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In May 1904, the journalist Maurice Baring is on a steamer, on Lake Baikal in Siberia, on his way to cover the Russo-Japanese War. "It had been a glorious day, and the sun in the cold, clear atmosphere – an atmosphere that has a radiant purity which is quite indescribable – was gradually assuming the appearance of a red, fiery, arctic ball," he reports in What I Saw In Russia (1913).
"In front of us was a silent sheet of ice, powdered with snow, white and spotless except for one long brown mark which had been made by sledges. On the horizon in front of us a range of mountains was visible, whose summits seemed to disappear into a veil of low-hanging clouds. It was impossible to discern where the mountains left off and where the clouds began; in fact this low range had not the appearance of mountains at all; it seemed as if we were making for some mysterious island, some miraculous reef of sapphires, so intense was the blue of these hills, so gem-like the way they glinted in the cold air."
The steamer ploughed the ice into innumerable shapes, fantastic flowers of ice and snow. "As the sun sank lower, the strangeness and beauty increased, for a faint pink halo pervaded the sky round the sun, which grew more and more fiery and metallic." He knew he had never seen such things before, and yet it felt familiar. And then a recollection of Coleridge's poetry came into his head: "And ice mast high came floating by/ As green as emerald."
