As he spoke they shot under the bridge.  Above them, to the left, towered the terrace of the castle, and the square face of that great building which has seen so many vicissitudes.  Every window was alight.  For the castle is used as a barracks now, and the soldiers, having been partially withdrawn from the streets, were going to bed.  Soon these lights were left behind, and the outline of the citadel, half buried in trees, could be dimly seen.  Then suddenly they left the city behind, and were borne on the breast of the river into the outer darkness beyond.

Kosmaroff sat up.

“Give me a piece of bread,” he said.  “I am famished.”

But he received no answer.  Prince Martin was asleep.

The sky was beginning to clear.  The storm was over, but the flood had yet to come.  The rain must have fallen in the Carpathians, and the Vistula came from those mountains.  In twenty-four hours there would be not only ice to fear, but uprooted trees and sawn timber from the mills; here and there a mill-wheel torn from its bearings, now and then a dead horse; a door, perhaps, of a cottage, or part of a roof; a few boats; a hundred trophies of the triumph of nature over man, borne to the distant sea on muddy waters.

Kosmaroff found the bread and tore a piece off.  Then he made himself as comfortable as he could in the stern of the boat, using one oar as a rudder.  But he could not see much.  He could only keep the boat heading down stream and avoid the larger floes.  Then—­wet, tired out, conscious of failure, sick at heart—­he fell asleep, too, in the hands of God.

When he awoke he found Martin crouching beside him, wide awake.  The prince had taken the oar and was steering.  The clouds had all cleared away, and a full moon was high above them.  The dawn was in the sky above the level land.  They were passing through a plain now, broken here and there by pollarded trees, great spaces of marsh-land, with big, low-roofed farms standing back on the slightly rising ground.  It was almost morning.

Kosmaroff sat up, and immediately began to shiver.  Martin was shivering too, and handed him the vodka-bottle with a laugh.  His spirits were proof even against failure and a hopeless dawn and bitter cold.

“Where are we?” he asked.

Kosmaroff stood up and looked round.  They were travelling at a great pace in the company of countless ice-floes, some white with snow, others gray and muddy.

“I know where we are,” he answered, after a pause.  “We have passed Wyszogrod.  We are nearing Plock.  We have come a great distance.  I wish my teeth wouldn’t chatter.”

“I have secured mine with a piece of bread,” mumbled Martin.

Kosmaroff was looking uneasily at the sky.

“We cannot travel during the day,” he said, after a long examination of the little clouds hanging like lines across the eastern sky.  “We shall not be able to cross the frontier at Thorn with this full moon, and I am afraid we are going to have fine weather.  We shall soon come to some large islands on this side of Plock.  I know a farmer there.  We must wait with him until we have promise of a suitable night to pass through Thorn.”