The Willows
Two friends canoeing down the Danube camp for the night on a tiny island of sand and willows in a flooded wilderness. The wind never stops, the willows seem to move, and something is aware of them. By Algernon Blackwood (1907). A public-domain classic.
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How it begins After 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. On the big maps this deserted area is painted in a fluffy blue, growing fainter in color as it leaves the banks, and across it may be seen in large straggling letters the word Sümpfe, meaning marshes.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 underside turns to the sun. Keep reading →About this story
Two friends canoeing down the Danube camp for the night on a tiny island of sand and willows in a flooded wilderness. The wind never stops, the willows seem to move, and something is aware of them. They start to notice small, wrong things about the place.
Algernon Blackwood published it in 1907. H. P. Lovecraft called it one of the finest weird stories ever written. It is long, and slow, and the effect comes from the setting: a river, a wind and a feeling that the place does not want them.
- Themes
- Nature’s indifference, fear of the unknown, an island
- Good for
- Readers who like slow, atmospheric horror
- Worth noticing
- How the narrator’s own explanations get thinner as the night goes on.