Afterwards it might have been easy to agree that it was always clear that the village stood squarely in the path of that terrible descent, but hope misleads, and inertia misleads, and it is hard to imagine the vanishing of what has seemed as stable as stone. So the villagers left it very late to make a plan to evacuate their village, and in the end left hurriedly and messily, running here and there in the stink and smoke of that bad breath, snatching up their belongings, putting them down and snatching up others, seething like an ants’ nest. They ran into the forest with sacks of corn and cooking-pots, with feather-beds and sides of bacon, completely bewildered.
![469ecc20-4bc1-4282-9a73-5c9b38a8badd [MJ upscaled]](../../../_data/i/upload/2023/12/02/20231202000247-013bfdd5-sq.jpg)
![Viy from Wikipedia-art-scale-4 00x Sccy6 please credit[palette.fm]](../../../_data/i/upload/2023/12/02/20231202001249-a5a89592-sq.jpg)
