought angrily.

"There's enough for tomorrow," I said, stirring vigorously, "and we can get lots more at Komorn or Gran. In twenty-four hours we shall be miles from here."

"I hope so—to God," he muttered, putting the things back into the sack, "unless we're claimed first as victims for the sacrifice," he added with a foolish laugh. He dragged the sack into the tent, for safety's sake, I suppose, and I heard him mumbling to himself, but so indistinctly that it seemed quite natural for me to ignore his words.

Our meal was beyond question a gloomy one, and we ate it almost in silence, avoiding one another's eyes, and keeping the fire bright. Then we washed up and prepared for the night, and, once smoking, our minds unoccupied with any definite duties, the apprehension I had felt all day long became more and more acute. It was not then active fear, I think, but the very vagueness of its origin distressed me far more that if I had been able to ticket and face it squarely. The curious sound I have likened to the note of a gong became now almost incessant, and filled the stillness of the night with a faint, continuous ringing rather than a series of distinct notes. At one time it was behind and at another time in front of us. Sometimes I fancied it came from the bushes on our left, and then again from the clumps on our right. More often it hovered directly overhead like the whirring of wings. It was really everywhere at once, behind, in front, at our sides and over our heads, completely surrounding us. The sound really defies description. But nothing within my knowledge is like that ceaseless muffled humming rising off the deserted world of swamps and willows.

We sat smoking in comparative silence, the strain growing every minute greater. The worst feature of the situation seemed to me that we did not know what to expect, and could therefore make no sort of preparation by way of defense. We could anticipate nothing. My explanations made in the sunshine, moreover, now came to haunt me with their foolish and wholly unsatisfactory nature, and it was more and more clear to us that some kind of plain talk with my companion was inevitable, whether I liked it or not. After all, we had to spend the night together, and to sleep in the same tent side by side. I saw that I could not get along much longer without the support of his mind, and for that, of course, plain talk was imperative. As long as possible, however, I postponed this little climax, and tried to ignore or laugh at the occasional sentences he flung into the emptiness.

Some of these sentences, moreover, were confoundedly disquieting to me, coming as they did to corroborate much that I felt myself; corroboration, too—which made it so much more convincing—from a totally different point of view. He composed such curious sentences, and hurled them at me in such an inconsequential sort of way, as though his main line of thought was secret to himself, and these fragments were mere bits he found it impossible to digest. He got rid of them by uttering them. Speech relieved him. It was like being sick.

"There are things about us, I'm sure, that make for disorder, disintegration, destruction, our destruction," he said once, while the fire blazed between us. "We've strayed out of a safe line somewhere."

And, another time, when the gong sounds had come nearer, ringing much louder than before, and directly over our heads, he said as though talking to himself:

"I don't think a gramophone 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 dimensional 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 tourists would have been welcome.

Yet what I felt of dread was no ordinary ghostly fear. It was infinitely greater, stranger, and seemed to arise from some dim ancestral sense of terror more profoundly disturbing than anything I had known or dreamed of. We had "strayed," as the Swede put it, into some region or some set of conditions where the risks were great, yet unintelligible to us; where the frontiers of some unknown world lay close about us. It was a spot held by the dwellers in some outer space, a sort of peep-hole whence they could spy upon the earth, themselves unseen, a point where the veil between had worn a little thin. As the final result of too long a sojourn here, we should be carried over the border and deprived of what we called "our lives," yet by mental, not physical, processes. In that sense, as he said, we should be the victims of our adventure—a sacrifice.

It took us in different fashion, each according to the measure of his sensitiveness and powers of resistance. I translated it vaguely into a personification of the mightily disturbed elements, investing them with the horror of a deliberate and malefic purpose, resentful of our audacious intrusion into their breeding-place; whereas my friend threw it into the unoriginal form at first of a trespass on some ancient shrine, some place where the old gods still held sway, where the emotional forces of former worshippers still clung, and the ancestral portion of him yielded to the old pagan spell.

At any rate, here was a place unpolluted by men, kept clean by the winds from coarsening human influences, a place where spiritual agencies were within reach and aggressive. Never, before or since, have I been so attacked by indescribable suggestions of a "beyond region," of another scheme of life, another revolution not parallel to the human. And in the end our minds would succumb under the weight of the awful spell, and we should be drawn across the frontier into their world.

Small things testified to the amazing influence of the place, and now in the silence round the fire they allowed themselves to be noted by the mind. The very atmosphere had proved itself a magnifying medium to distort every indication: the otter rolling in the current, the hurrying boatman making signs, the shifting willows, one and all had been robbed of its natural character, and revealed in something of its other aspect—as it existed across the border to that other region. And this changed aspect I felt was now not merely to me, but to the race. The whole experience whose verge we touched was unknown to humanity at all. It was a new order of experience, and in the true sense of the word unearthly.

"It's the deliberate, calculating purpose that reduces one's courage to zero," the Swede said suddenly, as if he had been actually following my thoughts. "Otherwise imagination might count for much. But the paddle, the canoe, the lessening food—"

"Haven't I explained all that once?" I interrupted viciously.

"You have," he answered dryly; "you have indeed."

He made other remarks too, as usual, about what he called the "plain determination to provide a victim"; but, having now arranged my thoughts better, I recognized that this was simply the cry of his frightened soul against the knowledge that he was being attacked in a vital part, and that he would be somehow taken or destroyed. The situation called for a courage and calmness of reasoning that neither of us could compass, and I have never before been so clearly conscious of two persons in me—the one that explained everything, and the other that laughed at such foolish explanations, yet was horribly afraid.

Meanwhile, in the pitchy night the fire died down and the wood pile grew small. Neither of us moved to replenish the stock, and the darkness consequently came up very close to our faces. A few feet beyond the circle of firelight it was inky black. Occasionally a stray puff of wind set the willows shivering about us, but apart from this not very welcome sound a deep and depressing silence reigned, broken only by the gurgling of the river and the humming in the air overhead.

We both missed, I think, the shouting company of the winds.

At length, at a moment when a stray puff prolonged itself as though the wind were about to rise again, I reached the point for me of saturation, the point where it was absolutely necessary to find relief in plain speech, or else to betray myself by some hysterical extravagance that must have been far worse in its effect upon both of us. I kicked the fire into a blaze, and turned to my companion abruptly. He looked up with a start.

"I can't disguise it any longer," I said; "I don't like this place, and the darkness, and the noises, and the awful feelings I get. There's something here that beats me utterly. I'm in a blue funk, and that's the plain truth. If the other shore was—different, I swear I'd be inclined to swim for it!"

The Swede's face turned very white beneath the deep tan of sun and wind. He stared straight at me and answered quietly, but his voice betrayed his huge excitement by its unnatural calmness. For the moment, at any rate, he was the strong man of the two. He was more phlegmatic, for one thing.

"It's not a physical condition we can escape from by running away," he replied, in the tone of a doctor diagnosing some grave disease; "we must sit tight and wait. There are forces close here that could kill a herd of elephants in a second as easily as you or I could squash a fly. Our only chance is to keep perfectly still. Our insignificance perhaps may save us."

I put a dozen questions into my expression of face, but found no words. It was precisely like listening to an accurate description of a disease whose symptoms had puzzled me.

"I mean that so far, although aware of our disturbing presence, they have not found us—not 'located' us, as the Americans say," he went on. "They're blundering about like men hunting for a leak of gas. The paddle and canoe and provisions prove that. I think they feel us, but cannot actually see us. We must keep our minds quiet—it's our minds they feel. We must control our thoughts, or it's all up with us."

"Death, you mean?" I stammered, icy with the horror of his suggestion.

"Worse—by far," he said. "Death, according to one's belief, means either annihilation or release from the limitations of the senses, but it involves no change of character. You don't suddenly alter just because the body's gone. But this means a radical alteration, a complete change, a horrible loss of oneself by substitution—far worse than death, and not even annihilation. We happen to have camped in a spot where their region touches ours, where the veil between has worn thin"—horrors! he was using my very own phrase, my actual words—"so that they are aware of our being in their neighborhood."

"But who are aware?" I asked.

I forgot the shaking of the willows in the windless calm, the humming overhead, everything except that I was waiting for an answer that I dreaded more than I can possibly explain.

He lowered his voice at once to reply, leaning forward a little over the fire, an indefinable change in his face that made me avoid his eyes and look down upon the ground.

"All my life," he said, "I have been strangely, vividly conscious of another region—not far removed from our own world in one sense, yet wholly different in kind—where great things go on unceasingly, where immense and terrible personalities hurry by, intent on vast purposes compared to which earthly affairs, the rise and fall of nations, the destinies of empires, the fate of armies and continents, are all as dust in the balance; vast purposes, I mean, that deal directly with the soul, and not indirectly with more expressions of the soul—"

"I suggest just now—" I began, seeking to stop him, feeling as though I was face to face with a madman. But he instantly overbore me with his torrent that had to come.

"You think," he said, "it is the spirit of the elements, and I thought perhaps it was the old gods. But I tell you now it is—neither. These would be comprehensible entities, for they have relations with men, depending upon them for worship or sacrifice, whereas these beings who are now about us have absolutely nothing to do with mankind, and it is mere chance that their space happens just at this spot to touch our own."

The mere conception, which his words somehow made so convincing, as I listened to them there in the dark stillness of that lonely island, set me shaking a little all over. I found it impossible to control my movements.

"And what do you propose?" I began again.

"A sacrifice, a victim, might save us by distracting them until we could get away," he went on, "just as the wolves stop to devour the dogs and give the sleigh another start. But—I see no chance of any other victim now."

I stared blankly at him. The gleam in his eye was dreadful. Presently he continued.

IV

"It's the willows, of course. The willows mask the others, but the others are feeling about for us. If we let our minds betray our fear, we're lost, lost utterly." He looked at me with an expression so calm, so determined, so sincere, that I no longer had any doubts as to his sanity. He was as sane as any man ever was. "If we can hold out through the night," he added, "we may get off in the daylight unnoticed, or rather, undiscovered."

"But you really think a sacrifice would—"

That gong-like humming came down very close over our heads as I spoke, but it was my friend's scared face that really stopped my mouth.

"Hush!" he whispered, holding up his hand. "Do not mention them more than you can help. Do not refer to them by name. To name is to reveal; it is the inevitable clue, and our only hope lies in ignoring them, in order that they may ignore us."

"Even in thought?" He was extraordinarily agitated.

"Especially in thought. Our thoughts make spirals in their world. We must keep them out of our minds at all costs if possible."

I raked the fire together to prevent the darkness having everything its own way. I never longed for the sun as I longed for it then in the awful blackness of that summer night.

"Were you awake all last night?" he went on suddenly.

"I slept badly a little after dawn," I replied evasively, trying to follow his instructions, which I knew instinctively were true, "but the wind, of course—"

"I know. But the wind won't account for all the noises."

"Then you heard it too?"

"The multiplying countless little footsteps I heard," he said, adding, after a moment's hesitation, "and that other sound—"

"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 have been 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 unimaginative, stolid!

"Now listen," he said. "The only thing for us to do is to go on as though nothing had happened, follow our usual habits, go to bed, and so forth; pretend we feel nothing and notice nothing. It is a question wholly of the mind, and the less we think about them the better our chance of escape. Above all, don't think, for what you think happens!"

"All right," I managed to reply, simply breathless with his words and the strangeness of it all; "all right, I'll try, but tell me one more thing first. Tell me what you make of those hollows in the ground all about us, those sand-funnels?"

"No!" he cried, forgetting to whisper in his excitement. "I dare not, simply dare not, put the thought into words. If you have not guessed I am glad. Don't try to. They have put it into my mind; try your hardest to prevent their putting it into yours."

He sank his voice again to a whisper before he finished, and I did not press him to explain. There was already just about as much horror in me as I could hold. The conversation came to an end, and we smoked our pipes busily in silence.

Then something happened, something unimportant apparently, as the way is when the nerves are in a very great state of tension, and this small thing for a brief space gave me an entirely different point of view. I chanced to look down at my sand-shoe—the sort we used for the canoe—and something to do with the hole at the toe suddenly recalled to me the London shop where I had bought them, the difficulty the man had in fitting me, and other details of the uninteresting but practical operation. At once, in its train, followed a wholesome view of the modern skeptical world I was accustomed to move in at home. I thought of roast beef, and ale, motor-cars, policemen, brass bands, and a dozen other things that proclaimed the soul of ordinariness or utility. The effect was immediate and astonishing even to myself. Psychologically, I suppose, it was simply a sudden and violent reaction after the strain of living in an atmosphere of things that to the normal consciousness must seem impossible and incredible. But, whatever the cause, it momentarily lifted the spell from my heart, and left me for the short space of a minute feeling free and utterly unafraid. I looked up at my friend opposite.

"You damned old pagan!" I cried, laughing aloud in his face. "You imaginative idiot! You superstitious idolater! You—"

I stopped in the middle, seized anew by the old horror. I tried to smother the sound of my voice as something sacrilegious. The Swede, of course, heard it too—the strange cry overhead in the darkness—and that sudden drop in the air as though something had come nearer.

He had turned ashen white under the tan. He stood bolt upright in front of the fire, stiff as a rod, staring at me.

"After that," he said in a sort of helpless, frantic way, "we must go! We can't stay now; we must strike camp this very instant and go on—down the river."

He was talking, I saw, quite wildly, his words dictated by abject terror—the terror he had resisted so long, but which had caught him at last.

"In the dark?" I exclaimed, shaking with fear after my hysterical outburst, but still realizing our position better than he did. "Sheer madness! The river's in flood, and we've only got a single paddle. Besides, we only go deeper into their country! There's nothing ahead for fifty miles but willows, willows, willows!"

He sat down again in a state of semi-collapse. The positions, by one of those kaleidoscopic changes nature loves, were suddenly reversed, and the control of our forces passed over into my hands. His mind at last had reached the point where it was beginning to weaken.

"What on earth possessed you to do such a thing?" he whispered with the awe of genuine terror in his voice and face.

I crossed round to his side of the fire. I took both his hands in mine, kneeling down beside him and looking straight into his frightened eyes.

"We'll make one more blaze," I said firmly, "and then turn in for the night. At sunrise we'll be off full speed for Komorn. Now, pull yourself together a bit, and remember your own advice about not thinking fear!"

He said no more, and I saw that he would agree and obey. In some measure, too, it was a sort of relief to get up and make an excursion into the darkness for more wood. We kept close together, almost touching, groping among the bushes and along the bank. The humming overhead never ceased, but seemed to me to grow louder as we increased our distance from the fire. It was shivery work!

We were grubbing away in the middle of a thickish clump of willows where some driftwood from a former flood had caught high among the branches, when my body was seized in a grip that made me half drop upon the sand. It was the Swede. He had fallen against me, and was clutching me for support. I heard his breath coming and going in short gasps.

"Look! By my soul!" he whispered, and for the first time in my experience I knew what it was to hear tears of terror in a human voice. He was pointing to the fire, some fifty feet away. I followed the direction of his finger, and I swear my heart missed a beat.

There, in front of the dim glow, something was moving.

I saw it through a veil that hung before my eyes like the gauze drop-curtain used at the back of a theater—hazily a little. It was neither a human figure nor an animal. To me it gave the strange impression of being as large as several animals grouped together, like horses, two or three, moving slowly. The Swede, too, got a similar result, though expressing it differently, for he thought it was shaped and sized like a clump of willow bushes, rounded at the top, and moving all over upon its surface—"coiling upon itself like smoke," he said afterwards.

"I watched it settle downwards through the bushes," he sobbed at me. "Look, by God! It's coming this way! Oh, oh!"—he gave a kind of whistling cry. "They've found us."

I gave one terrified glance, which just enabled me to see that the shadowy form was swinging towards us through the bushes, and then I collapsed backwards with a crash into the branches. These failed, of course, to support my weight, so that with the Swede on top of me we fell in a struggling heap upon the sand. I really hardly knew what was happening. I was conscious only of a sort of enveloping sensation of icy fear that plucked the nerves out of their fleshly covering, twisted them this way and that, and replaced them quivering. My eyes were tightly shut; something in my throat choked me; a feeling that my consciousness was expanding, extending out into space, swiftly gave way to another feeling that I was losing it altogether, and about to die.

An acute spasm of pain passed through me, and I was aware that the Swede had hold of me in such a way that he hurt me abominably. It was the way he caught at me in falling.

But it was the pain, he declared afterwards, that saved me; it caused me to forget them and think of something else at the very instant when they were about to find me. It concealed my mind from them at the moment of discovery, yet just in time to evade their terrible seizing of me. He himself, he says, actually swooned at the same moment, and that was what saved him.

I only know that at a later date, how long or short is impossible to say, I found myself scrambling up out of the slippery network of willow branches, and saw my companion standing in front of me holding out a hand to assist me. I stared at him in a dazed way, rubbing the arm he had twisted for me. Nothing came to me to say, somehow.

"I lost consciousness for a moment or two," I heard him say. "That's what saved me. It made me stop thinking about them."

"You nearly broke my arm in two," I said, uttering my only connected thought at the moment. A numbness came over me.

"That's what saved you!" he replied. "Between us, we've managed to set them off on a false tack somewhere. The humming has ceased. It's gone—for the moment at any rate!"

A wave of hysterical laughter seized me again, and this time spread to my friend too—great healing gusts of shaking laughter that brought a tremendous sense of relief in their train. We made our way back to the fire and put the wood on so that it blazed at once. Then we saw that the tent had fallen over and lay in a tangled heap upon the ground.

We picked it up, and during the process tripped more than once and caught our feet in sand.

"It's those sand-funnels," exclaimed the Swede, when the tent was up again and the firelight lit up the ground for several yards about us. "And look at the size of them!"

All round the tent and about the fireplace where we had seen the moving shadows there were deep funnel-shaped hollows in the sand, exactly similar to the ones we had already found over the island, only far bigger and deeper, beautifully formed, and wide enough in some instances to admit the whole of my foot and leg.

Neither of us said a word. We both knew that sleep was the safest thing we could do, and to bed we went accordingly without further delay, having first thrown sand on the fire and taken the provision sack and the paddle inside the tent with us. The canoe, too, we propped in such a way at the end of the tent that our feet touched it, and the least motion would disturb and wake us.

In case of emergency, too, we again went to bed in our clothes, ready for a sudden start.

It was my firm intention to lie awake all night and watch, but the exhaustion of nerves and body decreed otherwise, and sleep after a while came over me with a welcome blanket of oblivion. The fact that my companion also slept quickened its approach. At first he fidgeted and constantly sat up, asking me if I "heard this" or "heard that." He tossed about on his cork mattress, and said the tent was moving and the river had risen over the point of the island, but each time I went out to look I returned with the report that all was well, and finally he grew calmer and lay still. Then at length his breathing became regular and I heard unmistakable sounds of snoring—the first and only time in my life when snoring has been a welcome and calming influence.

This, I remember, was the last thought in my mind before dozing off.

A difficulty in breathing woke me, and I found the blanket over my face. But something else besides the blanket was pressing upon me, and my first thought was that my companion had rolled off his mattress on to my own in his sleep. I called to him and sat up, and at the same moment it came to me that the tent was surrounded. That sound of multitudinous soft pattering was again audible outside, filling the night with horror.

I called again to him, louder than before. He did not answer, but I missed the sound of his snoring, and also noticed that the flap of the tent was down. This was the unpardonable sin. I crawled out in the darkness to hook it back securely, and it was then for the first time I realized positively that the Swede was not here. He had gone.

I dashed out in a mad run, seized by a dreadful agitation, and the moment I was out I plunged into a sort of torrent of humming that surrounded me completely and came out of every quarter of the heavens at once. It was that same familiar humming—gone mad! A swarm of great invisible bees might have been about me in the air. The sound seemed to thicken the very atmosphere, and I felt that my lungs worked with difficulty.

But my friend was in danger, and I could not hesitate.

The dawn was just about to break, and a faint whitish light spread upwards over the clouds from a thin strip of clear horizon. No wind stirred. I could just make out the bushes and river beyond, and the pale sandy patches. In my excitement I ran frantically to and fro about the island, calling him by name, shouting at the top of my voice the first words that came into my head. But the willows smothered my voice, and the humming muffled it, so that the sound only traveled a few feet round me. I plunged among the bushes, tripping headlong, tumbling over roots, and scraping my face as I tore this way and that among the preventing branches.

Then, quite unexpectedly, I came out upon the island's point and saw a dark figure outlined between the water and the sky. It was the Swede. And already he had one foot in the river! A moment more and he would have taken the plunge.

I threw myself upon him, flinging my arms about his waist and dragging him shorewards with all my strength. Of course he struggled furiously, making a noise all the time just like that cursed humming, and using the most outlandish phrases in his anger about "going inside to Them," and "taking the way of the water and the wind," and God only knows what more besides, that I tried in vain to recall afterwards, but which turned me sick with horror and amazement as I listened. But in the end I managed to get him into the comparative safety of the tent, and flung him breathless and cursing upon the mattress where I held him until the fit had passed.

I think the suddenness with which it all went and he grew calm, coinciding as it did with the equally abrupt cessation of the humming and pattering outside—I think this was almost the strangest part of the whole business perhaps. For he had just opened his eyes and turned his tired face up to me so that the dawn threw a pale light upon it through the doorway, and said, for all the world just like a frightened child:

"My life, old man—it's my life I owe you. But it's all over now anyhow. They've found a victim in our place!"

Then he dropped back upon his blankets and went to sleep literally under my eyes. He simply collapsed, and began to snore again as healthily as though nothing had happened and he had never tried to offer his own life as a sacrifice by drowning. And when the sunlight woke him three hours later—hours of ceaseless vigil for me—it became so clear to me that he remembered absolutely nothing of what he had attempted to do, that I deemed it wise to hold my peace and ask no dangerous questions.

He woke naturally and easily, as I have said, when the sun was already high in a windless hot sky, and he at once got up and set about the preparation of the fire for breakfast. I followed him anxiously at bathing, but he did not attempt to plunge in, merely dipping his head and making some remark about the extra coldness of the water.

"River's falling at last," he said, "and I'm glad of it."

"The humming has stopped too," I said.

He looked up at me quietly with his normal expression. Evidently he remembered everything except his own attempt at suicide.

"Everything has stopped," he said, "because—"

He hesitated. But I knew some reference to that remark he had made just before he fainted was in his mind, and I was determined to know it.

"Because 'They've found another victim'?" I said, forcing a little laugh.

"Exactly," he answered, "exactly! I feel as positive of it as though—as though—I feel quite safe again, I mean," he finished.

He began to look curiously about him. The sunlight lay in hot patches on the sand. There was no wind. The willows were motionless. He slowly rose to feet.

"Come," he said; "I think if we look, we shall find it."

He started off on a run, and I followed him. He kept to the banks, poking with a stick among the sandy bays and caves and little back-waters, myself always close on his heels.

"Ah!" he exclaimed presently, "ah!"

The tone of his voice somehow brought back to me a vivid sense of the horror of the last twenty-four hours, and I hurried up to join him. He was pointing with his stick at a large black object that lay half in the water and half on the sand. It appeared to be caught by some twisted willow roots so that the river could not sweep it away. A few hours before the spot must have been under water.

"See," he said quietly, "the victim that made our escape possible!"

And when I peered across his shoulder I saw that his stick rested on the body of a man. He turned it over. It was the corpse of a peasant, and the face was hidden in the sand. Clearly the man had been drowned, but a few hours before, and his body must have been swept down upon our island somewhere about the hour of the dawn—at the very time the fit had passed.

"We must give it a decent burial, you know."

"I suppose so," I replied. I shuddered a little in spite of myself, for there was something about the appearance of that poor drowned man that turned me cold.

The Swede glanced up sharply at me, an undecipherable expression on his face, and began clambering down the bank. I followed him more leisurely. The current, I noticed, had torn away much of the clothing from the body, so that the neck and part of the chest lay bare.

Halfway down the bank my companion suddenly stopped and held up his hand in warning; but either my foot slipped, or I had gained too much momentum to bring myself quickly to a halt, for I bumped into him and sent him forward with a sort of leap to save himself. We tumbled together on to the hard sand so that our feet splashed into the water. And, before anything could be done, we had collided a little heavily against the corpse.

The Swede uttered a sharp cry. And I sprang back as if I had been shot.

At the moment we touched the body there rose from its surface the loud sound of humming—the sound of several hummings—which passed with a vast commotion as of winged things in the air about us and disappeared upwards into the sky, growing fainter and fainter till they finally ceased in the distance. It was exactly as though we had disturbed some living yet invisible creatures at work.

My companion clutched me, and I think I clutched him, but before either of us had time properly to recover from the unexpected shock, we saw that a movement of the current was turning the corpse round so that it became released from the grip of the willow roots. A moment later it had turned completely over, the dead face uppermost, staring at the sky. It lay on the edge of the main stream. In another moment it would be swept away.

The Swede started to save it, shouting again something I did not catch about a "proper burial"—and then abruptly dropped upon his knees on the sand and covered his eyes with his hands. I was beside him in an instant.

I saw what he had seen.

For just as the body swung round to the current the face and the exposed chest turned full towards us, and showed plainly how the skin and flesh were indented with small hollows, beautifully formed, and exactly similar in shape and kind to the sand-funnels that we had found all over the island.

"Their mark!" I heard my companion mutter under his breath. "Their awful mark!"

And when I turned my eyes again from his ghastly face to the river, the current had done its work, and the body had been swept away into mid-stream and was already beyond our reach and almost out of sight, turning over and over on the waves like an otter.

[afterourhearts]

amy’s fav moist banana bread & starbucks hack

There’s not much to do outside of med school besides studying, cooking, eating, and then more studying (although lately, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp has been ruining my productivity ... I don’t even like it because of the animals, I like it for the same reason I like playing The Sims ... it’s a slow “at your own pace” sort of game that allows you to construct the “perfect house/living space” by purchasing materials and “working hard” ... I guess the whole ‘work hard reap benefits’ mentality has really stuck with me even in my leisure time, but I’m getting off topic and you came here for a recipe ...) 

Anyways, theres nothing like a good ole’ loaf of moist banana bread to perk up the cold weather, especially when paired with a cup of hot chocolate or steamed milk. Years ago, after tasting the most amazing banana bread at Bob Evans (haha no it was not some bourgeois bakery it was Bob ok) I made it a goal to re-create only moist banana breads as well. I’ve had the dry stuff and I don’t like it. So here goes a recipe that has been tested many times in our family (mom even played an experimental hand) and this is what we’ve nailed it down to. (Btw, I’m lame and the photo below is not one I took, credits go to Well Plated by Erin, BUT this is not based on her recipe at all but rather our own experimenting)

Ingredients: 

-Butter/flour to grease the loaf pan -1.5 cups flour -1 tsp baking soda and 1/2 tsp baking powder -1 tsp salt -Dashes of cinnamon & nutmeg (optional, doesn’t seem to make a huge difference because banana will be the primary flavor)  -1/3 cup granulated white sugar -1/3 cup honey  -1/3 cup vegetable oil  -1/3 cup greek yogurt -2 large eggs, beaten -3 ripe bananas mashed (not totally liquified ... it can be chunky) -1 tsp vanilla extract -1.5-2 cups of fresh blueberries OR chocolate chips OR finely diced nuts ... whatever add in floats your boat! 

Directions: -Preheat oven to 350 and butter/flour your loaf pan (this recipe calls for those standard loaf pins not the cute mini ones ... makes a good amount of bread!) -Whisk dry ingredients together (flour, baking soda + powder, salt, spices) and in a different bowl mix the wet ingredients with sugar (sugar, honey, vanilla, eggs, oil, greek yogurt) -In the wet ingredients bowl, stir in bananas and add-ins gently. -Finally add the dry ingredients and stir until just blended. -Pour into loaf ban and bake for an hour or so. CHECK to make sure you don’t overtake as that will dry this baby out and nobody wants dry bread :( I usually start checking around 45 minutes in, every 5 min, until toothpick comes out almost completely clean, because it will keep cooking a little even after you take it out. This step is crucial!! Everyone’s oven is different. 

Let me know if you try this recipe and hope you enjoy!!!

BONUS Starbucks Hacking: Make the most out of your free holiday iced drink!!

-Order a venti latte (I like caramel brûlée for this recipe) with extra espresso shots which would have been like an 8 dollar drink but you’re getting it free so yay -Because it’s massive, you take it home and place in blender along with a bunch of add ins! I like to put chocolate flavored protein powder (I use GNC’s Gold Standard Whey), 2 or 3 frozen bananas, a crapload of Greek Yogurt, and a few big globs of peanut butter. This adds a HUGE protein boost, tastes like a caffeinated chocolate & PB shake, and extends my free drink for the whole week lolz -Makes a TON of drinks, like at least 3-4 tall glasses. Chill in fridge and drink in the morning in lieu of the daily coffee. (Only thing better than your AM caffeine is getting a healthy protein boost alongside it!!)

That’s it for this first segment of Amy’s recipes hahaha, stay tuned for more and enjoy the holiday baking!

#bananabread #recipe #baking #chocolatebanana #bananablueberry #starbucks #caramelbrulee #smoothie #proteinshake #nomnom #caffeine

[paulbenedictblog]

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Fox news State of the Franchise: Can talented Cardinals roster mesh on the field? - NFL.com

Fox news

Where does your franchise stand heading into 2020? Adam Atrocious devices the table by providing a Disclose of the Franchise detect at all 32 teams, zeroing in on the predominant figures to search and setting the stakes for the season to shut support.

Members of the Arizona Cardinals group, Cards followers across the sphere and folk of you who're extremely jealous of Kliff Kingsbury's dwelling:

The Cardinals made some fearless moves before last season, giving up on Steve Wilks and Josh Rosen after handiest one 300 and sixty five days and bringing in Kingsbury and Kyler Murray. It used to be an exhilarating offseason for the franchise. The Cardinals improved to 5-10-1 in 2019, which can presumably maybe no longer seem fancy the relaxation to bear an very impartial appropriate time, nonetheless it completely used to be a obvious model for a team coming off a brutal 3-13 advertising and marketing campaign. So, yeah, the change important to occur after '18. It's fancy when The Disclose of business utterly revamped Michael Scott's persona after one season after they removed the ill-fitting shirts and slicked support hair. That is typically what the Cardinals did last offseason.

How the Cardinals bought here

Let's opt a immediate detect support on the americaand downs of the 2019 season:

The highs:

Kyler Murray's debut. I acknowledged last 300 and sixty five days that his first sport used to be going to be so lit, and it used to be. The Cardinals fell in the support of by 18 aspects to the Detroit Lions, nonetheless Murray erased that deficit in the fourth quarter to ship the sport into previous in model time.

Trading for Kenyan Drake. It regarded a dinky queer to me before everything. I'll be factual about that. Drake hadn't basically broken out in three-plus seasons with Miami, so it regarded fancy a stretch to evaluate he used to be going to be appropriate model in Arizona. However it completely actually worked out pretty properly, especially in his first sport with the Cardinals. Drake had 162 complete yards and a touchdown in opposition to the 49ers, who had the league's top-ranked protection, on Thursday Evening Football. And definite, the Cardinals lost that sport, nonetheless it completely used to be a fairly frosty evening.

Chandler Jones had 19 sacks. And a league-high eight forced fumbles, besides. That roughly production is the capacity you accomplish first-team All-Pro honors.

Beating the Seahawks in Week 16. And they did it with Brett Hundley at QB for a great deal of the 2nd half of after Murray left with an damage. Whereas you may perhaps presumably maybe very properly be in the center of a 5-preserve shut season, a victory fancy here is huge.

Rosen faltering in Miami. I know this would presumably maybe even be a queer notify to encompass in this category, nonetheless Josh Rosen didn't exactly extinguish it with the Dolphins last season. It's seemingly you'll presumably maybe presumably presumably also very properly be no longer rooting in opposition to him, nonetheless it completely would bear been impartial appropriate the Cardinals' luck if he had long gone to Miami and grew to turn into into Dan Marino. (Google that name, younger folk. Marino used to be appropriate model.)

The lows:

Tying the Lions in Murray's debut. It used to be superior that Murray rallied the Cardinals leisurely in his career debut. Would bear been greater had they won the sport.

Shedding streaks. It's seemingly you'll presumably maybe presumably presumably also no longer consider this nonetheless the Cardinals had been winless in their first four games of the season, going 0-3-1. Then they won three consecutive games in opposition to the Bengals, Falcons and Giants. However they completed the season with impartial appropriate two wins over their closing 9. That used to be roughly a bummer.

Head coach: Kliff Kingsbury. Many had been skeptical of Kingsbury, and I am definite some of you even happy in the reality that the Cardinals completed 21st in complete offense. So grand for the whiz kid from Lubbock. However or no longer it's important to dig a dinky bit deeper to survey the improvements the Cardinals made on offense. The Cardinals scored 22.6 aspects per sport, which is 8.5 aspects greater than their 2018 sensible. They scored at least 25 aspects in 9 games, after having handiest one such sport the outdated season. They furthermore space a club file with seven games with out a giveaway. The team used to be clearly sharp in the impartial path. I would even inform it used to be a appropriate model first season for individuals who judge about how complicated the division is. Obvious, Kingsbury did fabricate some errors. There had been instances when he may perhaps presumably maybe presumably also bear been too concerned to expose the sphere how artful he used to be, nonetheless the team confirmed barely ample promise to bear me believing. And for proper, detect at this dwelling.

Quarterback: Kyler Murray. The Cardinals made a fearless choice to draft Murray first overall a 300 and sixty five days after selecting Josh Rosen 10th overall, and I applauded them for it. Mostly due to I am an Angels fan and I am tickled he's no longer playing for the A's. However it completely used to be a appropriate model soccer transfer, too. Murray grew to turn into the sixth participant in NFL history to post 3,500 passing yards and 500 dashing yards in a season, becoming a member of Cam Newton because the handiest inexperienced persons to invent it. Murray, the 2019 Offensive Rookie of the 300 and sixty five days, space the franchise rookie file for passing yards and touchdowns. Maybe the greatest notify, despite the reality that, is that Murray space the NFL rookie file with 211 consecutive stagger attempts without an interception. That is spectacular. He's indubitably one of basically the most fun avid gamers in the league and barely makes soccer detect fancy parkour. However he's no longer blindly obtainable heaving the ball into decided scenarios and turning the ball over. That can presumably maybe presumably even be basically the most spectacular notify he did last 300 and sixty five days. Neatly, that and these plays impartial here.

However tranquil, the dearth of interceptions (impartial appropriate 12 on 500-plus attempts) is improbable.

Projected 2020 MVP: Larry Fitzgerald, wide receiver. I know I may perhaps presumably maybe bear to tranquil inform Murray or even DeAndre Hopkins. However this team tranquil belongs to Larry Fitz. He's totaled 144 receptions over the previous two seasons. And basically, he may perhaps presumably maybe bear to tranquil pause up ceding some targets to Hopkins. So, yeah. Let me strive this again.

Projected 2020 MVP (for proper): Murray. It all comes down to him. Obvious, the Cardinals beat Seattle leisurely last season with Murray sidelined for a great deal of the 2nd half of (they built a double-digit lead when Murray used to be in the sport, mind you). However if Arizona goes to be the IT team this season (extra on that in a 2nd), it all comes down to Murray's model. And the precedent has been space. Lamar Jackson impartial appropriate won the MVP in his 2nd season. Patrick Mahomes won the MVP in his 2nd season and the Neat Bowl in his third 300 and sixty five days. Murray goes to opt to be the MVP, preserve shut a Neat Bowl and transfer into a dwelling fancy Kingsbury to top that.

2020 breakout superstar: Byron Murphy, cornerback. All impartial. I had Christian Kirk here last season, and I roughly imagine he may perhaps presumably maybe presumably also toughen twiddling with Larry Fitz and Nuk. However I invent no longer desire to be accused of being some dreary delusion dork, so let me fabricate bigger my horizons a dinky bit and discuss about Murph, who, fancy Kirk, performed high college ball in Arizona (Saguaro High in Scottsdale). He's furthermore one other native guy who didn't play at ASU fancy he may perhaps presumably maybe bear to tranquil bear, nonetheless we may perhaps presumably maybe presumably also no longer obtain into that. The Cardinals drafted him with the first soak up the 2nd round of the 2019 NFL Draft. He used to be pressed into motion with Robert Alford suffering a leg damage in coaching camp and Patrick Peterson serving a six-sport suspension to launch the season. He started every sport and performed properly in stretches. Look, he used to be a rookie. However he's proficient. He had 10 passes defensed last 300 and sixty five days and here is typically a sizable season for him.

Contemporary face to perceive: DeAndre Hopkins, wide receiver. Even with all of the predominant-match-role receivers who bear been traded in most up-to-date years, the DeAndre Hopkins deal used to be an absolute stunner -- no longer only appropriate for the compensation it took to construct Hopkins. Neatly, yeah. Maybe it used to be impartial appropriate the shockingly low price for his services and products. How are you able to build Hopkins for the relaxation lower than a first-rounder? Anyway, Hopkins is coming off support-to-support seasons with 100-plus receptions (he underachieved with impartial appropriate 96 in 2017), and he never drops the soccer. Plus, he's entering his age-28 season, meaning he's tranquil properly within his prime. I know that I've made pretty about a references to Kliff Kingsbury's dwelling. However this used to be the Kliff Kingsbury's dwelling of deals for the Cardinals.

The competitive urgency index is: GETTING THERE. I know that all individuals desires to discuss about Arizona's huge offseason and fabricate claims that this team may perhaps presumably maybe presumably actually bear a 49ers-fancy turnaround. And I am here for it. However sooner than we basically jump into that, there is one notify I basically desire to take care of and I'll invent that after we discuss ...

Week 1 at 49ers. The Cardinals had been the winners in the offseason, nonetheless how will that translate on the gridiron? Arizona may perhaps presumably maybe presumably also fabricate a sizable opening-week statement if it goes up north and defeats the defending NFC champions.

Week 7 vs. Seahawks. The Cardinals bear a complex stretch in October with three consecutive roadies on the Panthers, Jets and Cowboys. Then they play host to the Seahawks sooner than their bye week.

Week 17 at Rams. For Cardinals followers, all you may perhaps presumably maybe very properly be hoping for at this point is that this sport capacity something for the playoffs. (For Arizona.)

Will the Cardinals be ready to ...

Avoid being the Browns of 2020? Quit me if you occur to may perhaps presumably maybe presumably also bear gotten heard this one sooner than ... A team surrounds its 2nd-300 and sixty five days, Heisman Trophy-successful quarterback from Oklahoma with an all-world receiver and is anticipated to compete at a in point of fact high level. Neatly, that dispute didn't figure out very properly for the Cleveland Browns, who suffered one other humiliating season in 2019. So the Cardinals will desire to be definite that that that they are doing everything imaginable to preserve away from a an identical fate. At least Arizona appears to be like to be to luxuriate in greater leadership on the pinnacle. However indubitably one of the most huge causes the Browns failed last 300 and sixty five days is that they couldn't block. They allowed 50 sacks for the third consecutive season. This offseason, the Cardinals locked up model out D.J. Humphries on a brand new three-300 and sixty five days contract and added OT Josh Jones in the third round of the draft (which appears to be like to be to be an improbable price). So it looks fancy the Cardinals bear adequately addressed the dispute. You add that to finds fancy Justin Murray, who grew to turn into a starter last 300 and sixty five days, and the Cardinals may perhaps presumably maybe bear to tranquil be ready to pull this off up entrance.

Quit folk from throwing the soccer? The Cardinals had Chandler Jones and his 19 sacks. They furthermore had Patrick Peterson (granted, he uncared for six games) and Budda Baker in the secondary. So that you simply may judge that shall be a fairly appropriate model stagger protection. And yet, Arizona ranked 31st in the league in stagger protection last 300 and sixty five days. That impartial appropriate doesn't pretty add up. It's roughly fancy for individuals who may perhaps presumably maybe presumably also bear gotten a huge ensemble TV forged and it impartial appropriate doesn't work. Like the remake of V. You had Morena Baccarin. Morris Chestnut. Alan Tudyk. You had Steve the Pirate on a community TV expose. How does that fail? No matter. The Cardinals opt to fix that, despite the reality that. I fancy that they picked up Isaiah Simmons in the draft. I presumed that he used to be basically the most exciting non-quarterback in this class. Whereas you occur to ever watched a Clemson sport, you perceive Simmons plays all over the discipline. He's the roughly participant I ask to manufacture an instantaneous impact. The Cardinals furthermore had some nice signings with Devon Kennard and De'Vondre Campbell, who shall be half of Jordan Hicks at linebacker and fabricate the protection pretty solid.

Receive a feature for Dan Arnold? Now not getting a great deal of production from the tight pause dispute is an Arizona tradition, grand fancy hitting Portillo's each time I am in metropolis for spring coaching. Arnold flashed a dinky bit last 300 and sixty five days. All impartial, he caught six passes and two of them went for touchdowns. One of them used to be in opposition to Cleveland in Week 15. I made a humorous myth about him with a Weezer reference in our "That Helps No One" segment on NFL Delusion Stay. I know Maxx Williams is the incumbent starter and bought a two-300 and sixty five days extension leisurely last season, nonetheless Arnold has the size (6-foot-6, 220 kilos) and positively looks the piece. And having one other tight pause choice in this offense may perhaps presumably maybe presumably even be sizable. And dazzling, I am panicked I may perhaps presumably maybe presumably also no longer obtain George Kittle on my delusion team.

... folk are overlooking: The correct genius of the DeAndre Hopkins change. Obviously, anytime you obtain a participant fancy Hopkins, that's superior. Even greater, he didn't price a first-round take fancy the one Buffalo spent on Stefon Diggs (price it). The Cardinals did piece with David Johnson in the deal, and that used to be a appropriate model notify. Mostly due to Johnson's contract used to be going to swamp the Cardinals for a in point of fact very long time to shut support -- fancy the capacity Todd Gurley had turn into a burden for the Rams. The notify is, the Rams bought nothing for Gurley, who used to be launched. The Cardinals bought indubitably one of basically the most exciting receivers on this planet in their address Houston. For that by myself, it used to be a huge transfer for the Cardinals. The opposite piece is there used to be some troubling tape on Johnson last 300 and sixty five days, especially with plays fancy this:

I'm in a position to no longer unsee that. I hope DJ can rebound in Houston. However this used to be such a huge transfer for the Birds.

... folk are overthinking: Can Kenyan Drake basically invent it again? I invent obtain this demand in my mentions loads, and I heed. Drake had high expectations in Miami and never basically lived as a lot as them. However you may perhaps presumably maybe inform that for a great deal of dudes who performed for the Dolphins. Lawful detect at Ryan Tannehill and Minkah Fitzpatrick and what they've carried out since sharp to new teams. And if you occur to detect on the numbers, Drake used to be a sizable enchancment over Johnson in phrases of yards per try (4.8 to about a.7), yards after contact (2.69 to 2.05) and compelled uncared for tackles (17 p.c to 6.4 p.c). Now, Arizona tranquil has backup RB Trip Edmonds, who had some nice flashes, and rookie Eno Benjamin has been added to the aggregate, nonetheless Drake has the sixth-best seemingly snide salary on the team this season. He's going to be featured.

For the 2020 season to be triumphant in success, the Cardinals MUST:

Cease out some games. The Cards lost 5 games by seven aspects or less, and that doesn't encompass the Week 1 tie. Even despite the reality that it used to be superior to rally from that deficit, they tranquil had alternatives to preserve shut that season opener. Eradicate some of those shut ones and this team on the total is a playoff contender.

Proceed to invent Murray. But another time, this goes support to no longer eager to be the Browns of 2020. If the Cardinals completed 8-8 and Murray looked fancy an MVP candidate, that's loads easier to abdominal than scuffling to eight wins and questioning in case your quarterback goes in the impartial path.

Be competitive in the NFC West. This looks fancy basically the most exciting division in soccer. The Cardinals confirmed they may perhaps presumably maybe well also compete with the massive boys at instances last 300 and sixty five days, nonetheless that desires to be a weekly occurrence now.

Over again, I am pondering this squad. The Cardinals are poised to be indubitably one of basically the most exciting teams to search. I am trying no longer to let what took place to the Browns last season cloud my judgement. Or dampen my enthusiasm. There may perhaps be a great deal of motive in the support of optimism. Apart from, Season 2 used to be basically the most exciting season of The Disclose of business. So they bear that going for them.

[moonlitoutpost]

A Year of Games - 2017

It’s a new year! So why not get in on the action and recount the year previous, the last 12 moon cycles, just like everyone else with a top of the top’s list. They’re a fun way to catch up on things and stuff that may have slipped through the cracks, a shorthand, basically just cheating off your friend’s answers before a test. But there is no test, and we didn’t study either.

Having recently read through some great lists ourselves, we thought we’d write our own! Below are a few of our favorite games that we have played in 2017. These choices are unique in that they are not limited to the calendar year, more of things that we played during it :)

1. Summon Nights 5

Summon Nights 5 is a beautiful mix of bewitching artwork, endearing story, and sharp gameplay. An addicting brew of a finely sculpted battle system and lackadaisical leisure. For us, it was our dark horse of the year, an unexpected upsetter in the roster of contenders. A last minute entry, bought/purchase on a whim, that went on to rise it’s way to the top, as our game of the year.

Right out of its lush packaging, its mysterious and decked out box held our stare long before we officially put the cartridge in. And somehow after this, we were instantly hooked! The game initially was released in 2013 yet thanks to this english translation, we were able to enjoy the adventure in its full glory. It’s always our pleasure to encounter a sleeper hit that seems to have almost criminally gone under the radar. Most likely by happenstance, the graphics reminded us of a really sharp DreamCast game, and that only makes us like it even more ;)

Though the game’s scope isn’t massive, what is in view, is satisfying and rather comes off as quite focused. The amount of systems that they have given you to play with are so rewarding and joyfully exhausting when you really get a handle on them. Slyly unfolding an intricate depth when it comes to the combat, and conducted by a brilliant understanding of pacing.

If it were a candy: Summon Nights would be a rich nuggety strategic RPG, wrapped in the light airyness of a visual novel. A charming game from top to bottom, we can’t wait to play more in this series!

2. Asura’s Wrath

A game that offers no moderation, no holds barred, takes no prisoners, and leaves nothin’ on the table. Asura’s Wrath deals in grander rather than subtlety. It’s not often that a game’s vibe can be considered timeless, but strangely enough Asuras Wrath by all account balances that idea of strange classical timelessness and pull no punches insanity.  Every passing moment in it was just a new trip to revel in, as we blissfully savored every second.

It’s one of those oddities that you could say is by definition less than a ‘game’, but more than a movie.  It’s an experience worth having. A power nouveau of uninhabited ideas, truly one in a million.

3. Fortnite

If PUBG is the hard-R inescapable action flick of the summer, then Fortnite is the Saturday-morning cartoon spinoff complete with its own tie-in sugar-soaked cereal and line of action figures: some assembly required!

It’s fast, it’s frantic, it’s flashy, it’s vibrant! Mad-dash blitzing our way to surviving 98 other players has been a theme for us this year. While many multi-player games left victories ringing hollow, in Fortnite, the highs have never felt higher! Every moment has its own risks and rewards, with juuuust the right amount of luck sprinkled on top. Bang! Your team suddenly clashes head to head with another. You’re well stocked, but you could be better off. Shots are fired. Your team walks away from the fight - but just barely. Your emerging status to win has now been cut severely. It’s these calculated risks that makes the game more exciting! If you take them, you could come out worse for wear. But with a similar roll of the dice…you could come out king. And that has the potential to be in every fight, with the lasting effects rippling through the rest of the match.

We don’t know if we’ve felt like anything like this in any other multiplayer game. That’s what we like about it, and that’s where the best moments come from. from the hijinks of playing together and with friends, and the moments where it comes down to the wire, clawing your way to win an extreme underdog victory: it’s just a great flow!

Every match of Fortnite gives you the prospect to come away with a story. For many games it is often promised but rarely accomplished. However this is one that actually feels like it.

4. Hamtaro: Ham-Ham Heartbreak

The Gameboy is one of our most beloved systems, home to many of our all-time favorite games. Within its unassuming enclosure, there are many unique treasures and exciting surprises. This game is definitely one of them. If you are already familiar with the Hamtaro universe, you’ll recognize the perfect mix of adventure and adorability. If not though, get ready to embark on a game that is expressive, immersive and above all, heartwarming!

In this low-key adventure game you get to experience the world as the pint-size of a hamster. There’s a particular feeling it offers. Something about being shrunk down, tiny, a miniature evergladen, roaming through a world of macro amalgamations. You might say there’s an air of nearby secrets, or a peaceful openness, and this game lends to that atmosphere with a beautifully rendered playground of pixels. And like any fun adventure game, surprises are hidden behind every corner, making you want to poke and prod at everything in the world.

The pastel color palette is really pleasing and the art style is loose and free. Everything has so many different expressions and reactions to things, it really brings out the character, and goes a long way in tying the experience together. The animated Hamtaro show translates really well to the game, we found that like ‘wow, they captured it perfectly!’ Everything from the vibe to the design, is like you’re dropped into an episode of the anime itself!

In a world where so many recent visual novels and adventures games come with choices that hold the balance of life and death on the line, sometimes it’s nice to stop and smell the roses *hiff hiff*

No hamster will remember your choice..and that’s nice!

5. Persona 5

A long-awaited sequel to one our favorite JRPGS, Persona 5 improves on everything when it comes to the mechanics and the style of its predecessor. From the killer score to the fleshed-out battle system, a lot of it feels just grand! Each change that was introduced seemed to galvanize the strengths of previous work. It often feels like a combination of many smart changes and improvements, such as but not limited to: more meaningful fights, memorable dungeons/dungeon themes, more realized stealth mechanics, a more robust velvet room, increased save points, the addition of Momentos, more locations to visit, more interesting side quests, and more recreational activities than you have time in a day. The boss fights were super creative, leaps and bounds above what they had already laid out in 4. Dungeons feel like places, no longer just randomized tile sets of pre-fab pieces, making progressing through feel more significant.

For as many good things as we have to say about it, the experience is not without flaw. While it comes out hot at the gate, a long-winded pacing only serves to fatigue its excellence and only lessens the verocity of the latter half of the game. Going hand in hand with this, while it comes down to personal preference, both the story and characters, minus a few standouts, didn’t resonate with us as nearly as much as their Persona 4 counterparts. These two things combined made the final stretch in this feel more laborious and really made us wonder if dropping a dungeon or 20 hours would have made for a tighter experience. There is an art form to knowing when to end something. While it might be more evolutionary than revolutionary, Persona 5 is still one of the best RPG’s we’ve played in recent memory. It’s almost a compliment to say how hard it is to top yourself and how big an act Persona 4 is to follow. :)

Special Shoutouts:

1. Pocket Camp: We never played New Leaf, We Never Got to be mayor, we never got to design our own town, and we never got the 3DS. But we’re absolutely infatuated with Animal Crossing. This latest addition to the series is definitely an enjoyable one. It’s a little less full-featured, but you still get to interact with a motley crew of cute animals, and make that perfect decorating vision, and that’s just enough of a hit to stave off the encroaching cold grip of death before losing consciousness. It may not see like a big deal to people who cut their teeth in New Leaf, but for those who have missed their home away from home, Pocket Camp gave us just enough of a familiar taste of milk and honey, without the rule of a tyrannical higher power lording over you with monetary conflict..oh wait a minute…

2. HQ: Late last year we learned about a novel little app that changed our schedule completely. Twice a day we found ourselves dropping everything we did to pull out our phone in an attempt to win fabulous cash prizes. Whether it was calling live streams to halt, sneaking glances at it during work, or loosing track of time in public. Assembling the crew, nearby friends, anyone who would listen, in a huddle trying to remember what the progenitor of the Oreo was. (it’s the Hydrox cookie by the way).

HQ is the realization of a dream most people have, of being a contestant on a game show, all while being strangely futuristic. It’s more than an app, it’s a fun social drip of spontaneity.

3. Paragon: the game we spent the single most time with this year, We were interested in it more from an academic point than anything, and that eventually progressed into kind of liking it. We’ve played it a lot, and have had some pretty crazy moments, including a surprising amount of meeting new people while playing it. Even going as far as stumbling into seeing ourselves in someone else’s gameplay footage! :) It’s been the best year in our opinion for released heroes, and there have been many improvements both big and small. A lot of design choices still require smoothing out, but we feel it’s come a long way since then.

Due to very recent events, its days have now become numbered. Rumors had been swirling in the under realm for the past few weeks, and its future was pulled into question. Now with this latest announcement, the final nails have been put in the coffin. It’s sad to see a game with such promise pulled before the broadstokes really got all the details. A bit abrupt, though if you were literate it wouldn’t be hard to make out the writing on the walls. While it didn’t cast as towering a shadow as its contemporaries, its unique presence in the world of MOBAS will surely be missed.

This is actually the third time we’ve come back and written this last paragraph specifically. As news of Paragon’s decaying state were raised, we came back to re-amend it, each iteration getting a little more bleak, up until posting it today, having moments ago, with a tinge of morose irony, just finished filling out a refund form. So now that the final word has been given, now we’re here: as opposed to looking forward, we’re instead forced to look back.

New beginnings and new ends, the textbook definition of a new year

#summon nights 5 #summon nights #gaijinworks #jrpg #rpg #srpg #video games #games #gameboy #ps4 #ps vita #2018 #2017 #top of 2017 #game of the year #hewow #persona #persona 5 #hq #scott rogowsky #animal crossing #pocket camp #paragon #;-; #epic games #fortnite #battle royale #moba #hamtaro #ham-ham heartbreak

[travelworldnetwork]

Club Med and Peisey-Vallandry, France. Photo: Club Med

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Picture the scene: you're in a warm, woodsy brasserie perched in the French Alps, peckish after a morning's fun and games in the snow, snuggling up around a table with loved ones and new friends and licking your lips at the prospect of a deliciously cheesy lunch. There, on the table, emitting a heavenly scent to any fromage fan, is a bubbling pot of Fondue Savoyarde – a speciality of the Savoie region of France in which we're holidaying.

Cooked with white wine and garlic, this creamy ensemble is flavoured with three different alpine cow's milk cheeses – comte, emmental and beaufort – and is nigh on impossible to look at, and smell, without wanting to dip in your fork, to which you can attach crusty chunks of baguette nestled in the bread baskets on the table.

Exceedingly tempting, too, is raclette, another pungent alpine cheese that's being toasted to near-melting point on a small grill. We just have to scrape it off and drip it on to our baked potatoes and charcuterie. Complemented by vinaigrette-laced salads, Chignin-Bergeron (a crisp Savoie white wine) and a dessert of blueberry tart, whipped cream and espresso, this is a typical lunch in the Savoie region, and indeed in other parts of the Alps, and brings not just immense satisfaction but also provides fuel for further alpine adventures in the afternoon.

As we depart Brasserie des Pistes, the chalet-style venue for this calorific feast, the easiest thing to do would be to get back on the real pistes. A two-minute walk down the mountain-side, below the brasserie's sun terrace, is one of the myriad chairlifts of the Paradiski region, one of the Alps' premier winter sports areas.

Boasting 425 kilometres of ski runs, with altitudes ranging from 1200 metres to 3250 metres, Paradiski is spread across the gorgeous Tarentaise valley and sub-divided into three major zones: Les Arcs, Peisey-Vallandry and La Plagne. We're staying at Club Med Peisey-Vallandry, which is located at virtually the midway point of the region.

Walk, ski or snowboard out of the resort's back door and you'll find apres-ski bars, said chairlift (which whisks you to a variety of slopes suitable for all levels) and the Vanoise Express, a cable car that links Peisey-Vallandry with La Plagne. It bobs 1824 metres across the valley – and 380 metres above the valley floor at its highest point – in just four minutes.

We board this engineering marvel using the Paradiski pass that allows you to hop on the region's buses, chairlifts and funiculars (Club Med guests get the pass for "free" as part of its all-inclusive package). Unveiled in 2003 and made up of two double-decker cars that can each hold 200 people, the Vanoise Express is the longest cable car in the world without pylons.

Right now, we probably wouldn't be able to see any pylons even if there were any. The sun had been wrestling with the fog all morning and the fog has temporarily won the battle, wreathing the whole valley. In clear weather, spectacular views are a given through the windows and glass-bottomed floors, with everything from quaint little alpine villages to Mont Blanc, Europe's highest mountain, there to be gawped at.

As we close in on La Plagne, however, we can just about make out the tips of the frozen pine trees we're drifting above. My fellow passengers debate which movie or TV show this spooky scene reminds them of. There's talk of Game of Thrones and its zombie White Walkers. Some of the older folk – OK, me – mention The Fog, a 1980 film by horror director John Carpenter. A few hours later, I find myself wallowing in nostalgia once more and daydreaming about The Chronicles of Narnia. I half expect the White Witch or Aslan to make an appearance as we tramp through the magical, snow-drenched Vanoise National Park, a few kilometres from our resort.

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With the fog-induced poor visibility dashing any post-lunch downhill skiing plans, we opt for a safer and more leisurely activity: snowshoeing. We clip on our plastic snow-shoes, and grab some walking poles at the park's Nordic Centre, a chalet-style hub where you can hire equipment and source maps detailing local trails.

With the fog dissipating, we hike, in the company of local guides Yann and Marie, through this sublime slice of countryside – France's first national park, founded in 1963 –beneath towering, pine-carpeted peaks and past avenues of larch trees, sprinkled with white powder. Apart from the sound of us scrunching through the snow, and of water trickling under ice-blanketed streams, it's blissfully silent. It would have been much noisier here a few centuries ago, says Marie. She reveals that this was a bustling silver and lead mining area and we pass an abandoned stone building, formerly the French School of Mines, where engineering students from across the country would come to learn their trade.

Back then, the area was called Monts d'Argent ("mountains of silver", or money). A little further on, we come to a cluster of rustic wooden homes, icicles hanging from the roofs, in the one-street hamlet of Beaupraz aux Lanches. There is no sign of life as we shuffle along. We're told people live here in summer but in winter it's empty, almost eerily so, due to the threat of avalanches. With our cold breath wisping through the air and the setting sun causing bursts of pink and purple to mark the darkening sky, we return to the Nordic Centre, where the effects of a particularly torrid avalanche in 1995 are depicted in framed wall photos. Then we return, by bus, to base camp where roaring fires, hot chocolate, cocktails and nibbles await in the welcoming lounge area of Club Med Peisey-Vallandry.

Decked out with plush leather and fabric sofas, stone columns and timber beams, this 284-room resort opened in 2006 and is set to be "refreshed" over the next two northern summers. It has a quainter, more traditional alpine vibe than Club Med Les Arcs Panorama, which was unveiled, 10 kilometres away as the bearded vulture flies, last December.

While not as cool and contemporary as its sleek new baby sister, Club Med Peisey-Vallandry resort has a cosy charm, with many of the same perks and facilities as Les Arcs Panorama, such as free skiing and snowboarding classes, heated indoor and outdoor pools, all-inclusive meals and alcohol and quirky evening entertainment by the affable, youthful Club Med staff known as GOs (gentils organisateurs).

The Peisey-Vallandry location, with its cute village setting and wide array of easily-accessible slopes, might have more appeal, especially for beginners. And, as we discovered, if you fancy a break from the pistes and the resort, you're not short of alternative activities, whether it's fondue-munching in local brasseries or falling under the spell of the beguiling Vanoise National Park.

FIVE MORE THINGS TO DO IN VANOISE NATIONAL PARK

CROSS-COUNTRY SKIING

Harking back to the days when hardy alpine folk would use skis to chase game and gather firewood, this form of skiing involves propelling yourself across snow-covered terrain, and guarantees a good upper-body workout.

HORSE AND PONY RIDES

Trot through the snowy forests in the saddle, keeping an eye out for local wildlife such as the alpine ibex, a type of wild goat that flourishes in these mountains.

BIATHLON

Try your hand at one of the most watchable of the Winter Olympic events, combining skiing and rifle shooting.

DOG SLEDDING

Glide across the park's winter wonderland in a husky-pulled sled and learn how to harness, steer and brake.

NORDIC WALKING

A step up from snow-shoeing, you'll eat up more ground – and burn off more calories – with this fast-paced hiking technique.

TRIP NOTES

Steve McKenna was a guest of Club Med and Peisey-Vallandry Tourism Board.

MORE

traveller.com.au/france

peisey-vallandry.com

FLY

Air France flies to Paris from Sydney and Melbourne; code share with Qantas or Etihad. See qantas.com; etihad.com

The nearest train station to Peisey-Vallandry is Gare de Landry, a five-hour trip from Paris. See en.oui.sncf

STAY

A seven-night winter stay (December-April) at Club Med Peisey-Vallandry is from $2385 a person; children under four, free. Nearest airports to the resort are Grenoble and Geneva, about 2½ hours by road. See clubmed.com

from traveller.com.au

#Travel Guide

[lamoille-house]

Top Things Cannot be Missed out in RAS AL KHAIMAH

A holiday destination which has the most unique touristy places and activities to offer is none other than Dashing Dubai. We have all heard enough about the exorbitant skyscrapers, unending sand dunes and the tempting shopping options, but there is a lot more to add on your Dubai tour packages than the usual tourist destinations that are the city of Ras Al Khaimah.

Ras Al Khaimah is one of the most beautiful city in UAE. This city lies amidst the Hajjar Mountains and the Majestic Arabian Gulf. Ras Al khaimah is an ideal destination for those seeking a weekend getaway in UAE. This rising emirates boast of sandy deserts, beautiful mountains and lush greenery dotted with a series of lagoons and creeks. Ras Al Khaimah is based on rich cultural heritage, diverse landscapes and temperate climate. It is a great escape for quality value adventure, leisure travel and business trips. There are many tourist attractions to visit around this fascinating city and these are the things you can’t afford to miss in Ras Al Khaimah.

Desert Safari: Ras al Khaimah offer a delightful experience in the form of dune bashing which is later followed by the unique setup of dinner right in the middle of the desert camp during your desert safari. This means that you can enjoy the delicacies of the Arabs in the breezy and calm desert. Apart from these if you still have the appetite for the tourist spots then Ras al Khaimah definitely won’t disappoint you.

Mountain safari on Hajjar Mountains: the second thing you should make sure of not missing is experiencing mountain safari on hajjar Mountains. It is the best way to discover the true beauty of the Arabian Desert and along the way to the destination you will witness the best scenic drive. There are many mountain related sports adventures available.

The northern emirates mountain Jebel Jais has become one of the most popular camping spots in the UAE and is one of the top places to visit in Ras Al Khaimah. For breathtaking views and some adventure sports to get your adrenaline pumping there are lot of opportunities in Ras Al Khaimah. Adrenaline junkies will love speeding down the world longest zip line. Jebel jais is a perfect place for thrill seekers and adventure sports enthusiasts.

Al Sawan Race track is flocked by visitors and tourist from the months of October to April to witness the most traditional sport of the Middle East. Camel racing carried out in the nest of its form at Ras Al khaimah. This time honoured sport has robots driving the camels instead of kids and adults. Camel racing sport is a favourite sport right from the rulers of the country to the local citizen.

Enjoy a picnic at Ras Al Khaimah Saqr Park: there is no shortage of family friendly thing to do in Ras Al Khaimah. A family outing to the emirates is incomplete without a visit to Saqr Park. The lush green lawns dotted with beaches make the perfect venue to enjoy a picnic to soak in the pleasant weather. Visitors can hop on a train circling Saqr or take a refreshing walk to explore its green lawns .A serene lake and a waterfall is also one of the most popular places to visit in Ras Al Khaimah especially families. Saqr Park also has restaurants, swimming pools and children’s playground for some weekend fun for everyone.

The largest water park in the UAE and one of the most popular places to visit in Ras al Khaimah is Iceland Water Park. It is a haven on summer days, with more than 30 water slides a huge wave pool, high end private cabanas an Olympic sized lap pool, a beautiful beach and dedicated kids pool and play area. The gargantuan water park has something for everyone. Squeeze in a game of basketball on the Polar Game court, try out some adventurous water slides or simply laze around in the snow river.

Khatt Hot Springs offering therapeutic hot water springs at a place near the hajjar Mountains that looks almost like a castle. The Khatt hot springs gives you relaxation with its Ayurvedic treatments, hot stone and precious stone treatments. It is a perfect place for the tourist to relax and rejuvenate in a natural atmosphere with 3 natural mineral water hot springs. The Khatt hot springs resorts offer various amenities including a picnic location that adds to its advantage of being a weekend getaway.

Falcon show is one of the most traditional and still loved traditions of the UAE. Falconry is displayed with much funfair in the city of Ras al Khaimah at the Banyan Tree Al Wadi resort. Hawks, falcons, owls, eagles and kestrels are some of the most amazing species in this show. Enjoy the show along with a tour of the Falcony News breeding and rehabilitation center, which in itself is a one of a kind experience.

With its beautiful resorts, historic spots and exciting sports facilities, Ras Al Khaimah is fast becoming a favourite place among travellers. Residents as well as tourist in the UAE will definitely love this place.

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[wingsofilia]

What Chess Piece represents you?

Fiora

White Queen

You are the White Queen. The Queen is the most powerful piece on the board, meaning you are strong in some aspect of your life. Physically, emotionally, mentally, one of these is your strong suit. The queen can move anywhere she wishes upon the board, meaning you have your hands full with all the different tasks and choices in your life. Just be careful not to overwhelm yourself. For all your poise and status, your position will surely crumble under the weight of your pride.

Farina

Black Bishop

You are a Black Bishop. There is something you believe in, be it an oath, a phrase, a promise. It's what keeps the bishop on the diagonal path it takes on the board. You live by this creed and infect others with it. You can easily turn others to your own opinion, making them listen to you and eager to hear what you have to say next. But be careful with this power, for every iron fist will eventually shatter. Every uprising started with just one slip of the tongue.

Florina

White King

You are the White King. You are the most important piece on the board, often called the weakest. But you are not weak in terms of tradition and status. The king gives orders to others, ensures difficult tasks are done, and makes the hardest decisions. Yes, the king's movement is weak but in every other aspect, they are strong and important, for it is them that the game is fought for, to begin with. Do not forget your place, my dear king. Even if tradition suffocates you, even if your status haunts your every move. You are the only one who can do this. Be strong, my king.

#(( DASH GAMES - Leisure at Camp )) #// Do people do dash games anymore? I see them so rarely these days :( #// All that aside I'm shocked at how much I agree with these #(( FIORA - Wings of Honor )) #(( FARINA - Wings of Power )) #(( FLORINA - Wings of Perseverance ))

[stunningvacationtips]

Top 5 Family Weekend Getaway Ideas This Easter 2015

The Easter holidays are a fun time of year to be taking a trip as a household. In this article, We've shared couple of suggestions for Easter household vacations below.

Easter is the excellent time to travel to a brand-new location, go on a road trip with children or explore a high-end medspa resort. Our list of consists of lovely hotels which provide 5 star service, spaces with a view as well as a choice of fun activities. Easter getaways are significantly becoming preferred, as it offers every person a wonderful opportunity to hang around together as a family or couple. Going to one of the Easter vacations and also make your Easter much more special, purposeful and remarkable. Locate out the top getaway destinations for Easter this spring season.

Weekend Getaways For Easter:

The Royal Hawaiian

Get away to the Hawaiian islands to appreciate the tropical sun, swimming, searching as well as kicking back health facility treatments. Abhasa Waikiki Medical spa is situated at the Royal Hawaiian Resort in Waikiki. The medspa provides a full series of sessions, including massage therapies, body treatments, facials and also hair care. The day spa's 4 outdoor cabanas are popular, so make certain to reserve your treatment ahead of time if you intend to enjoy your massage therapy outside in the garden. Visitors could select from Japanese, Swedish, Hawaiian and other treatments from around the world.

Palm Springs Hotel, East London

Perfectly placed on the Sunlight Coastline, Palm Springs Resort rests on a river tidewater with private access to spectacular coastlines, the Umlele River, and also Gulu Nature Book. The reserve is plentiful with bird and animal life, with bushbuck, hornbills, fish eagles, Knysna loeries, and also bottlenose dolphins seen all year round.

Visitors have an option of huts as well as camp websites. Each unit rests a maximum of 5 or 6 individuals, making it excellent for bigger groups. Enjoy a game of snooker, table tennis, volley ball, or putt-putt. Water sporting activities consist of searching, diving, canoeing, and fishing, or you can enjoy a leisurely day of beachcombing and also sunlight tanning on the beach. East London is just 15 mins away. Right here you could enjoy buying, movies, the amazing aquarium with amusing seal series, and also the East London Gallery with the just well-known Dodo egg in the world.

Portland's White House

Surrounded by perfectly polished yards in the heart of Portland, Portland's White House shows historic style, colonial elegance and also quaint beauty. Showing a rich record as well as endearing hospitality, this elegant resort supplies an unforgettable sojourn back in time. Remarkable colonial architecture, gorgeous interiors and exquisite gardens echo the gold age of The U.S.A.. Perfectly designated collections are large with high ceilings and large home windows that let natural light flood in. Fusing timeless design with contemporary functionality, suites are climate regulated, with luxurious features, consisting of miniature bars, LCD TVs, and cordless high-speed Internet. Extravagant health facility suites flaunt French sparkling wine on arrival and also Moonstruck Chocolate presents on the cushion. Delight in superb breakfasts in the primary eating area with newly brewed coffee from the complimentary espresso coffee shop. Pleasant hospitality as well as exceptional company greets you on arrival at this luxurious hotel. Upscale services include doorperson help and assist with travel arrangements.

The Algarve, Portugal

The Algarve is prominent for Easter as well as possesses some great highlights. The excursion drivers organize Easter egg hunts on a large range throughout the city, thus keeping the youngsters entailed as well as entertained. For those who have a craving for sweets, the popular Portuguese delicious chocolate thrills will certainly not allow you resist. Folar de Pascoa is conventional sweet bread prepared on Easter to symbolize Jesus sharing food during the last dinner. After you are finished with the Easter events, unwind on the long sandy coastlines or dash off to among the fairway in The Algarve.

Sugar Bay Resort

The island of St. Thomas in the Caribbean is renowned for its white sandy coastlines and lush tropical vegetation. With non-stop flights from significant East Coastline cities, St. Thomas is easy enough to reach to be able to bring the entire family members. Sugar Bay Resort provides complete family holiday rates as well as a selection of activities. Kids could hang out at the resort's Kids' Klub, readily available to youngsters ages 4-12 from 10am to 4pm. While children are hectic at the child's facility, moms and dads could go snorkeling, diving as well as book a relaxing massage therapy at the health club. There is also tennis, basketball, beach ball, catamaran trips as well as lounging beside 3 freshwater pools. Discover even more concerning the Sugar Bay Resort and prepare your all inclusive family vacation to the Caribbean.

#all inclusive #destination #flights #flights from #get away #getaway #holidays #hotels #resort #travel #travel to #travel websites #trip #vacation

[wingsofilia]

Waifu Meter

“Um. Sis, I think you broke the machine.”

 :) 

#(( DASH GAMES - Leisure at Camp )) #(( CRACK - Turbulent Winds )) #// Shindan really trying to butter up Fiora here xD

[wingsofilia]

// Tag Dump incoming

#(( FIORA - Wings of Honor )) #(( FARINA - Wings of Power )) #(( FLORINA - Wings of Perseverance )) #(( IC - Flying High )) #(( OOC - Mayz Speaks )) #(( ASK - Mission Request )) #(( SUBMISSION - Resupply )) #(( DASH COMMS - Scouting Report )) #(( CRACK - Turbulent Winds )) #(( DASH GAMES - Leisure at Camp )) #(( PROMO - Reinforcements Received )) #(( MEME - Mission Briefing )) #(( SELF-PROMO - Behold the Wings )) #(( AESTHETICS - Knightly Insights )) #(( HEADCANON - Word Carries Like Wind )) #(( MOBILE - On the Move )) #(( VERSE - Post-Game )) #(( VERSE - Pre-Game )) #(( VERSE - Peri-Game ))