Tchernoff was describing the four scourges of the earth exactly as though he were seeing them.  The horseman on the white horse was clad in a showy and barbarous attire.  His Oriental countenance was contracted with hatred as if smelling out his victims.  While his horse continued galloping, he was bending his bow in order to spread pestilence abroad.  At his back swung the brass quiver filled with poisoned arrows, containing the germs of all diseases—­those of private life as well as those which envenom the wounded soldier on the battlefield.

The second horseman on the red steed was waving the enormous, two-edged sword over his hair bristling with the swiftness of his course.  He was young, but the fierce scowl and the scornful mouth gave him a look of implacable ferocity.  His garments, blown open by the motion of his wild race, disclosed the form of a muscular athlete.

Bald, old and horribly skinny was the third horseman bouncing up and down on the rawboned back of his black steed.  His shrunken legs clanked against the thin flanks of the lean beast.  In one withered hand he was holding the scales, symbol of the scarcity of food that was going to become as valuable as gold.

The knees of the fourth horseman, sharp as spurs, were pricking the ribs of the pale horse.  His parchment-like skin betrayed the lines and hollows of his skeleton.  The front of his skull-like face was twisted with the sardonic laugh of destruction.  His cane-like arms were whirling aloft a gigantic sickle.  From his angular shoulders was hanging a ragged, filthy shroud.

And the furious cavalcade was passing like a hurricane over the immense assemblage of human beings.  The heavens showed above their heads, a livid, dark-edged cloud from the west.  Horrible monsters and deformities were swarming in spirals above the furious horde, like a repulsive escort.  Poor Humanity, crazed with fear, was fleeing in all directions on hearing the thundering pace of the Plague, War, Hunger and Death.  Men and women, young and old, were knocking each other down and falling to the ground overwhelmed by terror, astonishment and desperation.  And the white horse, the red, the black and the pale, were crushing all with their relentless, iron tread—­the athletic man was hearing the crashing of his broken ribs, the nursing babe was writhing at its mother’s breast, and the aged and feeble were closing their eyes forever with a childlike sob.

“God is asleep, forgetting the world,” continued the Russian.  “It will be a long time before he awakes, and while he sleeps the four feudal horsemen of the Beast will course through the land as its only lords.”

Tchernoff was overpowered by the intensity of his dramatic vision.  Springing from his seat, he paced up and down with great strides; but his picture of the fourfold catastrophe revealed by the gloomy poet’s trance, seemed to him very weak indeed.  A great painter had given corporeal form to these terrible dreams.