TREPLIEFF. Attention, ladies and gentlemen! The play is about to begin.
[A pause] I shall commence. [He taps the door with a stick, and speaks
in a loud voice] O, ye time-honoured, ancient mists that drive at night
across the surface of this lake, blind you our eyes with sleep, and show
us in our dreams that which will be in twice ten thousand years!

SORIN. There won't be anything in twice ten thousand years.

TREPLIEFF. Then let them now show us that nothingness.

ARKADINA. Yes, let them--we are asleep.

The curtain rises. A vista opens across the lake. The moon hangs low
above the horizon and is reflected in the water. NINA, dressed in white,
is seen seated on a great rock.

NINA. All men and beasts, lions, eagles, and quails, horned stags,
geese, spiders, silent fish that inhabit the waves, starfish from the
sea, and creatures invisible to the eye--in one word, life--all, all
life, completing the dreary round imposed upon it, has died out at last.
A thousand years have passed since the earth last bore a living creature
on her breast, and the unhappy moon now lights her lamp in vain. No
longer are the cries of storks heard in the meadows, or the drone of
beetles in the groves of limes. All is cold, cold. All is void, void,
void. All is terrible, terrible--[A pause] The bodies of all living
creatures have dropped to dust, and eternal matter has transformed them
into stones and water and clouds; but their spirits have flowed together
into one, and that great world-soul am I! In me is the spirit of the
great Alexander, the spirit of Napoleon, of Caesar, of Shakespeare,
and of the tiniest leech that swims. In me the consciousness of man has