These were
Nature -- pure and anarchic as the conservative Christian
anarchist saw Nature -- active, vibrating, mostly unconscious,
and quickly reacting on force; but, from the first glimpse one
caught from the sleeping-car window, in the early morning, of the
Polish Jew at the accidental railway station, in all his weird
horror, to the last vision of the Russian peasant, lighting his
candle and kissing his ikon before the railway Virgin in the
station at St. Petersburg, all was logical, conservative,
Christian and anarchic. Russia had nothing in common with any
ancient or modern world that history knew; she had been the
oldest source of all civilization in Europe, and had kept none
for herself; neither Europe nor Asia had ever known such a phase,
which seemed to fall into no line of evolution whatever, and was
as wonderful to the student of Gothic architecture in the twelfth
century, as to the student of the dynamo in the twentieth.
Studied in the dry light of conservative Christian anarchy,
Russia became luminous like the salt of radium; but with a
negative luminosity as though she were a substance whose energies
had been sucked out -- an inert residuum -- with movement of pure
inertia. From the car window one seemed to float past undulations
of nomad life -- herders deserted by their leaders and herds --
wandering waves stopped in their wanderings -- waiting for their
winds or warriors to return and lead them westward; tribes that
had camped, like Khirgis, for the season, and had lost the means
of motion without acquiring the habit of permanence.
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