As for Yasma's predictions and warnings--what meaning had there been in them? Was it indeed possible that I might be left alone all winter in this desolate place? And was that why Abthar had advised me to make ready for the cold season while his own people had apparently done nothing to prepare? But, even so, how could they escape the winter? Was it not a mere poetic vagary to say, as Yasma had done, that they went to lands where robins sang and the lilac bloomed--how cross the interminable mountain reaches to the semi-torrid valleys of India or the warm Arabian plains? Or was it that, like the bears, they hibernated in caves? Or, like the wild geese that they watched so excitedly, were they swayed by some old migratory instinct, some impulse dormant or dead in most men but preserved for them by a long succession of nomad ancestors? Although reason scoffed at the idea, I had visions of them trekking each autumn across four or five hundred miles of wilderness to the borders of the Arabian Sea, surviving on provisions they had secreted along the route, and returning with the spring to their homes in Sobul. Unlikely as this explanation appeared, nothing more plausible occurred to me. But as the days went by, my sense of mystery increased. The people were fleeing almost as though Sobul were plague-ridden--of that there could be no further doubt! Daily now I missed some familiar face; first a child who had come to me of evenings to run gay races in the fields; then an old woman who had sat each morning in the sun before her cabin; then Yasma's brother, Barkodu, whose tall sturdy form I had frequently observed in the village. And then one evening when I inquired for Karem, I was told that he was not to be seen; and the people's peculiar reserved expression testified that he had gone "the way of the birds that fly south." And, a day later, when I wished to see Abthar in the hope that he would relieve my perplexed mind, I found no one in the cabin except Yasma; and she murmured that her father would not be back till spring. But did I make no effort to solve the enigma? Did I not strive to find out for myself where the absent ones had gone? Yes! I made many attempts--and with bewildering results. Even today I shudder to think of the ordeal I underwent; the remembrance of eerie midnights and strange shadows that flickered and vanished comes back to me after these many, many months; I feel again the cool, forest-scented breeze upon my nostrils as I crouch among the deep weeds at the village edge, or as I glide phantom-like beneath the trees in the cold starlight. For it was mainly at night that I wrestled with the Unknown; and it was at night that I received the most persuasive and soul-disturbing proof of the weirdness of the ways of Sobul.