- Was life better before?
- How can I tell you? It was much better before; and now I’m in trouble, and I’m afraid: why can’t I do it? this year to get your threshing machines? What then? At least get into the noose!...
But then a whistle sounded, and after it, the Iofzd, almost at full speed, suddenly stopped at the station. Looking out the window, I noticed that it was starting to break up. I had been waiting for a long time to see my native steppe, smooth as a tablecloth, but covered with green grass and containing its natural riches. Of course, I wanted to see this wall as I knew it in the days of my youth. At that time, the vegetation of the steppe was very luxurious. Lush grasses with feather grass at the top were colorful and interspersed with bushes of wild almonds (Apuu4i from pita), wall cherries (Ggilis slapisegisiz), sloe, etc. From the kingdom of animals, birds and itats were caught, despite the smooth and open forest, at almost every step. Particularly memorable to me are herds of drochas, cranes and gatherings of little bustards, not to mention the countless numbers and diversity of inhabitants of rivers, swamps and floodplains, namely: ducks, geese, cormorants and swans (“Swan Lake” at the end of Beisug). How much a naturalist would give now for Tanya of the steppes! How much new and interesting material would a current zoologist and botanist collect in such places? What is left now of all this?—0 Very little.
When the train left the setanshi, I stood on the UFO. looking at the side of the carriage, I saw long flatforms loaded to the very roof with sacks of iron. The covered platforms ended, the finished buttresses stretched out with the same coolies and, finally, the coolies lay directly on the ground without any bedding: coolies under tarpaulins, coolies under rags and without any cover. It is obvious that several hundred thousand pounds of grain from last year's harvest were stored here. It turned out that even more
The number of sacks of grain was accumulated on the next, Novorosoiskaya station, and almost the same amount, according to the sacks of our train's train station, of grain on all the previous sganschas from Rostov"). |
Meanwhile, it had already become light. To the east, along a barely noticeable ridge, a thick fog stretched, which, after some time, began to fall; I outlined a Nurpur, gigantic-sized ball of the morning sun. The air was quiet and warm. Our ride was racing along completely flat terrain, across the steppe, the gift from which was completely different from what it had been imagined to be according to my memories. The field for thirty miles around, up to and including the horizon, was one colossal field of ripened wheat. So, I’m going everywhere: in the fields, in carriages and on the platforms of the railway. It now became clear to Mia why my neighbor in the carriage could have 15 threshing machines in three years. It is also clear why a special, extremely original meeting of one and a half hundred - two hundred courtyards of residents was formed near the village of Arkhangelskaya. Not long ago, in 1575, there was a village pasture, beyond which a railway road ran a mile and a half away. And now here, through the conductor’s spruce trees, is “our Russian elevator.” This little thing has a very special appearance and exhibits independent activity. Imagine two streets of relatively clean and, in some places, two-story houses, built in a city style, under a roof. Near each house and street there are one or two large barns on heavy pillars; near the barns in the middle of the street there are fans and a whole row of weights connected by a common chain. There are no other buildings in the yard. In some places there are signs on houses with the inscription: “tavern establishment” or “grocery shop.” From early morning until late at night, some people here bring grain on trucks from somewhere else, then ripen and pour this grain, and others, similar to my neighbor who just left the carriage, write something down with milk on the walls of the barn or with a pencil on dirty paper. The first ones go to the “tavern establishments,” and the last ones go to the Novoroseyeka station, which plays the role of a club for them.
I haven't seen an American grain elevator, but
*) As we know, during the famine of 1892, the described space of Russia was called its granary, because it provided millions of pounds of grain for the zemstvos of the starving governors.