There is no sky

I’ve seen big countries before – the American plains on the old wagon-trails west of St Louis… or the Saskatchewan prairies in grasshopper time… But Russia is bigger: there is no sky, only empty space overhead, and no horizon, only a distant haze, and endless miles of sun-scorched rank grass and emptiness.

Flashman at the Charge, p.126, Pan edition, 5th printing, 1979.

Tags:
Flashman, Flashman quotes,America, Russia.

Country folk

He was a peasant, with a face like a walnut, and when he saw me he brought up short and stood glowering at me, the way country folk do at everyone who hasn’t got dung on his boots.

Royal Flash, p.187, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1978.

Tags:
Flashman, Flashman quotes.

Small change of a country's life

…I listened to Burnes and sniffed the wind. I took Ilderim with me a good deal, and sometimes his Gilzais, too, and they taught me some of the lore of the hills, and the ways of the people – who mattered, and what tribes were better to deal with, and why, and how the Kohistanis were more friendly disposed to us than the Abizai were, and which families were at feud with each other, and how the feeling ran about the Persians and the Russians, and where the best horses could be obtained, and how millet was grown and harvested: all the trivial information which is the small change of a country’s life.

Flashman, p.110, Pan edition, 12th printing, 1979.

Tags:
Flashman, Flashman quotes.