Next morning, at four o’clock, the captain came for me. He wore an old threadbare coat without epaulettes, wide Caucasian trousers, a white sheepskin cap, the wool of which had grown yellow and limp, and had a shabby Asiatic sword strapped round his shoulders. The small white horse he rode ambled along with short strides, hanging its head down and swinging its thin tail. Although the worthy captain’s figure was not very martial, nor even good-looking, it expressed such equanimity towards everything around him, that it involuntarily inspired respect.
I did not keep him waiting a single moment, but mounted my horse at once, and we rode together through the gates of the fortress. The battalion was some five hundred yards in front of us, and looked like a dense, oscillating, black mass. It was only possible to guess that it was an infantry battalion by the bayonets which looked like needles standing close together, and by the sounds of the soldiers’ songs which occasionally reached us, the beating of a drum, and the delightful voice of the fifth company’s second tenor, which had so often charmed me in the fortress. The road lay along the middle of a deep and broad ravine, by the side of a stream which had overflowed its banks. Flocks of wild pigeons whirled above it, now alighting on the rocky banks, now turning in the air in rapid circles and vanishing out of sight.
The sun was not yet visible, but the crest of the right side of the ravine was just beginning to be lit up. The grey and whitish rock, the yellowish-green moss, the dew-covered bushes of Christ’s-Thorn, dogberry and dwarf elm, appeared extraordinarily distinct and salient in the golden morning light; but the other side and the valley, wrapt in thick mist which floated in uneven strata, were damp and gloomy, and presented an indefinite mingling of colours: pale purple, almost black, dark green and