Page:Ossendowski - The Shadow of the Gloomy East.djvu/47

Rh This is the emblem of the ancient law of the Golden Horde, which ordains that the captured horse-thief should be impaled. Such an execution, however, requiring too many preparations, it is easier for the crowd to beat the culprit to death, and afterwards to impale the dead body within its grave.

The demon-worship or shamanism is quite comprehensible in the vast desert of the North, where Nature unlooses a veritable inferno of multifarious and terrifying voices; where the hurricanes, blowing from the Arctic Ocean, claim death; where the quagmires breathe plague, emit pestilence; where savage men and beasts run wild, carrying death in their despondent, hunger-glowing eyes; where the earth and the air are overcloyed with the blood, the groans, and the curses of those whom the Tsars and their intelligent bureaucracy cast into the bottomless pit of solitary torture and death, solely because they strove for freedom, giving them the freedom of the boundless desert of snow in which, like stones in the depths of an unfathomable sea, were lost without trail hundreds and thousands of tombs of martyrs!

In those God-forsaken regions shamanism appears a natural phenomenon amongst the savage tribes of nomads.

Still, even in Russia proper, even near the capital, its existence is revealed.

I knew two instances.

I was a student at that time spending my holidays