Vladimir Nabokov. De horas y mareas
Vladimir Nabokov. TIME AND EBB
Old men resembling the hoary ferryman of still more ancient fairy tales chanted out their intermittent "nextations" and checked the tickets of the travelers, among whom there were sure to be, if the journey was reasonably long, a great number of sprawling, dead-tired soldiers and one live, drunken soldier, tremendously peripatetic and with only his pallor to connect him with death. He always occurred singly but he was always there, a freak, a young creature of clay, in the midst of what some very modern history textbooks glibly call Hamilton's period— a