lted maize fields,
and mud or wattle-built villages, one's eyes rested with affection
upon slender trees laden with rosy pomegranates--the pomegranate on
the branch is a lovely rusty-brown fruit, and the tree is like a briar
with large berries. Then the ancient Drandsky Monastery was a fair
sight, white-walled and green-roofed against the background of black
mountains, the mountains in turn shown off against the snowy ranges
of the interior Caucasus. The clouds hung unevenly over the climbing
mountains, so that far snow-bestrewn headlands looked like the speckly
backs of monsters stalking up into the sky.

I walked through miles and miles of brown bracken and rosy withered
azalea leaves. There came a day of rain, and I spent thirty-six hours
in a deserted house, staring most of the time at the continuous drench
that poured from the sky. I made myself tea several times from the
rainwater that rushed off the roof. I crouched over a log fire, and
wondered where the summer had gone.

It needed but a day of rain to show how tired all nature was. The
leaves that were weighed down with water failed to spring back when
the rain had passed. The dry and dusty shrubs did not wash green as
they do in the spring. All became yellower and browner. That which had
come out of the earth took a long step back towards the earth again.

Tramping all day through a sodden forest, I also experienced the
autumnal feeling, the promise of rest, a new gentleness. All things
which have _lived_ through the summer welcome the autumn, the twilight
of the long hot day, the grey curtain pulled down over a drama which
is played out.

All day the leaves blew down as if the trees were preparing beds for
the night of winter. In a month all the woods would be bare and stark,
the bushes naked, the wild flowers lost in the copse; nought green but
the evergreens. And yet but a week ago, rhododendrons at New Athos,
wild roses and mallow in full bloom at Gudaout, acres of saffron
hollyhocks, and evening primroses at Sotchi!

I had entered an exposed country, colder than much of the land that
lay far to the north.

Two days later the clouds moved away, the zenith cleared, and after it
the whole sky, and then along the west and the south, as far as eye
could see, was a great snow-field, mountain after mountain, and slope
after slope all white to the sky. A cold wind, as of January, blew
keenly from the snow, and even froze the puddles on the road. It
seemed