church of crude hue reared itself starkly, harshly on the bare common. Beyond the church a tiny clayey pond gleamed in the sunlight below a dam of manure, a sheet of thick yellow water in which stood a herd of cows, incessantly discharging according to the demands of nature; and there a naked peasant was soaping his head. He, too, had waded into the water up to his waist; on his breast glistened his brass baptismal cross; his neck and face were black with sunburn, his body strikingly white, pallid.
“Unbridle my horse for me,” said Tikhon Ilitch, driving into the pond, which reeked of the cattle.
The peasant tossed his fragment of blue-marbled soap on the shore, black with cow-dung, and, his head all grey, with a modest gesture as though to cover himself, he made haste to comply with the command. The mare bent greedily to the water, but it was so warm and repulsive that she raised her muzzle and turned away. Whistling to her, Tikhon Ilitch waved his cap:
“Well, nice water you have! Do you drink it?”
“Well, then, and is yours sugar-water, I wonder?” retorted the peasant, amiably and gaily. “We’ve been drinking it these thousand years! But what’s water?—’tis bread we’re lacking.”
And Tikhon Ilitch was forced to hold his tongue; for in Durnovka the water was no better, and there was no bread there either. What was more, there would be none.
Beyond Rovnoe the road ran again through fields of rye—but what fields! The grain was spindling, weak, almost wholly lacking in ears, and smothered in cornflowers. And near Vyselki, not far from Durnovka, clouds of rooks perched on the gnarled, hollow willow-trees with their silvery beaks wide open. Nothing was left of Vyselki that day save its name—the rest was only black skeletons of cottages in the midst of