The Old Genie Hottabych

WHAT INTERFERES WITH SLEEPING?

They were having good sailing weather. For three days and three nights they sailed in open seas and only towards the end of the third day did they enter a region of scattered ice.

The boys were playing checkers in the lounge, when an excited Hottabych burst in on them, holding on to the brim of his old straw hat.

“My friends,” he said with a broad smile, “go and have a look: the whole world, as far as the eye can see, is covered with sugar and diamonds!”

We can excuse Hottabych these funny words, as never before in his nearly forty centuries of living had he seen a single mound of ice worth speaking of.

Everyone in the lounge rushed on deck and discovered thousands of snow-white drifting ice-floes sparkling and glittering in the bright rays of the midnight sun, moving silently towards the “Ladoga.” Soon the first ice-floes crunched and crashed against the rounded steel stem of the boat.

Late that night (but it was as bright and sunny as on a clear noonday) the passengers saw a group of islands in the distance. This was the first glimpse they had of the majestic and sombre panorama of Franz Joseph Land. They saw the gloomy, naked cliffs and mountains covered with glittering glaciers which resembled sharp, pointed clouds that had been pressed close to the harsh land.

“It’s time to go to bed, I guess,” Volka said when everyone had had his fill of looking at the far islands. “There’s really nothing to do, but I don’t feel like sleeping. It all comes from not being used to sleeping while the sun is shining!”

“O blessed one, it seems to me that it is not the sun which is interfering, but something else entirely,” Hottabych suggested timidly.

However, no one paid attention to his words.

For a while, the boys wandered up and down the decks. There were less and less people aboard. Finally they, too, went back to their cabin. Soon the only people on the ship who were not asleep were the crew members on duty.

It was quiet and peaceful aboard the “Ladoga.” From every cabin there came the sound of snoring or deep breathing, as if this were not taking place on a ship some two and a half thousand kilometres from the mainland, in the harsh and treacherous Barents Sea, but in a cosy rest home somewhere near Moscow , during the afternoon “quiet hour.” The shades were drawn on the port-holes, just as on the windows in rest homes, to keep out the bright sunshine.