 | XXIII. Visions—A Phantasy |  |
23. XXIII.
OUR flight was less rapid than usual, and I could follow with my eye the unfamiliar aspect of the familiar ground as it unrolled like an endless panorama before me. Woods, bushes, fields, ravines, streams, occasionally villages and churches; then fields, woods, bushes, and ravines again. I had a feeling of sadness and also of indifference, almost of ennui; but not in the least because it was Russia over which we were taking our flight. No; the earth in and for itself; this flat plain that spread beneath me, the whole planet with its short-lived, helpless races, oppressed with poverty, sickness and care, chained to a clod of dust; this rough and brittle crust, this sediment upon our planet's fiery core on which a mould is grown that we call by the high-sounding title of the vegetable world; these men-flies, a hundred times less useful than the flies themselves, with their dwellings of clay and the fugitive trace of their little monotonous lives, their eternal strife against the inevitable and the immutable—how it shocked me! My heart beat heavily in my bosom; the desire to contemplate any longer these unmeaning pictures had entirely left me. Yes, it was ennui that I felt, but something sharper than ennui as well. Not once did I feel pity for my fellow-men; every other thought was swallowed up in one that I hardly dare to name; it was loathing, and the profoundest, deepest loathing of all was—for myself.
"O cease," breathed Ellis, "cease your thoughts, else it will be impossible for me to carry you. You are too heavy."
"Home!" I cried to her with the tone in which I had summoned my driver once when at four o'clock in the morning I took leave of the friends at Moskow with whom I had been discussing Russia's future. "Home!" I repeated and closed my eyes.
| XXIII. Visions—A Phantasy | |