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.
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