Page:Albert Rhys Williams - Through the Russian Revolution (1921).djvu/246

196 The émigrés were delighted with him. He was to them a perpetual source of comfort—a flaming light in the Bolshevik darkness.

"In this honest mujik," they declared, "you see the soul of the millions of Russian peasants, content to serve their master, to obey the church and love the Czar. True, a few have been misled by Bolshevik fantasies, but only a few. What have these millions of patient, plodding folks to do with that madness festering back there in Moscow and Petrograd?"

This seemed plausible. For out here it is hard even for us to sustain our interest in the Revolution at high pitch. Great concerns, political and personal, are dwarfed by the vastness of the panorama unfolding before our eyes on this, the longest railway journey in the world.

We pass over the wide stretching grain-fields of Central Russia, across the vast bridges spanning the broad rivers flowing north to the Arctic, thru the winding passes of the Urals, into the shadows of the giant virgin forest (taiga), almost unblazed by man, then out again upon the steppelands of Siberia.

Thru the day we watch on the horizon the peasant huts, huddled together for protection against wolves, and winds blowing from the frozen tundras; or take our places in the long lines that obtain hot water for tea from the tanks, buying bread and eggs and fish from the peasant women. At evening we watch the wood-burning locomotive flinging spark showers