buffeting, the travellers as
clouds sailed over their heads. Also, to their right there lay
stretched a chain of mountains towards which the clouds kept wearily,
nervelessly tending, while to their left there lay spread a white-laced
expanse over the surface of which a roaring wind kept ceaselessly
driving transparent columns of spray.

On such stormy days in autumn everything near a seashore looks
particularly cheerful and vigorous, seeing that, despite the soughing
of wind and wave, and the swift onrush of cloud, and the fact that the
sun is only occasionally to be seen suspended in abysses of blue, and
resembles a drooping flower, one feels that the apparent chaos has
lurking in it a secret harmony of mundane, but imperishable, forces--so
much so that in time even one's puny human heart comes to imbibe the
prevalent spirit of revolt, and, catching fire, to cry to all the
universe: "I love you!"

Yes, at such times one desires to taste life to the full, and so to
live that the ancient rocks shall smile, and the sea's white horses
prance the higher, as one's mouth acclaims the earth in such a paean
that, intoxicated with the laudation, it shall unfold its riches with
added bountifulness and display more and more manifest beauty under the
spur of the love expressed by one of its creatures, expressed by a
human being who feels for the earth what he would feel for a woman, and
yearns to fertilise the same to ever-increasing splendour.

Nevertheless, words are as heavy as stones, and after felling fancy to
the ground, serve but to heap her grey coffin-lid, and cause one, as
one stands contemplating the tomb, to laugh in sheer self-derision...
.

Suddenly, plunged in dreams as I walked along, I heard through the
plash of the waves and the sizzle of the foam the unfamiliar words:

"Hymen, Demon, Igamon, and Zmiulan. Good devils are these, not bad."

"How does Christ get on with them?" I asked.

"Christ? He does not enter into the matter."

"Is He hostile to them?"

"Is He HOSTILE to them? How could He be? Devils of that kind are devils
to themselves-devils of a decent sort. Besides, to no one is Christ
hostile" .............................. . . . . .

[In the Russian this hiatus occurs as marked.]

As though unable any longer to brave the assault of the billows, the
path suddenly swerved towards the bushes on our right, and, in doing
so, caused the cloud-wrapped mountains to shift correspondingly to our
i