dense like a cloud resting on the hill;
the Nestor and our own country was soaked with sun.

"That's a fine forest," I said to my companion.

"Yes, the forest of S----, stretches miles back into Galicia." It was
Nikitin that day who spoke to me. We turned carelessly away. Meanwhile
how difficult and unpleasant those first weeks at Mittoevo were! We had
none of us realised, I suppose, how sternly those days of retreat had
tested our nerves. We had been not only retreating, but (at the same
time) working fiercely, and now, when for some while the work
slackened and, under the hot blazing sun, we found nothing for our
hands to do, a grinding irritable reaction settled down upon us.

I had known in my earlier experience at the war the troubles that
inevitably rise from inaction; the little personal inconveniences, the
tyrannies of habits and manners and appearances, when you've got
nothing to do but sit and watch your immediate neighbour. But on that
earlier occasion our army had been successful; it seemed that the war
would soon find its conclusion in the collapse of Germany, and good
news from Europe smiled upon us every morning at breakfast. Now we
were tired and over-wrought. Good news there was none--indeed every
day brought disastrous tidings. We, ourselves, must look back upon a
hundred versts of fair smiling country that we had conquered with the
sacrifice of many thousands of lives and surrendered without the
giving of a blow. And always the force that compelled us to this was
sinister and ironical by its invisibility.

It was the Russian temperament to declare exactly what it felt, to
give free rein to its moods and dislikes and discomforts. The weather
was beginning to be fiercely hot, there were many rumours of cholera
and typhus--we, all of us, lost colour and appetite, slept badly and
suffered from sudden headaches.

Three days after our arrival at Mittoevo we had all discovered private
hostilities and resentments. I was as bad as any one. I could not
endure the revolutionary student, Ivan Mihailovitch. I thought him
most uncleanly in his habits, and I was compelled to sleep in the same
room with him. Certainly it was true that washing was not one of the
most important things in the world to him. In the morning he would
lurch out of bed, put on a soiled shirt and trousers, dab his face
with a decrepit sponge, take a tiny piece of soap from an old tin box,
look at it, rub it on his fingers and put it hurr