Those who also read my blog of literature, must realize that I love horror and Gothic stories, specially the classic ones.
This summer I´ve read a compilation by Dorothy Scarborough et al, Famous Modern Ghost Stories, New York, 1921, and was fascinated by two of the stories in it: The Willows, written by Algernon Blackwood and Lazarus, by Leonid Andreyev.
From the first one, I´m thinking on Blackwood´s description of willows. He says they ¨never attain to the dignity of trees,¨ a vision that is totally different from the way we see them in the Pampa húmeda in Buenos Aires, a flat green land where the isolated willow is the king of trees.
But in the flooded islands of the Danube, they must look very different, as an incomprehensible green mass in movement. Of course, I´ve never imagined the landscape this way, as it had a life of its own. And I thought it was a great reflection.
Since then, I´ve been trying to take photos of willows, without too much success, because I still couldn´t find a group of sinister willows under such a ¨spell.¨
So I made the effort of visualizing them with my digital art, and though I´m still not absolutely happy with the results, I´d like to share them with my readers, intertwined with different paragraphs from Blackwood´s story.
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 under-side turns to the sun.(...)
Happy to slip beyond the
control of 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 innumerable which shift daily in size
and shape and possess at best an impermanent life, since the flood-time
obliterates their very existence.(...)
The sense of remoteness from
the world of human kind, 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.(...)
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 (...)
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 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. (...)
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. (...)
