As we turned our backs on Taganrok, we could easily foresee what we should have to suffer during our journey. A long drought and a temperature of 99 deg. had already changed the verdant plains of the Don into an arid desert. At times the wind raised such billows of dust around us, that the sky was completely veiled from our eyes; our breath failed us, and the blood boiled in our ears; our sufferings for the moment were horrible. The hot air of a conflagration does not cause a more painful sense of suffocation than that produced by the wind of the desert. The horses could not stand against it, but stopped and hung down their heads, seeming as much distressed as ourselves.
As we approached the Don the country was not quite such a dead, unbroken flat as before; a few Cossack stanitzas began to show themselves among the clumps of trees on the banks of the river. Deep gullies lined with foliage, and the traces of several streams, show how agreeable this part of the steppes must be in spring; but at the period of our journey every thing had been dried up and almost calcined by the rays of a sun which no cloud had obscured for two months.
Before reaching Rostof, we passed through a large Armenian village. Its picturesque position, in the midst of a ravine, and the oriental fashion of its houses, give some interest and variety to these lonely regions, and transiently busy the imagination. The evening promised to be very beautiful; something serene, calm, and melancholy, had succeeded to the enervating heat of the day.
Sunset in the steppes is like sunset nowhere else. In a country of varied surface, the gradually lengthening shadows give warning long beforehand that the sun is approaching the horizon. But here there is nothing to intercept its rays until the moment it sinks below the line of the steppe; then the night falls with unequalled rapidity; in a few moments all trace is gone of that brilliant luminary that just before was making the whole west ablaze. It is a magnificent transformation, a sudden transition to which the grandeur of the scene adds almost supernatural majesty and strangeness.
Fatigued by the rapidity with which we had been travelling since we left Taganrok, I took advantage of our halt at a post station, not far from the village, to ascend the rising ground that concealed the road from my view.
As I have said, the night had come down suddenly, and there remained in the west but a few pale red stripes that were fading away with every second. At the opposite point of the horizon the broad red glowing moon, such as it appears when it issues from the sea, was climbing majestically towards the zenith, and already filled that region of the heavens with a soft and mysterious radiance. The greater part of the steppe was still in gloom, whilst a golden fringe marked the limits of earth and sky: the effect was very singular and splendid.
When I reached the summit of the hill an involuntary cry of surprise and alarm escaped me. I remained motionless before the unexpected scene that presented itself to my eyes--a whole gipsy camp, realising one of Sir Walter Scott's most striking fictions. Dispersed over the whole surface of the globe, and placed at the bottom of the social scale, this vagrant people forms in Russia, as elsewhere, a real tribe of pariahs, whose presence is regarded with disgust, even by the peasants. The government has attempted to settle a colony of these Bedouins of Europe in Bessarabia, but with little success hitherto. True to the traditional usages of their race, the Tsigans abhor every thing belonging to agriculture and regular habits. No bond has ever been found strong enough to check that nomade humour they inherit from their forefathers, and which has resisted the rude climate of Russia and the despotism of its government. Just as in Italy and Spain, they roam from village to village, plying various trades, stealing horses, poultry, and fruit, telling fortunes, procuring by fraud or entreaty the means of barely keeping themselves alive, and infinitely preferring such a vagabond and lazy existence to the comfort they might easily secure with a moderate amount of labour.
Their manner of travelling reminds one of the emigrations of barbarous tribes. Marching always in numerous bodies, they pass from place to place with all they possess. The women, children, and aged persons, are huddled together in a sort of cart called pavoshk, drawn each by one or two small horses with long manes. All their wealth consists of a few coarse brown blankets, which form their tents by night, and in some tools employed in their chief trade, that of farriery.