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and look at ikons!”
    It was not a question. It was a statement of intent.
    Smiling sardonically Mark capitulated and drove us across town to the oldest Russian Orthodox church in the vicinity. It was a chilly morning, hazy and windless. We crossed the Angara River, glittering with moving crystals of shell ice. The church stood behind ancient walls a mile or two from town and beyond it farm lands rolled gently to an encircling rim of distant forests.
    The church (a nunnery once) was crowned by bulbous towers inhabited by what seemed like a million pigeons, wheeling and spiralling like living smoke. The tree-filled grounds and the old stone buildings had an air of gentle decrepitude about them.
    Irkutsk, Mark told us, was one of the earliest bastions of the Russian Empire in the East. It was founded by a band of marauding Cossacks who reached the region in 1634 and chose this spot to build a wooden fort as a base from which to harry the native Buryat people. The fort developed into a great trading centre. In the nineteenth century, it became the final staging point for anti-Tsarists exiled to the salt mines and oblivion. From Irkutsk, many of the great overland and overseas expeditions to the Far East and beyond set out. Mark showed us an unpretentious memorial to Alexei Chirikov who, in 1741, sailed with Vitus Bering to become the first known Europeans to reach the shores of Alaska.
    Even more impressive was the plethora of little stoneshalf buried under fallen leaves, marking the graves of the wives and children of the ill-fated Decembrist Revolutionaries of 1825 who were amongst the first to revolt against Tsarist rule. Wives and children voluntarily followed their men into Siberian exile along the incredibly arduous road leading to Irkutsk. They walked almost all the way, taking more than a year to complete the journey. Exhausted, sick, and starving, most of those who reached Irkutsk perished and were buried there.
    Their graves were marked by very modest stones, but in the side-yard, close to the grey wall of the church, was one grave marked by an enormous granite boulder which must have weighed a good forty tons. It belonged to a fabulously rich man who accumulated most of his wealth from the use of slave labour in the salt mines. Before his death he tried to insure a kind of immortality by having this gigantic rock rolled into the churchyard to mark where his remains would lie. He had a solid bronze plug poured into a hole drilled into the rock upon which was inscribed his name and fame. During the Bolshevik Revolution, when the Reds were fighting desperately for survival against the Whites, metal became so scarce that a local gunsmith chiseled out the bronze. Now only the nameless stone remains.
    We went into the church where, although this was a weekday, a special mass was being sung. The service was being conducted with the full pomp and panoply of Orthodox ritual. A hidden choir sang a lugubrious chant and the air was thick with incense. We caught glimpses of the high priest wearing a towering pearl-encrusted hat, and all but hidden from the worshippers in the dark depth of an inner sanctuary.
    There were ikons – hundreds of them of every age and degree of decay – glittering dully with gold and jewels. Alas, they were not for Claire. A venerable gentleman with a long, discoloured beard shuffled up to us and in no uncertain tone informed Mark there was a service in progress and tourists were not welcome. Whereupon fourmembers of the Soviet New Order and two embarrassed Canadians withdrew as unobstrusively as possible.
    Crouched on the stone steps outside the door was the one and only beggar we ever saw in Russia. He was a bent, unkempt and dirty old man but not, apparently, crippled. When I asked about him, Mark replied, “Well, like everyone else his age he draws a full State pension. Perhaps he enjoys the role he plays.…”
    As we left the churchyard the glaucous gold October sun broke through the haze and