“It was an odor. A strange odor, indefinable and sickening. It was filled with foreboding—evil. It smelt—gray! I can not describe it any other way. It smelt dead. It made me think of decay—decay, and mould and—ugly things. I shuddered. I looked at Von Housmann, and I saw that he, too, had noticed it.
“‘What is that smell?’ I asked.
“He shook his head.
“‘Ach, dot iss new. I haf not smelled it before. But—I do not lige it. It iss not goot. Smells is goot or bat—und dot is not goot. I say, I do not lige dot smell.’
“Neither did I. We went ahead, cautiously now. A curious sense pervaded the air. It puzzled me. Then it struck me: silence. Silence, as though the music of the spheres had suddenly been snuffed out. It was the utter cessation of the interminable chirping and chattering of the birds and monkeys and other small animals.
“We had become so accustomed to that multitudinous babel that its absence was disturbing. It was—eerie. Yes, that’s the word. It made that first impression of lifelessness more intense. Not death, you understand. Even death has in it a thought of life, an element of being. But this was just—lifelessness.
“The gray odor had become so strong it was wellnigh unbearable. Then we saw our guides running back to us. They rebelled. They refused to go beyond the line of trees ahead. They said it was tabu.
“That ended it. No promise, no threat, nothing would move them. Do you know what a savage’s tabu is? It is stronger than death. And this place was tabu. So we left them there with our stuff, and Sigmund and I went on alone. We reached the farthest line of trees and stopped on the edge of a clearing.
“I can’t describe that sight to you. But I can see it—good God, how I can still see it! Sometimes I wake up in the night with that nightmarish picture in my eyes, and my nostrils filled with that ghoulish stench.
“It was a field of gray; almost, I might have said, a field of living gray. And yet, it did not give the impression of life. It moved, although there was not a breath of wind; not a leaf on the trees quivered, but that mass of gray wiggled and crawled and undulated as though it were a huge gray shroud that was thrown over some monstrous jelly-like Thing.