244 CASUALS IN THE CAUCASUS 



inventive faculty — once by a rickety Irish-looking 

 bridge, once by a shallow ford, we drove into a culti- 

 vated region where fields of maize and sunflowers 

 grew. 



If you have only seen solitary sunflowers, or at most 

 twos and threes, upturned to the sun in some English 

 garden, you can have no idea of the glory of fifty acres 

 of massed sun- worshippers. All facing slightly to the 

 east, sown in rows, hilled up like potatoes, myriads of 

 them. 



The sunflower is a very important vegetable in 

 Russia, and a good crop is worth one hundred roubles 

 an acre. Everybody, everywhere, nibbles sunflower 

 seeds, and in the towns they are peddled at street 

 comers as are pea-nuts in America, and chestnuts and 

 ice-cream in England. 



A little stanitza, as the Russian villages are called, 

 crowned a rising hill ahead. Small, whitewashed, 

 green-roofed houses grouped themselves about a tiny 

 church. There was, of course, no post-house in these 

 parts, for there was no road, but our driver swung us 

 up to the most pretentious dwelling and stopped with 

 a jerk. 



The Starshina, an unkempt, unwashed individual, 

 welcomed us in Russian, and seemed electrified to be 

 replied to in that tongue. All the time he conversed 

 he fingered a string necklace he wore, from which 

 was suspended an amulet — most pagan of relics — a 

 bat's wing dried to tinder, to which was also attached 

 a small wooden cross. The old heathen faith dies 

 hard. Does it ever die ? Can it ever die ? Not, I 



