observed, or so it seemed to me, far away, on the very horizon, a long, black, moving strip of something; but in a moment it became quite plain to me that this was the very same train of wagons which we had overtaken and outstripped. Just the same creaking wheels, some of them no longer turning, enveloped in snow; just the same people asleep beneath their mats, and just the same leading piebald horse, with steaming, distended nostrils, smelling out the road and pricking up his ears.
"Look, we have gone round and round and are coming out by this train of wagons again!" said my driver in a sulky tone. "The courier's horses are good ones, though he drives them villainously, but ours are so-so and always stopping, just as if we had been driving all night long."
He coughed a bit.
"Shall we turn off somewhere, sir, for our sins?"
"Why? We are bound to arrive somewhere as it is."
"Arrive somewhere! We shall have to make a night of it in the steppe: that's what we shall do. How it is snowing, my little master!"
Although it did seem strange to me that the driver in front of us, who had obviously lost his road and had no idea of the direction in which he was going, took no trouble to find it again, but continued to drive at full tilt, cheerily shouting to his horses, I did not want to separate from him all the same.
"Follow after them!" I said.
The driver went on, but he drove along even more unwillingly than before and no longer conversed with me.
58
