l wizard,
and master of this remote, barren, swampy, ravine-pitted region--that
he it is who originally planted the town in this uncomfortable, clayey
hollow, and has thrown the houses into heaps, and entangled the
streets, and wantonly created the town's unaccountably rude and rough
and deadly existence, and addled men's brains with disconnected
nonsense, and consumed their hearts with a fear of life. Yes, it comes
to me that it must be he who, during the long six months of winter,
causes cruel snowstorms from the plain to invade the town, and with
frost compresses the buildings of the town until their rafters crack,
and stinging cold brings birds to the ground. Lastly, I become seized
with the idea that it must be he who, almost every summer, envelops the
town in those terrible visitations of heat by night which seem almost
to cause the houses to melt.

However, as a rule he maintains complete silence, and merely makes
chewing motions with his strong-toothed jaws as he sits wagging his
beard from side to side. At such times there is in his eyes a bluish
fire like the gleam of charcoal, while his crooked fingers writhe like
worms, and his outward appearance becomes sheerly that of a magician of
iniquity.

Once I asked him:

"What in particular ought men to wait for?"

For a while he sat clasping his beard, and, with contracted eyes,
gazing as at something behind me. Then he said quietly and didactically:

"Someday there will arise a Strange Man who will proclaim to the world
the Word to which there never was a beginning. But to which of us is
the hour when that Man will arise known? To none of us... And to which
of us are known the miracles which that Word will perform? To none of
us."

* * * * *

Once upon a time there used to glide past the window of my room the
fair, curly, wavering, golden head of Nilushka the idiot, a lad looking
like a thing which the earth has begotten of love. Yes, Nilushka was
like an angel in some sacred picture adorning the southern or the
northern gates of an ancient church, as, with his flushed face smeared
with wax-smoke and oil, and his light blue eyes gleaming in a cold,
unearthly smile, and a frame clad in a red smock reaching to below his
knees, and the soles of his feet showing black (always he walked on
tiptoe), and his thin calves, as straight and white as the calves of a
woman, covered with golden down, he walked the streets.

Sometimes hopping