Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [5]
For stretching across this vast landmass, from Northern Europe, across Russia and the frozen wastes of Siberia, all the way to the high grounds above China, that reach north almost to touch Alaska, is the world’s greatest plain.
The mighty north Eurasian plain is over seven thousand miles from west to east. From the Atlantic to the Pacific it stretches, a series of huge, interlocking plates, covering a sixth of Earth’s land surface – the size of the USA and Canada combined. To the north, most of the plain is bounded by the icy Arctic Ocean. From there it descends, sometimes two thousand miles, across huge belts of tundra, forest, steppe and desert to its southern border. And it is this border that may truly be said to divide Eurasia into two.
For if northern Eurasia is a vast plain, southern Eurasia consists of the huge regions, from west to east, of the Middle East, ancient Persia, Afghanistan, India, Mongolia and China. And dividing north from south, like a wall, is the mighty crescent of mountain ranges containing some of the highest summits in the world – from the Alps in western Europe to the mighty Asian Himalayas and beyond.
It is hard to see, therefore, why Eurasia was ever divided by geographers into west and east.
About a third of the way across the great plain, roughly above today’s Afghanistan, there is a long, low, north-south line of ancient hills that reach from the tundra to the desert’s edge. These are the Urals. Modern convention has called these ‘mountains’ and used them to designate the border between Europe and Asia.
Yet in truth, with the exception of a few quite modest peaks, these gently rounded hills often rise only hundreds of feet above the plain. By no stretch of the imagination do they form a continental divide: they form scarcely a ripple on that ocean of land. There is no border between Europe and Asia – the plain is one.
As it sweeps across northern Europe, the plain is quite narrow – only some four hundred miles wide. As it goes further, across eastern Europe, it begins to widen, like a wedge. Its northern border becomes the large, cold gulf of the Baltic Sea, which lies under the curving overhang of Scandinavia. Its southern, mountain border becomes the magnificent Balkan and Carpathian Mountains which guard the north of Greece. And then it opens out.
Russia: where the plain is endless.
Russia: where east and west meet.
Here, at the beginning of Russia, the northern border of the mighty plain starts to sweep up, to the Arctic Sea. In this northern land begins the world’s greatest forest – the cold, dark empire of firs called the taiga, that stretches for thousands of miles to the Pacific shores. In the middle section of the plain is a huge, mixed forest. And in the south begins the endless, grassy steppe land, that leads down, at this point, not to desert or mountain, but to pleasant, sunny sea shores, like those of the Mediterranean.
For the southern border of the Russian heartland is the warm Black Sea.
The Black Sea, lying as it does above the eastern end of the Mediterranean, is rather like a reservoir. The great southern crescent of mountains hold it in like a vast dam: to the south-west, the Balkans of Greece; to the south, the mountains of modern Turkey; to the south-east, the soaring Caucasus Mountains. Between the Balkans and the mountains of Turkey, a narrow channel allows the Black Sea to connect with its greater sister sea. This connecting link is known, at the Black Sea end, as the Bosphorus, and at the southern end as the Dardanelles.
The sea is large – some six hundred miles from west to east and four hundred north to south. It is fed by innumerable rivers including, on its western side above Greece, the stately River Danube. Its waters contain traces of sulphur, which may at some point have caused it to be called ‘Black’.
In the centre of the northern, Russian shore, jutting far out into the sea’s warm waters and shaped like a flat fish, is a broad peninsula. This is the Crimea. On