A drift--constant, restless, never
altering--sped over the level plain like the dust on a high-road before
a steady wind. This white scud--a flying scud of frozen water--was
singularly like the scud that is blown from the crest of the waves by a
cyclone in the China Seas. Any object that broke the wind--a stunted
pine, a broken tree-trunk, a Government road-post--had at its leeward
side a high, narrow snow-drift tailing off to the dead level of the
plain. Where the wind dropped the snow rose at once. But these objects
were few and far between. The deadly monotony of the scene--the
trackless level, the preposterous dimensions of the plain, the sense of
distance that is conveyed only by the steppe and the great desert of
Gobi when the snow lies on it--all these tell the same grim truth to all
who look on them: the old truth that man is but a small thing and his
life but as the flower of the grass.
Across the plain of Tver, before the north wind, a single sleigh was
tearing as fast as horse could lay hoof to ground--a sleigh driven by
Paul Howard Alexis, and the track of it was as a line drawn from point
to point across a map.
A striking feature of the winter of Northern Russia is the glorious
uncertainty of its snowfalls. At Tver the weather-wise had said:
"The snow has not all fallen yet. More is coming.
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