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I lay on a bank and gleaned sunshine. The morning came over the sea steadily, equably, like a good ship making for a sure harbour. Then, ten miles from Gudaout, on a mountain, I looked out from the ruins of the Tower of Iver, over a vast resplendent sea, and saw below me the monastery of Novy Afon and all its buildings, looking like children's toys.
But over and against it stands the bright morning of Gudaout, four days later. Gudaout is encompassed by the highest Caucasus its only refuge is the sea. It is a place most wonderful in the pageantry of dawn. Picture my life of one evening and morning. I left Gudaout at the dusk, and having bought myself a pound of purple grapes, strolled out along the dusty high road eating them.
In a month all the woods would be bare and stark, the bushes naked, the wild flowers lost in the copse; nought green but the evergreens. And yet but a week ago, rhododendrons at New Athos, wild roses and mallow in full bloom at Gudaout, acres of saffron hollyhocks, and evening primroses at Sotchi! I had entered an exposed country, colder than much of the land that lay far to the north.
I said as I pressed my companion's small, yielding hand: whereupon he looked me in the eyes in his open, boyish way, and replied: "I wish I were going with you!" "Well, come with me as far as Gudaout." "Yes, I will."
At Dzhugba the sea was quiet as a little lake; at Dagomise it was many-crested and thundering in the majesty of storm. At Gudaout the sun rose over it as it might have done on the first morning of the world. Every dawning I bathed, and each bathing was as a new baptism.
So thickly was the surface of the sea streaked with cloud-shadows that it bore the appearance of being in mourning, of being decked in the funeral colours of black and white. Afar off, Gudaout lay lashed with foam, while constantly objects like snowdrifts kept gliding towards it. "Tell me more about those devils," I said at length. "Well, if you wish. But what exactly am I to tell you about them?"
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