“I requested a position in the middle of Russia, and my uncle the archpriest promised to accommodate me. Don’t you see that if I go with you, I would have troubled them for no reason at all.”

“I don’t understand your hesitation. To continue being an ordinary deacon who is only required to serve on the holidays, while the rest of your days are spent idling away the time, you’ll remain exactly as you are in ten years’ time, the same person that you are right now, and the only new addition to you will be whiskers and a beard perhaps. Whereas, in that very same ten years’ time as someone returning from an expedition, you’ll be a new man, your consciousness will be enriched by the thing or two that you’ve accomplished.”

Screams of shock and excitement could be heard coming from the women’s carriage. The carriages drove along a road that fell away to a completely vertical cliff down to the shore, and it seemed to everyone that they were galloping along a narrow shelf, situated upon a high wall, and at that very minute the carriages would fall away into nothingness. On the right, the sea was outspread. On the left, a jagged brown wall with black spots, red sinew and creeping roots, while above, certainly out of fear and curiosity, tufts of acerose foliage bent over, peering down below. In another minute more shrieks and laughter: they had to pass beneath a gargantuan hanging rock.

“I don’t understand why the hell I’m riding with you all,” said Laevsky. “How foolish and trivial! I need to go north, to run, I should be saving myself, but for some reason, I’m going on this ridiculous picnic.”

“Will you just look at that panorama!” Samoylenko said to him, when the horses had turned left and the Yellow River Valley opened before them, and the river itself sparkled, yellow, turbid, insane …

“Sasha, I don’t see the good in this,” answered Laevsky. “To be perpetually excited by nature is to reveal the poverty of your own imagination. Compared to what my imagination has to offer, all of these little streams and cliffs are rubbish and nothing more.”

The carriages rode narrowly along the banks of a rivulet. The high mountainous banks slowly but surely began to join with the narrowed vale and transformed into a gorge before them; the rocky mountain, alongside which they traveled, consisted of gargantuan rocks bound together by flora, pressing against one another with such frightening force that at the very sight of them Samoylenko involuntarily groaned. Damp and mystery fluttered at the passengers from narrow fissures and gorges that sliced the shadowy and beautiful mountain in places; other mountains could be seen, brown, pink, lilac, smoke-colored or awash in bright light through the gorges. As the road passed the gorges the sound of water was heard occasionally falling from above, slapping against the rocks.

“Oh, these damned mountains,” Laevsky sighed, “how tired I am of them!”

At the point where the Black River fell into the Yellow, and black water resembling India ink sullied the yellow and struggled with it, across the road stood Tartar Kerbalay’s dukhan with a Russian flag on the roof and a signboard on which “The Pleasant Dukhan” was written in chalk. Near that was a smallish garden enclosed by a wicker fence; there stood a table and chairs, and in the center of pitiful prickly shrubbery rose a single solitary cypress tree, dark and beautiful.

Kerbalay was a small, clever Tartar, in a blue shirt and white apron, he stood in the road and, holding his stomach, bowed low in greeting to the carriages and, smiling, displayed his shiny white teeth.

“Greetings, Kerbalayka!” Samoylenko called out to him. “We’ll ride a bit further, and you drag the samovar and chairs over! Be lively now!”

Kerbalay nodded assent with his closely cropped head and muttered something, and only those sitting at the back of the carriage could make out: “We have trout, Your Excellency.”

“Bring it over, bring it over!” Von Koren said to him.

Driving five hundred paces from the dukhan, the carriage stopped. Samoylenko selected a meadow that wasn’t too big, that was peppered with rocks, comfortable for sitting on, and where a tree fallen by a gale lay with upturned knotted roots and dried-out yellow needles. There was a sparse bridge of timber thrown across the little river, and on the other shore, exactly opposite them, on four not very tall pylons stood a little wooden shed used for drying corn, reminiscent of the cabin that stood on chicken legs in the folktale about Baba Yaga; a ladder had been lowered from its door.

Everyone had the same first impression, that they would never find their way out of this place. Wherever you looked, in every direction, mountains towered and closed in around them, and from the direction of the dukhan and the dark cypress the evening dusk quickly, quickly raced at them, and as a result the narrow, crooked Black River Valley became even more narrow and the mountains even higher. They could hear the roaring river and the cicadas’ ceaseless cries.

“How charming!” Maria Konstantinovna said, inhaling deeply in excitement. “Children, just look how good this all is! What quiet!”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, it is good,” agreed Laevsky, who had liked the view but for some reason, as he looked up at the sky and at the bluish smoke rising from the chimney pipe of the dukhan, suddenly became sad. “Yes, it’s good!” he repeated.

“Ivan Andreich, describe this view!” Maria Konstantinovna said, teary-eyed.

“What for?” Laevsky asked. “Your impression is better than some description. This wealth of color and sound that many experience in nature by means of their impressions, writers garble into a shameful, indecipherable scene.”

“Is that so?” Von Koren coldly asked, selecting the largest rock for himself near the water and attempting to climb atop it to have a seat. “Is that so?” he repeated, staring at Laevsky point-blank. “What about Romeo and Juliet? What about Pushkin’s Ukrainian night, for example? Nature is expected to arrive, bent low at the knee.”

“I suppose so …” agreed Laevsky, who didn’t have the energy to conceptualize or contradict. “By the way,” he said, after a moment had passed, “what is Romeo and Juliet in actuality? A beautiful, poetic sacred love, a bed of roses beneath which is hidden, rot. Romeo is the same kind of beast as anyone else.”

“No matter what anyone says to you, it all comes back to …”

Von Koren glanced at Katya and did not finish speaking.

“What do I come back to?” asked Laevsky.

“For instance, someone says to you: ‘What a lovely bunch of grapes!’ But you: ‘Yes, although it will look so disgraceful once chewed and digested in the stomach.’ What does this speak to? It’s nothing new but it’s a strange habit.”

Laevsky knew that Von Koren had no love for him. He feared him for this reason, and in his presence, he felt as though everyone were encumbered and that someone was looking over his shoulder. He did not give a reply, walked off to the side and regretted ever having come on the trip.

“Ladies and gentlemen, march! Find kindling for the fire!” commanded Samoylenko.

They all dispersed in every which direction, and the only ones to remain were Kirilin, Achmianov and Nikodim Aleksandrich.