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 Freischütz, 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!’