two o’clock in the afternoon
It was indeed a journey of three days which the prisoners , under the guard of a numerous detachment of Tartars , were to make across the steppe . A hundred and fifty versts lay between the camp and the town -- an easy march for the Emir 's soldiers , who wanted for nothing , but a wretched journey for these people , enfeebled by privations . More than one corpse would show the road they had traversed . It was two o'clock in the afternoon , on the 12th of August , under a hot sun and cloudless sky , that the toptschi-baschi gave the order to start . Alcide and Blount , having bought horses , had already taken the road to Tomsk , where events were to reunite the principal personages of this story . Amongst the prisoners brought by Ivan Ogareff to the Tartar camp was an old woman , whose taciturnity seemed to keep her apart from all those who shared her fate . Not a murmur issued from her lips .