Tchernoff continued drinking, but with a distracted air, his eyes fixed
on the red cloud that floated over the roofs.

The two friends conjectured his mental labor from his concentrated look,
and the low exclamations which were escaping him like the echoes of an
interior monologue. Suddenly he leaped from thought to word without any
forewarning, continuing aloud the course of his reasoning.

"And when the sun arises in a few hours, the world will see coursing
through its fields the four horsemen, enemies of mankind. . . . Already
their wild steeds are pawing the ground with impatience; already the
ill-omened riders have come together and are exchanging the last words
before leaping into the saddle."

"What horsemen are these?" asked Argensola.

"Those which go before the Beast."

The two friends thought this reply as unintelligible as the preceding
words. Desnoyers again said mentally, "He is drunk," but his curiosity
forced him to ask, "What beast is that?"

"That of the Apocalypse."

There was a brief silence, but the Russian's terseness of speech did not
last long. He felt the necessity of expressing his enthusiasm for the
dreamer on the island rock of Patmos. The poet of great and mystic
vision was exerting, across two thousand years, his influence over this
mysterious revolutionary, tucked away on the top floor of a house in
Paris. John had foreseen it all. His visions, unintelligible to the