Miloslavsky and I were parted when we took our places in the dreary procession, and the slow march to the cathedral was begun. Every eye was turned on the Czarevna Sophia Alexeievna, who walked beside the bier of the late czar. I saw that the Miloslavskys were playing for high stakes, for the unusual presence of one of the princesses and her manifest grief were producing a strange effect upon the vast crowd surging about the _cortége_. It seemed a long time before we stood at last within the great cathedral, which was draped in black until it looked like a huge sarcophagus, and the multitude, swayed by a new and deep emotion, packed the immense edifice and filled the square without. It was a scene of strange solemnity. Before the altar stood the bier, covered with the imperial pall, and the tall tapers around it made a blaze of light almost dazzling in its contrast to the gloom of the rest of the great interior, except here and there, where a ray of light was caught and reflected from the gold upon the pillars. By the dead czar stood the patriarch and the archbishops in their rich robes, chanting the service, while the multitude knelt in the silence beyond. Every word that the priests chanted sounded clearly in that intense quiet, and the awful solemnity of death brooded over us. A dead man, but for that hour, czar of all the Russias still! It seemed to my imagination that some secret emotion possessed the kneeling crowd, that every breath was drawn with some new resolution, that even the atmosphere was surcharged with foreboding. The blaze of gold and silver upon the high altar flashed in the light of a hundred tapers, and every line in the patriarch’s face was magnified in that clear blaze; but beyond the circle of the tapers, not even the daylight seemed to penetrate to where we knelt in the shadow, and the low chant of the clergy rose and fell and sobbed in its monotonous refrain. Suddenly, in the midst of that solemn ceremony, we heard a woman’s voice raised in lamentation. I think that every man in that great multitude caught his breath to listen, and every eye was fixed on that circle of flame about the pall, as the Czarevna Sophia rose and stretched out her hands in passionate supplication to Heaven. Her words were incoherent, but we heard her voice, and we saw her as she flung herself down beside the bier, clutching it in an agony of grief.