CHAPTER XV. 



ON THE CRIMEAN STEPPES. 



THE country between the crossing of the Dneiper 

 and the narrow entrance to the Crimean Peninsu- 

 la, at Perekop, is a dead-level, treeless steppe. Broad 

 areas are devoted to the production of wheat, and long 

 bullock trains were met, hauling the newly harvested 

 crop to Berislav for transportation down the Dneiper 

 to Odessa. Bullocks, wagons, and drivers looked like 

 animated shapes of dust ; the drivers either liked it or 

 were too indifferent and lazy to care about keeping out 

 of the dense clouds that the oxen kicked up as they 

 crawled along. 



Near the river bottom were melon gardens, and it 

 seemed to me that there was about one watcher to 

 every dozen vines, from which the reader is at liberty 

 to draw his or her own most charitable inferences as 

 to the character of the passers-by. 



On the wild steppe were numerous flocks of merino 

 sheep in charge of Tartar shepherds; and there now 

 began to appear wells for watering them, operated by 

 bullocks hauling a rope wound round an enormous 

 drum. 



These wells on the Southern steppes are different 

 from anything the writer had ever seen before. They 

 are the places of rendezvous on the steppe for all sorts 

 ^nd conditions of people, who collect about them for 

 water and to rest during the heat of the summer's 



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