The skiff now crept along upon the water almost noiselessly. Only from the oars dripped blue drops and when they fell into the sea, tiny blue spots lingered for an instant on the place where they fell. The night grew even darker and stiller. The sky no longer resembled a sea in insurrection--the clouds had spread all over it and covered it with an even, heavy baldachin, drooping low and motionless over the sea. The sea grew still quieter, blacker, and exhaled a still stronger saline odour, nor did it seem so vast as heretofore. "Ah! if only the rain would come!" whispered Chelkash, "it would be as good as a curtain for us." Right and left of them some sort of edifice now rose out of the black water--barges, immovable, sinister, and as black as the water itself. On one of them a fire was twinkling, and someone was going about with a lantern. The sea, washing their sides, sounded supplicatory and muffled, and they responded in a shrill and cold echo, as if quarrelsome and refusing to concede anything to it. "The cordons!" whispered Chelkash in a scarcely audible voice. From the moment when he commanded Gabriel to row more gently, Gabriel was again dominated by a keen expectant tension. Onwards he kept, going through the gloom, and it seemed to him that he was growing--his bones and sinews were extending within him with a dull pain, his head, filled with a single thought, ached abominably, the skin on his back throbbed, and his feet were full of tiny, sharp, cold needles. His eyes were exhausted by gazing intently into the gloom, from which he expected to emerge every instant something which would cry to them with a hoarse voice: "Stop, thieves!" Now, when Chelkash whispered, "The cordons!" Gabriel trembled, a keen burning thought ran through him, and settled upon his over-strained nerves--he wanted to shout and call to people to help him. He had already opened his mouth, and, rising a little in the skiff, stuck out his breast, drew in a large volume of air, and opened his mouth ... but suddenly, overcome by a feeling of terror which struck him like the lash of a whip, he closed his eyes and rolled off his bench.