later on in the same day I found my unknown once more. He was sitting on a low camp-stool in a corner of the grand mosque, and making a study of the minaret. His aristocratic face, of a long oval, was ornamented with a beard of a chestnut colour, and it contrasted strangely with the olive complexion and high cheek-bones of the Mussulman-Cossacks who surrounded him and peeped curiously at the work he was doing. It reminded me of Salvator Rosa working in the midst of the bandits of the Abruzzi. At this point a common friend of both of us came on the scene and presented us to one another. I had before me the great Russian painter Basil Verestchagin, who had but just recovered from the serious wound received in the previous June. We talked for a long time of Paris and of the war. Verestchagin complained bitterly of not having been able to take part in the passage of the Danube, and see the winter campaign as he had seen the summer one. ‘What good luck you had,’ he said, ‘to follow Gourko in his expedition beyond the great Balkans! What things you must have seen, the massacre at Shipka, and the burning of Eski Zara. If you only knew how it enraged me to be tied down to my bed in the ambulance while the army was going on!’ Then he paid me a few compliments on the modest drawings which I was sending to the _Monde Illustré_, compliments which touched me very much as they were offered by such an eminent artist. “A few days after, the branch of the Cossacks of the Don to which I was attached, and the regiment of the Grenadiers of the Guard, entered the pass of the Balkans by the route which leads to Statitza. At nightfall we halted on a plateau covered with snow, and where the temperature was below zero. We were therefore not at all disinclined to take refuge in an old Turkish block-house and to light up a good fire. There I found Verestchagin again, with Prince Tzerteleff, the former secretary of Ignatieff, and Prince Tchakowski, who were all following our columns as amateurs. Enveloped in our _bourkas_, we talked away for hours round this bivouac fire, Verestchagin telling us of his perilous expedition in Turkestan. I can still hear him talking in his soft and quiet voice of all those scenes of massacre and carnage which he had seen with his own eyes.