King Stakh's Wild Hunt

Night-time. Stars. Primitive darkness in the forests.

And nevertheless even this was Italy in comparison with what we saw two days later.

The forest was beginning to wither, was less dense than before. And soon an endless plain came into view.

This was not an ordinary plain throughout which our rye rolls on in small rustling waves; it was not even a quagmire… a quagmire is not at all monotonous. You can find there some sad, warped saplings, a little lake may suddenly appear, whereas this was the gloomiest, the most hopeless of our landscapes: the peat-bogs. One has to be a misanthropist with the brain of a cave-man to imagine such places. Nevertheless, this was not the product of the imagination, here before our very eyes lay the swamp…

This boundless plain was brownish, hopelessly smooth, boring, gloomy.

At times we met great heaps of stones, at times it was a brown cone. Some god-forsaken man was digging peat, nobody knows why, — at times we came across a lonely little hut along the roadway, with its one window, with its chimney sticking out from the stove, with not a tree anywhere around. And the forest that dragged on beyond the plain seemed even gloomier than it really was. After a short while there began to appear little islands of trees even on this plain, trees overgrown with moss and covered with cobwebs, most of them as warped and ugly as those in the drawings that illustrate a horribly frightening tale.

I was ready to weep out loud, such resentment did I feel.

And as if to spite us, the weather changed for the worse: low dark clouds were creeping on to meet us, and here and there leaden strips of rain came slanting down at us. Not a single crested-lark did we see on the road, and this was a bad sign: it would rain cats and dogs all night through.

I was ready to turn in at the first hut, but none came in sight. Cursing my friend who had sent me here, I told the man to drive faster, and I drew my raincloak closer around me. But the sky became filled with dark, low rain-clouds; over the plain there descended such a gloomy and cold twilight that it made me shiver. A feeble streak of lightning flashed in the distance.

No sooner did the disturbing thought strike me that at this time of the year it was too late for thunder, than an ocean of cold water came pouring down on me, on the horses and the coachman.

Someone had handed the plain over into the clutches of night and rain.

And the night was as dark as soot, I couldn't see my fingers even, and only guessed that we were still moving on because of the jolting of the carriage. The coachman, too, could probably see nothing and gave himself up entirely to the instincts of the horses.

Whether they really had the instincts I don't know: the fact is that our closed carriage was thrown out from a hole onto a kind of hillock and back again into a hole.

Lumps of clay, marsh dirt and paling flew into the carriage, onto my cloak, into my face, but I resigned myself to this and prayed for only one thing: not to fall into the quagmire. I knew that the most forsaken places are met with in these marshes — the carriage, the horses, and the people, all would be swallowed up — and it would never enter anybody's mind that somebody had ever been there, that only a few minutes ago a human being had screamed there until the thick brown marsh mass had stopped his mouth, that now that being was lying together with the horses buried six metres down below the ground.

Suddenly there was a roar, a dismal howl: a long, drawn-out howl, an inhuman howl… The horses gave a jerk… I was almost thrown out… they ran on, heaven knows where, apparently straight on across the swamp. Then something cracked, and the back wheels of the carriage were drawn down. On feeling water under my feet, I grabbed the coachman by the shoulder and he, with a kind of indifference, uttered:

“It's all over with us, sir. We shall die here!”

But I did not want to die. I snatched the whip from out of the coachman's hand and began to strike in the darkness where the horses should have been.

An unearthly howl was heard and the horses neighed madly and pulled, the carriage trembled as if it were trying with all its might to pull itself out of that swamp, then a loud smacking noise from under the wheels, the cart bent, jolted even worse, the mare began to neigh! And lo! A miracle!.. The cart rolled on, and was soon knocking along on firm ground. Only now did I comprehend that it was none other than I myself who had uttered those heart-rending cries. How ashamed I felt!

I was about to ask the coachman to stop the horses on this relatively firm ground, and spend the night there, when the rain began to quiet down.

At this moment something wet and prickly struck me in the face. “The branch of a fir-tree,” I guessed. “Then we must be in a forest. The horses will stop of their own accord.”