In Paris this background and the whole scene was accepted as a part of
the pageant of that city, but in Kiev it was different. There we got the
other side of the picture; the man and the woman who are really Russia,
the element that finds an outlet in the folk music, for its age-old
rebellious submission. One hears the soul of the Russian pulsating in
the continued reiteration of the same theme; it is like the endless
treadmill of a life without vistas. We were looking at the Russia of
Maxim Gorky, the Russia that made Tolstoy a reformer; that has now
forced its Czar to abdicate.

We reached Kiev just before the Easter of the Greek Church, the season
when the pilgrims, often as many as fifty thousand of them, tramp over
the frozen roads from all parts of the empire to expiate their sins,
kneeling at the shrine of one of their mummied, sainted bishops.

The men and women alike, clad in grimy sheepskin coats, moved like
cattle in straggling droves, over the roads which lead to Kiev. From a
distance one cannot tell man from woman, but as they come closer, one
sees that the woman has a bright kerchief tied round her head, and red
or blue peasant embroidery dribbles below her sheepskin coat. She is as
stocky as a Shetland pony and her face is weather-beaten, with high
cheekbones and brown eyes. The man wears a black astrachan conical cap
and his hair is long and bushy, from rubbing bear grease into it. He
walks with a crooked staff, biblical in style, and carries his worldly
goods in a small bundle flung over his shoulder. The woman carries her
own small burden. As they shuffle past, a stench arises from the human
herd. It comes from the sheepskin, which is worked in, slept in, and,
what is more, often inherited from a parent who had also worn it as his
winter hide. Added to the smell of the sheepskin is that of an unwashed
human, and the reek of stale food, for the poorest of the Russian
peasants have no chimneys to their houses. They cannot afford to let the
costly heat escape.

Kiev, the holy city and capital of Ancient Russia, climbs from its
ancestral beginnings, on the banks of the River Dneiper, up the steep
sides and over the summit of a commanding hilltop, crowned by an immense
gold cross, illumined with electricity by night, to flash its message of
hope to foot-sore pilgrims. The driver of our drosky drove us over the
rough cobbles so rapidly, despite the hill, that we were almost
overturned. It is the manner