eets, and the water of its foaming river
sparkling hotly, yet dimly, in the sunlight.

It was a scene like a scene beheld in a vision.

A WOMAN

The wind is scudding over the steppe, and beating upon the rampart of
the Caucasian heights until their backbone seems to be bellying like a
huge sail, and the earth to be whirling and whizzing through
unfathomable depths of blue, and leaving behind it a rack of wind-torn
clouds which, as their shadows glide over the surface of the land, seem
ever to be striving to keep in touch with the onrush of the gale, and,
failing to maintain the effort, dissolving in tears and despondency.

The trees too are bending in the attitude of flight--their boughs are
brandishing their foliage as a dog worries a fleece, and littering the
black soil with leaves among which runs a constant querulous hissing
and rustling. Also, storks are uttering their snapping cry, sleek rooks
cawing, steppe grasshoppers maintaining their tireless chirp, sturdy,
well-grown husbandmen uttering shouts like words of command, the
threshing-floors of the rolling steppe diffusing a rain of golden
chaff, and eddying whirlwinds catching up stray poultry feathers,
dried-onion strips, and leaves yellowed with the heat, to send them
dancing again over the trim square of the little Cossack hamlet.

Similarly does the sun keep appearing and disappearing as though he
were pursuing the fugitive earth, and ever and anon halting through
weariness before his decline into the dark, shadowy vista where the
snowclad peaks of the western mountains are rearing their heads, and
fast-reddening clouds are reminding one of the surface of a ploughed
field.

At times those clouds part their bulk to reveal in blinding splendour
the silvery saddle of Mount Elburz, and the crystal fangs of other
peaks--all, apparently, striving to catch and detain the scudding
vapours. And to such a point does one come to realise the earth's
flight through space that one can scarcely draw one's breath for the
tension, the rapture, of the thought that with the rush of that dear
and beautiful earth oneself is keeping pace towards, and ever tending
towards, the region where, behind the eternal, snow-clad peaks, there
lies a boundless ocean of blue--an ocean beside which there may lie
stretched yet other proud and marvellous lands, a void of azure amid
which one may come to descry far-distant, many-tinted spheres of
planets as yet unknown, but sisters,