ndscape was different. There
were no hills now, but on all sides, wherever one looked, there
stretched the brown cheerless plain; here and there upon it small
barrows rose up and rooks flew as they had done the day before. The
belfries and huts of some village showed white in the distance
ahead; as it was Sunday the Little Russians were at home baking and
cooking--that could be seen by the smoke which rose from every
chimney and hung, a dark blue transparent veil, over the village.
In between the huts and beyond the church there were blue glimpses
of a river, and beyond the river a misty distance. But nothing was
so different from yesterday as the road. Something extraordinarily
broad, spread out and titanic, stretched over the steppe by way of
a road. It was a grey streak well trodden down and covered with
dust, like all roads. Its width puzzled Yegorushka and brought
thoughts of fairy tales to his mind. Who travelled along that road?
Who needed so much space? It was strange and unintelligible. It
might have been supposed that giants with immense strides, such as
Ilya Muromets and Solovy the Brigand, were still surviving in Russia,
and that their gigantic steeds were still alive. Yegorushka, looking
at the road, imagined some half a dozen high chariots racing along
side by side, like some he used to see in pictures in his Scripture
history; these chariots were each drawn by six wild furious horses,
and their great wheels raised a cloud of dust to the sky, while the
horses were driven by men such as one may see in one's dreams or
in imagination brooding over fairy tales. And if those figures had
existed, how perfectly in keeping with the steppe and the road they
would have been!

Telegraph-poles with two wires on them stretched along the right
side of the road to its furthermost limit. Growing smaller and
smaller they disappeared near the village behind the huts and green
trees, and then again came into sight in the lilac distance in the
form of very small thin sticks that looked like pencils stuck into
the ground. Hawks, falcons, and crows sat on the wires and looked
indifferently at the moving waggons.

Yegorushka was lying in the last of the waggons, and so could see
the whole string. There were about twenty waggons, and there was a
driver to every three waggons. By the last waggon, the one in which
Yegorushka was, there walked an old man with a grey beard, as short
and lean as Father Christopher, but with a sunbu