For, unlike mere insomnia, lying awake at night in the woods is
pleasant. The eager, nervous straining for sleep gives way to a
delicious indifference. You do not care. Your mind is cradled in an
exquisite poppy-suspension of judgment and of thought. Impressions slip
vaguely into your consciousness and as vaguely out again. Sometimes
they stand stark and naked for your inspection; sometimes they lose
themselves in the midst of half-sleep. Always they lay soft velvet
fingers on the drowsy imagination, so that in their caressing you feel
the vaster spaces from which they have come. Peaceful-brooding your
faculties receive. Hearing, sight, smell--all are preternaturally keen
to whatever of sound and sight and woods perfume is abroad through the
night; and yet at the same time active appreciation dozes, so these
things lie on it sweet and cloying like fallen rose leaves.
In such circumstance you will hear what the _voyageurs_ call the
voices of the rapids. Many people never hear them at all. They speak
very soft and low and distinct beneath the steady roar and dashing,
beneath even the lesser tinklings and gurglings whose quality
superimposes them over the louder sounds. They are like the tear-forms
swimming across the field of vision, which disappear so quickly when
you concentrate your sight to look at them, and which reappear so
magically when again your gaze turns vacant. In the stillness of your
hazy half-consciousness they speak; when you bend your attention to
listen, they are gone, and only the tumults and the tinklings remain.
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