Fragments of the other world stray into the hero’s ordinary life: ‘The Island of Apple-trees where the heroes and princes of the nations live their second life’ is the northern equivalent of the Greek Hesperides, and Colin only reaches it in death, shot in a faraway desert whilst on patrol. ‘The Watcher by the Threshold’ is regarded by some critics as an outstanding story of demonic possession. A Scottish laird is haunted by a malign spirit that attacks his very nervous system. Buchan described it as his ‘horrible’ story, where he tried to fit a gruesome comedy to a particular type of Scottish moor. The mysterious hills and dark woods of Perthshire that surround the laird’s house add to the sense of menace. The narrator, on leaving the green, pastoral valleys behind, ‘rarely had so keenly the feeling of movement in the inanimate world. It was an unquiet place, and I shivered nervously . . . it was a sullen relic of a lost barbarism.’ The laird, possibly showing signs of schizophrenia, is in thrall to a Roman bust of Justinian in his dining-room. Justinian—the emperor who ‘Watched by the Threshold ever at the left side’, and whose servant once saw beside him something ‘which had no face or shape, but which he knew to be that hoary Evil which is older than the stars.’ The laird talks of the countryside as being that of Manann, and says that if he could explore the secret of the moors, he would write of that prehistoric life, ‘the unknown, the hideous, shrieking mystery at the back of this simple nature’.  The narrator can eventually stand no more and leaves, finding no peace until ‘the ghoulish elder world was exchanged for the homely ugliness of civilisation’.

Both Janet Adam Smith and Andrew Lownie, Buchan’s main biographers, maintain that there is nothing supernatural in ‘Fountainblue’. However, one of Buchan’s recurring themes appears—that of the thin frontier between civilization and the other world. The hero, Maitland, comes not only to realise that there is a very narrow line between the warm room and the savage out-of-doors—‘You call it miles of rampart; I call the division a line, a thread, a sheet of glass’—but that ‘the sad elemental world of wood and mountain was far more truly his own than this cosy and elegant civilisation’. It is no surprise that Maitland dies on a frontier, killed like Colin Raden in ‘The Far Islands’. The last story in the collection, ‘The Outgoing of the Tide’, features the Devil and a strong dose of witchcraft, and leads to tragedy for two young lovers on Beltane Eve. The tale is set in the days when ‘warlocks and apparitions [and] witches pursued their wanchancy calling, bairns were spirited away, young lassies selled their souls to the Evil One . . . the parish stank of idolatory, abominable rites were practised in secret . . .’ It is a straightforward story of the eternal conflict between Christianity and Satanism and is a first-class aperitif for one of Buchan’s most forceful novels, Witch Wood (1927).

Buchan’s last collection of short stories before the Great War, The Moon Endureth: Tales and Fancies, was published in April 1912. ‘The Grove of Ashtaroth’ was the first short story to use his South African experiences, and it is a powerful example of both the temenos theme and the idea of frontier, on this occasion that of religious belief. Lawson plans his home with its lawns and rose-gardens amongst a countryside of stark savagery. He is to build near a copse that was no Christian wood: ‘It was not a copse, but a “grove”—one such as Diana may have flitted through in the moonlight, and in its centre the little, conical tower.’ The story charts Lawson’s mental and physical disintegration as the grove takes hold of him. His friend, the narrator, ‘a prosaic, modern Christian gentleman’ (contrasting with Lawson’s ‘ancient’ Semitic race), feels drawn, too, into the spell of the temenos: ‘I seemed to peer into a new world . . . I seemed to see the earth peopled with forms—not human, scarcely divine, but more desirable than man or god.’ He destroys the grove to save Lawson, but he too had been seduced—‘I knew that I had driven something lovely and adorable from its last refuge on earth.’ This theme of the violation of a shrine is returned to in ‘The Green Wildebeest’ which, although not published until 1927, was written in 1912. This time Andrew du Preez, with his mixed blood, is caught in another ancient spell, which eventually leads to supernatural vengeance. The sacred temenos is violated when du Preez shoots the guardian wildebeest.