The transparent air allowed us vast vistas of distant blue hills and nearer green valleys, in which nestled villages under caps of thatch, encircled by red-brown fences cleverly wattled of long boughs.  In one hollow we passed through a village of the Tchuvashi, a Turkish or Finnish tribe, which was stranded all along the middle Volga in unrecorded antiquity, during some of the race migrations from the teeming plateaux of Asia.  The village seemed deserted.  Only a few small children and grannies had been left at home by the harvesters, and they gazed curiously at us, aroused to interest by the jingling harness with its metal disks, and the bells clanging merrily from the apex of the wooden arch which rose above the neck of our middle horse.

The grain closed in upon us.  We plucked some ears as we passed, and found them ripe and well filled.  The plain seemed as trackless as a forest, and our postboy suspected, from time to time, that he had lost his way among the narrow roads.  A few peasant men whom we encountered at close quarters took off their hats, but without servility, and we greeted them with the customary good wishes for a plentiful harvest, “Bog v pomozh” (God help), or with a bow.  The peasant women whom we met rarely took other notice of us than to stare, and still more rarely did they salute first.  They gazed with instinctive distrust, as women of higher rank are wont to do at a stranger of their own sex.

Although the grain was planted in what seemed to be a single vast field, belonging to one estate, it was in reality the property of many different peasants, as well as of some proprietors.  Each peasant had marked his plot with a cipher furrow when he plowed, and the outlines had been preserved by the growing grain.  The rich black soil of the fallow land, and strips of turf separating sections, relieved the monotony of this waving sea of gold.

The heat was intense.  In our prone position, we found it extremely fatiguing to hold umbrellas.  We had recourse, therefore, to the device practiced by the mountaineers of the Caucasus, who, in common with the Spaniards, believe that what will keep out cold will also keep out heat.  We donned our heavy wadded pelisses.  The experiment was a success.  We arrived cool and tranquil, in the fierce heat, at the estate of our friends, and were greeted with fiery reproaches for not having allowed them to send one of their fifteen or twenty carriages for us.  But we did not repent, since our conduct had secured for us that novel ride and a touch of our coveted “experience,” in spite of the strain of our thirty hours’ vigil and the jolts of the springless vehicle.