THE RECLUSE
there, stood gaunt, dead trees, and in places half-submerged logs rotted. As far as he could look to his right nd left, the swamp spread its interminable length. He debated for a moment; he looked again at the logs, the stumps, and the occasional unfallen trees that rose at intervals. Then he ran forward.
The going was easy for a time. He walked across great tree-trunks lying in the ooze, or jumped from stump to stump, or swam through patches of stagnant water covered by a luminous green slime. Sometimes he dragged himself through mud that made a husky sucking sound when he pulled out his legs … like the sound of ghouls feeding. On one or two occasions it seemed to him that a shadow passed overhead, a sweeping shadow as of some huge nocturnal thing… He shuddered as he stumbled on.
And he came to an open space, brown-covered. Unthinking, he plunged in and swam forward. The entire surface instantaneously lived with a million million wriggling shapes that swarmed in hellish motion. Hissing snakes moved from his path and piled up on each side; cold vipers slithered across his back and neck and squirmed like fat worms in a carcass. He dived under the surface and swam as long as he could. When he rose, the water was moving with mounting waves of serpents, and great bunches of snakes threshed on every side. The affirighted air trembled in one mighty hiss that ascended from the hordes.
When at last the water ended in mud and he pulled himself upon a rotting log, he lay for a long while regaining his strength. The seething mass of reptiles gradually subsided, and when he took up his way again was quiescent. Above, the comets had fled the sky, and the heavens were void and absolutely empty in a terrible blackness.
Hour after hour he ploughed through foul swamps and slimy water. The noisome odors of the place made him dizzy after a time, but he fought onward. He sometimes thought of casting away the sword which hung heavy and cumbersome at his side, but he kept it. He knew not what he might meet.
He must have traveled leagues before he staggered from the slough unexpectedly. He was on firm ground, but the forest had ceased. He lay down on the earth for a time to rest his weary body, and carelessly looked back across the slough. From far behind came a shuddering heave; as he watched, something gigantic and horrible rose out of the depths and mounted upward. And from the top of the soaring bulk he saw a head swaying from side to side with one huge central eye gleaming blindly.
In a moment he was on his feet and trotting forward until the slough and the monster were entombed in the deepening gloom behind.
The ground was level with a tall grass or weed that rustled gently. And a soft night-wind began to rise in fitful moans and whisper with the grass in a reedy rustling. The plaintive music came dim from the sounding darkness, infinitely sombre, in strange, minor harmonies and chants of loneliness as if the drooping soul of misery itself were floating through the reeds. From every side as he passed came, low and elusive, the rhythmic cadences, a mournful litany from the susurrous grass. All the plain seemed weeping at his passing, and he became filled with a desire to rush through the trackless extent and soothe the crying of the grass. But there rose before his eyes the shadowy, haunting beauty of his Loma: in one fearful second the sounds melted together and streamed in speeding waves to the utmost darkness. And the plain was as a thing that, having lived, had died.
Winding and tortuous his way became, shortly afterward, when the plain ceased abruptly near a range of hills. And even as he entered them, the darkness again began to lighten. By the time he had crossed the hills, a wan, immense moon was spreading across the sky like a decaying thing that fled, shunned by the aloof ebon depths of the heavens. It cast a pallor, sick and deathly, on the ground; it limned the gaunt trees pallidly against the sky; it laid a soft and fat wave of white rottenness on everything it touched. And under the ghastly paleness the wanderer’s features
