Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/28

 4 of the Great Siberian Railway, which girds two continents, we see the magnificent terminal buildings rising as if by magic at the word of the imperial ukase, "Buit Darog Zalojen" (let the railway be built). What would Russia have been, what could she have done, without her autocrats, without her centralized administration, and without that gigantic machinery which secures a rough and ready law and order from the Gulf of Finland to the Pacific, and from the Arctic Ocean to the Afghan frontier, all dominated by an imperial will? Without these Russia would be now, as she once was, a mass of disunited intriguing principalities, which would never have thrown off the Tartar yoke, or, even if they had accomplished this, would have been absorbed by the Teutonic political power on the west. And that thought remained in my mind as on that April evening the Siberian express glided out of the great station at Moscow, and plunged into the darkness eastwards.

For two nights and a day the train crosses the southern agricultural zone of European Russia. Immense expanses of open plain gently undulate in wide sweeps up which the train crawls and down which it imperceptibly runs. The black friable soil is farmed on the "three-field" system, and from horizon to horizon one sees nothing but patchy agriculture and the cultivated fields alternating with areas of waste fallow. Little villages are crowded together under the shadow of the Greek church with its five-cupola bell tower and a couple of windmills, and the straw-thatched houses of wattle and mud, picturesquely scattered, remind the traveller of parts of East Anglia. The peculiar social and economic