"Deuce take it!" growled the soldier, spitting a bit; "if only we could fall in with a single living soul! There's nobody at all! We shall have to do as the bears do in winter-time and suck our own paws."
"I said we ought to have gone towards inhabited places," observed "the student" didactically.
"You said, did you!" the soldier fired up at once. "Talk—that's about all you students are up to! What sort of inhabited places are there here? The Devil knows where they are."
"The student" was silent, he only pressed his lips tightly together. The sun was setting, and the clouds on the horizon exhibited a play of colour of every shade that language fails to grasp. There was a smell of earth and of salt in the air, and this dry and tasty smell piqued our appetites still more.
There was a sucking sensation in our stomachs, a strange and unpleasant feeling. It seemed as if the juice was gradually trickling out of every muscle in our bodies—trickling away somewhither, and evaporating, and that our muscles were losing their vital elasticity. A feeling of prickly dryness filled the hollow of the mouth and throat, there was a dull sensation in our heads, and dark spots really arose and flashed before our eyes. Sometimes they took the form of steaming pieces of meat—nourishing beef. Memory provided these "visions of the past, dumb visions," with their own peculiar fragrance, and then it was just as if a knife were turning round in our stomachs.
We went along all the same, giving one another a description of our feelings, casting angry sidelong glances about us in case we might peradventure perceive a sheepfold, and listening for the sharp creak of a Tatar arba[2] carrying fruit to the Armenian bazaar.
But the steppe was desolate and voiceless.
On the eve of this hard day we three had eaten four pounds of rye bread and five melons, had walked about thirty-five miles—our income was scarcely equal to our expenditure!—and after going to sleep in the bazaar square at Perekop were awakened by hunger.
"The student" had very properly advised us not to lie down to sleep, but in the course of the night to occupy ourselves with ... but in orderly society it is not considered the right thing openly to speak of any project for infringing the rights of property, and I will therefore keep silence. I only want to be just and not rude to others even in my own interests. I know that people in our highly cultured days are becoming more and more soft hearted, and even when they take their neighbours by the throat with the obvious intention of throttling them—they try to do it with as much amiability as possible, and with the observance of all the consideration which the circumstances will admit of. The experience! of my own throat has caused me to observe this progress in morals, and I maintain, with a pleasant feeling of conviction, that everything in this world is developing towards perfection. In particular this remarkable process is solidly established every year by the growth of prisons, taverns, and tolerated houses.
[2] A two-wheeled cart used in the Crimea.