Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/381

 Rh glories the bylines have sung, whose monument stands at Tobolsk, whom the very Church venerates almost as a saint, was to be lifted up, in posthumous apotheosis, as high as Cortez or Christopher Columbus.

Legend is a power, for it commands, in a certain measure, those moral forces which play so decisive a part in the destinies of every race. It was inevitable that Ermak, magnified after this fashion, should have imitators and avengers. Dying, as he did, when his task was but half accomplished, he might well have said, Non omnis morior! He had been no more than an instrument, and behind him, ready to begin again, to send forth more warriors, and push forward the never-ending progress of their peaceful toil under cover of the 'bows that smoked and thundered,' stood the real conquerors of Siberia—the Stroganovs, and their industrious army of colonists.

When the news of the catastrophe on the banks of the Irtych which had momentarily checked the Cossacks' onward march reached Moscow, Ivan was no more. Before I relate the story of the Sovereign's end—as tragic, though in a different way, as Ermak's—I will endeavour to evoke, in its splendour, its singularity, its horror, the picture of the strange surroundings, both of the Court and the home circle, in which he lived.

first impression, when he arrived at Moscow, was a mixture of admiring astonishment and disappointment. The town struck him as being larger than London—city and suburbs together—but he looked in vain for the splendour of which he had heard at Kholmogory. The only way in which the Kremlin surprised him was by its lack of everything he had expected to find there. He was conducted into an edifice which he had heard described as a 'palace of gold,' and it was not much more than a hut.

The celebrated enclosure already presented that appearance of an agglomeration of small things forming one huge