The Master and Margarita. Rook and immediately melted into thin air, not considering it worth the trouble to climb back up the stairs

Rook and immediately melted into thin air, not considering it worth the trouble to climb back up the stairs. The rook turned on the headlights and rolled the car out through the gates past the man who was fast asleep at the gateway. And the lights of the big black car blended in with the other lights on sleepless and noisy Sadovaya Street.

An hour later, in the basement of the small house on one of the side streets off the Arbat, in the front room, where everything was just as it had been a year ago before that terrible autumn night, at the ¿ ble covered with the velvet tablecloth, beneath the shaded lamp, near which stood the vase filled with lilies of the valley, Margarita sat, weeping quietly from the shock and happiness she had experienced. The fire-damaged notebook lay before her, and next to it towered a pile of undamaged notebooks. The little house was silent In the small, adjoining room, sound asleep on the couch, covered by his hospital robe, was the Master. His even breathing could not be heard.

When she had cried her fill, Margarita took up the undamaged notebooks and found the place she had been rereading before her meeting with Azazello beneath the Kremlin wall. Margarita did not feel like sleeping. She stroked the manuscript affectionately, as one would stroke a beloved cat, and turned it over in her hands, looking at it from all sides, now pausing at the title page, now looking at the end. She suddenly had a horrible thought that it was all witchcraft, that the notebooks were about to vanish before her eyes, that she would end up in her bedroom back home, and that when she woke up, she would have to go drown herself. But that was the last horrible thought she had, a vestige of the prolonged suffering she had undergone. Nothing vanished, the omnipotent Woland was indeed omnipotent, and Margarita was free to leaf through the pages of the notebooks for as long as she liked, even till dawn. She examined them closely, kissed them, and reread the words again and again, " The darkness that had come in from the Mediterranean covered the city so detested by the procurator...' Yes, the darkness..."

XXV

How the Procurator Tried to Save Judas ofKerioth

He darkness that had come in from the Mediterranean covered the city so detested by the procurator. The hanging bridges which connected the temple with the fearsome Antonia Tower had disappeared, an abyss descended from the sky, and covered the winged gods above the hippodrome, the Hasmonaean palace and its embrasures, the bazaars, the caravanseries, the alleys, the ponds... Yershalaim—the great city—vanished as if it had never existed. Everything was devoured by the darkness, which frightened all living creatures in Yershalaim and its surroundings. A strange dark cloud drifted in from the sea towards the end of the afternoon on the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan.

The cloud had already spilled its belly onto Bald Skull, where the executioners had hastily pierced the condemned men, it had broken over the temple in Yershalaim, coursed down its hills in steamy rivulets, and flooded the Lower City. The cloud gushed through windows and chased people indoors from the winding streets. It was slow to release its moisture and at first gave off only light Whenever fire ripped through the steamy black brew, the great hulk of the temple with its glistening scaly roof soared out of the pitch darkness into view. But the fire was extinguished in an instant, and the temple again sank into the dark abyss. It leapt out several times, only to fall back again, and each time its fall was accompanied by the thunder of catastrophe.

Other quivering flashes of light summoned from the abyss the palace of Herod the Great that stood opposite the temple on the western hill, and its fearsome eyeless golden statues soared up into the black sky with their arms extended. But the heavenly fire hid once again, and heavy claps of thunder drove the golden idols back into the darkness.