Not one of them knows why he has got into this house,
or who the men are with him. On all faces there
is disquiet and melancholy ... all, in turn, approach
the windows and gaze attentively about them, as though
expecting something from without.
Then again they set to roaming up and down. Among
us a lad of short stature is running about; from time
to time he screams in a shrill, monotonous voice:
“Daddy, I’m afraid!”—This
shrill cry makes me sick at heart—and I
also begin to be afraid.... Of what? I myself
do not know. Only I feel that a great, great
calamity is on its way, and is drawing near.
And the little lad keeps screaming. Akh, if I
could only get away from here! How stifling it
is! How oppressive!... But it is impossible
to escape.
That sky is like a shroud. And there is no wind....
Is the air dead?
Suddenly the boy ran to the window and began to scream
with the same plaintive voice as usual: “Look!
Look! The earth has fallen in!”
“What? Fallen in?”—In
fact: there had been a plain in front of the
house, but now the house is standing on the crest of
a frightful mountain!—The horizon has fallen,
has gone down, and from the very house itself a black,
almost perpendicular declivity descends.
We have all thronged to the window.... Horror
freezes our hearts.—“There it is
... there it is!” whispers my neighbour.
And lo! along the whole distant boundary of the earth
something has begun to stir, some small, round hillocks
have begun to rise and fall.
“It is the sea!” occurs to us all at one
and the same moment.—“It will drown
us all directly.... Only, how can it wax and rise
up? On that precipice?”
And nevertheless it does wax, and wax hugely....
It is no longer separate hillocks which are tumbling
in the distance.... A dense, monstrous wave engulfs
the entire circle of the horizon.
It is flying, flying upon us!—Like an icy
hurricane it sweeps on, swirling with the outer darkness.
Everything round about has begun to quiver,—and
yonder, in that oncoming mass,—there are
crashing and thunder, and a thousand-throated, iron
barking....
Ha! What a roaring and howling! It is the
earth roaring with terror....
It is the end of it! The end of all things!
The boy screamed once more.... I tried to seize
hold of my comrades, but we, all of us, were already
crushed, buried, drowned, swept away by that icy,
rumbling flood, as black as ink.
Darkness ... eternal darkness!
Gasping for breath, I awoke.
March, 1878.
When I was living in Petersburg,—many years
ago,—whenever I had occasion to hire a
public cabman I entered into conversation with him.
I was specially fond of conversing with the night
cabmen,—poor peasants of the suburbs, who
have come to town with their ochre-tinted little sledges
and miserable little nags in the hope of supporting
themselves and collecting enough money to pay their
quit-rent to their owners.
