Napoleon marched to Moscow, to Leipsic, to Waterloo. The Kiahta caravans came and went. The St. Petersburg Dekabrists rose for Constantine and the Constitution. The Kiahta caravans came and went. The Crimean War saw the Russian flag flutter down at Sevastopol. Even as the Malakoff was stormed, a Russian army marched into Central Asia to seize the Zailust Altai slope, which points as a spear toward Turkestan and India, and a Russian navy sailed under Muraviev to occupy the forbidden Amur. The Kiahta caravans came and went. At length a railroad, pushed year by year, reached the Pacific. One branch cut across the reluctantly-accorded Manchurian domain to Vladivostok; another struck southward to Dalny and Niu-chwang. The Russian Eagles perched at Port Arthur and nested by the far Pacific. The camel-commerce of the old overland road across Mongolia shrank now as shrinks a Gobi snow-rivulet under the burning desert sun. The meagre Kiahta caravans became but a gaunt shadow of the mighty past. Only an intermittent wool-export and a dwindling traffic in tea to the border cities remained of the great tribute of the Urga Road. As trade vanished from their once busy warehouses, the Chinese merchants were troubled. Perhaps to prayer and sacrifice the God of Commerce would relent? So a scarlet temple rose on the hill by Maimachen. Prosperity came suddenly once again, a new trade rolled north over the historic way. The Mongol cart-drivers returned from far Ulasati. The camel-trains, that had scattered south to the trails beyond Shama, gathered back as antelopes herd to a new spring in the desert. The God of the Red Temple, the God of the Caravan, had sent the Japanese. As the Amban’s executioner strikes off a victim’s hand, so had the Nipponese lopped away the railroad reaching down to Dalny and Niu-chwang--the road that was breaking the camel-trade a thousand versts beyond, on the old route by Maimachen and Kiahta. Against the Russian control of the Pacific the Japanese had hurled all their gathered might. By battle genius and efficiency the Island soldiers won, and athwart the front of Slavic empire they set their desperate legions. Far more was lost to Russia than men and squandered treasure, far more than prestige and power of place. The enormous stakes, even in the port of Dalny, in the forts of Port Arthur, in the East China Railway, were but incidents. The real tragedy of the war was that the vital terminus of her continent railroad was alienated, and that her civilization was barred back indefinitely.