Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/26

2 the formation of the Mongol Empire and which thereby was thrown back along the path of civilization for many centuries, has since that time gradually grown and by peaceful penetration Eastwards conquered the Mongol and Tartar power of Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. Gifted with powers of assimilation and adaptability to their natural surroundings, the Russian Slavs have shown themselves to be the great political European power which dominates Northern and Western Central Asia. Their civilization is not veneered on an Eastern framework; East and West are blended in them as wine of two different growths is blended by the wine merchant. And then there is the third political power of Asia, an Eastern power, which stands like a solitary figure amid the surrounding races. Recent events have demonstrated the mutability of things least susceptible of change; the Dragon Throne of China has been overturned; and what the future may hold we cannot tell. This third power, also—the most mysterious and ancient of them all—the wanderer on Russia's eastern frontiers encounters. In the fertile plains and barren tablelands beyond the Siberian and Turkestan frontiers, that power, once held by the Dragon Throne, now usurped by the five-coloured Republic, is still seen maintaining its feeble political influence over the ruins of the once glorious Turko-Mongol Empire.

Is not this then a new way of approaching the East?—a way which seems to have appealed little so far to my countrymen. The difficulties of language and lack of travelling facilities seem to bar the way, for once the great Siberian or the Central Asiatic railways have been left behind, the traveller must