hirt.

At intervals, the defile would convey to our ears a dull echo of sounds
so wholly at variance with the locality as muffled hammer-blows, a
screeching of saws, a rasping of planes, and a confused murmur of human
voices.

Also, a moist breeze blew constantly from the dark-blue depths of the
defile, and caused the stiff, upright larches on the knoll behind the
barraque to rustle their boughs, and distilled from the rank soil the
voluptuous scents of ace-rose and pitch-pine, and evoked in the trees'
quiet gloom a soft, crooning, somnolent lullaby.

About a sazhen [Fathom] below the level of the barraque there coursed
noisily over its bed of stones a rivulet white with foam. Yet though of
other sounds in the vicinity there were but few, the general effect was
to suggest that everything in the neighbourhood was speaking or singing
a tale of such sort as to shame the human species into silence.

On our own side of the valley the ground lay bathed in sunshine--lay
scorched to the point of seeming to have spread over it a tissue-cloth.
Old gold in colour, while from every side arose the sweet perfume of
dried grasses, and in dark clefts there could be seen sprouting the
long, straight spears and fiery, reddish, cone-shaped blossoms of that
bold, hardy plant which is known to us as saxifrage--the plant of which
the contemplation makes one long to burst into music, and fills one's
whole body with sensuous languor.

Laced with palpitating, snow-white foam, the beautiful rivulet pursued
its sportive way over tessellated stones which flashed through the
eddies of the glassy, sunlit, amber-coloured water with the silken
sheen of a patchwork carpet or costly shawl of Cashmir.

Through the mouth of the defile one could reach the valley of the
Sunzha, whence, since men were ther, building a railway to Petrovsk on
the Caspian Sea, there kept issuing and breaking against the crags a
dull rumble of explosions, of iron rasped against stone, of whistles of
works locomotives, and of animated human voices.

From the barraque the distance to the point where the defile debouched
upon the valley was about a hundred paces, and as one issued thence one
could see, away to the left, the level steppes of the Cis-Caucasus,
with a boundary wall of blue hills, topped by the silver-hewn saddle of
Mount Elburz behind it. True, for the most part the steppes had a dry,
yellow, sandy look, with merely here and there dark patches of gardens
or bl