The boy keeps on and on with his wail. Oh, to
escape from here! How stifling! How weary!
how heavy.... But escape is impossible.
That sky is like a shroud. And no wind....
Is the air dead or what?
All at once the boy runs up to the window and shrieks
in the same piteous voice, ‘Look! look! the
earth has fallen away!’
‘How? fallen away?’ Yes; just now there
was a plain before the house, and now it stands on
a fearful height! The horizon has sunk, has gone
down, and from the very house drops an almost overhanging,
as it were scooped-out, black precipice.
We all crowded to the window.... Horror froze
our hearts. ’Here it is ... here it is!’
whispers one next me.
And behold, along the whole far boundary of the earth,
something began to stir, some sort of small, roundish
hillocks began heaving and falling.
‘It is the sea!’ the thought flashed on
us all at the same instant. ’It will swallow
us all up directly.... Only how can it grow and
rise upwards? To this precipice?’
And yet, it grows, grows enormously.... Already
there are not separate hillocks heaving in the distance....
One continuous, monstrous wave embraces the whole
circle of the horizon.
It is swooping, swooping, down upon us! In an
icy hurricane it flies, swirling in the darkness of
hell. Everything shuddered—and there,
in this flying mass—was the crash of thunder,
the iron wail of thousands of throats....
Ah! what a roaring and moaning! It was the earth
howling for terror....
The end of it! the end of all!
The child whimpered once more.... I tried to
clutch at my companions, but already we were all crushed,
buried, drowned, swept away by that pitch-black, icy,
thundering wave! Darkness ... darkness everlasting!
Scarcely breathing, I awoke.
March 1878.
When I lived, many years ago, in Petersburg, every
time I chanced to hire a sledge, I used to get into
conversation with the driver.
I was particularly fond of talking to the night drivers,
poor peasants from the country round, who come to
the capital with their little ochre-painted sledges
and wretched nags, in the hope of earning food for
themselves and rent for their masters.
So one day I engaged such a sledge-driver....
He was a lad of twenty, tall and well-made, a splendid
fellow with blue eyes and ruddy cheeks; his fair hair
curled in little ringlets under the shabby little patched
cap that was pulled over his eyes. And how had
that little torn smock ever been drawn over those
gigantic shoulders!
But the handsome, beardless face of the sledge-driver
looked mournful and downcast.
I began to talk to him. There was a sorrowful
note in his voice too.
‘What is it, brother?’ I asked him; ’why
aren’t you cheerful? Have you some trouble?’
