Page:The way of Martha and the way of Mary (1915).djvu/47

Rh ruins, shops, hostelries of the Petcherskaya Lavra. This Kief stands high on those cliffs of the Dnieper whence the Russians sent tumbling down their old god Peroun; it looks upon the river to which King Vladimir at the dawning of Russian faith stepped down with his whole army to be baptized. Yellow walls, half a mile long, twenty feet high, go down, alongside steep, snowy, rutty, over-drifted roads, from church to church. Peasant men and women in chestnut-coloured sheepskins, fur-edged and embroidered, are plodding up and down with bundles on their shoulders. Bright gilded domes of churches glitter above white walls, and from many kolokolnyas come antique-sounding chimes. As you look down from a tower you see beyond the thirty-five churches of the beautiful Lavra the blue and white Dnieper, half frozen and snowed over, half free as yet from winter's grip—you see beyond all the far snowy steppes and forests of Little Russia.

Here, in a historical sense, is Holy Russia, for the whole cliff on which the monasteries are built is holy ground. The foundations are honeycombed with cells of the primeval hermits and saints of Russia. You enter dark and narrow passages in the rock, places in which you cannot stand erect, and you wander candle in hand from shrine to shrine in the depths of the earth. An old monk with black cloak, grey hair, and yellow five-times broken twisted candle, leads you from skeleton to skeleton wrapped in purple pall; shows you now