Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/42

20 city which one now gets from the shore is only just enough to stimulate the imagination and to excite, without gratifying, the curiosity.

The prístan or steamer-landing of Kazán, however, is quite as remarkable in its way as the city itself. The builders of the shops, hotels, and "rooms for arrivers" on the river bank, finding themselves unable, with the scanty materials at their command, to render their architecture striking and admirable in form, resolved to make it at least dazzling and attractive in color; and the result is a sort of materialized architectural aurora borealis, which astounds if it does not gratify the beholder. While our steamer was lying at the landing I noted a chocolate-brown house with yellow window shutters and a green roof; a lavender house with a shining tin roof; a crimson house with an emerald roof; a sky-blue house with a red roof; an orange house with an olive roof; a house painted a bright metallic green all over; a house diversified with dark-blue, light-blue, red, green, and chocolate-brown; and, finally, a most extraordinary building which displayed the whole chromatic scale within the compass of three stories and an attic. What permanent effect, if any, is produced upon the optic nerves of the inhabitants by the habitual contemplation of their brilliantly colored and sharply contrasted dwellings I am unable to say; but I no longer wonder that prekrásni, the Russian word for "beautiful," means literally "very red"; nor that a Russian singer imagines himself to be using a highly complimentary phrase when he describes a pretty girl as krásnaya dévitsa [a red maiden]. When I think of that steamboat-landing at Kazán I am only surprised that the Russian language has not produced such forms of metaphorical expression as "a red-and-green maiden," "a purple scarlet-and-blue melody," or "a crimson-yellow-chocolate-brown poem." It would be, so to speak, a red-white-and-blue convenience if one could express admiration in terms of color, and use the whole chromatic scale to give force to a superlative.