A sense of awe awakened, true, but of awe touched somewhere by a vague terror. Some essence emanated from them that besieged the heart. The willows seem to give off a threatening air… 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!īut once on the island and with night approaching, a strange feeling of dread begins to fall over the travellers. 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, 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. 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.Īlready Jim has shown that he feels the river as a mighty presence with its own character. Driven forward by the fast waters and a howling wind, they have some difficulty landing for the night on one of the small temporary islands that spring up in this swampy stretch of the river, but finally they manage it… They decide to continue anyway, both being experienced rivermen and having done many journeys together before. They have reached a place where the river splits into three branches, and know that a high flood is due. Our unnamed narrator (I shall call him Jim) and his friend, known only as the Swede, have travelled far along the Danube on a pleasure excursion in a little canoe. When two young men who are canoeing down the Danube in the middle of a great flood decide to camp for the night on a tiny island, what could possibly go wrong? Time to find out in this week’s…Īfter 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.

Algernon blackwood's the willows