As I had travelled some score or so of versts without a night’s rest, notwithstanding the fact that I was very much interested in the issue of our wanderings, I involuntarily shut my eyes and dozed off. All at once, when I opened my eyes again, I was struck by what seemed to me in the first moment a bright light illuminating the white plain; the horizon had considerably widened, the low, black sky had suddenly disappeared; in every direction were visible white oblique lines of falling snow; the figures of the troika people in front appeared more plainly, and when I looked upwards it seemed to me for the first moment as if the clouds had Parted and that only the falling snow covered the sky. Whilst I had been slumbering the moon had arisen and threw her cold and clear light through the scattered clouds and falling snow.
The one thing I saw clearly was my sledge, the horses, the driver, and the three troikas going on in front: the first troika, the courier’s, on the box of which one of the drivers was still sitting urging his horses on at a good round pace; the second, in which sat the two other drivers, who had thrown the reins aside and made themselves a shelter against the wind out of their armyaks never ceasing to smoke their pipes the whole time, as was clear from the sparks proceeding from that quarter, and the third troika, in which nobody was visible — presumably the driver was sleeping in the middle of it. Before I went to sleep, however, the leading driver had at rare intervals stopped his horses and tried to find the way.
Then, every time we stopped, the howling of the wind became more audible and the enormous quantity of snow suspended in the air more strikingly visible. I now saw by the light of the moon, half obscured by the snowstorm, the small, squat figure of the driver, with the big whip in his hand, with which he flicked at the snow in front of him, moving backwards and forwards in the bright mist and coming back again to the sledge, leaping sideways on to the box seat, and amidst the monotonous whistling of the wind the alert, sonorous ringing and clanging of the little bells was audible once more. Every time the driver in front leaped out to look for the road or the verst posts one could hear the brisk, self-confident voice of one of the drivers shouting to the driver in front:
“Do you hear, Ignashka! take the road to the left! You’ll find more shelter to the right!” Or, “Why are you going round and round like a fool? Go by the snow; take the lee of it, and you’ll come out all right!” Or, “A little more to the right, a little more to the right, my brother! Don’t you see there’s something black yonder — some sign-post or other?” Or, “Where are you going? Where are you going? Loose the piebald nag and go on in front and he’ll guide you to the road straight away. It’ll be much better if you do that!”
This selfsame person, who was so fond of giving advice, not only did not loose the side-horse and go over the snow to look for the road, but did not even so much as thrust his nose from out of his arrnyak, and when Ignashka, the driver in front, in reply to one of his counsels, shouted to him to go in front himself if he knew where to go so well, the counsellor replied that if he had been travelling with courier’s horses he would have gone on and led them to the right road straight away, “but our horses cannot go on in front in snow-drifts, not such nags as these, anyway.”
“Then you can hold your jaw!” replied Ignashka, cheerily whistling to his horses.
The other driver, sitting in the same sledge with the counsellor, said not a word to Ignashka, and in fact did not interfere at all, although he was not asleep either, at least I assumed as much from the fact that his pipe continued unextinguished, and also from the circumstance that whenever we stopped I heard his measured, uninterrupted narration. He was telling some tale or other. Only when Ignashka suddenly halted for the sixth or seventh time, this other driver plainly became very angry at being interrupted by such leisurely procedure, and he shouted at him:
“What! stopping again! You want to find the road, eh? It’s a snowstorm we’re in, and there’s an end of it! Why, even a land-surveyor wouldn’t be able to find the road now. Go on as long as the horses can drag us! Never fear; we shan’t freeze to death! Go on, I say!”
“Never fear, indeed! Last year a postilion was frozen to death!” observed my driver.
The driver of the third troika did not wake the whole time, only once, during a stoppage, the counsellor shouted:
“Philip! I say, Philip!” and receiving no answer observed: “I wonder if he’s frozen? You might go and see, Ignashka!”
Ignashka, who hastened to do everyone’s bidding, went to the sledge and began to shake the sleeper.
“Why, he’s drunk as drunk — like a log!” said he, “I say! you! are you frozen?” he said, shaking him violently.
The sleeper babbled something or other and cursed him.
“He’s alive, all right, my brother!” said Ignashka; and again he ran forward and again we went on, and so quickly indeed, this time, that the little brown side horse attached to my troika, constantly lashed up from behind, more than once broke into a clumsy gallop.
V.
I think it must have been almost midnight when we were joined by the little old man and Vas-il-y, who had been in pursuit of the stampeded horses. They had found the horses and pursued and overtaken us; but how they had done so in the dark, blinding snowstorm, in the midst of the barren steppe, has always remained unintelligible to me. The little old man, moving his elbows and legs, rode up at a gallop on the brown horse. The two other horses were attached to the collar: in the snowstorm it was impossible to leave the horses to themselves. On coming up to his, the old fellow began attacking my driver again.
“Look here, you cock-eyed devil, really if . . .”
“Hie, Uncle Matvich!” shouted the tale-teller from the second sledge, “alive, eh? Crawl in here I” But the old man did not answer him, but went on with his cursing. When it appeared to him that he had cursed enough, he did go to the second sledge.
“Caught ’em all?” they said to him from that quarter.
“Of course! Why not?”
And his diminutive figure, on the trot, with the upper Part of his body bobbing up and down on the back of the horse, after leaping out on to the snow, ran forward without stopping behind the sledge, and scrambled in to where they were, with his legs sticking up in the air as he forced his way through the orifice. Tall Vas-il-y, as before, took his seat in silence on the box seat in the foremost sledge alongside Ignashka, whom he helped to look for the road.
“You see what a curser he is, my little master!” murmured my driver.
We went along for some time after this, without stopping, over the white wilderness, in the cold, trans-parent, and quivering light of the snowstorm. Every time I opened my eyes, there in front of me was the selfsame clumsy hat and back, covered with snow; there, too, was the selfsame low shaft-bow, beneath which, between the tightly drawn leather reins, and always the same distance off, the head of the brown horse with the black mane deliberately bending in the direction of the wind, moved slowly up and down. Behind its back one could also see, to the right, the bay side-horse, with its tail tied up into a bunch, occasionally bumping against the front board of the sledge. Look down — and there was the selfsame snow thumping against the sides of the sledge, which the wind stubbornly lifted and carried off in one direction.
In front, always at the same distance, the leading troika ran steadily along; on the right and on the left everything was white and twinkling. In vain the eye sought for some new object: not a post, not a rick, not a fence — nothing at all was visible. Everywhere everything was white, white and mobile; sometimes the horizon seemed incomprehensibly far off, sometimes compressed within two paces distance in every direction. Sometimes a high white wall would grow up suddenly on the right and run alongside the sledge, then it would as suddenly disappear and grow up in front only to run further and further off and again disappear.
If you looked up it would appear quite light the first instant, and you would seem to see little stars through the mist; but the little stars vanished from your view ever higher and higher, and all you saw was the snow, which fell past your eyes on to your face and into the collar of your furs; the sky was identically bright everywhere, identically white, colourless, uniform, and constantly mobile. The wind seemed to be perpetually shifting.
Now it blew right against you and blinded your eyes, now it blew teasingly sideways and flung the collar
