THE HORSE AND HIS RIDER. 89 



the waste into a fairy scene. On this carpet of rich 

 green grass, variegated by the hyacinth, the tulip, the 

 crocus, and the wild mignionette, besides a thousand 

 other flowers, a traveller mounted on the fleetest steed, 

 and riding without intermission night and day, if such a 

 thing were possible, would find the spring elapse be- 

 fore he could reach the end of this vast plain, so large 

 a portion of the earth's surface does it cover ; and so 

 little would he find it differing from the frontiers of the 

 Ukraine to those of Chinese Tartary, that at his jour- 

 ney's end he might still fancy the same scene sur- 

 rounded him as when he began it ; the Steppe almost 

 everywhere resembling the Steppe on its eastern, the 

 same as on its western frontier. 



With the first summer months the soil, which is 

 badly watered, becomes dry and arid in the burning 

 sun ; the grass withers and turns brown, and then 

 more dusky still, as it gets covered with the black 

 dust which the wind disturbs, until at last the whole 

 Steppe becomes covered with the same sombre hue ; 

 life seems for ever destroyed in all the withered vegeta- 

 tion, except wormwood and prickly weeds, which 

 cover whole tracts, still thriving in the rankness of the 

 nitrous soil, wherein they have grown to such gigantic 

 size, that the thistles rise like little woods, capable of 

 concealing a whole encampment, and in which a 

 mounted rider is perfectly hidden when sitting on the 

 tallest horse. 



