* * * * *

Suddenly there came into view over the bushes to my left a file of dark
heads, while through the surging of the waves and the babble of the
stream I caught the sound of human voices, a sound emanating from a
party of "famine people" or folk who were journeying from Sukhum to
Otchenchiri to obtain work on a local road then in process of
construction.

The owners of the voices I knew to be immigrants from the province of
Orlov. I knew them to be so for the reason that I myself had lately
been working in company with the male members of the party, and had
taken leave of them only yesterday in order that I might set out
earlier than they, and, after walking through the night, greet the sun
when he should arise above the sea.

The members of the party comprised four men and a woman--the latter a
young female with high cheek-bones, a figure swollen with manifest
pregnancy, and a pair of greyish-blue eyes that had fixed in them a
stare of apprehension. At the present moment her head and yellow scarf
were just showing over the tops of the bushes; and while I noted that
now it was swaying from side to side like a sunflower shaken by the
wind, I recalled the fact that she was a woman whose husband had been
carried off at Sukhum by a surfeit of fruit--this fact being known to
me through the circumstance that in the workmen's barraque where we had
shared quarters these folk had observed the good old Russian custom of
confiding to a stranger the whole of their troubles, and had done so in
tones of such amplitude and penetration that the querulous words must
have been audible for five versts around.

And as I had talked to these forlorn people, these human beings who lay
crushed beneath the misfortune which had uprooted them from their
barren and exhausted lands, and blown them, like autumn leaves, towards
the Caucasus where nature's luxuriant, but unfamiliar, aspect had
blinded and bewildered them, and with its onerous conditions of labour
quenched their last spark of courage; as I had talked to these poor
people I had seen them glancing about with dull, troubled, despondent
eyes, and heard them say to one another softly, and with pitiful smiles:

"What a country!"

"Aye,--that it is!--a country to make one sweat!"

"As hard as a stone it is!"

"Aye, an evil country!"

After which they had gone on to speak of their native haunts, where
every handful of soil had represented to them the dust