climate of southwestern Siberia to be arctic in its character, our minds would have been dispossessed of that erroneous idea in less than twelve hours after our arrival in Semipalátinsk. When we set out for a walk through the city about one o'clock Sunday afternoon, the thermometer indicated eighty-nine degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, with a north wind, and the inhabitants seemed to regard it as rather a cool and pleasant summer day. After wading around in the deep sand under a blazing sun for an hour and a half, we were more than ready to seek the shelter of the hotel and call for refrigerating drinks. The city of Semipalátinsk fully deserves the nickname that has been given to it by the Russian officers there stationed, viz., "The Devil's Sand-box." From almost any interior point of view it presents a peculiar gray, dreary appearance, owing partly to the complete absence of trees and grass, partly to the ashy, weather-beaten aspect of its unpainted log-houses, and partly to the loose, drifting sand with which its streets are filled. We did not see in our walk of an hour and a half a single tree, bush, or blade of grass, and we waded a large part of the time through soft, dry sand which was more than ankle-deep, and which in places had been drifted, like snow, to a depth of four or five feet against the walls of the gray log-houses. The whole city made upon me the impression of a Mohammedan town built in the middle of a north African desert. This impression was deepened by the Tatár mosques here and there with their brown, candle-extinguisher minarets; by the groups of long-bearded, white-turbaned mullas who stood around them; and by the appearance in the street now and then of a huge double-humped Bactrian camel, ridden into the city by a swarthy, sheepskin-hooded Kírghis from the steppes.
Monday morning I called upon General Tseklínski, the governor of the territory, presented my letters from the Russian Minister of the Interior and the Minister of Foreign
