Through Russia | Page 4

has thrown
over its hills rare carpets silk-embroidered by Turcoman weavers of
Shemi and Samarkand, and contains, heaped everywhere, plunder
brought from all the quarters of the world for the delectation of the sun.
Yes, it is as though men sought to say to the Sun God: " All things here
are thine. They have been brought hither for thee by thy people."
Yes, mentally I see long-bearded, grey-headed supermen, beings
possessed of the rounded eyes of happy children, descending from the
hills, and decking the earth, and sowing it with sheerly kaleidoscopic
treasures, and coating the tops of the mountains with massive layers of
silver, and the lower edges with a living web of trees. Yes, I see those
beings decorating and fashioning the scene until, thanks to their labours,
this gracious morsel of the earth has become fair beyond all conception.
And what a privilege it is to be human! How much that is wonderful
leaps to the eye-how the presence of beauty causes. the heart to throb
with a voluptuous rapture that is almost pain!
And though there are occasions when life seems hard, and the breast
feels filled with fiery rancour, and melancholy dries and renders athirst
the heart's blood, this is not a mood sent us in perpetuity. For at times

even the sun may feel sad as he contemplates men, and sees that,
despite all that he has done for them, they have done so little in
return. . . .
No, it is not that good folk are lacking. It is that they need to be
rounded off--better still, to be made anew.
**********************
Suddenly there came into view over the bushes to my left a file of dark
heads, while through the surging of the waves and the babble of the
stream I caught the sound of human voices, a sound emanating from a
party of " famine people " or folk who were journeying from Sukhum
to Otchenchiri to obtain work on a local road then in process of
construction.
The owners of the voices I knew to be immigrants from the province of
Orlov. I knew them to be so for the reason that I myself had lately been
working in company with the male members of the party, and had
taken leave of them only yesterday in order that I might set out earlier
than they, and, after walking through the night, greet the sun when he
should arise above the sea.
The members of the party comprised four men and a woman--the latter
a young female with high cheek-bones, a figure swollen with manifest
pregnancy, and a pair of greyish-blue eyes that had fixed in them a
stare of apprehension. At the present moment her head and yellow scarf
were just showing over the tops of the bushes; and while I noted that
now it was swaying from side to side like a sunflower shaken by the
wind, I recalled the fact that she was a woman whose husband had been
carried off at Sukhum by a surfeit of fruit--this fact being known to me
through the circumstance that in the workmen's barraque where we had
shared quarters these folk had observed the good old Russian custom of
confiding to a stranger the whole of their troubles, and had done so in
tones of such amplitude and penetration that the querulous words must
have been audible for five versts around.
And as I had talked to these forlorn people, these human beings who
lay crushed beneath the misfortune which had uprooted them from their
barren and exhausted lands, and blown them, like autumn leaves,
towards the Caucasus where nature's luxuriant, but unfamiliar, aspect
had blinded and bewildered them, and with its onerous conditions of
labour quenched their last spark of courage; as I had talked to these

poor people I had seen them glancing about with dull, troubled,
despondent eyes, and heard them say to one another softly, and with
pitiful smiles:
"What a country!"
"Aye,-- that it is !--a country to make one sweat!"
"As hard as a stone it is!"
"Aye, an evil country! "
After which they had gone on to speak of their native haunts, where
every handful of soil had represented to them the dust of their ancestors,
and every grain of that soil had been watered with the sweat of their
brows, and become charged with dear and intimate recollections.
Previously there had joined the party a woman who, tall and straight,
had had breasts as flat as a board, and jawbones like the jawbones of a
horse, and a glance in her dull, sidelong black eyes like a gleaming,
smouldering fire.
And every evening this woman had been wont to step outside the
barraque with the woman in the yellow scarf and to