The town, raised all of a piece by Peter the Great, could claim no
ancient history at all; but through every stick and stone that had been
laid there stirred the spirit and soul of the ground, so that out of one
of the sluggish canals one might expect at any moment to see the horrid
and scaly head of some palaeolithic monster with dead and greedy eyes
slowly push its way up that it might gaze at the little black hurrying
atoms as they crossed and recrossed the grey bridge. There are many
places in Petrograd where life is utterly dead; where some building,
half-completed, has fallen into red and green decay; where the water
lies still under iridescent scum and thick clotted reeds seem to stand
at bay, concealing in their depths some terrible monster.

At such a spot I have often fancied that the eyes of countless
inhabitants of that earlier world are watching me, and that not far away
the waters of Neva are gathering, gathering, gathering their mighty
momentum for some instant, when, with a great heave and swell, they will
toss the whole fabric of brick and mortar from their shoulders, flood
the streets and squares, and then sink tranquilly back into great sheets
of unruffled waters marked only with reeds and the sharp cry of some
travelling bird.

All this may be fantastic enough, I only know that it was sufficiently
real to me during that winter of 1916 to be ever at the back of my mind;
and I believe that some sense of that kind had in all sober reality
something to do with that strange weight of uneasy anticipation that we
all of us, yes, the most unimaginative amongst us, felt at this time.

Upon this afternoon when I went to pay my call on Vera Michailovna, the
real snow began to fall. We had had the false preliminary attempt a
fortnight before; now in the quiet persistent determination, the solid