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"The truth is," he says, "that we never had any real plows until James Oliver and John Deere invented theirs. All the plowing before that was merely scratch-work, and here in Manchuria the plows are hardly better than those the Egyptians used. But for the extremely light, ash-like, wind-drift soil the people with such crude tools could hardly make enough to subsist on."
Then they see in the south a white curtain, which, after their further progress in its direction, they observe reaches from the sky to the water. The water of the ocean current which is hurrying them along becomes hour by hour warmer, and finally hot. An ash-like material, which seems to melt as it touches the water, falls all around and over them.
This was especially the case when they left the grassy and flowery prairie and entered upon an arid plain, on which for months of the year no drop of rain or dew fell, while the whitened bones of men and beasts told of former havoc of starvation and drouth. The heated surface was in places incrusted with alkaline earth worn into ash-like dust, or paved with pebbles blistering hot to the feet.
All the way across had no depth but a bottomless mud, so soft it would engulf a person if he tried to wade across. On the west there was no growth. The shore was nothing but an ash-like powder, not a sand, but a rich soil blown here and there, building in dunes against every obstruction, ever moving before the wind.
The heat was scorching, the sun, reflected from the sand and water, was blistering, and we could well imagine what a walk across that ash-like soil would mean. Mirages in the distance beckoned, trees and lakes were seen over toward the mountains where we had seen nothing but desert before; heat waves rose and fell.
It must be confessed that at no time of the year does Kolotovka present a very cheering spectacle; but it has a particularly depressing effect when the relentless rays of a dazzling July sun pour down full upon the brown, tumble-down roofs of the houses and the deep ravine, and the parched, dusty common over which the thin, long-legged hens are straying hopelessly, and the remains of the old manor-house, now a hollow, grey framework of aspenwood, with holes instead of windows, overgrown with nettles, wormwood, and rank grass, and the pond black, as though charred and covered with goose feathers, with its edge of half-dried mud, and its broken-down dyke, near which, on the finely trodden, ash-like earth, sheep, breathless and gasping with the heat, huddle dejectedly together, their heads drooping with weary patience, as though waiting for this insufferable heat to pass at last.
The figure of a large, pure-white woman, into whose arms their half-delirious fancies pictured them as rushing, was simply a large statue of spotless marble, which stands at the entrance of the bay of Hili-li. The ash-like material which for days had rained upon them and into the ocean around them, was no longer seen.
Here is not a suggestion of the tropics, but just a large Indian village of mud and adobe houses and neck-breaking, cobbled streets, a town older than time, sown on and about a hillside backed by pine-treed peaks, with several expanses of plazas, all grown to grass above their cobbled floors, shaded by enormous ash-like trees with neither flowers, shrubs, nor fountains to detract from their atmosphere of roominess.
The dampness was less fetid, and all the strange fungi had withered to a kind of harmless grayish powder which blew ash-like along the floor. One of earth's nethermost terrors had perished for ever; and if there be a hell, it had received at last the demon soul of an unhallowed thing.
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