t; the barge, the bushes of willow on the
water, and the waves could be clearly discerned, and if one looked round
there was the steep clay slope; at the bottom of it the hut thatched
with dingy brown straw, and the huts of the village lay clustered higher
up. The cocks were already crowing in the village.

The rusty red clay slope, the barge, the river, the strange, unkind
people, hunger, cold, illness, perhaps all that was not real. Most
likely it was all a dream, thought the Tatar. He felt that he was
asleep and heard his own snoring.... Of course he was at home in the
Simbirsk province, and he had only to call his wife by name for her to
answer; and in the next room was his mother.... What terrible dreams
there are, though! What are they for? The Tatar smiled and opened his
eyes. What river was this, the Volga?

Snow was falling.

"Boat!" was shouted on the further side. "Boat!"

The Tatar woke up, and went to wake his mates and row over to the other
side. The ferrymen came on to the river-bank, putting on their torn
sheepskins as they walked, swearing with voices husky from sleepiness
and shivering from the cold. On waking from their sleep, the river, from
which came a breath of piercing cold, seemed to strike them as revolting
and horrible. They jumped into the barge without hurrying themselves....
The Tatar and the three ferrymen took the long, broad-bladed oars,
which in the darkness looked like the claws of crabs; Semyon leaned his
stomach against the tiller. The shout on the other side still continued,
and two shots were fired from a revolver, probably with the idea that
the ferrymen were asleep or had gone to the pot-house in the village.

"All right, you have plenty of time," said Semyon in the tone of a man
convinced that there was no necessity in this world to hurry--that it
would lead to nothing, anyway.

The heavy, clumsy barge moved away from the bank and floated between the
willow-bushes, and only the willows slowly moving back showed that the
barge was not standing still but moving. The ferrymen swung the
oars evenly in time; Semyon lay with his stomach on the tiller and,
describing a semicircle in the air, flew from one side to the other.
In the darkness it looked as though the men were sitting on some
antediluvian animal with long paws, and were moving on it through
a cold, desolate land, the land of which one sometimes dreams in
nightmares.

They passed beyond the willows and floated out in