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first time, Martin, with amazement and even with a certain horror, recognized in him the drunk who had invited him to stand against the wall and be shot, but apparently Zaryanski remembered nothing, so that Dedman’s identity remained unclear. Zaryanski was an outstanding drinker, and got violent when in his cups, but the revolver, which reappeared one day—during a picnic on the mountain plateau above Yalta, on a night steeped in moonlight, cricket-chirr, and muscatel wine—turned out to have an empty cylinder: for a long time Zaryanski went on shouting, threatening, and mumbling, talking of some fatal love of his; they covered him with amilitary greatcoat, and he went to sleep. Lida sat close to the campfire with her chin propped on her hands, and with shiny, dancing eyes, reddish brown from the flames, watched the escaping sparks. Presently Martin stood up, stretched his legs, ascended a dark turfy slope, and walked to the edge of the precipice. Right under his feet he saw a broad black abyss, and beyond it the sea, which seemed to be raised and brought closer, with a full moon’s wake, the “Turkish Trail” spreading in the middle and narrowing as it approached the horizon. To the left, in the murky, mysterious distance, shimmered the diamond lights of Yalta. And when Martin would turn, he saw the flaming, restless nest of the fire a short distance away, and the silhouettes of people around it, and someone’s hand adding a branch. The crickets kept crepitating; from time to time there came a sweet whiff of burning juniper; and above the black alpestrine steppe, above the silken sea, the enormous, all-engulfing sky, dove-gray with stars, made one’s head spin, and suddenly Martin again experienced a feeling he had known on more than one occasion as a child: an unbearable intensification of all his senses, a magical and demanding impulse, the presence of something for which alone it was worth living.

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    That moon’s scintillating wake enticed one in the same ways as had the forest path in the nursery picture, and the clustered lights of Yalta amid the extensive blackness of unknown composition and properties reminded him too of a childhood impression: aged nine, wearing only his nightshirt, with chilled heels, he knelt at a sleeping-car window; the Sud Express hurtled across the French countryside. Sofia, having put her son to bed, had joined her husband in thedining car; the maid was sound asleep in the upper berth. It was dark in the narrow compartment; only the blue fabric of the night lamp’s flexible shade let some light through; its tassel swayed, and panels creaked softly. Having wriggled out from under the sheet, he had crawled along the blanket to the window and raised the leathern curtain—for this he had to undo a button, after which the curtain slid smoothly up. He shivered with cold, and his knees ached, but he could not tear himself away from the window, beyond which the oblique hillsides of night rushed past. It was then that he suddenly saw what he now remembered on the Crimean plateau—a handful of lights in the distance, in a fold of darkness between two black hills: the lights would hide and reappear, and then they came twinkling from a completely different direction, and abruptly vanished, as if somebody had covered them with a black kerchief. Soon the train braked and stopped in darkness. Strangely disembodied noises became audible within the car: monotonous speech, coughing; then his mother’s voice passed down the corridor; and, deducing that his parents were returning from the dining car and might look in on the way to the adjacent compartment, Martin slipped quickly back into bed. A little later the train began to move, but then stopped for good, emitting a long, softly sibilant sigh of relief, and simultaneously pale stripes of light passed slowly across the dark compartment. Martin once again crawled over to the window: he saw a lighted station platform; a man passed trundling an iron