Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/156

 114 with life, but its beauty of another kind was indescribable. For hours one could pass by the stems of the aspen poplar, like silvery pillars supporting overhead an emerald canopy of foliage, which rustled and quivered in the wind. Beneath my feet lay an endless carpet of anenome and peony, and as evening came on the slanting rays of the sun pierced sideways through the forest, and as they fell they lit up the silvery trunks with a splendour that was almost dazzling. Here and there in the poplar forest I came across open patches where the wild bird-cherry and spirea bushes were blossoming in profusion, making a natural shrubbery such as might surround a country mansion in England. Yet everything was wild; no sign of a human being all day long, and only the blackbird warbled in the cherry-trees and the great black woodpecker chattered from a dead poplar stump. Never before have I seen anything like the beauties of a Siberian spring. The sight of forested hill and vale stretching as far as the eye could see, throbbing with plant and animal life, in an atmosphere as clear as crystal, filled me with a new sensation and made here existence a deep and subtle joy. I felt that if the ideal in the next world is that of a boundless field of joyous, throbbing life, then the Siberian forest in spring more nearly approaches it than anything I have ever yet seen upon this earth.

One afternoon I wandered out from the village in another direction. I set my face away from the forest, directing my steps aimlessly towards the north, where I knew the peasants had their cultivated lands. As the villages in those districts were situated at the edge of the great forest, the cultivated lands all lay in a long belt, fringing the forest. Here the