Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/139

 had interesting conversations with a Finnish professor of the Mongolian language. He visited Tammerfors, the Manchester of Finland, and records his admiration for Finnish education, Finnish institutions, and Finnish industries. Then he took a journey further north still, to Tornea, not very far from the Polar circle, at the head of the Gulf of Bothnia, and there with a party he ascended a hill and saw the midnight sun. The sight of the midnight sun evokes from Bikiev a very fine passage on the majesty of God, and then he returns to his difficult theological question—how can Mohammed's precepts on fasting that had in view a hot country like Arabia, with its long nights, be observed in the land of the midnight sun? Bikiev was born in the Russian empire at Kazan on the Volga. He saw the midnight sun also in the Russian empire, and the fact that impressed me was, that it was the extreme diversity of social and geographical conditions prevailing in the empire that quickened in him this interesting process of thought, that stimulated his fruitful work of theological inquiry.

Then I think of a young Buriat scholar, a member of a semi-nomad tribe in the east of Siberia. One evening in Petrograd I walked with this young Buriat along the banks of the Neva, and he described to me a very interesting visit he had made to the great Buddhist monastery of Lhassa in Tibet. He told me of the wonderful library of Buddhist works and of the magnificent image of Buddha Maitreya in the monastery, and then he went on to tell me of his very interesting attempt to transliterate his Buriat-Mongol mother-tongue by means of Roman characters. That again