Here the wild beast has his lair, where he hears no murmur but that of the giant trees which shelter him at their feet. The great waving branches, broken down by the winds, are thrown up in heaps and rot in great mounds, overgrown with mosses and pale grasses; the wild hop-vine crowns them, and running plants cover them with their interlacing tendrils.
Here and there, under a thick bed of dry, half-rotten leaves, flows a black-looking brook, bearing with it dead grasses and the remains of other plants.
Sometimes it spreads itself and forms a large pond of stagnant water and moving mud, in the midst of which grow water-lilies and rushes; farther on, it again contracts and runs in a narrow, miry bed, interrupted by unevenness of the land, hummocks of turf, and trunks of trees.
These gloomy coppices are succeeded by rude clearings and fields of small extent. Here, the opening seems wider and less savage; there young shrubs grow thickly; farther on, marshes and thickets appear; and at last you see the open fields.
The gloomiest places in these wild forests are those where fire has devastated them, leaving deep traces of its ravages. Great trunks still stand, dry and blackened; the branches of the pine-trees put out sad, yellow-looking leaves; scanty, miserable grass begins to cover the ground.
Sometimes the flight of a bird breaks this awful silence; a squirrel leaps and makes the boughs of an oak-tree bend; a hungry raven goes by cawing; a black swan darts into the thickest part of the forest, or a startled deer bounds over the tall grasses. Then the woods fall again into their majestic, eternal sleep.
The deeper you penetrate, the fewer traces you find of man's passage. At first there is a road, then a path, and farther on broken bushes, trodden grass, a tree cut down, trails of yellow chips in places where beams have been hewn, a hut where hunters have been on the watch, the cabin of a sentinel, the trench of a charcoal-burner, the ashes of a shepherd's fire; then one sees only the traces of animals, then no traces of anything, for the wild animal leaves few traces behind him when he has passed by.
On the second day of their journey, when they began to go deeper into the heart of the forest, which stretched toward the north like a great green sea, they only at rare intervals came upon any indications of the passage of man. The silence was universal and profound; and it was rare that the noise of the woodman's axe, resounding in the distance, obliged them to withdraw rapidly from the direction whence the sound came.
The old man, guiding himself by inspecting the mosses and the part of the sky whence the light came, continued to go northward. They neither saw nor encountered any one; and toward evening they stopped on a little rising ground, shadowed by such thickly growing pine-trees and hazel-nut bushes that they could allow themselves boldly to light a fire without fear of being betrayed by the smoke or by the crackling of the flames.
Iermola then declared that they were too far from Malyczki for any one to discover any trace of them. Their feet, in fact, had left no impression upon the slippery, moss-covered ground under the sombre dome of the pines; chance alone could put the pursuers on their track.