Silence.
Foma spent all day long on the captain's bridge beside his father.
Without uttering a word, he stared wide-eyed at the endless panorama of the banks, and it seemed to him he was moving along a broad silver path in those wonderful kingdoms inhabited by the sorcerers and giants of his familiar fairy-tales.

At times he would load his father with questions about everything that passed before them.

Ignat answered him willingly and concisely, but the boy was not pleased with his answers; they contained nothing interesting and intelligible to him, and he did not hear what he longed to hear.

Once he told his father with a sigh: "Auntie Anfisa knows better than you." "What does she know ?" asked Ignat, smiling.
"Everything," replied the boy, convincedly.
No wonderful kingdom appeared before him.

But often cities appeared on the banks of the river, just such cities as the one where Foma lived.
Some of them were larger, some smaller, but the people, and the houses, and the churches--all were the same as in his own city.