We found ourselves on a flat riverside plain.
To the left, newly-mown meadows, with rows of huge
hayricks, stretched endlessly till they were lost
in the distance; to the right extended the smooth surface
of a vast mighty river, till it too was lost in the
distance. Not far from the bank, big dark barges
slowly rocked at anchor, slightly tilting their slender
masts, like pointing fingers. From one of these
barges came floating up to me the sounds of a liquid
voice, and a fire was burning in it, throwing a long
red light that danced and quivered on the water.
Here and there, both on the river and in the fields,
other lights were glimmering, whether close at hand
or far away, the eye could not distinguish; they shrank
together, then suddenly lengthened out into great
blurs of light; grasshoppers innumerable kept up an
unceasing churr, persistent as the frogs of the Pontine
marshes; and across the cloudless, but dark lowering
sky floated from time to time the cries of unseen
birds.
‘Are we in Russia?’ I asked of Alice.
‘It is the Volga,’ she answered.
We flew along the river-bank. ’Why did
you tear me away from there, from that lovely country?’
I began. ’Were you envious, or was it jealousy
in you?’
The lips of Alice faintly stirred, and again there
was a menacing light in her eyes.... But her
whole face grew stony again at once.
‘I want to go home,’ I said.
‘Wait a little, wait a little,’ answered
Alice. ’To-night is a great night.
It will not soon return. You may be a spectator....
Wait a little.’
And we suddenly flew across the Volga in a slanting
direction, keeping close to the water’s surface,
with the low impetuous flight of swallows before a
storm. The broad waves murmured heavily below
us, the sharp river breeze beat upon us with its strong
cold wing ... the high right bank began soon to rise
up before us in the half-darkness. Steep mountains
appeared with great ravines between. We came
near to them.
‘Shout: “Lads, to the barges!"’
Alice whispered to me. I remembered the terror
I had suffered at the apparition of the Roman phantoms.
I felt weary and strangely heavy, as though my heart
were ebbing away within me. I wished not to utter
the fatal words; I knew beforehand that in response
to them there would appear, as in the wolves’
valley of the Freischuetz, some monstrous thing; but
my lips parted against my will, and in a weak forced
voice I shouted, also against my will: ‘Lads,
to the barges!’
