“I don’t know why the devil I’m coming with you,” said Laevsky.  “How stupid and vulgar it is!  I want to go to the North, to run away, to escape; but here I am, for some reason, going to this stupid picnic.”

“But look, what a view!” said Samoylenko as the horses turned to the left, and the valley of the Yellow River came into sight and the stream itself gleamed in the sunlight, yellow, turbid, frantic.

“I see nothing fine in that, Sasha,” answered Laevsky.  “To be in continual ecstasies over nature shows poverty of imagination.  In comparison with what my imagination can give me, all these streams and rocks are trash, and nothing else.”

The carriages now were by the banks of the stream.  The high mountain banks gradually grew closer, the valley shrank together and ended in a gorge; the rocky mountain round which they were driving had been piled together by nature out of huge rocks, pressing upon each other with such terrible weight, that Samoylenko could not help gasping every time he looked at them.  The dark and beautiful mountain was cleft in places by narrow fissures and gorges from which came a breath of dewy moisture and mystery; through the gorges could be seen other mountains, brown, pink, lilac, smoky, or bathed in vivid sunlight.  From time to time as they passed a gorge they caught the sound of water falling from the heights and splashing on the stones.

“Ach, the damned mountains!” sighed Laevsky.  “How sick I am of them!”

At the place where the Black River falls into the Yellow, and the water black as ink stains the yellow and struggles with it, stood the Tatar Kerbalay’s duhan, with the Russian flag on the roof and with an inscription written in chalk:  “The Pleasant duhan.”  Near it was a little garden, enclosed in a hurdle fence, with tables and chairs set out in it, and in the midst of a thicket of wretched thornbushes stood a single solitary cypress, dark and beautiful.

Kerbalay, a nimble little Tatar in a blue shirt and a white apron, was standing in the road, and, holding his stomach, he bowed low to welcome the carriages, and smiled, showing his glistening white teeth.

“Good-evening, Kerbalay,” shouted Samoylenko.  “We are driving on a little further, and you take along the samovar and chairs!  Look sharp!”

Kerbalay nodded his shaven head and muttered something, and only those sitting in the last carriage could hear:  “We’ve got trout, your Excellency.”

“Bring them, bring them!” said Von Koren.

Five hundred paces from the duhan the carriages stopped.  Samoylenko selected a small meadow round which there were scattered stones convenient for sitting on, and a fallen tree blown down by the storm with roots overgrown by moss and dry yellow needles.  Here there was a fragile wooden bridge over the stream, and just opposite on the other bank there was a little barn for drying maize, standing on four low piles, and looking like the hut on hen’s legs in the fairy tale; a little ladder sloped from its door.