The Kononov women sat at their looms while the men went a-preying in the forest. And so they toiled on stubbornly, sternly, alone, fighting hand-to-hand with the night, with the forest and with the frost. The crossways to the forests became choked, and they made new ways to the marshlands, to the Seven Brothers, to the wastelands. Life was hard and stern. The peasants looked out upon the world from beneath their brows, as their cottages from beneath the pines; and they lived gladsomely, as they should. They knew it was the Rising. And in the Rising there could be no falling back. Forests, thickets, fields, a tranquil sky--and crossways!... Sometimes the crossways joined the main-road that ran alongside the railway. Both led to the towns where dwelt Those Others who had yearned to march over the crossways, who had made the main-roads straight as rules. And to the towns the elemental Rising of the Crossways brought death. There, lamenting the past, in terror before the people's Rising, all were employed in offices filling up papers. All for safety held official positions, all to a man busying themselves over papers, documents, cards, placards, and speeches until they were lost in a whirlwind of words. The food of the towns was exhausted; the lights had gone out; there was neither fuel nor water. Dogs, cats, mice, all had disappeared-- even the nettles on the outskirts had been plucked by famished urchins as vegetable for soup. Into the cookhouses, whence cutlery had vanished, crowded old men in bowlers and bonneted old women, whose bony fingers clutched convulsively at plates of leavings. Everywhere there were groups of miscreants selling mouldy bread at exorbitant prices. The dead in their thousands, over whom there was no time to carry out funeral rites, were borne away to the churches. Famine, disease, and death swept the towns. The inhabitants grew savage in their craving for bread. They starved. They sat without light. They froze. They pulled down the hedges and wooden buildings to warm their dying hearths and their offices. The red-blood life deserted the towns; indeed it had never really existed in them; and there came a white-paper life that was death. When death means life there is no death, but the towns were still-born. There were harrowing scenes in the spring, when, like incense at funeral-rites, the smoky wood-piles smouldered on the pillaged, ransacked, and bespattered streets with their broken windows, boarded-up doors, and defaced walls, consuming carrion and enveloping the town in a stinking and stifling vapour.