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inhabited. Past the Volga, across the Urals, across the frozen wastes of Siberia to the distant Pacific Ocean: still there are three and a half thousand miles to go.
     
    And where was the village, with its river and forest?
    It is easy for us to say. It lay at the edge of the south Russian steppe: a few dozen miles east of the great River Dniepr, and roughly three hundred miles above that huge stream’s estuary in the north-west corner of the warm Black Sea.
    Yet, strange though it may seem, had a traveller from some other land asked, at that date, how to reach the place, there was scarcely a person living who could have told him.
    For the state of Russia did not yet exist. The ancient civilizations of the east – China, India, Persia – all lay far away, below the huge crescent of mountains that was the southern border of the plain. To them, the empty plain was wasteland. In the west, the mighty empire of Rome spread all around the Mediterranean’s shores and even as far north as Britain. But Rome had never penetrated beyond the outer fringes of the forests of the great Eurasian plain.
    For what did Rome know of the forest? Only that east of the River Rhine were warlike German tribes, and that north, by the Baltic, lay primitive peoples – Baits, Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians – they had vaguely heard of. But that was all. Of the Slav lands beyond the Germans they knew little; of the Finno-Ugrians in the forests that stretched beyond the Volga, nothing at all. Of the Turkish and Mongol tribes that lay in the huge Siberian hinterland, there was, as yet, not a sound over the forest, scarcely a whisper across the steppe.
    And what did Rome know of the steppe? True, at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, Rome had expanded as far as Armenia, below the Caucasus Mountains; and she had for centuries known the little ports on the Black Sea’s northern shore, where mariners came to buy furs or slaves from the interior, or to meet the caravans that had journeyed across the desert from the mysterious orient. But the huge plain beyond these places was terra incognita – an unknown land of barbarous tribes, dangerous steppe and impassable rivers. Long before the little hamlet was reached, the lines and names on the maps of the classical world – of Herodotus, Ptolemy, Pliny – dissolved into rumour, or simply petered out.
    Nor could the villagers themselves have explained where they were.
    Even today, to the confusion of strangers, the people of Russiahave difficulty in giving directions. Ask if a road runs east or west, north or south, or for how many miles, and a Russian will not know. Why should he, in that endless landscape, where horizon succeeds horizon, always the same?
    But he can tell you how the rivers run.
    The villagers, therefore, knew that their little stream ran down into another small river; and that, after a little time, that river joined the mighty Dniepr. They knew that somewhere, far across the southern steppe, the Dniepr ran into the sea.
    But that was all they knew. Only five of them had even seen the Dniepr.
    To convey the truth, as it then was, we cannot speak of Russia, which did not exist, nor can we build an exact framework by which position may be defined. We can only say that the hamlet lay in the lands above the Black Sea, somewhere to the east of the River Dniepr and to the west of the River Don; a little to the east of the forest, a little to the west of the steppe; by one of a thousand uncharted rivers. For to be more precise, in this imprecise land, would be meaningless.
    Softly the wind moved over the land, and a summer’s night stretched over the vast plain. At the great plain’s western edge, dusk was falling. Here, in the southern hamlet, it was starry midnight although, far to the north at the Arctic’s beginning, a pale polar twilight still persisted. East, by the Urals, it was the early hours, the depth of night. In Central Siberia, it was dawn; by the Pacific shores it was now