But what gives scenes like this their ambiance of otherworldliness is not that there are menacing monsters in the night, but rather that the entire environment-the mountains, sky, river, trees-are somehow alive, and alive in an impersonal but sublime way that far exceeds the taxonomies of the naturalist or the theories of the biologist. It was doubtless the river talking in its sleep, or the wind wandering lost among the bushes.Īlready this is the stuff of Blackwood’s many stories of supernatural horror. In the night we woke and thought we heard people moving round the tent, but, on going out to see, the canoe was still safe, and the white moonshine revealed no figures. Only the tumbling of the water and the chirping of the crickets broke the silence. When we went to bed at ten o’clock the full moon shone upon the white cliffs with a dazzling brilliance that seemed to turn them into ice, while the deep shadows over the river made the scene strangely impressive. Limestone cliffs, scooped and furrowed by the eddies of a far larger Danube thousands of years before, rose gleaming out of the pine-woods about their base… One moment we were in blazing sunlight, the next in deep shadow under the cliffs. The mountains became higher, the valley narrower. Soon the water increased and the canoe sped onwards among the little waves and rapids like a winged thing. In one passage, savoring the solitude of the trip, he writes: There Blackwood writes about those things we have come to expect in nature writing: the urge to flee the modern city, the peace of solitude in nature, encounters with rural village life along the way, and the many scenes of majestic natural landscapes.

Traveling by canoe and bringing with him only the sparsest of supplies, Blackwood’s voyage began “not one hundred yards from the Black Forest” for a “journey of four and twenty hundred miles to the Black Sea.” This was not the first such voyage Blackwood had taken, nor was it in any way unusual for him though he was in many respects a modern, cosmopolitan figure-traveling widely, he worked as a farmer, bartender, hotel manager, business investor, radio presenter, and journalist-Blackwood, by his own account, was more apt to be found hiking in the mountains, camping in forests, or drifting down the isolate and languorous byways of winding rivers.īut the Danube boat trip seemed to make a particular impact on Blackwood, so much so that he would later write about it in a two-part article, “Down the Danube in a Canadian Canoe,” published in Macmillan’s Magazine in the autumn of 1901. In the summer of 1901, 32-year-old Algernon Blackwood made two trips down the Danube River: the first with a friend and the second alone.

Algernon blackwood's the willows