Page:Albert Rhys Williams - Through the Russian Revolution (1921).djvu/247

Rh from its stack like a comet. Night after night we go to sleep with the wheels grinding beneath our car, and every morning we wake to see the track in two glistening ribbons of steel, still unrolling itself before the eastward plunging engine.

Slowly these immensities steal over us with mesmeric influence, creating the feeling the Russians call prostor, a sense of space and vastness. Under its spell things once mighty and imperative, become trivial and unimportant. Even the Revolution relaxes its grip upon us. May it not after all be a ferment confined to railwaymen and the industrial workers of the cities?

Back there the Revolution was an insistent fact, assailing us in eye and ear with banners and battlecries, parades and assemblages. Out here on the Siberian steppes we see no evidence of it. We see woodsmen with axes, drivers with horses, women with baskets, a few soldiers with guns; but beyond a few tattered remnants of red flags flapping on poles there are no marks of the Revolution.

"Is the revolutionary spirit as frayed out as those faded flags?" we ask. "Are the émigrés right in summing up the aspirations of the Russian peasant as love and service to his master, his church and the Little Father? Is this after all 'Holy Russia'?"

In the midst of our ruminations—Crash! Bang! The brakes clutch the wheels, grinding and grating, sending a shiver thru the car and hurling us out of our seats. The train comes abruptly to a standstill.