As it
is, we're just a bit of the old Caucasus."
He pointed to a group of drunkards, all armed from head to foot,
but now clinging to one another and raising their voices in Asiatic
chanting.
After supper--a stew of mutton and maize, with a bottle of very sweet
rose-coloured wine--the old man took me aside and made me a long
harangue on life and death and the hereafter. Better sermon on a
Sunday evening I never heard in church. He told me the whole course of
the good man's life and compared it with that of the bad man, weighed
the two, and found the latter wanting on all counts, adding, however,
that it was impossible to be good.
"How did you come to think so seriously of life?" I inquired.
"In this way," he replied. "Once I was very 'flee-by-the-sky'--I
didn't care a rap, sinned much, and feared neither God nor the
devil--or, if anything, I feared the devil a little; for God I never
had the least respect. But one day I picked up a book written by one
Andrew, and I read some facts that astonished me. He said that in
eight thousand years after the creation of the world the sun would go
red and the moon grey, the sun would grow old and cease to warm the
world--just as you and I must inevitably grow old. In that day would
be born together, one in the East and one in the West, Christ and the
Anti-Christ, and they would fight for the dominion of the world.
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