Or a wreath of it would start to dance, as if gently
pulled or plucked at from above; and it would revolve,
faster towards the end, and fade again into the shadows
behind. I thought of a summer in Norrland, in Sweden, in
the stone-and-birch waste which forms the timberline,
where I had also encountered the mist pools. And a trip
down a stream in the borderland of the Finns came back
with great vividness into my mind. That trip had been
made in a fog like this; only it had been begun in the
early morning, and the whole mass of the mist had been
suffused with the whitest of lights. But strange to say,
what stood out most strikingly in the fleeting memory of
the voyage, was the weird and mocking laughter of the
magpies all along the banks. The Finnish woods seemed
alive with that mocking laughter, and it truly belongs
to the land of the mists. For a moment I thought that
something after all was missing here on the prairies.
But then I reflected again that this silence of the grave
was still more perfect, still more uncanny and ghostly,
because it left the imagination entirely free, without
limiting it by even as much as a suggestion.
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