[…] Before my eyes, the tram car rumbled and started along the narrow Sviatopolk-Mykhailivsky Alley, under the monastery wall, and to the descent to Podil. The unpleasant rumble awakened and stirred my imagination that had been lost before in the magical world of The Arabian Nights.

I walk along the short alley to the tram station, past the car besieged by a crowd of people trying to get down, and come to the hills behind the monastery and the station, to the edge of a cliff, to which a glass corridor clings and goes all the way down like a crayfish, neck dangling in the air, propped from below the cliff with iron poles. From there, a heavy red car like a crocodile crept out and soon scrambled down above a deep narrow hollow, green and bright at the bottom where the beautiful weeping willows show their green washed free of dust, where on either side from hanging rails there are two rows of deep covered wells used to drain the underground springs. From the hill, those closely dug wells seem to me as rows of hive chambers at the bottom of the hollow in a strange apiary. I stare at that green crack in the hollow. My eyes rest at the two canted cars dragging up and down each other like boys playing a strange game of teeterboard or sway on a swing in a green hollow in the country. Yet I turned my gaze higher, looked at Podil and the landscape far beyond Podil, beyond Obolon, and I saw such a vista, such a beauty that rarely could be seen above the Dnipro.

To get a wider view of the expanse on the horizon, I walk along a side path on the very edge of the hills like steep crags. I go past the two newly planted alleys under the highest white wall of the monastery and look down from the crag to where the hillside had slumped, and now, in the narrow steep valley, wooden stairs to Podil were constructed, and so I reach the spire above the hilltop. Here, on the top, I find a beautiful columned kiosk like a fine little chapel with benches and walkways around. Here is the largest ledge of the Volodymyr’s Hill, and the highest. From here, I range my eyes round the wide expanse, Podil, the whole Obolon, flat like meadows, up to the hills of Vyshhorod above the Dnipro.

1910.