At a place called Taiga a branch line goes north to Tomsk. From here after 130 miles through forest country, with scarcely anything to break the featureless monotony of the land, the railway enters the Yenisei Government near the town of Achinsk. Another 100 miles of exactly the same undulating forest as before, with fewer and fewer signs of colonization and habitation, brings us to the great Yenisei River sluggishly crawling through the open fiat beyond the forest and threading its way from the Mongolian frontier northwards across the centre of this great continent to the Arctic Ocean. Straggling along its banks for some two or three miles is the city of Krasnoyarsk, the chief commercial and administrative centre of this most central province of Siberia, the Yenisei Government.
Krasnoyarsk was the starting-point of our southward journey to the Mongolian frontier, and here, after travelling 4000 miles, half of which was in Siberia, from Moscow, we left the railway. The romance of such a journey is soon swallowed up in the tedious monotony of the scenery and the immensity of the country, which makes even Canada seem small in comparison with it. From the railway we could form some rough idea of the general progress which is being made in this part of the world; but the really instructive part of our sojourn in Siberia was yet to come.
