“R-r-right!” Samoylenko shouted at the top of his voice when he met a cart or a mountaineer riding on a donkey.

“In two years’ time, when I shall have the means and the people ready, I shall set off on an expedition,” Von Koren was telling the deacon.  “I shall go by the sea-coast from Vladivostok to the Behring Straits, and then from the Straits to the mouth of the Yenisei.  We shall make the map, study the fauna and the flora, and make detailed geological, anthropological, and ethnographical researches.  It depends upon you to go with me or not.”

“It’s impossible,” said the deacon.

“Why?”

“I’m a man with ties and a family.”

“Your wife will let you go; we will provide for her.  Better still if you were to persuade her for the public benefit to go into a nunnery; that would make it possible for you to become a monk, too, and join the expedition as a priest.  I can arrange it for you.”

The deacon was silent.

“Do you know your theology well?” asked the zoologist.

“No, rather badly.”

“H’m! . . .  I can’t give you any advice on that score, because I don’t know much about theology myself.  You give me a list of books you need, and I will send them to you from Petersburg in the winter.  It will be necessary for you to read the notes of religious travellers, too; among them are some good ethnologists and Oriental scholars.  When you are familiar with their methods, it will be easier for you to set to work.  And you needn’t waste your time till you get the books; come to me, and we will study the compass and go through a course of meteorology.  All that’s indispensable.”

“To be sure . . .” muttered the deacon, and he laughed.  “I was trying to get a place in Central Russia, and my uncle, the head priest, promised to help me.  If I go with you I shall have troubled them for nothing.”

“I don’t understand your hesitation.  If you go on being an ordinary deacon, who is only obliged to hold a service on holidays, and on the other days can rest from work, you will be exactly the same as you are now in ten years’ time, and will have gained nothing but a beard and moustache; while on returning from this expedition in ten years’ time you will be a different man, you will be enriched by the consciousness that something has been done by you.”

From the ladies’ carriage came shrieks of terror and delight.  The carriages were driving along a road hollowed in a literally overhanging precipitous cliff, and it seemed to every one that they were galloping along a shelf on a steep wall, and that in a moment the carriages would drop into the abyss.  On the right stretched the sea; on the left was a rough brown wall with black blotches and red veins and with climbing roots; while on the summit stood shaggy fir-trees bent over, as though looking down in terror and curiosity.  A minute later there were shrieks and laughter again:  they had to drive under a huge overhanging rock.