Chapter 29

It was August. For days the sky had been cloudless, the sun
scorched unbearably and from early morning the warm wind raised a
whirl of hot sand from the sand-drifts and from the road, and bore
it in the air through the reeds, the trees, and the village. The
grass and the leaves on the trees were covered with dust, the
roads and dried-up salt marshes were baked so hard that they rang
when trodden on. The water had long since subsided in the Terek
and rapidly vanished and dried up in the ditches. The slimy banks
of the pond near the village were trodden bare by the cattle and
all day long you could hear the splashing of water and the
shouting of girls and boys bathing. The sand-drifts and the reeds
were already drying up in the steppes, and the cattle, lowing, ran
into the fields in the day-time. The boars migrated into the
distant reed-beds and to the hills beyond the Terek. Mosquitoes
and gnats swarmed in thick clouds over the low lands and villages.
The snow-peaks were hidden in grey mist. The air was rarefied and
smoky. It was said that abreks had crossed the now shallow river
and were prowling on this side of it. Every night the sun set in a
glowing red blaze. It was the busiest time of the year. The
villagers all swarmed in the melon-fields and the vineyards. The
vineyards thickly overgrown with twining verdure lay in cool, deep
shade. Everywhere between the broad translucent leaves, ripe,
heavy, black clusters peeped out. Along the dusty road from the
vineyards the creaking carts moved slowly, heaped up with black
grapes. Clusters of them, crushed by the wheels, lay in the dirt.
Boys and girls in smocks stained with grape-juice, with grapes in
their hands and mouths, ran after their mothers. On the road you
continually came across tattered labourers with baskets of grapes
on their powerful shoulders; Cossack maidens, veiled with
kerchiefs to their eyes, drove bullocks harnessed to carts laden
high with grapes. Soldiers who happened to meet these carts asked
for grapes, and the maidens, clambering up without stopping their
carts, would take an armful of grapes and drop them into the
skirts of the soldiers' coats. In some homesteads they had already
begun pressing the grapes; and the smell of the emptied skins
filled the air. One saw the blood-red troughs in the pent-houses
in the yards and Nogay labourers with their trousers rolled up and
their legs stained with the juice. Grunting pigs gorged themselves
with the empty skins and rolled about in them. The flat roofs of
the outhouses were all spread over with the dark amber clusters
drying in the sun. Daws and magpies crowded round the roofs,
picking the seeds and fluttering from one place to another.

The fruits of the year's labour were