‘Away!’ she murmured wrathfully, and again whirling and darkness and giddiness.... Only this time not the shout of legions, but the voice of the singer, breaking on a high note, lingered in my ears.... We stopped. The high note, the same note was still ringing and did not cease to ring in my ears, though I was breathing quite a different air, a different scent ... a breeze was blowing upon me, fresh and invigorating, as though from a great river, and there was a smell of hay, smoke and hemp. The long-drawn-out note was followed by a second, and a third, but with an expression so unmistakable, a trill so familiar, so peculiarly our own, that I said to myself at once: ‘That’s a Russian singing a Russian song!’ and at that very instant everything grew clear about me. XV We found ourselves on a flat riverside plain. To the left, newly-mown meadows, with rows of huge hayricks, stretched endlessly till they were lost in the distance; to the right extended the smooth surface of a vast mighty river, till it too was lost in the distance. Not far from the bank, big dark barges slowly rocked at anchor, slightly tilting their slender masts, like pointing fingers. From one of these barges came floating up to me the sounds of a liquid voice, and a fire was burning in it, throwing a long red light that danced and quivered on the water. Here and there, both on the river and in the fields, other lights were glimmering, whether close at hand or far away, the eye could not distinguish; they shrank together, then suddenly lengthened out into great blurs of light; grasshoppers innumerable kept up an unceasing churr, persistent as the frogs of the Pontine marshes; and across the cloudless, but dark lowering sky floated from time to time the cries of unseen birds. ‘Are we in Russia?’ I asked of Alice. ‘It is the Volga,’ she answered. We flew along the river-bank. ‘Why did you tear me away from there, from that lovely country?’ I began. ‘Were you envious, or was it jealousy in you?’ The lips of Alice faintly stirred, and again there was a menacing light in her eyes.... But her whole face grew stony again at once. ‘I want to go home,’ I said. ‘Wait a little, wait a little,’ answered Alice. ‘To-night is a great night. It will not soon return. You may be a spectator.... Wait a little.’ And we suddenly flew across the Volga in a slanting direction, keeping close to the water’s surface, with the low impetuous flight of swallows before a storm. The broad waves murmured heavily below us, the sharp river breeze beat upon us with its strong cold wing ... the high right bank began soon to rise up before us in the half-darkness. Steep mountains appeared with great ravines between. We came near to them.