the light grows stronger in the sky, something in us that is wooed by light responds.  New eyes open in the soul.  Spring comes, and then the tramp is marching with the summer.  Down come the floods, and often for hours one takes shelter from the rain, and it seems as if all we hope for were being inundated.  But, as I wrote before, “the spring is not advanced by rain, but it gathers strength in the rain to proceed more quickly when the sun comes out:  so also with the tramp.”  Summer is the year itself, all that the other seasons have laboured for.  It is the glory of the year.  Then may the tramp cease marching, for in the height of summer nature also must cease, must cease from going forward to turn back.  He may rest in the sun and mature his fruits.  Autumn is coming and all the year’s beauties must yield to death.

I think of my autumn on the way to Jerusalem, and all that a day told me then.  The skies became grey at last, and cold searching winds stole into the summer weather.  Many things that by sunlight I should have rejoiced in became sombre and ugly in the shade.  The tobacco farms, with their myriad tobacco leaves drying and rotting from green into yellow, became ill-kept and untidy, the peasants harvesting them surly and unwashed:  the sky spread over them no glamour.

I was walking over the swamps of Sukhum, and I noticed all that I disliked—­the deep dust on the road, the broken-down bridges, the streams that cattle had befouled.  It was perhaps a district that lacked charm even in fine weather.

There were some compensations.  In a wilderness of wilted maize fields, and mud or wattle-built villages, one’s eyes rested with affection upon slender trees laden with rosy pomegranates—­the pomegranate on the branch is a lovely rusty-brown fruit, and the tree is like a briar with large berries.  Then the ancient Drandsky Monastery was a fair sight, white-walled and green-roofed against the background of black mountains, the mountains in turn shown off against the snowy ranges of the interior Caucasus.  The clouds hung unevenly over the climbing mountains, so that far snow-bestrewn headlands looked like the speckly backs of monsters stalking up into the sky.

I walked through miles and miles of brown bracken and rosy withered azalea leaves.  There came a day of rain, and I spent thirty-six hours in a deserted house, staring most of the time at the continuous drench that poured from the sky.  I made myself tea several times from the rainwater that rushed off the roof.  I crouched over a log fire, and wondered where the summer had gone.

It needed but a day of rain to show how tired all nature was.  The leaves that were weighed down with water failed to spring back when the rain had passed.  The dry and dusty shrubs did not wash green as they do in the spring.  All became yellower and browner.  That which had come out of the earth took a long step back towards the earth again.