Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/76

60 Romans seems not to be known, but the historical records show that during the thirteenth century the Sultan Yarmorasen ben Zeiyan founded on this site a town, which was the beginning of Tlemsen. This was in turn deserted and nothing remains of it save the minaret and a crumbling mosque of the sixteenth century, some canals that were built by the Romans and reconstructed by the Arabs and the kubba of Sidi Daoudi.

On our way from the minaret into town we discovered some soldiers' tents in an olive grove near the road and were informed that it was a camp of a unit of the First Foreign Legion. We stopped to chat with the soldiers in the hope of finding some Poles. It turned out that there were none in this company, though it counted Germans, Russians, Dutch, Swedes, Spaniards and even Greeks.

The Russians talked freely and told us much about themselves. Most of them had joined the legion after the revolts among the Russians fighting on the French front following the peace of Brest-Litovsk. I felt no Bolshevik tendency in their words, but I was very definitely struck by another marked feature of their views—all of them were impregnated with a Eurasian ideology, that is, an ideology which has fastened itself upon many young Russian émigrés who dream of the strengthening of Eastern Christianity and of a return to Asiatic politics following upon the jettisoning of socialism.

"Russia must again be powerful; she must lean upon the moral and physical strength of Asia and must not forget that moment when, at the time of our great tragedy, the West forsook us."

In such wise spoke several of the Russians. The