goat, she was quite as regular as, as--"

"Things must have been indeed terrible on that expedition!" I
interposed.

"I do not know for certain, since, though men who took an actual part
in the expedition's engagements have said that they were so (the
Chechintze is a vicious brute, and never gives in), I myself know but
little of the affair, since I spent my whole time in the reserve, and
never once did my company advance to the assault. No, it merely lay
about on the sand, and fired at long range. In fact, nothing but sand
was to be seen thereabouts; nor did we ever succeed in finding out what
the fighting was for. True, if a piece of country be good, it is in our
interest to take it; but in the present case the country was poor and
bare, with never a river in sight, and a climate so hot that all one
thought of was one's mortal need of a drink. In fact, some of our
fellows died of thirst outright. Moreover, in those parts there grows a
sort of millet called dzhugar--millet which not only has a horrible
taste, but proves absolutely delusive, since the more one eats of it,
the less one feels filled."

As the ex-soldier told me the tale colourlessly and reluctantly, with
frequent pauses between the sentences (as though either he found it
difficult to recall the experience or he were thinking of something
else), he never once looked me straight in the face, but kept his eyes
shamefacedly fixed upon the ground.

Unwieldily and unhealthily stout, he always conveyed to me the
impression of being charged with a vague discontent, a sort of captious
inertia.

"Absolutely unfit for settlement is this country" he continued as he
glanced around him. "It is fit only to do nothing in. For that matter,
one doesn't WANT to do anything in it, save to live with one's eyes
bulging like a drunkard's--for the climate is too hot, and the place
smells like a chemist's shop or a hospital."

Nevertheless, for the past eight years had he been roaming this "too
hot" country, as though fascinated!

"Why not return to Riazan?" I suggested.

"Nothing would there be there for me to do," he replied through his
teeth, and with an odd division of his words.

My first encounter with him had been at the railway station at Armavir,
where, purple in the face with excitement, he had been stamping like a
horse, and, with distended eyes, hissing, or, rather, snarling, at a
couple of Greeks:

"I'll tear the flesh from your bones!"

Meanwhile th