Arctic petrels flew across the road with joyful cries; marmots
called to one another in the grass. Somewhere, far away to the left,
lapwings uttered their plaintive notes. A covey of partridges,
scared by the chaise, fluttered up and with their soft "trrrr!"
flew off to the hills. In the grass crickets, locusts and grasshoppers
kept up their churring, monotonous music.

But a little time passed, the dew evaporated, the air grew stagnant,
and the disillusioned steppe began to wear its jaded July aspect.
The grass drooped, everything living was hushed. The sun-baked
hills, brownish-green and lilac in the distance, with their quiet
shadowy tones, the plain with the misty distance and, arched above
them, the sky, which seems terribly deep and transparent in the
steppes, where there are no woods or high hills, seemed now endless,
petrified with dreariness. . . .

How stifling and oppressive it was! The chaise raced along, while
Yegorushka saw always the same--the sky, the plain, the low hills
. . . . The music in the grass was hushed, the petrels had flown away,
the partridges were out of sight, rooks hovered idly over the
withered grass; they were all alike and made the steppe even more
monotonous.

A hawk flew just above the ground, with an even sweep of its wings,
suddenly halted in the air as though pondering on the dreariness
of life, then fluttered its wings and flew like an arrow over the
steppe, and there was no telling why it flew off and what it wanted.
In the distance a windmill waved its sails. . . .

Now and then a glimpse of a white potsherd or a heap of stones broke