I fed my horses, and I too was ferried over. After struggling for a
couple of miles through the boggy prairie, I got at last on to a narrow
raised wooden causeway to a clearing in the forest. The cart jolted
unevenly over the round beams of the causeway: I got out and went along
on foot. The horses moved in step snorting and shaking their heads from
the gnats and flies. The forest took us into its bosom. On the
outskirts, nearer to the prairie, grew birches, aspens, limes, maples,
and oaks. Then they met us more rarely, the dense firwood moved down on
us in an unbroken wall. Further on were the red, bare trunks of pines,
and then again a stretch of mixed copse, overgrown with underwood of
hazelnut, mountain ash, and bramble, and stout, vigorous weeds. The
sun's rays threw a brilliant light on the tree-tops, and, filtering
through the branches, here and there reached the ground in pale streaks
and patches. Birds I scarcely heard--they do not like great forests.
Only from time to time there came the doleful, thrice-repeated call of
a hoopoe, and the angry screech of a nuthatch or a jay; a silent,
always solitary bird kept fluttering across the clearing, with a flash
of golden azure from its lovely feathers. At times the trees grew
further apart, ahead of us the light broke in, the cart came out on a
cleared, sandy, open space. Thin rye was growing over it in rows,
noiselessly nodding its pale ears. On one side there was a dark,
dilapidated little chapel, with a slanting cross over a well. An unseen
brook was babbling peaceably with changing, ringing sounds, as though
it were flowing into an empty bottle. And then suddenly the road was
cut in half by a birch-tree recently fallen, and the forest stood
around, so old, lofty, and slumbering, that the air seemed pent in. In
places the clearing lay under water. On both sides stretched a forest
bog, all green and dark, all covered with reeds and tiny alders. Ducks
flew up in pairs--and it was strange to see those water-birds darting
rapidly about among the pines. 'Ga, ga, ga, ga,' their drawn-out call