As far as eye can reach stretches out the endless reddish-brown plain. Rushes, reeds, and other water-plants not yet freed from their dried-up winter clothing, lend a deep-red shimmer to the landscape, to which the sprouting willows, now illumined by the light of the setting sun, add their tinge of color. The storm-portending evening glow tinges the fleecy clouds flame color, causing the rest of the sky to appear topaz green. Myriads of water-birds whirl restlessly through the air, filling the plain with their cries. In the far distance swim a flock of swans, tinged golden in the setting sun, which, half-sunken beneath the horizon, sends out its last rays across the changing clouds, like a departing sovereign clothed in gold and purple. Across the great, never-ending plain there is but one path, laid bridge-like with willow stems. Over this the traveller must needs make his way--there is no alternative. The river banks passed, further sign of human habitation ceases. The smithy of a gypsy colony, which has established itself on the side of a hill, alone sends its light far out into the evening mist. Soon that, too, will be lost in the gathering gloom; then the traveller's three-horsed car must jolt along by the fitful light of the moon. An occasional kurgan rising up here and there in the Steppe is the sole sign that it was once inhabited by a people. Those tschudas upon the brow of the hill were their gods. Blocks of stone, with roughly carved human heads, proclaim afar, even to the banks of the Amur, the former abiding-place of a race which has not left even a name behind, only its gods, which later races have called tschudas (from the Hungarian word _csuda_, signifying "miracle"). The traveller will find shelter for the night with a Czaban, who has chanced to dig himself a cave near the wayside, and lives there, surrounded by his numerous herds of sheep. The Colonel remarks in his note-book that the shepherds living in the neighborhood of the kurgans are a stupid, squalid set, who smell of cheese. Next morning the chariot with its ringing bells proceeds ever farther and farther, until the inundated banks of the Dnieper oblige it to halt. Here, the traveller has no resource but to take to a boat. Luckily the stream is sufficiently swollen to enable his boat successfully to navigate the famous Falls of Herodotus without striking on the rocks. Only of the last does the ferryman warn him. It is the Nyenaschiketz (the Insatiable). There it is not advisable to tempt one's fate by evening light.