CHAPTER V
LIFE IN A SIBERIAN VILLAGE
IT was on an afternoon of an April day, as the last touch of winter was disappearing, that I drove into a small Siberian village, the last outpost of the little Slav colonies which are scattered in every available corner of the Yenisei basin from the great railway southwards to the mountains of Mongolia. The village, about half-a-mile in length, consisted of two long straggling rows of single-storeyed log-houses, built on the open ground, where the birch and pine forest had been cleared. The usual broad space of about eighty yards separated the two rows, and here the passing to and fro of carts for a generation or more had worn deep ruts and hollows in the black earth, which were now filled with stagnant water. A small stream ran across the village, its banks covered with piles of rubbish and manure over which dogs, cows, sheep and other domestic animals roamed aimlessly. This was the village refuse-heap, which had accumulated during the last winter, and portions of which are periodically swept away by the spring floods; for no one here puts any value upon such an article as manure when the land will yield twenty bushels to the acre by the simple process of ploughing and sowing. Even in the straggling street bony specimens of cattle wandered about from one house door93
