“...And two more days passed in anxious anticipation of something that neither the residents themselves understood, nor Pyotr Vasilyevich, with all his learning, nor Alexander Trofimovich. They didn’t understand, but they felt some kind of heaviness, either in their hearts or somewhere else. From high blood pressure, they say. And in the evening of the second day, just before sunset, when the villagers were returning from the river with their children, climbing the slope, and the housewives were going to untie the goats, snakes suddenly swarmed from the direction of the village. Yes, there were so many of them, so many that there was nowhere to step..."