In another week, when the floods were quite over and they set the ferry going, none of the ferrymen but Semyon would be wanted, and the Tatar would begin going from village to village begging for alms and for work.  His wife was only seventeen; she was beautiful, spoilt, and shy; could she possibly go from village to village begging alms with her face unveiled?  No, it was terrible even to think of that....

It was already getting light; the barge, the bushes of willow on the water, and the waves could be clearly discerned, and if one looked round there was the steep clay slope; at the bottom of it the hut thatched with dingy brown straw, and the huts of the village lay clustered higher up.  The cocks were already crowing in the village.

The rusty red clay slope, the barge, the river, the strange, unkind people, hunger, cold, illness, perhaps all that was not real.  Most likely it was all a dream, thought the Tatar.  He felt that he was asleep and heard his own snoring....  Of course he was at home in the Simbirsk province, and he had only to call his wife by name for her to answer; and in the next room was his mother....  What terrible dreams there are, though!  What are they for?  The Tatar smiled and opened his eyes.  What river was this, the Volga?

Snow was falling.

“Boat!” was shouted on the further side.  “Boat!”

The Tatar woke up, and went to wake his mates and row over to the other side.  The ferrymen came on to the river-bank, putting on their torn sheepskins as they walked, swearing with voices husky from sleepiness and shivering from the cold.  On waking from their sleep, the river, from which came a breath of piercing cold, seemed to strike them as revolting and horrible.  They jumped into the barge without hurrying themselves....  The Tatar and the three ferrymen took the long, broad-bladed oars, which in the darkness looked like the claws of crabs; Semyon leaned his stomach against the tiller.  The shout on the other side still continued, and two shots were fired from a revolver, probably with the idea that the ferrymen were asleep or had gone to the pot-house in the village.

“All right, you have plenty of time,” said Semyon in the tone of a man convinced that there was no necessity in this world to hurry—­that it would lead to nothing, anyway.

The heavy, clumsy barge moved away from the bank and floated between the willow-bushes, and only the willows slowly moving back showed that the barge was not standing still but moving.  The ferrymen swung the oars evenly in time; Semyon lay with his stomach on the tiller and, describing a semicircle in the air, flew from one side to the other.  In the darkness it looked as though the men were sitting on some antediluvian animal with long paws, and were moving on it through a cold, desolate land, the land of which one sometimes dreams in nightmares.

They passed beyond the willows and floated out into the open.  The creak and regular splash of the oars was heard on the further shore, and a shout came:  “Make haste! make haste!”