The sun had now risen, its parcelled beams illuminating the dewy green grass. The Terek seethed close by; in the awakened forest, greeting the morning, the pheasants called to one another from every side. Silent and motionless, the Cossacks stood around the dead man, looking at him. The brown body, dressed only in the darkened wet blue trousers, drawn in by a small belt over the sagging stomach, was well-formed and handsome. The muscular arms lay straight, along the sides of his ribs. The round, bluish, freshly-shaven head with the congealed wound on one side was thrown back. The smooth, sunburned forehead stood out sharply from the shaven part. The glassy open eyes with their low-frozen pupils looked upward – it seemed, past and beyond everything. On the thin lips, stretched at the corners and jutting from behind a red, trimmed moustache, a thin, good-natured and ironic smile seemed to have remained. The fingers of the small hands, covered with reddish hairs, were bent inward and their nails were dyed red. Lukashka had not yet put his clothes back on, his neck was redder and his eyes were gleaming more than they usually did. The broad cheek-bones quivered; the white, healthy body gave off a barely perceptible vapour in the fresh morning air.
‘He was a man, too!’ he said quietly, evidently admiring the corpse.
‘Yes, if you’d ended up in his hands, he’d have given you no quarter,’ one of the Cossacks responded.
The angel of silence had flown away. The Cossacks began to stir, began to talk. Two of them went off to cut brushwood for the shelter. Others took a stroll to the cordon. Luka and Nazarka ran to prepare to return to the settlement.
From The Cossacks, a Tale of 1852 by Leo Tolstoy.
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