Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/259

Rh dead or sleeping. No fish broke the glassy surface; no birds touched it with their feathered breasts.

Memory once more assumed her sway over me and bore me on her magic carpet to the shores of Black Lake in Siberia, which lay before me in the blaze of the sun's bright shafts of light and was also framed in a white band—of evaporated salt. Standing before the silent and motionless sheen of the surface one is afraid the specter of forgetfulness or death may be imprisoned there. A dead silence holds everything around in its grip, the silence of death or of agony, of some dumb curse or of non-existence; and suddenly out of it a voice, from far away a long-drawn, uncanny call to nothingness, to the brink of a bottomless precipice. My eyes searched the distance for the creator of these sounds that had such power to travel far and waken fright. For a long time I could not find their source, but finally I made out, on the naked crag of a towering gray mountain, the dark silhouette of a wolf, which stood with raised head and straining neck, howling hopelessly, dully and in despair. &hellip;

"This is the palace pavilion," said Monsieur Delarue, snapping the train of my Siberian thoughts. The pavilion was small, of two stories, with colored glass windows and a broad terrace extending out and dominating the tragically silent lake. Near by, between the emeraldgreen pomegranate-trees with their reddish-golden fruit, two dark cypresses towered over all and emphasized the sepulchral character of the scene.

What occurred here? For whose solitary life was all this prepared? Who was it that dreamed, suffered, loved or hated here? The literature on the region is