bellowing;
the cow kept raising her large eyes to the sky, opening her mouth in
wonder, and lowing deeply. But the boar lagged behind, fretting and
gnashing his teeth, and stole sheaves of grain and seized them for his
stores.

The birds hid in the woods, in the thatched roofs, in the depths of the
grass; the ravens, surrounding the ponds in flocks, walked to and fro with
measured steps; they turned their black eyes on the black clouds, and,
protruding their tongues from their broad, dry throats and spreading out
their wings, they awaited their bath. Yet even they, foreseeing too fierce
a storm, already were making for the wood, like a rising cloud. The last
of the birds, the swallow, made bold by its fleetness of wing, pierced the
cloud like an arrow, and finally dropped from it like a bullet.

Just at that moment the gentry had finished their terrible combat with the
Muscovites, and one and all were seeking shelter in the houses and
stables, deserting the battlefield, where soon the elements joined in
combat.

To the west, the earth, still gilded by the sun, shone with a gloomy,
yellowish-red tint; already the cloud, spreading out its shadows like a
net, was catching the remnants of the light and flying after the sun as if
it wished to seize upon it before it set. Blasts of wind whistled sharply
below; they rushed by, one after another, bringing drops of rain, large,
clear, and rounded as hailstones.

Suddenly the winds grappled, split asunder, struggled, whirled about, and
in whistling columns circled over the ponds, stirring the waters in the
ponds to their depths; they fell upon the meadows and whistled through the
willows and the grass. The willow branches snapped, the swaths of grass
were borne on the wind like hair torn out by handfuls, mixed with ringlets
from the sheaves. The winds howled; they fell upon the field, wallowed,
dug into the earth, snatched up clods, and made an opening for a third
wind, which tore itself from the field like a pillar of black earth, and
rose and whirled like a moving pyramid, boring into the ground with its
brow and from its feet sprinkling sand in the eyes of the stars; it
broadened at every step and opened out at the summit, and with its immense
trumpet it proclaimed the storm. At last with all this chaos of water and
dust, of straw, leaves, branches, and torn-up sod, the winds smote on the
forest and roared through the depths of the thicket like bears.

And now the rain p