Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/351

Rh strong reminiscences—the rattle of cut bars; the clinking of chains; the soft muffled sound of the earth being dug in the tunnel; dull cries of pain, of hate or of supplication; the echoes of fights and of shots.

When, astonished and frightened with the reality of it all, I came back to myself and looked around, I realized that the panorama of the open country was passing before my car window and that out of the rumble of wheels and the booming of the speeding train my memory had, without will of mine, made these other sounds and pictures, heard and seen so many times during that life in the desert of human dust which was dominating all my conscious and subconscious moods.

I began to think again about those who remained within the sack and about those who had passed before my eyes during these twenty lost months. What had they left in my memory, the memory of a normal, trained man who sought to understand everything, to see the least ray of light in the souls of these men, every throb of feeling that likened them to those who had never heard a prison door clang behind them and the long-drawn cries of the guards, as they shouted their "Take care, take care!"

During my journey across the continent I thought often and much about the Russians. Now I had seen them not only in the whirlpool of life in great cities, at liberty, where many surrounding and moulding circumstances compelled them to be like the men of other nations; but also I had looked upon their naked souls without artificial coverings. I had seen them in torture and in suffering, without mask or decorations which hide characteristics so intimately close to them, so innate as to be impossible of perception in the ordinary contacts of everyday life.