THE COLD 251 



they could not be dignified with the name of hills — 

 into a wide and arid plain. Tufts of scrubby 

 grass stuck here and there in small patches 

 above the sandy soil, like the straggling growth 

 upon an old man's chin. Whirls of dust sprang 

 up as though some invisible magician had caught 

 and set them spinning. The dust from the cart 

 wheels rose in a tliin sandy spume, and the hair 

 was frozen to one's upturned coat collar by a biting 

 wind. Its sigh and moan whistling around tlie thin 

 telegraph wire — the only sign linking this strange 

 country with the present — seemed like the mournful 

 wail of some great stricken beast. The telegraph 

 poles themselves stood bleak, bare and irregular 

 above the flat surface of the plain and were 

 swallowed up in the unwholesome haze which shut 

 in the horizon. Overhead a pale wintry sky 

 showed sickly and blue. One no longer wondered 

 that men and animals should often perish beneath 

 its inhospitable and anaemic brilliance. At times 

 low hills, sharply drawn against the horizon, 

 seemed, so blue and flat was the plain, as though 

 they rose from an azure sea, whilst the white lines 

 of drifted snow or encrusted alkali took the 

 semblance of crashing breakers. One looked for 

 the smoke of tall ships to rise out of the mists 

 beyond a purple headland, to mingle with the 

 snows of lofty peaks which rose beyond the straits. 

 Early in the afternoon, across the yellow grasses 

 and the dusty patches of snow, rose a mud wall, 

 topped by some magnificent poplars. It stood 

 there impassive in the tearing wind, never getting 

 any nearer, though by degrees it grew larger and 

 larger until, at the end of a couple of hours, we 



