In Kobdo, ten thousand feet among the mountains in the west of Mongolia, was a great lama, and the Cossack was full of this man's prophecy.
Three emperors, said the lama, would fight. One would be overwhelmed and utterly destroyed, the other would lose immense sums of money, and the third would have great glory.
“The Tsar, Madame,” said my friend, “the Tsar, of course, is the third.”
I wonder what part he took in the revolution. He was a Balt, a man from the Baltic Provinces, heart and soul with the Poles, and he did not even call himself a Russian. Well, the Tsar has been overwhelmed, but which is the one who is to have great glory? After all, the present is no very great time for kings and emperors. I am certainly not taking any stock in them as a whole. Perhaps that lama meant the President of the United States!
We went round Lake Baikal, and the Holy Sea, that I had seen before one hard plain of glittering ice, lay glittering now, beautiful still in the August sunshine. There were white sails on it and a steamer or two, and men were feverishly working at alterations on the railway. The Angara ran swiftly, a mighty river, and we steamed along it into the Irkutsk station, which is by no means Irkutsk, for the town is—Russian fashion—four miles away on the other side of the river.
At Irkutsk it seemed to me we began to be faintly Western again. And the exiles who had come so far I suppose abandoned hope here. All that they loved—all their life—lay behind. I should have found it hard to turn back and go east myself now. What must that facing east have been for them?
They turned us out of the train, and Buchanan and I were ruefully surveying our possessions, heaped upon the platform, wondering how on earth we were to get them taken to the cloakroom and how we should get them out again supposing they were taken, when the captain of the Askold appeared with a porter.
“Would Madame permit,” he asked, not as if he were conferring a favour, “that her luggage be put with mine in the cloakroom?”
Madame could have hugged him. Already the dusk was falling, the soft, warm dusk, and the people were hastening to the town or to the refreshment-rooms. There would be no train that night, said my kind friend, some time in the morning perhaps, but certainly not that night. I sighed. Again I was adrift, and it was not a comfortable feeling.
If Madame desired to dine—— Madame did desire to dine.