Rescuing the Czar / Two authentic diaries arranged and translated

is badly blurred and torn, bu

... With a little imagination one can delineate the jeweled crown which the two girlish angels are holding above her head.... Pathos, resignation and a sort of recreating FAITH are painted against that threatening wall and overhanging dirt.... If that should fall WE ARE ALL BOUND TO SUFFOCATE before any help can come.... My 'prisoner' is not a bit discouraged, however.... He is using his jackknife against the concrete wall with great patience and whistling softly and slowly an air from 'The Blessing of the Waters.'... WATER!... I know those girls are CHOKING for a drink as I have been for the last ten hours myself.... Still, not one of them has murmu

ere follows

he hole my prisoner has be

n evidently water-soaked a

ntly distinct to make out wha

wn upon us it seemed that we would soon be drowned alive.... The small hole in the wall had allowed enough water to filter through at first to slake our thirst and make us all quite happy.... But gradually the ground beneath us became damp and sticky

wish, and a roar, and a deadening GUSH,-and then a RUSHING FLOOD tore open the side of the wall and burst like a torrent into our muddy, narrow cell. Higher and higher it mounted, enveloping us to our arm pits.... My 'prisoner' mov

For a moment his body seemed to tremble.... Then with a supreme effort he pulled his body into the opening and for a moment checked the flood.... It seemed like a gallant sac

OP quickly, and, turning in the direction of Maria I saw her body being caught up by the current and sucked painfully forward into the opening her delicate hands had made.... It was too horrible to endure!... Now, while there is no blood of martyrs in my vein

llowing th

ly hope of life!... When I did recover there was Maria bending over me and vigorously see-sawing my arms back and forth in an effort to resuscitate me.... If ever there were an excuse for the chivalry of the Middle Ages it must have crept out of those dark moments when some puissant knight opened his tired eyelids upon a vision such as I then beheld!... But there was no time f

ng entry seems

ng; 'I'm as certain as I'm alive that the loan of $250,000,000 has been made by Japan to those fiends who have escaped,-and I KNOW they have the GOLD, for why have those trucks disappeared?... so it is worth while to keep up this revolution until we get our hands on some of it if we have to follow them all the way to Vladivostok.'... 'That rumor has been floating around for the past week,' another bass voice grumbl

istake when we endorsed that BURNING lie,-we are ALL in for it NOW, and the only way to get out of it is to STAY IN IT and lie it out to the end-'.... 'UNLESS-' 'Unless what?'... 'Unless the Lett who pretended to do the killing is taken out and SHOT!'... 'Oh, give him a little more rope and he'll hang himself

we have t

or help it will mean a FIRING SQUAD for sure.... The criminal crew who have already reported our death will HAVE to

such a proposition,-they are all agreed that they would rather organize themselves into a little platoon and FIGHT IT OUT if we can ever g

r conditions such as these, will understand instinctively what is written in their suggestive depths!... They literally SHAME me for the little I can do.... Some lounge lizards may specu

lling my Lady Buckingham's repeated rescues, I begin to recognize a reason for the existence of that

offers a little

ay around the wall of this cistern until I had a dozen steps completed ... then the girls began making the balls and bringing them in to me like muddy little hod-carriers.... My masonry took on proportions as the minutes dragged by.... Finally we have a stairway four feet wide and extending from the bottom to within four feet of the to

Emperor speaks of Rasp

end of the Metropolitan Archbishop of Protopopov. He was seeking to redeem the reputation of a horse-stealing father if I remember right-'He was a friend of Stuermer, Niki, not a friend to you,' interrupted the ex-Empress... 'You are right, darling,' returned the 'prisoner,' 'quite right, I know.'... 'What kind of a mountebank was RASPUTIN?' I asked to feel my 'prisoner' out.... 'He was a worthless rasputnik at best,' the fallen Emperor answered.... And you think the Jews are responsible for your reported attachment to him?' I asked.... 'Undoubtedly,' he said bitterly with a sigh of resignation.... 'When we were being taken to the boat at Tobolsk did they not make faces at me and Alice and flout me with their cries: "Take him to the Criminal Court and let him read the record of his libertine, Rasputin! Let his Barnabas teach him how to sin for the joy of gaining absolution!"... How little do those enfranchised Jews understand the meaning of forgiveness!' lamented the ex-Czar.... 'May I ask your actual estimate of creatures like Rasputin?' I ventured.... 'Our Rasputin was a hardened criminal beyond a doubt until his conversion by Father Zaborovsky, the good Rector at the Theological Academy at Tomsk,' the ex-Czar replied.... 'He would have made an excellent subject for investigation by Lombroso, by Havelock Ellis or other eminent criminologists ... but I believed the man was sincere in his repentance and accepted him as a sort of text for other sinners to point a way toward regeneration.... The higher Rasputin rose, the greater his fame became, the more impressive would be his textual example to other aspiring souls,-even a criminal should not be denied the consolation of hope where crime is the result of ignorance or misdirected patriotism.... If I sinned in pardoning a sinner then sin must be an unpardonable crime!... Nathan treated David as I treated Rasputin, although both were guilty of the same offense.... He was grossly illiterate,-the only schooling he ever