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.
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