Pale crag martin to do so, it would cast doubts on their specific distinctness. There are several subspecies differing in plumage shade or size, although the differences are clinal, and races interbreed where their ranges meet. The pale crag martin of the nominate subspecies "P. o. obsoleta" is 12–13 cm (4.7–5.1 in) long with light brown upperparts, becoming paler on the lower back, and a short square tail that has small white patches near the tips of all but the central and outermost pairs of feathers. It has a pale grey throat, upper breast and underwing coverts, and the rest of the underparts
John Shade giving no samples of the conversation), Chekhov makes him joke in a really attractive, winning way." The longest sample is Shade's 999-line work, rendered in heroic couplets (rhyming pairs of lines in iambic pentameter), which is also titled "Pale Fire" and provides one facet of the novel's reflexive structure. Divided into four cantos, Shade's poem describes his life, his obsession with the senses, and his boyhood-to-maturity preoccupation with death. The work is notable for its description of a near-death experience (Shade treats it with a mixture of skepticism and reverence), and for the "faint hope" of an afterlife which it