Page:Taras Bulba. A Tale of the Cossacks. 1916.djvu/188

182 threaten, while the most exasperating on both sides exchanged fierce remarks.

At last all dispersed. One, weary with battle, stretched himself out to rest; another sprinkled his wounds with earth, and tore up for bandages kerchiefs and rich garments captured from the enemy. Others, who were less exhausted, began to sort over the corpses, and to render them the last honours. They dug graves with their swords and spears, brought earth in their caps and the skirts of their garments, laid the kazáks' bodies out decently, and buried them in fresh earth, in order that the ravens and the eagles might not claw out their eyes. But binding the corpses of the Lyakhs by tens, as they came to hand, to the tails of wild horses, they let these loose on the plain, pursued them, and lashed them for a long time on their flanks. The infuriated horses flew over furrow and hillock, through gullies and streams, and thrashed the bodies of the Poles, all covered with blood and dust, against the earth.

Then all the kuréns sat down in circles in the evening, and talked long of their deeds, and of the feats which had fallen to the share of each, for eternal repetition by newcomers and by posterity. It was long before they lay down to sleep; and longer still before old Taras, meditating what it might signify that Andríi was not among the