Russian custom, they discussed their misfortunes so volubly and so loudly that their pitiful words must have been heard for five versts around.

These people were crushed by their sorrow. It had wrenched them from their native barren and exhausted lands and had carried them to this spot, the way a wind carries dry leaves in autumn. Here the exuberant and unfamiliar aspect of nature dazzled and bewildered them, while the oppressive conditions of work robbed them of the last ounce of courage. They looked at the land, blinking their dull, sad eyes forlornly, smiling piteously at each other and saying quietly:

“Ah…what rich soil.…”

“Things just push out of it.”

“My—yes…still, rather stony.…”

“Not very easy to work, this soil, I must say.…”

And they recalled their native villages, where every handful of soil was the dust of their ancestors, and the land was memorable, familiar, dear—watered by their sweat.

There was with them a woman, tall, straight, flat as a board, with equine jaws and a dull look in her coal-black, squinting eyes. In the evening, together with the woman in the yellow kerchief, she would go off beyond the barracks, and sitting on a pile of crushed stone, her cheek in her palm, her head bent to one side, she would sing in a high, angry voice:

Her companion usually held her peace, staring down at her stomach, her head bent forward, but sometimes she would suddenly join in, with words like sobs, singing indolently and thickly in a mannish, somewhat hoarse voice:

In the stifling blackness of the Southern night these plaintive voices recalled the North, the snowy wastes, the wailing of snowstorms and the distant of wolves.…

Then the squint-eyed woman had been taken ill with a fever, and she had been carried to town on a tarpaulin stretcher. She shook and moaned, as though continuing her song about the churchyard and the sand-bank.

Ducking suddenly, the yellow head disappeared.

I finished my breakfast, covered the honey in the kettle with leaves, tied up my bundle, and without hurrying, set out after the others, who had left earlier, tapping my cornel stick against the hard path.

And now I too am on the narrow, gray strip of road. On my right, the dark blue sea is tossing; it is as though a thousand invisible carpenters were planing it—the white shavings roll up on the beach with a rustling sound, driven by a wind, moist, warm, and fragrant, like the breath of a healthy woman. A Turkish felucca, listing to port, is gliding toward Sukhum, her sails bellied, the way an important engineer at Sukhum used to puff out his fat cheeks as he shouted:

“Shut up! You may be smart, but I’ll have you in jail in a jiffy!”

He was fond of having men arrested, and it is good to think that worms have surely long since gnawed him to the bone.