Page:The Czechoslovak Review, vol4, 1920.pdf/231

 thus compensating us for the lack of singing birds which was the only thing we missed so far in this charming spring landscape.

After riding through the valley for some time, we banched off from the pathway—which led on through the midst of the deserted mountains heaven knows whither—to something which Tabunov certainly designated by the name of road, but which in reality by no means deserved such a name. As we ascended the hill-side on this alleged road behind the surgeon and the Cossacks, I searched in vain upon the ground for any ruts or other traces of conveyances, horses or wayfarers; I saw nothing but high grass, stones and prickly shrubs. Later on in the forest I came to the conclusion that this gap between the dense trees which was narrow and overgrown with lower and sparser shrubs and along which we passed with some difficulty, was the trace of a roadway long since abandoned. And Tabunov partly corroborated my conjecture by informing us that this road was a survival. from Circassian days, and that owing to the remarkable rankness of the vegetation here, it would have long been covered up, if from time to time the Cossacks had not made use of it on their expeditions into the mountains.

It was not over pleasant to ride upon. The horses had to keep out of the way of the thorny brushwood, and our two Cossacks frequently drew the long broad daggers from their leathern scabbards at their sides to elip the long overgrowth of branches and the cross-wise outstretched tendrils and garlands with which the hops and the vine covered in our pathway, as the villagers used to do for a wedding procession. From the forest we then rode out on to a stony level where a deadly heat blazed down on to us, sweltering from above and below, and from where we had a difficult task to mount across the boulders along a bare steep hill-side to a rocky ravine from which we caught a discouraging glimpse of the troublesome road to the high stony slope opposite. To this we could at the most look forward like Eulenspiegel because of the journey down again, but this journey was even worse than the upward one. And so it went on the whole time.

Our humor became less cheerful. I myself no longer even looked at the landscape. It is difficult to take any pleasure in picturesque views when the sweat is trickling in streams from your forehead, when your jaded limbs grow aching and numb, and your cramped knees are chafed by a feeling as if they were being cut into two with a saw. Duňaška stopped singing. Suslikov had started some mordant argument with Aglaja Andrejevna, but they soon gave it up; argue, if you will, when your tongue is being perpetually threatened by jolts, and when at a most telling point in your speech your opponent suddenly disappears behind a boulder.

During this journey the ladies had to dismount from their horses several times, and upon us younger men devolved the more or less agreeable duty of helping them across the worst obstacles. Anna Kirilovna was especially insistent in her demands upon our support, and the task of helping her along was all the more laborious, since in addition to the burden of her capacious charms it was necessary at the same time to bear the brunt of her continual lamentations and reproaches: “Oh, oh—what a journey!—dear, dear!—how terribly hot it is!—my poor darlings (this was intended for the girls, who with a smile and as nimbly as fawns, were leaping across the stones)—what a hard time you are having! oh, Pavel Semenovitch, have you no conscience?—This is an outrageous sin, to lead us astray among such horrible precipices and abysses.”

The sinner obstinately held his peace. But all at once, as we were riding out towards the wood on the spacious projection of a peak, he stopped his horse and exclaimed, pointing to the little wood: “We are at our journey’s end, ladies and gentlemen. Look, there is the aúl—aúl—well, I do not know its name. Imagine, if you like, that this is the same Circassian aúl in which Pushkin’s prisoner of the Caucasus spent his days in grievous hardship and his nights in secret wooing of the unhappy Circassian girl.”

We stopped and looked more closely at the place which the surgeon pointed out, but we could see only the little wood which was indeed of recent growth and not very high, but extremely dense and full of wild beauty. And yet Tabunov was right—it was a decayed Circassian village of bygone times.

A decayed village. What a depth of poetry reposes in these words. Imagine in the slumbering depths of the forest a group of half-ruined cottages, or rather only the remains of low walls in the interior of which among ferns and heather there is a rank growth of dense briar which thrusts its prickly branches with wild roses through the cavities of the windows. The deserted scene of former human activity with its joys and sorrows, with its love and hatred is concealed and grown over by the victorious forest with its thick branches, through the gaps in which a sun-ray seldom penetrates into the dull, mysterious dusk and plays like a will-o-the-wisp on the rich velvety moss from which compassionate nature is weaving a green shroud for the dead village. Perhaps you also imagine in its midst a half-ruined chapel into whose bare interior the branches of old oak trees force their way through the Gothic windows and with their thick leafage replace the fallen roof, and in whose moss-covered belfry with its rusty cross instead of the sacred chimes only the song of the forest birds now resounds.

Well, the decayed Circassian village, before which we stood, presented a somewhat different appearance. The mountain hamlets in the Cau-