Mikhail Bulgakov. The Fateful Eggs -
83 >
shirt-front all askew, leapt out of the crowd at Persikov and split the
Professor's skull open with a terrible blow from his stick. Persikov
staggered and collapsed slowly onto one side. His last words were:
"Pankrat. Pankrat."
The totally innocent Maria Stepanovna was killed and torn to pieces in
the Professor's room. They also smashed the chamber with the extinguished
ray and the terrariums, after killing and trampling on the crazed frogs,
then the glass tables and the reflectors. An hour later the Institute was in
flames. Around lay corpses cordoned off by a column of soldiers armed with
electric revolvers, while fire-engines sucked up water and sprayed it on all
the windows through which long roaring tongues of flame were leaping.
On the night of 19th August, 1928, there was an unheard-of frost the
likes of which no elderly folk could recall within living memory. It lasted
forty-eight hours and reached eighteen degrees below. Panic-stricken Moscow
closed all its doors and windows. Only towards the end of the third day did
the public realise that the frost had saved the capital and the endless
expanses under its sway afflicted by the terrible disaster of 1928. The
cavalry army by Mozhaisk, which had lost three-quarters of its men, was on
its last legs, and the poison gas squads had been unable to halt the
loathsome reptiles, who were advancing on Moscow in a semi-circle from the
west, south-west and south.
They were killed off by the frost. The foul hordes could not survive
two days of minus eighteen degrees centigrade, and come the last week of
August, when the frost disappeared leaving only damp and wet behind it,
moisture in the air and trees with leaves dead from the unexpected cold,
there was nothing to fight. The catastrophe was over. The forests, fields