Page:Taras Bulba. A Tale of the Cossacks. 1916.djvu/129

Rh wings, never recognising one another, the dove not seeing the vulture, nor the vulture the dove, and no one knows how near he may be flying to his destruction.

Ostap had, long before, attended to his duties, and gone to the barrack. Andríi, without knowing why, felt a sort of oppression in his heart. The kazáks had finished their evening meal; the evening had fully quieted down, the wonderful July night ruled the air: but he did not go to the barracks, he did not lie down to sleep, and involuntarily he surveyed the whole scene before him. In the sky, with a thin, sharp gleam, twinkled innumerable stars. The plain was covered, far and wide, by wagons scattered over its expanse, their swinging tar-buckets smeared with tar, loaded with every description of goods and provisions captured from the foe. By the side of the carts, under the carts, and far beyond the carts, Zaporozhtzi were everywhere visible, stretched out upon the grass,—all asleep in picturesque attitudes: one had thrust a sack under his head, another his cap, still another was simply making use of his comrade's side. Swords, guns, arquebuses, short-stemmed pipes with copper mountings, iron awls, and a flint and steel were inseparable from every kazák. The heavy oxen, with legs doubled under them, lay in huge, whitish