‘‘Poorly.’’
‘Hm... I can’t give you any guidance in that regard, because I have little acquaintance with theology. Give me a list of the books you need, and I’ll send them to you from Petersburg in the winter. You’ll also have to read the notes of clerical travelers: you sometimes find good ethnographers and connoisseurs of Oriental languages among them. When you’ve familiarized yourself with their manner, it will be easier for you to set to work. Well, and while there are no books, don’t waste time, come to me, and we’ll study the compass, go through some meteorology. It’s all much needed.’’
‘‘Maybe so ...’ the deacon murmured and laughed. ‘‘I’ve asked for a post in central Russia, and my uncle the archpriest has promised to help me in that. If I go with you, it will turn out that I’ve bothered him for nothing.’’
‘‘I don’t understand your hesitation. If you go on being an ordinary deacon, who only has to serve on feast days and rests from work all the other days, even after ten years you’ll still be the same as you are now; the only addition will be a mustache and a little beard, whereas if you come back from an expedition after the same ten years, you’ll be a different man, enriched by the awareness of having accomplished something.’’
Cries of terror and delight came from the ladies’ carriage. The carriages were driving along a road carved into the sheer cliff of the rocky coast, and it seemed to them all that they were riding on a shelf attached to a high wall, and that the carriages were about to fall into the abyss. To the right spread the sea, to the left an uneven brown wall with black spots, red veins, and creeping roots, and above, bending over as if with fear and curiosity, curly evergreens looked down. A minute later, there were shrieks and laughter again: they had to drive under an enormous overhanging rock.
‘‘I don’t understand why the devil I’m coming with you,’’ said Laevsky. ‘‘How stupid and banal! I need to go north, to escape, to save myself, and for some reason I’m going on this foolish picnic.’’
‘‘But just look at this panorama!’’ Samoilenko said to him as the horses turned left, and the valley of the Yellow River came into view, and the river itself glistened—yellow, turbid, mad...
‘‘I don’t see anything good in it, Sasha,’’ replied Laevsky. ‘‘To constantly go into raptures over nature is to show the paucity of your imagination. All these brooks and cliffs are nothing but trash compared to what my imagination can give me.’’
The carriages were now driving along the riverbank. The high, mountainous banks gradually converged, the valley narrowed, and ahead was what looked like a gorge; the stony mountain they were driving along had been knocked together by nature out of huge stones, which crushed each other with such terrible force that Samoilenko involuntarily grunted each time he looked at them. The somber and beautiful mountain was cut in places by narrow crevices and gorges that breathed dampness and mysteriousness on the travelers; through the gorges, other mountains could be seen, brown, pink, purple, smoky, or flooded with bright light. From time to time, as they drove past the gorges, they could hear water falling from a height somewhere and splashing against the rocks.
‘‘Ah, cursed mountains,’’ sighed Laevsky, ‘‘I’m so sick of them!’’
At the place where the Black River fell into the Yellow River and its water, black as ink, dirtied the yellow water and struggled with it, the Tartar Kerbalai’s dukhan stood by the side of the road, with a Russian flag on the roof and a sign written in chalk: ‘‘The Pleasant Dukhan.’’ Next to it was a small garden surrounded by a wattle fence, where tables and benches stood, and a single cypress, beautiful and somber, towered over the pitiful thorny bushes.
Kerbalai, a small, nimble Tartar in a blue shirt and white apron, stood in the road and, holding his stomach, bowed low to the approaching carriages and, smiling, showed his gleaming white teeth.
‘‘Greetings, Kerbalaika!’’ Samoilenko called out to him. ‘‘We’ll drive on a little further, and you bring us a samovar and some chairs! Step lively!’’
Kerbalai kept nodding his cropped head and muttering something, and only those sitting in the last carriage could hear clearly: ‘‘There are trout, Your Excellency!’’
‘‘Bring them, bring them!’’ von Koren said to him.
Having driven some five hundred paces past the dukhan, the carriages stopped. Samoilenko chose a small meadow strewn with stones suitable for sitting on, and where a tree brought down by a storm lay with torn-up, shaggy roots and dry yellow needles. A flimsy log bridge had been thrown across the river at this spot, and on the other bank, just opposite, a shed for drying corn stood on four short pilings, looking like the fairy-tale hut on chicken’s legs.16 A ladder led down from its doorway.
The first impression everyone had was that they would never get out of there. On all sides, wherever one looked, towering mountains loomed up, and the evening shadow was approaching quickly, quickly, from the direction of the dukhan and the somber cypress, and that made the narrow, curved valley of the Black River seem narrower and the mountains higher. One could hear the murmuring of the river and the constant trilling of cicadas.
‘‘Charming!’’ said Marya Konstantinovna, inhaling deeply with rapture. ‘‘Children, see how good it is! What silence!’’
‘‘Yes, it is good, in fact,’’ agreed Laevsky, who liked the view and, for some reason, when he looked at the sky and then at the blue smoke coming from the chimney of the dukhan, suddenly grew sad. ‘‘Yes, it’s good!’’ he repeated.
‘‘Ivan Andreich, describe this view!’’ Marya Konstantinovna said tearfully.
‘‘What for?’’ asked Laevsky. ‘‘The impression is better than any description. When writers babble about this wealth of colors and sounds that we all receive from nature by way of impressions, they make it ugly and unrecognizable.’’
‘‘Do they?’’ von Koren asked coldly, choosing for himself the biggest stone by the water and trying to climb up and sit on it. ‘‘Do they?’’ he repeated, staring fixedly at Laevsky. ‘‘And Romeo and Juliet? And Pushkin’s Ukrainian night,17 for instance? Nature should come and bow down at its feet.’’
‘Perhaps ...’ agreed Laevsky, too lazy to reason and object. ‘‘However,’’ he said a little later, ‘‘what are Romeo and Juliet essentially? A beautiful, poetic, sacred love—roses under which they want to hide the rot. Romeo is the same animal as everyone else.’’
‘‘Whatever one talks with you about, you always bring it all down to...’
Von Koren looked at Katya and did not finish.
‘‘What do I bring it down to?’’ asked Laevsky.
