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AT LONG LAST (and none too soon for Eric's liking, since he was heartily sick and tired of Krasnoyarsk by now) on a crisp blue Thursday the expedition was ready to set off, from a jetty in the Yenisei. (The weather was also read for them: mornings were sharp with frost again, and flurries of snow had blown by during the past few days.
Scores of well-wishers and spectators gathered on the riverbank; foremost among them Governor Pajari and his lady, accompanied by the editor of Krasnoyarets who had written an extolling letter the day before. Aho and Abramovich were there, of course, though they too would leave Krasnoyarsk within hours; they had received further travel expenses and testy orders to proceed posthaste to the Amur before the full onset of winter could entrap them into months of gambling, balls, and other festivities.
Old Stasya and Phyllis Faerber were shepherding Lydia's daughters.
Evpra waved and wept and capered, and at one point was in danger of falling into the filthy waters of the river. But Zino squinted tightly at her mother, as if Countess Lydia was a criminal who should be reported for abandoning her family, were it not for the incredible fact that the authorities connived corruptly in whatever chicanery was going on. The little girl stared daggers at Mishin. She hoped to get rid of him somehow; though this was useless, since he seemed to be eloping with her mother. And Mr. Delko she continued to regard with beady suspicion. He was supposed to be famous, but he didn't behave as if he believed it, so Zino suspected a confidence trick, particularly when Mama had given the man so much money. Mr. Delko hadn't even shown a scrap of interest in his "own" play! Maybe had hadn't actually written it. As for that scruffy fellow Tsiolkovsky, whom the said "Delko" had invited once he'd tested the bathwater with his toe, obviously he was a shady accomplice! None of his hamstrung, hectic talk of people on the planets and ships sailing through the sky had fooled little Zino. It was just amazing how gullible adults could be!
In one respect the girl was looking forward to her mother's absence with some relish. For this would allow her ample leeway to practice deceptions of her own upon silly Evpra and daft old Stasya. Maybe even upon dear Phyllis Faerber, too, though Zino respected the hell out of that bubbly old woman's ability to make cards vanish and turn up in the darnedest places. Still, a governess was only a jumped-up servant!
Finally, Zino brought herself to wave. And a moment later, to her great surprise, she also broke down and cried.275Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡJ6kBNlkVWy
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The six members of the expedition had embarked upon two specially constructed rafts, piloted by a small gang of hired rivermen. Stout rails penned the pack horses with their stock of hay, two sledges, and assorted panniers, saddlebags and bonzes. On the first raft rode Yanovich, Matousek and Tsiolkovsky; on the second, Mishin, Lydia Zelenina and Eric.
As the rivermen poled them away from the jetty into the rushing current, Lydia snapped a photograph of all the people waving farewell then restored her camera to the safety of its waterproof box.
"The die is cast," said Mishin. "Or, as Vasily Romanych would put it: the Rubicon is crossed!"
"But we're not crossing the Yenisei," Lydia said, puzzled. "Not until we reached the Angara."
"Exactly!" Mishin roared with laughter. "But that's what old Feotodik would say, bless his heart."
She smiled at him. "Yes, he would say that, would he not?"
Meanwhile Fedotik and everyone else on the shore diminished swiftly in size until they were indistinguishable. Eric turned away, and began to fire up a Spanish cigar. Had Krasnoyarsk been Moscow itself, he would still have been bored with it long ago.275Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡElSyM8QYYE
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The first stage of the route was by far the easiest: swiftly downstream along the river for two hundred versts as far as the confluence with the Angara. Soon they left behind the lumber mills and tanneries and workers' hovels behind; and then, behind them, too, some chilly marshes where the honk of geese sounded more like the sad croaking of frogs soon to be interred by ice. Presently, forest pressed gloomily about both banks.
Occasionally their rafts sped past a clearing in the mass of spruce and stone pine, larch and silver fir; there would be a hut or two, where a few peasants might be hunched around a wood fire, smoking fish to last them through the winter. Once or twice, they passed a vaster devastated scab, one of the summer's forest fires. But these gaps in the woodland were as nothing.
"All these trees!" bubble Lydia excitedly. "What a theme for drama!"
"Do you really think so?" asked Minshin. "Surely there's no action in trees---you need action in a drama, eh Eric Saveli?"
For weeks now Eric suspected that it would be most unwise of him to write another play for the rest of his life.
"You agree, don't you?"
"Whatever you say, Kuzma."
Lydia struck up a poetic pose. While the rivermen gaped at her, she improvised:
"Surely the Angel of Silence has passed over this land! With her wing she has brushed the ducks, the herons, the hares, the frozen mammoths slumbering in the soil, and the infinitude of trees. How fearful is this silence! May Heaven help the homeless wayfarer lost in it!
"Yet the humbles human wayfarer is a Higher Being. He is higher than a goose or a fox. Wherever he goes, in his despair, seeks--all unknowing for the World Soul of the Taiga...to free her from that seal of silence so that she shall at last speak her secrets, hidden from all human ears and eyes till now."
Mishin grinned. "I thought we were looking for a million tons of iron---or a shipwreck from the stars?"
"And only she, the World Soul, knows where those brave Higher Beings from the heavens have found their final resting place, Kuz."
"Tsiolkovsky says they all evaporated into thin air."
"Ah, but what if they didn't? Just imagine, Kuz, finding the body of a being even higher than Mankind! It would be like coming across the corpse of an angel, preserved by the cold, the way mammoths are preserved. Imagine a play written about a Baron who gets exiled to Siberia for conspiracy. He escaped. And he's trudging through the wilderness in despair, soliloquizing when suddenly he finds the dead body of an angel. Or maybe the World Soul hears him and crosses his path. She guides him through this army of trees to where the angel lies. And lo!" Lydia gestured. "Here she comes! Behold the World Soul herself!"
Just then another little clearing happened to open up on the riverbank; wrapped in a shawl of rags an old crone stood staring blankly over the rushing water at them.
With a chuckle, Eric tossed his latest spent cigar away. "You really should write that play when we get back, Lydia Feodorovna."
"Should I? Ah, the words flow freely enough at the moment, but how does one halt them for long enough to write them down?" Lydia clapped her hands. "I've got it! I shall dictate the speeches to Phyllis while I walk around composing them. She'll be my amanuensis."
For a while the rivermen had been humming to themselves. Now the humming grew louder, like a hive of bees. Before long they struck up a dirge of a song. It was about the great bell of Uglich, deported across the Urals to Siberian Tobolsk for the crime of having been rung by rebels. This had happened four centuries ago, however the memory of that ancient expulsion was still as freshly preserved as a primeval corpse by the permafrost.
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