Ill fortune had dogged my footsteps. Markoff had seen me there. He would naturally inquire of the Emperor the reason of my audience.
His Majesty might tell him.
If so, what then?
Chapter Twenty.
The Land of No Return.
The day had been grey and dispiriting, the open windswept landscape a great limitless expanse of newly-fallen snow of dazzling whiteness—the same cheerless wintry tundra over which I had been travelling by sledge for the past four weary weeks to that everlasting jingle of harness-bells.
My companion, the police-agent Petrakoff, a smart, alert young man, wrapped to the tip of his nose in reindeer furs, was asleep by my side; and I, too, had been dozing, worn out by that fifteen hundred miles of road since leaving the railway at Ekaterinburg.
Suddenly I was awakened by Vasilli, our yamshick, a burly, bearded, unkempt ruffian in shabby furs, who, pointing with his whip to the grey far-off horizon, shouted: