CHAPTER I

INTO THE FORESTS


In the beginning of the year 1920 I happened to be living in the
Siberian town of Krasnoyarsk, situated on the shores of the River
Yenisei, that noble stream which is cradled in the sun-bathed mountains
of Mongolia to pour its warming life into the Arctic Ocean and to whose
mouth Nansen has twice come to open the shortest road for commerce from
Europe to the heart of Asia. There in the depths of the still Siberian
winter I was suddenly caught up in the whirling storm of mad revolution
raging all over Russia, sowing in this peaceful and rich land vengeance,
hate, bloodshed and crimes that go unpunished by the law. No one could
tell the hour of his fate. The people lived from day to day and left
their homes not knowing whether they should return to them or whether
they should be dragged from the streets and thrown into the dungeons of
that travesty of courts, the Revolutionary Committee, more terrible
and more bloody than those of the Mediaeval Inquisition. We who were
strangers in this distraught land were not saved from its persecutions
and I personally lived through them.

One morning, when I had gone out to see a friend, I suddenly received
the news that twenty Red soldiers had surrounded my house to arrest me
and that I must escape. I quickly put on one of my friend's old hunting
suits, took some money and hurried away on foot along the back ways of
the town till I struck the open road, where I engaged a peasant, who in
four hours had driven me twenty miles from the town and set me down