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He careered, almost without resistance, over those vast campinas or pasture-lands which formed a part of the domains of the duke of Medina Sidonia. In vain the bells were rung and the alarm-fires kindled: the band of Hamet had passed by before any force could be assembled, and was only to be traced, like a hurricane, by the devastation it had made.
She reappeared a few minutes later, wearing a white hood with a cape, and a knitted woolen shawl over her shoulders. "This way!" said she, showing a path that led across the pasture-lands. They walked along silently at first. The sky was clear, the wind had freshened. Suddenly, as if by enchantment, the fog, which had hung over the forest, became converted into needles of ice.
In the northern section of the vast Mongolian plateau, that immense outreach of pasture-lands which forms the great abiding-place of the shepherd tribes of the earth, there long dwelt a warlike race which was destined to play an extraordinary part in the world's history.
One summer there was a great drought, and the rooks, unable to get their usual food from the hard, sun-baked pasture-lands, attacked the roots and would have pretty well destroyed them if the farmer had not protected his swedes by driving in stakes and running cotton-thread and twine from stake to stake all over the field.
About two miles after the turn of the road the more thickly set habitations ceased, and there were only isolated farm-houses, with long, sloping reaches of woods and pasture-lands between. The pasture-lands were hummocked with ice-coated rocks and hooped with frozen vines; they seemed to flow down in glittering waves, like glaciers, over the hill-sides.
Reine was already nothing more than a dark speck against the gray of the increasing fog. Then he went off, haphazard, across the pasture-lands. The fog was rising slowly, and the sun, shorn of its beams, showed its pale face faintly through it. To the right and the left, the woods were half hidden by moving white billows, and Claudet walked between fluid walls of vapor.
For miles after Caen there were long stretches of green pasture-lands hundreds of cows and horses, some of them the big Norman dray-horses resting a little before beginning again their hard work, and quantities of long-legged colts trotting close up alongside of their mothers, none of them apparently minding the train. We finally arrived at the quiet little station of Valognes.
They were severely criticized by many of their own countrymen, and they had some doubts of their own about the wisdom of their action. You see, nobody knew then that corn and wheat would grow so abundantly in this territory, or that beyond the Mississippi there were such stretches of glorious pasture-lands, or that underneath its mountainous regions were such mines of gold, silver, and copper.
Then John Upham, aroused to boldness by desperation, as the very oxen will sometimes run in madness if the goad be sharp enough, told Doctor Prescott to his face, with scarce a stumble in his speech, that he owned half the town now; that his land was much more valuable than his, which was mostly swampy woodland and pasture-lands, bringing in scarcely enough income to feed and clothe his family.
And beyond, the barns, the dairy, the tall silos standing like lookout towers, the alfalfa-fields crisscrossed with irrigating ditches, and still farther on, the pasture-lands where the big herd of cows was grazing. Here the valley was spread out until from side to side it measured something more than four miles.
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