Page:Taras Bulba. A Tale of the Cossacks. 1916.djvu/72

66 so chat only their black kazák caps were visible among its spikes.

"Come, come, why are you so quiet, my lads?" said Bulba at last, waking from his own revery. "You're like monks. Come, send all thinking to the Devil on the spot! Take your pipes in your lips, and we'll smoke, and spur on our horses, and fly so swiftly that no bird can overtake us."

And the kazáks, bending low over their horses, disappeared in the grass. Their black caps were no longer visible; a wake of trodden grass alone showed a trace of their swift flight.

The sun had long since peered forth from the clear heavens and inundated the steppe with his vitalising, warming light. All that was dim and sleepy in the minds of the kazáks fled away in a twinkling; their hearts fluttered like birds. The further they penetrated into the steppe, the more beautiful did it become. At that time all the South, all that region which now constitutes New Russia, even to the Black Sea, was a green, virgin wilderness. No plough had ever passed over the immeasurable waves of wild growth; horses alone, hiding themselves in it as in a forest, trod it down. Nothing in Nature could be finer. The whole surface of the earth looked like a green-gold ocean, upon which were sprinkled millions of