Excerpt from The Romance of Reality

Far over the eastern half of Europe extends a vast and mighty plain, spreading thousands of miles to the north and south, to the east and west, in the north a land of forests, in the south and east a region Of treeless levels. Here stretches the Black Land, Whose deep dark soil is fit for endless harvests; here are the arable steppes, a vast fertile prairie land, and here again the barren steppes, fit only for wan dering herds and the tents Of nomad shepherds. Across this great plain, in all directions, flow myriads Of meandering streams, many of them swelling into noble rivers, whose waters find their outlet in great seas. Over it blow the biting winds of the Arctic zone, chaining its waters in fetters Of ice for half the year. On it in summer shine warm suns, in whose enlivening rays life flows full again.

Such is the land with which we have to deal, Rus sia, the seeding-place of nations, the home of restless tribes. Here the vast level of Northern Asia spreads like a sea over half of Europe, until checked in its flow by lofty mountain walls. Over these broad plains the fierce horsemen Of the East long found an easy pathway to the rich and doomed cities of the West. Russia was playing its part in the grand drama of the nations in far-off days when such a land was hardly known to exist.

Have any of my readers ever from a hill-top looked out over a broad, low-lying meadow-land filled with morning mist, a dense white Shroud under which everything lay hidden, all life and movement lost to view? In such a scene, as the mist thins under the rays of the rising sun, vague forms at first dimly appear, magnified and monstrous in their outlines, the Shadows Of a buried wonderland. Then, as the mist Slowly lifts, like a great white curtain, living and moving objects appear below, still of strange outlines and unnatural dimensions. Finally, as if by the Sweep of an enchanter's wand, the mists vanish, the land lies clear under the solar rays, and we per coive that these seeming monsters and giants are but the familiar forms which we know so well, those of houses and trees, men and their herds, actively stirring beneath us, clearly revealed as the things of every day.

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