The owl began it, hooting from beneath the house roof; the bats rustled with flimsy wings, and flew towards the house, where shone the panes of the windows and human faces; but nearer, the little sisters of the bats, the moths, hovered in a swarm, attracted by the white garments of the women; they were especially troublesome to Zosia, beating against her face and her bright eyes, which they mistook for two candles. In the air an immense cloud of insects gathered and whirled about, playing like the music of the spheres; Zosia's ear distinguished amid the thousand noises the accord of the flies and the false half-tone of the mosquitoes.
In the fields the evening concert had hardly begun; the musicians were just finishing the tuning of their instruments: already the land rail, the first violin of the meadow, had shrieked thrice; already from afar the bitterns seconded it with a bass boom below in the marshes; already the woodcocks were rising up with whirling flight, uttering repeated cries, as though they were beating on drums.
As a finale to the humming of the insects and the din of the birds there resounded in a double chorus two ponds, like enchanted lakes in the Caucasus mountains, silent through all the day and playing at evening. One pond, which had clear depths and a sandy shore, gave forth from its blue chest a gentle, solemn call; the other pond, with a muddy bottom and a turbid throat, answered it with a mournfully passionate cry. In both ponds sang countless hordes of frogs; the two choruses were attuned into two great accords: one thundered fortissimo, the other gently warbled; one seemed to complain, the other only sighed; thus the [pg 197] two ponds conversed together across the fields, like two Æolian harps that play alternately.
The darkness was thickening; only in the woods and among the willows along the streamlet the eyes of wolves shone like candles, and farther off, on the narrowed borders of the horizon, here and there were the fires of shepherds' camps. Finally the moon lighted her silver torch, came forth from the wood, and illumined both sky and land. Now they both, half uncovered from the darkness, slept side by side, like a happy married pair; the heaven took into its pure arms the breast of the earth, which shone silvery in the moonlight.
Now, opposite the moon, first one star and then another began to shine; now a thousand of them, and now a million twinkled. Castor and his brother Pollux glittered at their head, once called among the Slavs Lele and Polele;[139] now they have been christened anew in the people's zodiac; one is called Lithuania and the other the Kingdom.[140]
Farther off glitter the two pans of the heavenly Scales. Upon them God on the day of creation—as old men say—weighed in turn the earth and all the planets before he set the burden of them in the abysses of the air; then he hung up in heaven the gilded scales: on these men have modelled their balances and scale pans.
To the north shines the circle of the starry Sieve,[141] through which God, as they say, gifted grains of corn, when he cast them down from heaven for Adam our father, who had been banished for his sins from paradise.
Somewhat higher, David's Car,[142] ready for mounting, turns its long pole towards the north star. The old Lithuanians know, concerning this chariot, that the populace err in calling it David's, since it is the Angel's [pg 198] Car. On it long ago rode Lucifer, when he summoned God to combat, rushing at full gallop along the Milky Way towards the threshold of heaven, until Michael threw him from his car, and cast the car from the road. Now it is stretched out ruined amid the stars; the Archangel Michael will not allow it to be repaired.
And it is also well known among the old Lithuanians—but this knowledge they probably derived from the rabbins—that the huge, long Dragon of the zodiac, which winds its starry coils over the sky, and which astronomers erroneously christen a serpent, is not a serpent, but a fish, and is named Leviathan. Long ago it dwelt in the seas, but after the deluge it died for lack of water; hence on the vault of heaven, both as a curiosity and as a reminder, the angels hung up its dead remains. In the same way the priest of Mir has hung up in his church the ribs and shanks of giants that have been dug from the earth.[143]
Such stories of the stars, which he had conned from books or learned from tradition, did the Seneschal relate. Though in the evening the old Seneschal's sight was weak, and he could see nothing in the sky through his spectacles, yet he knew by heart the name and form of every constellation; with his finger he indicated their places and their paths.