when the other gorky paints stillness and silence

there were clouds everywhere now, and the rafts looked as though they had stopped floating and were standing motionless in that concentrated black water, crushed down by heavy, dark-gray mounds of clouds that, falling from the sky, had obstructed the path. the river looked like a bottomless pit, girded on all sides by hills reaching up to the sky and cloaked in a close shroud of mist. it was oppressively quiet all around and the water, as though waiting for something, splashed gently against the rafts. a lot of sorrow and a sort of shy questioning could be detected in that plaintive sound, the only audible one in the night and the one that made the stillness even more marked.

...

two voices tore the silence of the night, rousing and shaking it, now blending into one dense note as rich as the sound of a big brass tuba, now rising to a falsetto, and they floated in the air, faded and died away. the silence again succeeded.

two paragraphs from maxim gorky's story "on the rafts".