The Ball of Snow

No, iincle; the moon is floating in an azure ocean; she is pouring her burning beams into the sea. The roofs are as dry as the steppes of the Mogan, and the scorpions are playing about gayly. A h, said tlie old man, with a sigh, it means that to-morrow will be as warm as to-day. The best thing to do, Kassime, is to go to bed. And the old man falls asleep, dreaming of his silver; and his niece falls asleep dreaming of what a young girl of sixteen always dreams, whatever her nationality may be, of love; and the town falls asleep dreaming that it was Alexander the Great who had built the Caucasian Wall and forged the iron gates of Derbend. And so, toward midnight, everything slept. The only sounds to be heard, in the general stillness, were the warnings of the sentinels to each other, Slotichay I (watch!) and the moaning of the Caspian sea, as it advanced to press its humid lips upon the burning sands of the shore. One could have fancied the souls of the dead to be communing with eternity, and this conception would have been the more striking, since nothing so resembles a vast cemetery as the city of Derbend. Long before day the surface of the sea seemed ablaze. The swallows, awake before the muezzin, were singing upon the mosque. True, they did not much precede him. The sounds of his footsteps put them to flight.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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