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I had devised no language of rebellion, forged no icons of discontent, and, on a more practical level, had no sense of what I wanted to do or whom I wanted to be. I had met Rama when I was seventeen. Now I was twenty-four. I had never experienced successes or failures from following a path of my own design. I had been deprived of this ritual of passage into adulthood.
At first, in some districts, it was popularly believed that the Icons informed the Russian priests against those who did not fast as the Church prescribed; but experience gradually exploded this theory. Some of the more prudent converts, however, to prevent all possible tale-telling, took the precaution of turning the face of the Icon to the wall when prohibited meats were about to be eaten!
Though this teaching repudiated all ceremonies, icons, and sacraments, Katerina Ivanovna had icons in every room, and one on the wall above her bed, and she kept all that the Church prescribed without noticing any contradiction in that. "There now; if your Magdalene could hear him she would be converted," said the Countess. "Do stay at home to-night; you will hear him. He is a wonderful man."
In vain you endeavour to explain to him that saints and Icons are not essential parts of Christianity, and that habits of intoxication have no religious significance. On these points he may make concessions to you, but the doctrine of the Trinity remains for him a fatal stumbling-block.
He stopped as if awakening from a dream and lifted his head. By the side of the path, on the dusty dry grass, all sorts of household goods lay in a heap: featherbeds, a samovar, icons, and trunks. On the ground, beside the trunks, sat a thin woman no longer young, with long, prominent upper teeth, and wearing a black cloak and cap.
And everywhere the signs of the gentle faith appear: its ideographs and symbols are chiselled upon the faces of the rocks; its icons smile upon you from every shadowy recess by the way; even the very landscape betimes would seem to have been moulded by the soul of it, where hills rise softly as a prayer.
A little behind them stood the two younger princesses holding handkerchiefs to their eyes, and just in front of them their eldest sister, Catiche, with a vicious and determined look steadily fixed on the icons, as though declaring to all that she could not answer for herself should she glance round.
Let me explain then, briefly, what an Icon is a very necessary explanation, for the Icons play an important part in the religious observances of the Russian people. Icons are pictorial, usually half-length, representations of the Saviour, of the Madonna, or of a saint, executed in archaic Byzantine style, on a yellow or gold ground, and varying in size from a square inch to several square feet.
The icons, the sacred images, are hung in the chief corner, called "The Beautiful," of a Russian izba. A lamp is always lit before them, and some food spread "for the ghosts to come and eat." The well-to-do peasant is still "strict about his fasts and festivals, and never neglects to prepare for Lent.
Now I have been thinking; Allah has bestowed on thee a rare and wondrous gift, which is, to make flat likenesses of all things that thine eyes behold. There lives in El Cuds a sheykh of my acquaintance a righteous man, and steadfast in the faith who earns his living, and a fat one, by no other means. He makes the icons and religious pictures for many of our monasteries and great churches.
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