Altaiskaya was full of the freshness of youth, and the air gave you wings and its valleys were full of wonderful flowers. I have a long-acquired habit of associating a certain phrase in the Lord’s Prayer with the most beautiful thing I have seen during the day, and if I have seen nothing beautiful, and have been leading a dull life in a town, my mind goes roving back to certain wondrous sights in the past. Most frequently of all it goes to the wastes, covered with crimson poppies, in Russian Central Asia, and occasionally to the verdure and splendour of the Altai and the delphiniums there, the blue, purple and yellow monkshood, the China-blue larkspurs, blue and purple larkspurs. A wonderful place for flowers. Here are sweeps of blue sage, mauve cranesbills poking everywhere, saffron poppies, grass of Parnassus, campanula, pink moss flowers and giant thistle-heads, gentian, Siberian iris.
Just outside the Cossack settlement it was late summer, and the glossy peony fruits were turning crimson from green, opening to show rows of black teeth—seeds. But as you climbed upward toward the snow the season changed, and it was possible to recover the lost spring.
The southern side of the mountains seemed to be very bare, but our side, the northern one, was green. It was comparatively easy to reach districts where it might be thought no foot of man had ever trod—primeval moss-grown forest, where were no tracks, no flowers, nothing but firs and moss. Numberless trees had fallen, and the moss had grown over them, and, in climbing through, one helped oneself from tree to tree, balancing and finding a footing. Above this jungle was a stretch of steep mountain-side sparsely grown with young firs, and then grey, barren, slippery rock. Wonderful shelves and chasms, fissures, precipices, and ways up without ways down, boulder-strewn tracks and founts of bubbling water, milk-white streams, crystal streams.
I was housed very well with a prosperous Cossack family, and, except for the fact that there was a terrible monotony in their dinners, had no reason to complain. Every evening when I returned there was beef “cutlets,” white scones and butter, a jug of milk, and the samovar. The whole family was in the fields hay-making all day, and were indisposed to give time to cooking.
ALTAISKA STANITSA: VIEW OF MOUNT BIELUKHA
Most days I spent by the side of a little mountain river, where I built a sort of causeway out of rocks, diverted the channel, made a deep bathing-pool—enthralling occupations. Here also I had a bonfire, made coffee, baked potatoes, cooked red currant jam. Strips of red currants hung like bunting on some of the bushes, and were so thick that you could pick a potful in a quarter of an hour. Here also I sorted out and re-read thirty or forty copies of The Times, saved up for me, with letters, at the post office of Semipalatinsk—all the details of the political quarrel over Ulster, the resignation of Sir John French (as he was then called), of Colonel Seely, the vigorous speeches of Mr. John Ward, the brilliant defences of Mr. Asquith. We seemed to be running forward silently and smoothly to an exciting rebellion or civil war in Ireland, and nobody seemed to deplore the prospect of strife. The Government, nominally in favour of peace at all costs, were incapable of preventing their opponents obtaining arms, and were, therefore, allowing their friends to arm. On the whole we seemed to be tired of the dull blessings of peace, out of patience with peace. Yet we were not ready for the strife that was coming, though certainly in a mood to take arms. It is astonishing that with our many international characters—those diplomatical journalists of ours—we did not know what was coming, or no one was at pains to undeceive us. Journalists abroad, even if they are out of touch with Courts and are uninfluential, have yet much greater opportunities for understanding international situations than Foreign Offices. Why is it that they nearly always mislead? In our country a certain glamour overspreads the personality of the polyglot who writes of foreign Courts and foreign policies, but as an observer of the Press for many years I can give it as my opinion that, as a nation, we do not gain much from the pens of those journalists who run in and out of chancelleries and are well known at foreign Courts. In any case, as regards those who dealt specially with Germany, Austria and the Balkans at the time of the outbreak of war, they were either blind or ignorant, which is unthinkable, or mixed up somehow in the great German intrigue.
Silence reigned in Europe, and under cover of that silence what tremendous preparations were being made, what hurrying to and fro there was. It is astonishing to look back now to those serene and happy weeks in the Altai and to feel the contrast of the innocence of Nature and the devilish conspiracy in the minds of men. If there are devils in the world, black spirits as opposed to white spirits, what triumph was theirs, what hidden ecstasy as at the coming triumph of negation. Behind the screen of this silence horns were blowing announcing the great feasts of death, the blasting of the temples wherein the spirit of man dwells, the orgy of ugliness and madness. But being, happily, untuned to this occult world, we did not hear them.
MOBILISATION DAY ON THE ALTAI:
THE VILLAGE EMPTIED OF ITS FOLK