Two friends are midway on a canoe trip down the Danube River. Throughout the story Blackwood personifies the surrounding environmentriver, sun, windand imbues them with a powerful and ultimately threatening character. Most ominous are the masses of dense, desultory, menacing willows, which "moved of their own will as though alive, and they touched, by some incalculable method, my own keen sense of the horrible."

Algernon Henry Blackwood (14 March 1869 10 December 1951) was an English broadcasting narrator, journalist, novelist and short story writer, and among the most prolific ghost story writers in the history of the genre.