An unknown force was drawing the barge *Saint Nicholas* inexorably into the very essence of the white night, into a dissolved, bottomless radiance that had abolished gravity. The world had ceased to be composed of things and had become a single milky-silver plasma in which water and sky were one substance of differing thickness. Vasily stood at the stern, and it seemed to him that the enormous drowsing eye of the world was slowly letting him in through the slit of the white night, examining his soul from within.
The sea beneath the hull was breathing — the slow, chest-deep sighs of a vast sleeping creature, and every sigh was a change in the density of space itself. Through the thick air, sweetish as whey, outlines began to come through.
First a fold appeared out of the fog, a crease in an endless cloth. Then the fold hardened, turned black and cutting. It rose out of the water like a blade laid on the edge of creation. The island did not emerge as a whole body — its granite flesh tore through the thin film of the sea edge-first, like a rib.
The barge moored with a dull, soft thud against pilings sheathed in sealskins. Vasily came down the gangway. Dozens of people came down with him: the crowd poured onto the shore, crossing themselves, looking about, losing their bundles. At first Vasily was carried along with the rest, but the moment his foot touched the quay, the crowd vanished.
What he felt was not simply cold but an answering pressure. It seemed the island had not merely accepted his weight but met it, leaned in toward it, and now held it, the way a palm holds a fallen object, testing its weight and shape.
The chapter goes on in the book.