to make navigation possible, that my two companions and I set out to accomplish our journey of 280 miles from the Siberian railway to Minusinsk, the last town on the Mongolian frontier in the Yenisei Government of Siberia.
The town of Achinsk on the Siberian railway, about eighty miles west of Krasnoyarsk, was our starting-point. Thence the road leads southwards for 100 miles across ridges and undulating hills of open forest, and for another 150 miles over rolling steppes along a stretch of country called the Abakansk steppe, till it finally reaches Minusinsk.
In Achinsk we found a typical provincial town, with perhaps less European conveniences than Krasnoyarsk, but with a quieter and more respectable population of the truer Siberian type. It is a market town and the centre for a considerable area of country into which immigrants from old Russia are gradually moving. Here agriculture shows every sign of successful development. There were traders, too, of various nationalities, and I remember an interview with a remarkable personage, whom one would not have expected to meet in Siberia. He was a Greek who, born in Turkey, had become a Russian subject, had lived in Manchuria, and had now come to settle in Siberia. A man of such wide experience could not fail to have some knowledge of the world, and I was interested when he told me that in his opinion the southern parts of Western and Central Siberia had the most prosperous future before them. He had left Manchuria because he could not face the commercial competition of the yellow races, the Japanese and Chinese, who had in the last few years, since the Russo-Japanese War, become very active
