ten o'clock in the morning
The Star of the Desert -- it must have been a poet who so called it -- has now sunk from the first rank to the fifth or sixth . A momentary glance was afforded at its old walls , with their useless battlements , the ancient towers in the center of the city , the mosques and modern churches , the cathedral with its five domes , gilded and dotted with stars as if it were a piece of the sky , as they rose from the bank of the Volga , which here , as it joins the sea , is over a mile in width . Thenceforward the flight of the `` Albatross '' became quite a race through the heights of the sky , as if she had been harnessed to one of those fabulous hippogriffs which cleared a league at every sweep of the wing . At ten o'clock in the morning , of the 4th of July the aeronef , heading northwest , followed for a little the valley of the Volga . The steppes of the Don and the Ural stretched away on each side of the river . Even if it had been possible to get a glimpse of these vast territories there would have been no time to count the towns and villages . In the evening the aeronef passed over Moscow without saluting the flag on the Kremlin .