In the evening, as we rode through the ravine, I felt I was being transported to a different world. I listened to Daniyar with my eyes half-closed, and before me flashed strangely familiar scenes from childhood. First the delicate, smokey-blue, migratory spring clouds floating at crane's height above the yurtas; then herds of horses racing across the ringing earth, neighing and pounding to their summer pastures, the young stallions with streaming forelocks and wild, black fire in their eyes proudly overtaking their mares; then flocks of sheep slowly spreading like lava over the foothills; now a waterfall gushing from the rocks with blinding, creamy-white, foaming water; the sun setting calmly in the thicket of needle-grass beyond the river, and the solitary distant rider on the horizon's fiery margin dashing in pursuit - surely all he had to do was stretch out his hand and touch the sun and he too would vanish into the thickets and twilight.

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