#Tolstoy just captures the moment where a stunning landscape opens up around you so vividly

[queenlucythevaliant]

Suddenly, not more than twenty paces away, as he first thought, he saw massive mountains, clean and white in their gentle contours, the intricate, distinct line of the peaks and the sky. He suddenly grasped the great distance between himself, the mountains, and the sky, the immensity of the mountains, and the boundlessness of this beauty, and was afraid that this might be only an illusion, a dream. He shook himself to wake up—but the mountains were still there.

“What are they? Can you tell me what they are?” he asked the driver.

“Mountains,” the Nogai answered indifferently.

“I’ve been looking at them too,” Vanyusha said. “What a sight! No one back home would believe it!”

As the troika sped over the smooth road, the mountains looked as if they were running along the horizon, the rose-colored peaks sparkling in the rising sun. At first the mountains merely took Olenin aback, then they filled him with joy; but then, the more he looked at the chain of mountains that rose not from behind other mountains but straight out of the steppe, the more he felt them. At that moment everything he saw, everything he thought, everything he sensed, took on the stern and majestic character of the mountains. All his Moscow memories, the shame and repentance, all his foolish and trivial dreams about the Caucasus, disappeared forever. It was as if a solemn voice told him: “Now it has begun!” The road, the outline of the river Terek visible in the distance, the Cossack villages, and the people—all this now seemed to him no longer trivial. He looks at the sky and sees the mountains. He looks at himself, at Vanyusha—again the mountains. Two Cossacks ride by, their rifles in slings bouncing lightly on their backs, and the brown and gray legs of their horses blur—again the mountains…. Across the Terek smoke rises from a village—again the mountains…. The sun rises and sparkles on the Terek shimmering through the reeds—the mountains…. A bullock cart rolls out of a Cossack village, the women are walking, beautiful young women—the mountains…. Chechen marauders roam the steppes, I am riding along the road, but I am not frightened of them, I have a gun, strength, youth—the mountains….

From The Cossacks by Leo Tolstoy