re. While the dry twigs and stems were burning up,
Kiruha and Vassya went off somewhere to get water from a creek;
they vanished into the darkness, but could be heard all the time
talking and clinking their pails; so the creek was not far away.
The light from the fire lay a great flickering patch on the earth;
though the moon was bright, yet everything seemed impenetrably black
beyond that red patch. The light was in the waggoners' eyes, and
they saw only part of the great road; almost unseen in the darkness
the waggons with the bales and the horses looked like a mountain
of undefined shape. Twenty paces from the camp fire at the edge of
the road stood a wooden cross that had fallen aslant. Before the
camp fire had been lighted, when he could still see things at a
distance, Yegorushka had noticed that there was a similar old
slanting cross on the other side of the great road.

Coming back with the water, Kiruha and Vassya filled the cauldron
and fixed it over the fire. Styopka, with the notched spoon in his
hand, took his place in the smoke by the cauldron, gazing dreamily
into the water for the scum to rise. Panteley and Emelyan were
sitting side by side in silence, brooding over something. Dymov was
lying on his stomach, with his head propped on his fists, looking
into the fire. . . . Styopka's shadow was dancing over him, so that
his handsome face was at one minute covered with darkness, at the
next lighted up. . . . Kiruha and Vassya were wandering about at a
little distance gathering dry grass and bark for the fire. Yegorushka,
with his hands in his pockets, was standing by Panteley, watching
how the fire devoured the grass.

All were resting, musing on something, and they glanced cursorily
at the cross over which patches of red light were dancing. There
is something melancholy, pensive, and extremely poetical about a
solitary tomb; one feels its silence, and the silence gives one the
sense of the presence of the soul of the unknown man who lies under
the cross. Is that soul at peace on the steppe? Does it grieve in
the moonlight? Near the tomb the steppe seems melancholy, dreary
and mournful; the grass seems more sorrowful, and one fancies the
grasshoppers chirrup less freely, and there is no passer-by who
would not remember that lonely soul and keep looking back at the
tomb, till it was left far behind and hidden in the mists. . . .

"Grandfather, what is that cross for?" asked Yegorushka.

Panteley looked a