At last he half-opened his eyes, to see if he could perceive anything of the young stranger. The moon, rising behind a hillock, looked like a weird eye peeping on a ghastly scene. What did he see—what were those uncouth shapes looming in the distance, amidst the surrounding mist?
Why was the earth newly dug at his feet, shedding a smell of clay and mildew?
He felt his head spinning, and everything about him seemed to whirl.
What was that dark object dangling down, as from a huge gallows?
Whither was he to go?—back across the wide morass, where the earth, soft and miry, sank under his feet, where the unhallowed lights lead the wanderers into bottomless quagmires?
He opened his eyes widely, and began to stare around. He saw strange shapes flit through the fog, figures darker than the fog itself rise, mist-like, from the earth. Were they night-birds or human beings? He could not tell.
All at once he bethought himself that they were witches and wizards, carovnitsi and viestitche, the morine or nightmares, and all the creatures of hell gathering together for their nightly frolic.
Fear prompted him to run off as fast as he possibly could, but huge pits were yawning all around him; moreover, curiosity held him back, for he would have liked to see where the damned store away their gold; so, between these two feelings, he stood there rooted to the earth.
At last, when fear prevailed over covetousness, he was about to flee; he felt the ground shiver under his feet, a grave slowly opened on the spot where he stood, for—as you surely must have understood—he was in the very midst of a burying-ground. At midnight in a burying-ground, when the tombs gape and give out their dead! His hair stood on end, his blood was curdling within his veins, his very heart stopped beating.
Can you fancy his terror in seeing a voukoudlak, a horrid vampire all bloated with the blood it nightly sucks. Slowly he saw them rise one after the other, each one looking like a drowsy man awaking from deep slumbers. Soon they began to shake off their sluggishness, and leap and jump and frolic around, and as the mist cleared he could see all the other uncouth figures whirl about in a mazy dance, like midges on a rainy day.