Page:Ossendowski - The Shadow of the Gloomy East.djvu/156

140 She was carried away in rapturous excitement when the young "priest" began the ritual dance. He turned round with such speed that it was impossible to discern his face, and increased the rapidity of his movements to such a degree that the current of air he made extinguished all the candles.

Notwithstanding the young lady's accession to the sect, and her bringing in with her her family and many members of the aristocracy, Paul I instituted a cruel and pitiless persecution of the "floggers"; they were beaten to death in public squares to the accompaniment of military drums, exiled to Siberia, tortured in prisons. Since then the sect has almost disappeared from the capital cities, although I remember that in 1911 there were discovered in Petersburg mysteries of the "floggers" who were members of the merchant class and the aristocracy.

They are most numerous in the provinces of Yaroslav, Saratov, and Ujim, where the most prominent priests of this sect live and hide in the houses of rich merchants.

There exists in Russia another, perhaps still more immoral sect.

When one visited in Moscow or Petersburg those quarters of the town where the small Russian money-changing counters were, one was struck by the yellow, faded, sleepy, and hairless faces of the stout, womanly-shaped men.