CHAPTER X

THE terrifyingly still, short days seemed longer than those
of harvest-time. The villages lay like the untrodden, virgin
steppe. It was as though all the Donside districts had died,
as though a pestilence had laid waste the district settlements.
And it was as though clouds had covered all the Don region
with their black, opaque wings, spreading silently and
terribly, until a wind should send the poplars bending to the
earth, a dry, crashing peal of thunder should burst and
march to crush and shatter the white forest beyond the Don,
to send the savage stones leaping from the chalky hills, and
roar with the destructive voice of thunder. . . .
Since morning, a mist had enveloped Tatarsk and the
steppe. A roaring in the hills presaged a frost. By noonday
the sun had peeled out of the clinging mist, but it grew no
lighter. The mist aimlessly wandered over the heights of the
Donside hills, huddled into the cliffs, and perished there,
settling a white dust over the mossy slopes of chalk and on
the bare snowy ridges.
In the evening the red-hot shield of the moon arose from
beyond the roots of the naked forest. It mistily sowed the
bloody seeds of war and incendiary fire over the silent
villages. And in its miserable, faded light an inarticulate
alarm was born in the hearts of men. The animals fidgeted
anxiously ; the horses and bullocks could not sleep, and
wandered about the yards until dawn. The dogs howled
balefully, and the cocks began to crow one against another
long before midnight. Their stirrups and weapons clattering,
an invisible mounted army might have been marching down
the left bank of the Don, through the dark forest and the
grey mist.
Almost all the Tatarsk cossacks who had been on the
northern front had returned to the village, abandoning their
regiments as they slowly retreated towards the Don, Some
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