SIBERIA
CHAPTER I
ON THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY
IT was early in the month of April 1910, when I arrived at Moscow, which was to be the starting-place of my journey of 4000 miles along Russia's eastern frontier. Till recently few travellers from our shores seemed to be aware that there was any other way of visiting the Middle and Far East except by the usual sea route via India. Thus, following the beaten tracks of many thousands who have gone before him, the European traveller leaves his home and suddenly plunges, after the sea-voyage is done, into the old, yet to him new, world of the East, where he finds the ideas and institutions of the West veneered wholesale upon the Oriental framework. But there is another medium through which a traveller can approach the East, and perhaps learn to understand it a little by the way. Already in Moscow the Slavonic atmosphere is about him; and as he passes farther Eastward he becomes insensibly orientalized. The Anglo-Saxon power which overthrew the Moguls and thereby destroyed the relics of the Central Asiatic Mongol Empire in those regions, now dominates India and Southern Asia. But another power which, unlike the former, bore all the terrible brunt of the Tartar onslaughts during
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