The prisoner stood still and clenched his teeth so hard that the sharp corners of his cheek-bones projected, and his grey bristles stood up like a hedgehog's. He measured Efimushka from head to foot with screwed-up eyes, which blazed with wrath.
But before Efimushka had had time to observe this play of feature, he had once more begun to measure the ground with broad strides.
A shade of distraught pensiveness lay across the face of the garrulous Sotsky. He looked upwards, whence flowed the trills of the larks, and whistled in concert between his teeth, beating time to his footsteps with his stick as he marched along.
They drew nearer to the confines of the wood. There it stood, a dark, immovable wall—not a sound came from it to greet the travellers. The sun was already sinking, and its oblique rays coloured the tops of the trees purple and gold. A breath of fragrant freshness came from the trees, the gloom and the concentrated silence which filled the forest gave birth to strange sensations.
When a forest stands before our eyes, dark and motionless, when it is all plunged in mysterious silence, and every single tree seems to be listening intently to something—then it seems to us as if the whole forest were filled with some living thing which is only hiding away for a time. And you wait expectantly for something immense and incomprehensible to the human understanding to emerge the next moment, and speak in a mighty voice concerning the great mysteries of nature and creation.
II.
On arriving at the skirts of the wood Efimushka and his comrade resolved to rest, and sat down on the grass round the trunk of a huge oak. The prisoner slowly unloosed his knapsack from his shoulder, and said to the Sotsky indifferently: "Would you like some bread?"
"Give me some, and I'll show you," said Efimushka, smiling.
And they began to munch their bread in silence. Efimushka ate slowly, sighing to himself from time to time, and gazing about the fields to the left of him; but his comrade, altogether absorbed in the process of assimilation, ate quickly, and chewed noisily, with his eyes fixed steadily on his morsel of bread. The fields were growing dark, the ears of corn had already lost their golden colouring, and were turning a rosy-yellow; ragged clouds were creeping up the sky from the south-west, and their shadows fell upon the plain—fell and crept along the corn towards the wood, where sat the two dusky human figures. And from the trees also shadows descended upon the earth, and the breath of these shadows wafted sorrow into the soul.
"Glory be to Thee, O Lord!" exclaimed Efimushka, gathering up the crumbs of his piece of bread from the ground, and licking them off the palm of his hand.... "The Lord hath fed us, no eye beheld us. And if any eye hath seen, unoffended it hath been. Well, friend, shall we sit here a little while? How about that cold dungeon of ours?"