Sevastopol Author:Leo Tolstoy Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SEVASTOPOL IN AUGUST, 1855. I. At the end of August, along the rocky highway to Sevastopol, between Duvanka and Bakh- tchisara'f, through the thick, hot dust... more », at a footpace, drove an officer's light cart, that peculiar tclyczl1ka, not now to be met with, which stands about half-way between a Jewish britchka, a Russian travelling-carriage, and a basket-wagon. In the front of the wagon, holding the reins, squatted the servant, clad in a nankeen coat and an officer's cap, which had become quite limp; seated behind, on bundles and packages covered with a military coat, was an infantry officer, in a summer cloak. As well as could be judged from his sitting position, the officer was not tall in stature, but extremely thick, and that not so much from shoulder to shoulder as from chest to back ; he was broad and thick, and his neck and the base of the head were excessively developed and swollen. His waist, so called, a receding strip in the centre of the body, did not exist in his case; but neither had he any belly ; on the contrary, he was rather thin than otherwise, particularly in the face, which was overspread with an unhealthy yellowish sunburn. His face would have been handsome had it not been for a certain bloated appearance, and the soft, yet not elderly, heavy wrinkles that flowed together and enlarged his features, imparting to the whole countenance a general expression of coarseness and of lack of freshness. His eyes were small, brown, extremely searching, even bold; his moustache was very thick, but the ends were kept constantly short by his habit of gnawing them ; and his chin, and his cheek-bones in particular were covered with a remarkably strong, thick, and black beard, of two days' growth. The officer had been wounded on the loth of May, by a splinter, in the he...« less