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I started on my mission to the Urals with absolute confidence that, in the absence of General Knox, our interests in Omsk would not suffer so long as they were in the hands of our senior consul. After infinite trouble with Russian official elements, I started on my western journey on April 5. We were now entering the district behind the Ural front.

It was a sleepless night for the Ambassador. This was just such a complication as might embroil the nations of Europe in strife, an excuse which might serve to snap diplomatic relations and spread the lurid clouds of war from the Ural range to the shores of the Atlantic. One thing seemed certain, De Froilette had not repeated his information broadcast.

When the pyramids were young, long before the flood gates of the Ural Mountains had broken before the inundating Aryan hordes that overran the forests and mountains of Europe to the edge of the Netherland seas, this race which you can see to-day dwelling in New Mexico and Arizona were spinning their wool, working their silver mines, and on the approach of the enemy, withdrawing to those eagle nests on the mountain tops which you can see, where only a rope ladder led up to the city, or uncertain crumbling steps cut in the face of the sheer red sandstone.

For twenty days he had travelled by caravan across the Persian uplands, through Herat, and Meshed and Bokhara, striking off with his guide alone toward the Sea of Aral and the eastern shores of the Caspian, thence through the Ural foothills to the old Roman highway that led down into the sweet green valleys of a land he had thought of as nothing more than the creation of a hairbrained fictionist.

It is scarcely necessary to observe, that the Dnieper and Don run into the Euxine, while the Volga and Jaik, or Ural, are discharged into the Caspian. The Reception of Carpini at the Court of Baatu.

But Nijni is, besides, the terminus of the railway from Moscow. That line places this town and its fair in communication with all the lines of Russia and the Western World, while the Volga, with its tributary, the Kama, leads to Perm, and the Pass of the Ural Mountains, and the vast regions of Siberia and Central Asia.

It will open up the forests, the arable country land, the cattle-breeding districts, and, above all, the mineral deposits. Here is a fine coming opportunity for the capitalists of the world. The Siberian railway starts at Cheliabinsk, just across the Ural Mountains, which it reaches through Samara on the Volga from the European side, coming over the boundary hills through Ufa, Miass and Zlatoust.

In Europe the Scandinavian plateau was the chief center of dispersion. At the time of greatest glaciation a continuous field of ice extended from the Ural Mountains to the Atlantic, where, off the coasts of Norway and the British Isles, it met the sea in an unbroken ice wall.

But all mountains are Organ Mountains: the Alps and the Himalayas; the Appalachian Chain, the Ural, the Andes, the Green Hills and the White. All of them play anthems forever: The Messiah, and Samson, and Israel in Egypt, and Saul, and Judas Maccabeus, and Solomon. Archipelago Rio! ere Noah on old Ararat anchored his ark, there lay anchored in you all these green, rocky isles I now see.

Barley, buckwheat, oats, millet and rye form the staple food of the inhabitants. Mines of great value exist in the Ural, Obdorsk and Altai mountains, which produce gold, copper, iron, silver, platinum, rock-salt, marble and kaolin or china clay. Rich naphtha springs exist on the Caspian and an immense bed of coal has been discovered between the Donetz and Dnieper rivers.