He descends, He descends,
Holy, Holy Spirit,
Come, come to us!
The King blessed his children, and again the dancing began, only more frenzied than ever; the Queen at the end of the room, the King in the centre of the whirling circles, alone remained motionless. From time to time the King slowly raised his arms; and every time the dance grew faster. Inhuman shrieks rose up:—
“Eva, Evoe; Eva, Evoe!”
Tichon remembered reading in old Latin commentaries of Pausanias, that the ancient Bacchantes were supposed to greet the god Dionysus with almost the same sounding cries: “Evan, Evoe!” By what miracle did the mysteries of the dead god penetrate here, filtering by channels of subterranean waters, from the summit of Mount Cithaeron into this out-of-the-way corner of Moscow?
He contemplated the white troop of whirling dancers and at times he lost consciousness. Time had stopped; everything had vanished; there was nothing but whiteness, a white abyss, into which white birds were falling. Nothing existed, he himself no longer existed. Only the white precipice,—the white death.
He recovered when Yemelian took him by the hand, saying:—“Let us go!”
Although the daylight did not penetrate into the cellar, Tichon felt that dawn was near. The burnt-down candles were smoking. The air was unbearably close and unpleasant. The pools of sweat on the floor were being mopped up with rags. The night watch had come to an end. The King and the Queen had gone out. Some of the people, groping their way towards the exit, crept along like stupefied flies. Others had fallen to the ground and lay as in a deep swoon. Others, again, hanging their heads sat on the benches with faces like drunkards taken with nausea. The white birds had fallen to earth, mortally wounded.