About Me
The Czar's officers showed His Apostolic Majesty's officers the meaning of Russian hospitality. And not one of the Czar's officers and not one of His Apostolic Majesty's officers knew that Death was already crossing his haggard, invisible hands over the glass beakers from which the men drank.
In the vast plain between the two border forests, the Austrian and the Russian, the sotnias of the borderland Cossacks, uniformed winds in military formations, raced around on the mercuric ponies of their homeland steppes, swinging their lances over their tall fur caps like
lightning with dainty pennons. It was as if the Cossacks were soaring over the meadows...The riders mvovements were almost swifter than the spectators' eyes. With their strong yellow horse teeth, the saddled Cossacks, in mid gallop, lifted their red-and-blue handkerchiefs from the ground, their bodies, suddenly felled, ducked under the horses
bellies, while the legs in the reflective boots still squeezed the animals' flanks. Other riders flung their lances high into the air, and the weapons whirled and obediently dropped back into the horsemen's fists--they returned like living falcons into their
master's hands. Still other riders, with torsos crouching horizontal along the horses' backs, human mouths fraternally pressing against animal mouths, leaped through wonderously small rounds of iron hoops that could have girded a small keg. The horses splayed all four legs. Their manes rose like wings, their tails stood as upright as rudders, their narrow heads resembled the slender bows of skidding canoes. Further riders vaulted across a line of twenty beer kegs placed bottom to bottom. The horse always neighed as it prepared to jump. The rider came bounding from infinitely far away; at first a tiny gray dot, he grew at breakneck speed into a stroke, a body, a rider, became a
gigantic mythical bird, half man, half horse, a winged centaur who then, after a successful leap, halted, stock-still, a hundered yards beyond the kegs--a statue, a monument of lifeless matter.
