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the old city of Irkutsk lying across the river from us became radiant and lovely.
    Rather hesitantly Mark asked if we still wanted to visit the power plant. Discovering that none of us really had any great hankering to see it, he was not-so-secretly relieved. Being a writer himself he knew the inutility of such expeditions to anyone except industrialists, engineers and people of that ilk. He understood that the spectacle of thousands of men and women swarming over a concrete mountain in order to produce millions of kilowatts of invisible electricity would add little to our understanding of the Russian people.
    “Well,” he said. “Why don’t I show you my Irkutsk instead?”
    So we drove to a great stone-paved esplanade on the banks of the Angara at mid-city. This broad wall, guarding the banks against spring floods, was dotted with men and women promenading in the pale, autumnal sunshine. The half-mile-wide river flowed strong and steady below us from its source at Lake Baikal toward its union with the Yenisei, and thence onward to the Arctic Ocean. On its congealing surface were dozens of tiny rowboats manned by fishermen who, unperturbed by the skim of ice, concentrated soberly on their rods and lines. They were engaging in one of the two great outdoor pastimes of all Russians. The season was a trifle late for the other: the passionate pursuit of wild mushrooms.
    We left the car and walked through a park where platoons of well-dressed men were rehearsing for their partin the coming parade to celebrate the day of the Revolution. The quietness was startling. There was none of the pulsating roar that rises from a city of half a million people in the west, and yet the broad, tree-lined avenues seemed to carry a steady stream of cars and trucks.
    “It is so quiet because Irkutsk is still a wooden city,” Mark explained. “In the forest the trees absorb sound like a sponge and it is the same with the log houses of Irkutsk.”
    These wooden houses were all about us; long streets of them, even near the centre of the city. They were beautifully constructed of squared logs, and many stood three stories high. Each was a work of loving labour and of art, decorated around doors and windows and under the eaves with scrolls and fretwork, sculptured shutters and complicated carved porticos painted in blues and greens to form intricate patterns against the chocolate brown of the ancient logs.
    Here and there were gaps where these buildings out of another time had given way to the stark concrete constructions of the new age.
    “The shape of things to come,” I mused, half to myself, “when this city becomes as faceless as all cities, and thunders and reverberates to the sound of the machine, and knows no more quietness.”
    Mark stopped and looked intently at me for a moment. Then this New Man of a New Age said a heartening thing.
    “We will not
let
that happen. There has been too much lost already in our land – by war and by senseless change. Change must come; but it cannot be allowed to obliterate the past. We have many destroyers amongst our planners – too many of them. But here in Irkutsk, as elsewhere, we are forcing them to be careful. Whole streets of these old houses will be preserved, not as museums, but as living homes. Man is a living thing, and man has roots. Any fool knows that without roots all things die, and we are not going to go that way. Just last year wepersuaded the administration to give us hundreds of pounds of real gold leaf so we could re-guild the domes of every church in Irkutsk. It was not religious zeal made us do that. It was our certainty that the old things belong to life as surely as the new – and must be cared for tenderly.”
    “But surely,” I demurred, thinking of the tremendous concrete waste I had seen on the outskirts of Moscow, “people who think the way you do must be very much in the minority.”
    “Not so much. And we have the young people behind us now – we writers and