Page:Ossendowski - The Shadow of the Gloomy East.djvu/206

190 Burlats, and Tartars, the chieftains of the valiant Chinese Chunchuzes, sing songs of this day of revenge.

I listened to the gloomy lays breathing horror in the plain of Caydam, on the slopes of Bogdo-Ulu, in the forests of Tauan-Ola, and the waters of the Hwang Ho.

This is the aim of the hapless "great" Russian revolution, the revolution of nomads, suicides, wizards, witches, and various other fiends, and almost apocalyptic monsters.

It ended in a genuine counter-revolution: Bolshevism, a movement directed against Socialism, nationhood, and civilisation, ultimately leading somebody—unknown as yet—to the throne of the Tsars of a new dynasty unprecedented in its autocracy.

Whom?

Perhaps a new Great Mogol, Jengiz-Temudjin or Tamerlane. &hellip;

And he will be for Christian civilisation an Antichrist, black or red, an antithesis of the evolution of the spirit and of progress—the first harbinger of the approaching doom of mankind.

That terrible shadow coming from the East has happened more than once before in the history of mankind, and has been always gloomy, like autumnal night, like the soul of suicide.