But it is impossible to
escape.

That sky is like a shroud. And there is no wind.... Is the air dead?

Suddenly the boy ran to the window and began to scream with the same
plaintive voice as usual: "Look! Look! The earth has fallen in!"

"What? Fallen in?"--In fact: there had been a plain in front of the
house, but now the house is standing on the crest of a frightful
mountain!--The horizon has fallen, has gone down, and from the very
house itself a black, almost perpendicular declivity descends.

We have all thronged to the window.... Horror freezes our
hearts.--"There it is ... there it is!" whispers my neighbour.

And lo! along the whole distant boundary of the earth something has
begun to stir, some small, round hillocks have begun to rise and fall.

"It is the sea!" occurs to us all at one and the same moment.--"It will
drown us all directly.... Only, how can it wax and rise up? On that
precipice?"

And nevertheless it does wax, and wax hugely.... It is no longer
separate hillocks which are tumbling in the distance.... A dense,
monstrous wave engulfs the entire circle of the horizon.

It is flying, flying upon us!--Like an icy hurricane it sweeps on,
swirling with the outer darkness. Everything round about has begun to
quiver,--and yonder, in that oncoming mass,--there are crashing and
thunder, and a thousand-throated, iron barking....

Ha! What a roaring and howling! It is the earth roaring with terror....

It is the end of it! The end of all things!

The boy screamed once more.... I tried to seize hold of my comrades, but
we, all of us, were already crushed, buried, drowned, swept away by that
icy, rumbling flood, as black as ink.

Darkness ... eternal darkness!

Gasping for breath, I awoke.

March, 1878.

MASHA

When I was living in Petersburg,--many years ago,--whenever I had
occasion to hire a public cabman I entered into conversation with him.

I was specially fond of conversing with the night cabmen,--poor
peasants of the suburbs, who have come to town with their ochre-tinted
little sledges and miserable little nags in the hope of supporting
themselves and collecting enough money to pay their quit-rent to their
owners.

So, then, one day I hired such a cabman.... He was a youth of twenty
years, tall, well-built, a fine, dashing young fellow; he had blue eyes
and rosy cheeks; his red-gold hair curled in rings beneath a wretched
little patched cap, which was pulled down over his