Page:Zakhar Berkut(1944).djvu/94

 rippling waves of a calm sea the lights fluctuated in the darkening expanse above the valley, here bright and enlivened and there vacillating, dying out. These were the campfires of the Mongols.

But away in the distance where the twinkling sea of light ended, burned other fires appallingly wide, which curved around the Mongol encampment in a broad, fiery belt, at times flaming high into the air. Here the foreign marauders plundered, robbed and murdered the people, taking the able-bodied prisoners, burning and demolishing everything they could not carry away with them.

It was almost dusk when along the narrow trail leading towards the crest of the lower Senevid mountain range rode two people on their small but sturdy, sure-footed Carpathian mountain horses. One of the riders, a man in his prime, was dressed and armed as a warrior, with a helmet, sword, battle-axe, and a lance fastened to the horse’s saddle. The coarse, thick, already greying hair falling to his shoulders, showed from beneath the helmet. Even the thick mists, rolling themselves upward from the gorges and ravines completely enveloping the mountain ranges, could not hide the look of deep dissatisfaction and defiant, blind determination evident upon his face which every now and then reflected the wild outbursts of blasphemy and wrath, waxing in bitter mirth as if a palsy with its accompanying queer involuntary flutter of muscles wrenched at his joints followed by a clouding into gloomy meditation, until his fine, sensitive horse also trembled at the man’s agitation.

The other rider, a young and beautiful girl was garbed in a tunic of fine, striped linen and a turban of beaver skin, which did not quite succeed in confining the luxuriantly abundant tresses of yellow-gold hair. Suspended across her shoulders was a bow made of the flexible horn of a bison and a “saydak” (pouch) filled with arrows. Her dark, flashing eyes swept the