right and embraced the hills. Something warm touched
Yegorushka's spine; the streak of light, stealing up from behind,
darted between the chaise and the horses, moved to meet the other
streak, and soon the whole wide steppe flung off the twilight of
early morning, and was smiling and sparkling with dew.

The cut rye, the coarse steppe grass, the milkwort, the wild hemp,
all withered from the sultry heat, turned brown and half dead, now
washed by the dew and caressed by the sun, revived, to fade again.
Arctic petrels flew across the road with joyful cries; marmots
called to one another in the grass. Somewhere, far away to the left,
lapwings uttered their plaintive notes. A covey of partridges,
scared by the chaise, fluttered up and with their soft "trrrr!"
flew off to the hills. In the grass crickets, locusts and grasshoppers
kept up their churring, monotonous music.

But a little time passed, the dew evaporated, the air grew stagnant,
and the disillusioned steppe began to wear its jaded July aspect.
The grass drooped, everything living was hushed. The sun-baked
hills, brownish-green and lilac in the distance, with their quiet
shadowy tones, the plain with the misty distance and, arched above
them, the sky, which seems terribly deep and transparent in the
steppes, where there are no woods or high hills, seemed now endless,
petrified with dreariness. . . .

How stifling and oppressive it was! The chaise raced along, while
Yegorushka saw always the same--the sky, the plain, the low hills
. . . . The music in the grass was hushed, the petrels had flown away,
the partridges were out of sight, rooks hovered idly over the
withered grass; they were all alike and made the steppe even more
monotonous.

A hawk flew just above the ground, with an even sweep of its wings,
suddenly halted in the air as though pondering on the dreariness
of life, then fluttered its wings and flew like an arrow over the
steppe, and there was no telling why it flew off and what it wanted.
In the distance a windmill waved its sails. . . .

Now and then a glimpse of a white potsherd or a heap of stones broke
the monotony; a grey stone stood out for an instant or a parched
willow with a blue crow on its top branch; a marmot would run across
the road and--again there flitted before the eyes only the high
grass, the low hills, the rooks. . . .

But at last, thank God, a waggon loaded with sheaves came to meet
them; a peasant wench was lying on the v