Siberia and the Exile System/Volume 1/Chapter II
CHAPTER II
ACROSS THE SIBERIAN FRONTIER
IN the city of Perm, where we spent one night, we had our first skirmish with the Russian police; and although the incident has intrinsically little importance, it is perhaps worth recital as an illustration of the suspicion with which strangers are regarded on the great exile route to Siberia, and of the unlimited power of the Russian police to arrest and examine with or without adequate cause. Late in the afternoon on the day of our arrival, Mr. Frost and I set out afoot for the summit of a high hill just east of the town, which we thought would afford a good point of view for a sketch. In making our way toward it we happened to pass the city prison; and as this was one of the first Russian prisons we had seen, and was, moreover, on the exile route to Siberia, we naturally looked at it with interest and attention. Shortly after passing it we discovered that the hill was more distant than we had supposed it to be; and as the afternoon was far advanced, we decided to postpone our sketching excursion until the following day. We thereupon retraced our steps, passed the prison the second time, and returned to our hotel. Early the next morning we again set out for the hill; and as we did not know any better or more direct route to it we took again the street that led past the prison. On this occasion we reached our destination. Mr. Frost made a sketch of the city and its suburbs, and at the expiration of an hour, or an hour and a half, we strolled homeward. On a large, open common near the son we were met by two dróshkies, in which were four officers armed with swords and revolvers, and in full uniform. I noticed that the first couple regarded us with attentive
scrutiny as they passed; but I was not as familiar at that time as I am now with the uniforms of the Russian police and gendarmes, and I did not recognize them. The two officers in the second dróshky left their vehicle just before reaching us, walked away from each other until they were forty or fifty feet apart, and then advanced on converging lines to meet us. Upon looking around I found that the first pair had left their carriages and separated in a similar way behind us, and were converging upon us from that direction. Then for the first time it flashed upon my mind that they were police officers, and that we, for some inconceivable reason, were objects of suspicion, and were about to be arrested. As they closed in upon us, one of them, a good-looking gendarme officer about thirty years of age, bowed to us stiffly, and said, "Will you permit me to inquire who you are?"
"Certainly," I replied; "we are American travelers."
"Where are you from?"
"Of course from America."
"I mean where did you come from last?"
"From St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Nízhni Nóvgorod."
"Where are you going?"
"To Siberia."
"Ah! To Siberia! To what part of Siberia?"
"To all parts."
"Allow me to inquire what you are going to Siberia for?"
"We are going there to travel."
"What is the object of your travels?"
"To see the country and the people."
"But tourists [with a contemptuous intonation] are not in the habit of going to Siberia. You must have some particular object in view. Tell me, if you please, exactly what that object is."
I explained to him that American travelers—if not tourists—are in the habit of going everywhere, and that the objects they usually have in view are the study of people and places, and the acquirement of knowledge. He did not seem, however, to be satisfied with this vague general statement, and plied me with all sorts of questions intended to elicit a confession of our real aims and purposes in going to such a country as Siberia. Finally he said with increasing seriousness and severity, "Yesterday you deigned to walk past the prison."
"Yes," I replied.
"What did you do that for?"
"We were going up on the hill to get a view of the town."
"But you did not go up on the hill—you merely walked past the prison, looked at it attentively as you passed, and then came back."
I explained that the hour was late and that after passing the prison we decided to postpone our excursion to the top of the hill until morning.
"Both in going and returning," he continued, "you devoted all your attention to the prison. This morning it was the same thing over again. Now, what were you looking at the prison in that way for?"
When I understood from these questions how we happened to fall under suspicion, I could not help smiling in the officer's face; but as there was no responsive levity, and as all four officers seemed to regard this looking at a prison as an exceedingly grave offense, I again went into explanations.
"Where are you staying in the city?" inquired one of the police officers.
"At the Bourse hotel."
"How long do you intend to remain here?"
"We intended to leave here to-night."
"For Ekaterínburg?"
"For Ekaterínburg."
"Where did you learn to speak Russian?" inquired the chief of gendarmes, taking up the examination in turn.
"In Siberia," I replied.
"You have been there before then?"
"I have."
"Do you speak German?"
"Very imperfectly—I have studied it."
"What were you doing in Siberia before?"
"Trying to build a telegraph line—but may I be permitted to inquire what is the object of all these questions?"
The gendarme officer, to whom my statements were evidently unsatisfactory, made no reply except to ask, rather peremptorily, for my passport. When informed that our passports were at the hotel he said that we must regard ourselves as under arrest until we could satisfactorily establish our identity and explain our business in Perm. We were then separated, Mr. Frost being put into one dróshky under guard of the gendarme officer, while I took my seat in another beside a gray-bearded official whom I took to be the chief of police. The driver of my dróshky happened to be a highway robber of a hackman who had tried that very morning to make me pay three times the usual rate for five minutes' ride, and when he saw me taken into custody he was unable to conceal his delight.
"They're a bad lot, your high nobility," he said to the chief of police as we drove away in the direction of the town; "only a little while ago they hired my dróshky and then tried to cheat me out of half my fare."
"How much did they give you?" asked the police officer with assumed sympathy.
The driver hesitated.
"Fifty kopéks," I said indignantly, "and it was twice what he ought to have had."
The driver began to asseverate, by all he held sacred, that he had not received half as much as the service was worth; but before he had spoken a dozen words, the chief of police, who evidently knew exactly how far we had ridden in a dróshky that morning, interrupted him with a stern command "Malchí razbóinik! [Shut your mouth, you brigand.] They gave you three times as much as you were entitled to, and still you complain! A stick on the bare back is what you need—twenty blows laid on hot!"
The astonished driver, not daring to make any reply to the all-powerful chief of police, relieved his feelings by flogging his horse, and we were borne in a tornado of dust to the door of the Bourse hotel.
I invited the officers to my room, gave them cigarettes, offered to get them tea, and treated them in every way as if they were guests; but this unexpected courtesy seemed to puzzle rather than placate them. They evidently regarded us as political conspirators about to make an attempt to release somebody from the Perm prison, and when I handed my passport to the young gendarme officer with a polite "Izvóltia" [It is at your service], he looked at me as if I were some new species of dangerous wild animal not classified in the books, and consequently of unknown power for evil. Our passports did not seem, for some reason, to be satisfactory; but the production of the letter of recommendation from the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs brought the comedy of errors to an abrupt termination. The gendarme officer's face flushed a little as he read it, and after a whispered consultation with the chief of police he came to me with some embarrassment and said that he hoped we would pardon what was evidently an "unfortunate misunderstanding"; that they had taken us for two important German criminals (!) of whom they were in search, and that in detaining us they were only doing what they believed to be their duty. He hoped that they had not treated us discourteously, and said that it would gratify them very much if we would shake hands with them as an evidence that we did not harbor any resentment on account of this "lamentable mistake." We shook hands solemnly with them all, and they bowed themselves out. This little adventure, while it interested me as a practical illustration of Russian police methods, made me feel some anxiety with regard to the future. If we were arrested in this way before we had even reached the Siberian frontier, and for merely looking at the outside of a prison, what probably would happen to us when we should seriously begin our work of investigation?[1]
Perm, which is the capital of the province of the same name, is a city of 32,000 inhabitants, situated on the left bank of the river Káma about 125 miles from the boundary line of European Russia. It is the western terminus of the Urál Mountain railway, and through it passes nearly the whole of the enormous volume of Siberian commerce. In outward appearance it does not differ materially from other Russian provincial towns of its class. It is cleaner and apparently more prosperous than Nízhni Nóvgorod, but it is much less picturesque than the latter both in architecture and in situation.
On Thursday, June 11, at half-past nine o'clock in the evening, we left Perm by the Urál Mountain railroad for Ekaterínburg. As we were very tired from two days spent almost wholly in walking about the streets of the former city, we converted two of the extension seats of the railway carriage into a bed, and with the help of our blankets and pillows succeeded in getting a very comfortable night's rest.
When I awoke, about eight o'clock on the following morning, the train was standing at the station of Bíser near the summit of the Uráls. The sun was shining brightly in an unclouded sky; the morning air was cool, fresh, and laden with the odor of flowers and the resinous fragrance of mountain pines; a cuckoo was singing in a neighboring grove of birches; and the glory of early summer was over all the earth. Frost made hasty botanical researches beside the railroad track and as far away from the train as he dared to venture, and came back with alpine roses, daisies, wild pansies, trollius, and quantities of other flowers to me unknown.
The scenery of the Urál where the railroad crosses the range resembles in general outline that of West Virginia where the Baltimore and Ohio railroad crosses the Alleghanies; but it differs somewhat from the latter in coloring, owing to the greater preponderance in the Urál of evergreen trees. All the forenoon, after leaving Bíser, the train swept around great curves in a serpentine course among the forest-clad hills, sometimes running for an hour at a time through a dense larch wood, where there was not a sign of human life; sometimes dashing past placer mining camps, where hundreds of men and women were at work washing auriferous gravel; and sometimes coming out into beautiful park-like openings diversified with graceful clumps of silver birch, and carpeted with turf almost as smooth and green as that of an English lawn. Flowers were everywhere abundant. Roses, dandelions, violets, wild strawberries, and lilies of the valley were in blossom all along the track, and occasionally we crossed an open glade in the heart of the forest where the grass was almost entirely hidden by a vivid sheet of yellow trollius.
We were greatly surprised to find in this wild mining region of the Urál, and on the very remotest frontier of European Russia, a railroad so well built, perfectly equipped, and luxuriously appointed as the road over which we were traveling from Perm to Ekaterínburg. The stations were the very best we had seen in Russia; the road-bed was solid and well ballasted; the rolling stock would not have suffered in comparison with that of the best lines in the empire; and the whole railroad property seemed to be in the most perfect possible order. Unusual attention had been paid evidently to the ornamentation of the grounds lying adjacent to the stations and the track. Even the verst-posts were set in neatly fitted mosaics three or four feet in diameter of colored Urál stones. The station of Nízhni Tagíl, on the Asiatic slope of the mountains, where we 
A RAILROAD VERST POST. stopped half an hour for dinner, would have been in the highest degree creditable to the best railroad in the United States. The substantial station building, which was a hundred feet or more in length, with a covered platform twenty feet wide extending along the whole front, was tastefully painted in shades of brown and had a red sheet-iron roof. It stood in the middle of a large, artistically planned park or garden, whose smooth, velvety greensward was broken by beds of blossoming flowers and shaded by the feathery foliage of graceful white-stemmed birches; whose winding walks were bordered by neatly trimmed hedges; and whose air was filled with the perfume of wild roses and the murmuring plash of falling water from the slender jet of a sparkling fountain. The dining-room of the station had a floor of polished oak inlaid in geometrical patterns, a high dado of dark carved wood, walls covered with oak-grain paper, and a stucco cornice in relief. Down the center of the room ran a long dining-table, beautifully set with tasteful china, snowy napkins, high glass epergnes and crystal candelabra, and ornamented with potted plants, little cedar trees in green tubs, bouquets of cut flowers, artistic pyramids of polished wine-bottles, druggists' jars of colored water, and an aquarium full of fish, plants, and artificial rock-work. The chairs around the table were of dark hard wood, elaborately turned and carved; at one end of the room was a costly clock, as large as an American jeweler's "regulator," and at the other end stood a huge bronzed oven, by which the apartment was warmed in winter. The waiters were all in evening dress, with low-cut waistcoats, spotless shirt-fronts, and white ties; and the cooks, who filled the waiters' orders as in an English grill-room, were dressed from head to foot in white linen and wore square white caps. It is not an exaggeration to say that this was one of the neatest, most tastefully furnished, and most attractive public dining-rooms that I ever entered in any part of the world; and as I sat there eating a well-cooked and well-served dinner of four courses, I found it utterly impossible to realize that I was in the unheard-of mining settlement of Nízhni Tagíl, on the Asiatic side of the mountains of the Urál.
Early in the evening of Friday, June 12, we arrived at Ekaterínburg. The traveler who has not studied attentively the geography of this part of the Russian empire is surprised to learn, upon reaching Ekaterínburg, that although he has passed out of Europe into Asia he has not yet entered Siberia. Most readers have the impression that the boundary of European Russia on the east is everywhere coterminous with that of Siberia; but such is by no means the case. The little stone pillar that marks the Asiatic line stands beside the railway track on the crest of the Ural mountain divide; while the pillar that marks the Siberian line is situated on the Ekaterínburg-Tiumén post road, more than a hundred miles east of the mountains. The effect of this arrangement of boundaries is to throw a part of the European province of Perm into Asia, and thus to separate Siberia from Russia proper.
Ekaterínburg, which although not the largest is the most cultivated and enterprising town in this part of the empire, is situated on the eastern slope of the Uráls in the Asiatic portion of the province of Perm, about one hundred and fifty miles from the Siberian frontier. It impresses the traveler at once as a city that makes some pretensions to wealth, taste, and cultivation. The well-built and architecturally effective railway station, with its circumjacent lawn and glowing flower-beds, the polished private carriages and droshkies with coachmen in livery that stand behind it, the well-dressed, prosperous looking gentlemen that alight from the train and enter the waiting vehicles, and the white globes of electric lights hanging here and there over the broad streets, are all significant evidences of enterprise, success, and prosperity. And it is not without reason that Ekaterínburg shows signs of wealth. The famous mineral region of which it is the center yields annually about $3,335,000 worth of gold, 5000 pounds of platinum, 6,700,000 pounds of copper, 280,000 tons of pig iron, 140,000 tons of hard coal, 16,000 tons of manganese, and 277,000 tons of salt; to say nothing of quantities of malachite, jasper, beryl, topaz, agate, emeralds, and other precious or semi-precious stones.[2] Of this wealth, which is produced almost at their doors, the inhabitants of Ekaterínburg have naturally taken their share; and they have used it to secure for themselves all the luxuries and opportunities for self-culture that are within their reach. They have organized, for example, the "Urál Society of Friends of Natural Science," which holds regular meetings and publishes its proceedings and the papers read by its members; they have established a museum of anatomy in connection with the Nevyánsk hospital, and a small but promising museum of natural history under the patronage of the scientific society; they sustain two newspapers[3] they boast of having occasionally a season of opera; and they recently carried to a successful conclusion a scientific, agricultural, and industrial exhibition that attracted public attention throughout Russia and brought visitors to Ekaterínburg from almost all parts of the empire. These evidences of culture and enterprise, judged by an American standard, may seem trifling and insignificant; but they are not so common in Russia as to justify a traveler in passing them without notice.
In external appearance Ekaterínburg does not differ essentially from the typical Russian town of its class.
There are the same wide, unpaved streets that one sees everywhere in Russia, the same square log houses with ornamented window casings and flatly pyramidal tin roofs, the same high board fences between the scattered dwellings, the same white-walled churches with colored or gilded domes, and the same gastínnoi dvor or city bazar. In the bazars of these Russian provincial towns you may find, if you search diligently, almost everything that the empire produces, and a great many things that it does not produce. In roaming through gastínnoi dvor of Ekaterínburg a day or two after our arrival, we happened to get into what seemed to be a small grocery. The chief clerk or proprietor, a bright-faced, intelligent young peasant, answered good-humoredly all our questions with regard to his business and stock in trade, allowed us to taste certain Asiatic commodities that were new to us, and gave us as much information as he could concerning a lot of Russian and Chinese nuts that lay in open bags on the counter, and that attracted our attention because many of them were new to us. After we had examined them all, and tested experimentally a few of them, the young groceryman said, "I have in the back part of the shop some very curious nuts that were sold to me a year or two ago as 'African nuts.' Whether they ever came from Africa or not I don't know,—the Lord only does know,—but the people here don't like the taste of them and won't buy them. If you will condescend to wait a moment I will get a few."
"What do you suppose they are?" inquired Mr. Frost as the young man went after the "African" nuts.
"Brazil nuts, very likely," I replied, "or possibly cocoa-nuts. I don't believe anybody here would know either of them by sight, and they are the only tropical nuts that I can think of."
In a moment the young groceryman returned, holding out toward us a handful of the fruit of the plant known to science as Arachis hypogaea.
"Why, those are peanuts!" shouted Mr. Frost in a burst of joyful recognition. "Americanski peanuts," he explained enthusiastically to the groceryman, "kushat khorosho" [American peanuts eat well], and he proceeded to illustrate this luminous statement by crushing the shell of one of them and masticating the contents with an ostentatious, pantomimic show of relish. Suddenly, however, the expression of his face changed, as if the result had not fully justified his anticipations, and spitting out the crushed fragments of the "African" nut he said, "They have n't been roasted."
"Nada zharit!" [It is necessary to fry] he remarked impressively to the groceryman, "Amerikanski toujours zharit" [American always to fry].
"Zharit!" exclaimed the young groceryman, to whom fried nuts were a startling novelty,—"How is it possible to fry them?"
I explained to him that Mr. Frost meant to say roast them, and that in America raw peanuts are not regarded as fit to eat. To roast a nut, however, seemed to the groceryman quite as extraordinary as to fry one, and when he was informed that the peanut is not the fruit of a tree, but of an herbaceous plant, and that it grows underground, his astonishment was boundless. His practical, commercial instincts, however, soon resumed their sway; and when we left his shop he was already preparing to roast a quantity of the "wonderful American underground nuts," with a view to sending them out again for trial as samples of a new importation. I trust that his enterprise has been crowned with success, and that the idlers of Ekaterínburg, who obstinately declined to consume African nuts raw, have learned, long ere this, to eat American peanuts roasted, and to like them at least as well as the Russian fruits of idleness—the sunflower seed and the melon seed.[4]
The pleasantest experience that we had during our brief stay in Ekaterínburg was a visit that we made to Mr. N.J. Nesterófski, the cultivated and hospitable superintendent of the Berózef gold mines. I had brought a letter of introduction to him from one of his friends in St. Petersburg; but upon reaching Ekaterínburg I discovered that he lived ten or fifteen miles away in what was known as the Berózef mining district. I sent the letter to him, however, at the first opportunity, and on Monday, June 15th, he drove into the city with a carriage and took us out to his house. The route thither lay through a rather wild, lonely region, not noticeably mountainous but densely wooded, with a still, black pond here and there in the midst of the evergreens, and a thin fringe of buttercups or golden trollius on either side of the road to relieve a little the somber gloom of the forest. Mr. Nesterófski's house, which was situated in rather a large mining village of unpainted log cabins, was a complete surprise to travelers who had expected to find in that wild part of the Ural little more than the bare necessaries of life. Although built of squared logs, it was high and spacious, with a metallic roof, ornamented window-casings, and a substantial storm house at the head of the front steps. Our host pressed an electric bell button at the door, and in a moment we were admitted by a neatly dressed maid-servant to a spacious hall, where we removed our overcoats and goloshes. We were then shown into the drawing room, a beautiful apartment hung with paper of a delicate gray tint, lighted by three long windows, filled with the perfume of fuchsias, geraniums, and splendid cinnamon pinks, and luxuriously furnished with rugs, easy chairs, long mirrors, and a grand piano. Before I recovered from the state of breathless surprise into which I was thrown by this unexpected display of luxury, I found myself shaking hands with Mrs. Nesterófski, a pleasant-faced lady thirty or thirty-five years of age, who welcomed us with warm-hearted hospitality, insisted that we must be hungry after our long ride, and invited us to come out at once to luncheon. We took seats in the dining-room at a cozy little table, just big enough for four, upon which were vodka, excellent sherry and claret, bread and butter, Edam and cream cheese, sardines, fresh lettuce and radishes; and as soon as we had made a beginning by drinking the customary "fifteen drops," and nibbling at the bread, cheese, and radishes, the neat little maid-servant brought to us delicious, hot Pozhárski cutlets with new potatoes. And all this in an unheard-of mining camp in the Asiatic wilderness of the eastern Ural! If I may judge of the expression of my own face from the expression that irradiated the face of my comrade, Mr. Frost, I must have been fairly beaming with surprise, delight, and half-suppressed enthusiasm.
After luncheon Mr. Nesterófski escorted us through what he called the fabrik, a six-stamp quartz mill, where we were shown the whole process of quartz crushing and washing, the amalgamation of the gold, and the roasting of the amalgam to get rid of the mercury. It was substantially the same process that I had already seen in California and Nevada. Gold is obtained, in the Berózef district, both from quartz mines and from open placers; and after we had inspected the quartz-crushing machinery of the fabrik, we were taken, in a sort of Irish jaunting car known as a dalgúshka, to one of the nearest of the placer mines—the Andréyefski prüsk. It was merely an extensive excavation in the midst of the forest, where 150 men and women were hard at work shoveling earth into small one-horse carts for transportation to the "machine." As fast as the carts were loaded they were driven up an inclined plane to the top of a huge iron cauldron, or churn, into which their contents were dumped. In this churn revolved horizontally in different planes half a dozen sharp iron blades, and over the blades fell continually a small stream of water. The auriferous earth, agitated incessantly by the revolving blades and drenched by the falling water, was thoroughly broken up and disintegrated, and it finally made its escape, with the water in which it was partially dissolved, through an opening at the base of the churn. From its place of exit the muddy stream ran down a series of wooden flumes or sluices, in the bottoms of which were pockets and transverse ledges to catch the heavier particles of gold and the black sand with which the gold was mixed. After it had passed through these flumes, the stream was again raised, by means of an Archimedean screw, to a height of twenty or thirty feet, and turned into another series of sluices, where it finally parted with its last and lightest flakes of precious metal. From 460 to 560 tons of earth were churned and washed in this manner every day, with a product ranging in value from $235 to $285, the average yield of the auriferous earth being about 51 cents a ton. Mr. Nesterófski said that he expected to get three puds, or about 131 pounds (troy) of gold out of the Andréyefski priisk before the end of the working season. This would represent a value of about $30,000. The average number of men and women employed in the placer was 150. They worked from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m., with from one to two hours' rest at noon, and their wages ranged from 17 cents a day for girls and women to 50 cents a day for men that furnished their own horses and carts. Out of these wages they had to pay $2 a hundredweight for coarse wheaten flour, 5 cents a pound for second quality meat, and about 75 cents a hundredweight for oats. Nothing, of course, but the direst necessity will force a woman to toil strenuously in a gold placer eleven hours a day for a dollar and two cents a week; and yet I saw many women, and a number of young girls, engaged in such work and receiving such wages, in the Andréyefski priisk. The life of men in the Siberian gold placers is a life of terrible hardship, privation, and suffering; but for the women it must be worse than penal servitude.
We did not leave the priisk until late in the afternoon, when the last sluice had been "cleaned up" for the night, the last flake of gold separated with a magnet from the heavy "iron sand," and a little more than a pound of gold dust locked up in an iron flask as the proceeds of 500 tons of earth churned and washed that day. We then drove back to Mr. Nesterófski's house, where we found dinner waiting for us. It consisted of "fifteen drops" to wash down a preliminary zakúska or appetizer of rye bread and pickled fish; then vegetable soup with little crescent-shaped meat pies; spinach and mashed potatoes served together as a course; cutlets of brains; small birds on toast; delicious charlotte russe; chocolate cake, and macaroons with sherry, claret, and white Crimean wine ad libitum.
I thought, after the delicious and tastefully served lunch at noon, that Mr. Nesterófski could hardly have any more surprises in store for us, but he was not yet at the end of his resources. After dinner he suggested, in a nonchalant, matter-of-fact sort of way, that we light cigarettes and take our coffee out in the garden. It did not seem to me possible that he could have much of a garden, on the 15th of June, in latitude 57° north, and in the mountains of the Urál; but I was quite willing, nevertheless, to go into the yard and see how, in that latitude and at that season of the year, he managed to have lettuce, radishes, and new potatoes. We went out upon a broad piazza in the rear of the house, and then descended a flight of steps into the prettiest and most tastefully arranged garden that I had seen in Russia. The winding walks were neatly graveled and bordered with beds of blossoming, verbena-like flowers; graceful birches, with snowy stems and drooping, feathery foliage, stood here and there in the grass plots, like fountains of foaming water breaking aloft into light-green, down-drifting spray; wild cherry trees, in full blossom, relieved the darker foliage with their nebulous masses of misty white; while currant bushes, raspberry bushes, and strawberry vines, in the outlying region away from the house, gave promise of an abundant summer fruitage. At the extreme end of the yard, beyond the vegetable garden, stood a large conservatory filled with plants, flowers, and fruits of various kinds, among which were dwarf palms and cactuses, good-sized oranges and lemons, and half-ripe pineapples. Lemons, oranges, and pineapples in the mountains of the Urál on the threshold of Siberia! Could anything be more out of harmony with the impressions received from the elementary geographies of childhood? Mr. Nesterófski apologized for the half-ripe state of the pineapples, as if it was really a very humiliating and discreditable thing, and as if travelers from America had every right to expect, in the mountains of Asiatic Russia, navel oranges as big as foot-balls, and dead-ripe pineapples with sweet, spicy juice oozing out of every pore. We assured him, however, that apologies were wholly unnecessary, and that if he had shown us pine cones, instead of pineapples, our brightest anticipations would have been fully realized.
After inspecting the conservatory, the vegetable garden, and the flower garden, we seated ourselves at a little rustic table under the trees near the croquet lawn, and were there served with fragrant coffee and delicious cream. Although it was half-past eight o'clock in the evening, the sun had not yet set, and it was warm enough to sit out of doors without hat or wrap. We talked, smoked, and sipped coffee for half an hour or more, and then Mrs. Nesterófski proposed a game of croquet. The suggestion was received with acclamation, the wickets were set, and at nine o'clock at night we began knocking the balls around in bright sunshine and with birds singing in all parts of the garden. Mrs. Nesterófski and I played against her husband and Mr. Frost; and after a hard struggle beat them, hands down, by five wickets. It was a highly entertaining, if not a strictly scientific, game. Mr. Frost at that time spoke Russian very imperfectly, using French or English words when he could not remember their Russian equivalents; I myself was wholly out of practice; neither of us knew the Russian croquet rules, and our trilingual attempts to advise or consult our partners, at critical stages of the game, excited so much merriment that we were hardly able to make a strike, to say nothing of a carom. More than once I became so weak from laughter at the kaleidoscopic combinations of broken language in Mr. Frost's speech that I had to go away and sit down under a tree to recover my breath. I have no doubt Mr. Frost will say that if the mosaic of my conversation did not have as many pieces in it as his, it was only because I did not know so many tongues; and that, in the touching and plaintive words of the Portuguese grammar, "It is difficult to enjoy well so much several languages."
By the time we had finished our game and refreshed ourselves with delicately flavored caravan tea it was after ten o'clock, and time to think of getting back to Ekaterínburg. Our warm-hearted and hospitable host urged us to stay with him for the rest of the night, and return to the city some time the next day; but as we intended to set out the next day for the Siberian frontier it did not seem best to yield to the temptation. The horses were therefore ordered, and at half-past ten the carriage appeared at the door. We expressed to Mr. and Mrs. Nesterófski, as well as we could in Russian, our grateful appreciation of their cordiality and kindness, thanked them for the great pleasure they had given us, bade them good-night and good-by, and drove back to Ekaterínburg. The streets of the city, when we entered it, were still filled with the soft glow of the long northern twilight; but there was not a sign nor a sound of life in them save the slow, measured "ting!—ting!—ting!" of the triangles carried by the night watchmen, and struck, now and then, as a warning to "vagrom" men. I had heard of "belling the cat," but I never saw a practical illustration of it until I came into Ekaterínburg that night, and found a policeman with a Chimes-of-Normandy attachment prowling up and down our street in search of evil-doers. Of course the wary evil-doer fled from the sound of that watchman's triangle as a schooner in thick weather would flee from the warning boom of a fog bell, while the innocent and the righteous drew near in conscious rectitude and were promptly taken to the lock-up. 
At the time when we made our journey to Siberia, the railroad from Ekaterinburg, the last Russian town, to Tiumen, the first Siberian town, had not been completed. There was in operation, however, between the two cities an excellent horse express service, by means of which travelers were conveyed over the intervening two hundred miles of country in the comparatively short time of forty-eight hours. The route was let by the Government to a horse express company, which sold through tickets, provided the traveler with a vehicle, and carried him to his destination with relays of horses stationed along the road at intervals of about eighteen miles. The vehicle furnished for the traveler's use in summer is a large, heavy, four-wheeled carriage called a tárantás, which consists of a boat-shaped body without seats, a heavy leathern top or hood, and a curtain by which the vehicle can be closed in stormy weather. The body of the tárantás is mounted upon two or more long stout poles, which unite the forward with the rear axletree, and serve as rude springs to break the jolting caused by a rough road. The traveler usually stows away his baggage in the bottom of this boat-shaped carriage, covers it with straw, rugs, and blankets, and reclines on it with his back supported by one or more large, soft pillows. The driver sits sidewise on the edge of the vehicle in front of the passenger and drives with four reins a team of three horses harnessed abreast. The rate of speed attained on a good road is about eight miles an hour.
On the evening of June 16, having bought through tickets, selected a tárantás, and stowed away our baggage in it as skilfully as possible, we climbed to our uncomfortable seat on Mr. Frost's big trunk, and gave the signal for a start. Our gray-bearded driver gathered up his four reins of
weather-beaten rope, shouted "Nu rodníya!" [Now, then, my relatives!] and with a measured jangle, jangle, jangle, of two large bells lashed to the arch over the shaft-horse's back we rode away through the wide unpaved streets of Ekaterínburg, across a spacious parade-ground in front of the soldiers' barracks, out between two square white pillars surmounted by double-headed eagles, and then into a dark, gloomy forest of pines and firs.
When we had passed through the gate of Ekaterínburg, we were on the "great Siberian road"—an imperial highway which extends from the mountains of the Urál to the head-waters of the Amúr River, a distance of more than three thousand miles. If we had ever supposed Siberia to be an unproductive arctic waste, we soon should have been made aware of our error by the long lines of loaded wagons which we met coming into Ekaterínburg from the Siberian frontier. These transport wagons, or obózes, form a characteristic feature of almost every landscape on the great Siberian road from the Urál mountains to Tiumén. They are small four-wheeled, one-horse vehicles, rude and heavy in construction, piled high with Siberian products, and covered with coarse matting securely held in place by large wooden pins. Every horse is fastened by a long halter to the preceding wagon, so that a train of fifty or a hundred obózes forms one unbroken caravan from a quarter of a mile to half a mile in length. We passed five hundred and thirty-eight of these loaded wagons in less than two hours, and I counted one thousand four hundred and forty-five in the course of our first day's journey. No further evidence was needed of the fact that Siberia is not a land of desolation. Commercial products at the rate of one thousand five hundred tons a day do not come from a barren, arctic waste.
As it gradually grew dark towards midnight, these caravans began to stop for rest and refreshment by the roadside, and every mile or two we came upon a picturesque bivouac on the edge of the forest, where a dozen or more obóz drivers were gathered around a cheerful camp-fire in the midst of their wagons, while their liberated but hoppled horses grazed and jumped awkwardly here and there along the road or among the trees. The gloomy evergreen forest, lighted up from beneath by the flickering blaze and faintly tinged above by the glow of the northern twilight, the red and black Rembrandt outlines of the wagons, and the group of men in long kaftáns and scarlet or blue shirts gathered about the camp-fire drinking tea, formed a strange, striking, and peculiarly Russian picture.
We traveled without stop throughout the night, changing horses at every post station, and making about eight miles an hour over a fairly good road. The sun did not set until half-past nine and rose again at half-past two, so that it was not at any time very dark. The villages through which we passed were sometimes of great extent, but consisted almost invariably of only two lines of log-houses standing with their gables to the road, and separated one from another by inclosed yards without a sign anywhere of vegetation or trees. One of these villages formed a double row five miles in length of separate houses, all fronting on the Tsar's highway. Around every village there was an inclosed area of pasture-land, varying in extent from two hundred to five hundred acres, within which were kept the inhabitants' cattle; and at the point where the inclosing fence crossed the road, on each side of the village, there were a gate and a gate-keeper's hut. These village gate-keepers are almost always old and broken-down men, and in Siberia they are generally criminal exiles. It is their duty to see that none of the village cattle stray out of the inclosure, and to open the gates for passing vehicles at all hours of the day and night. From the village commune they receive for their services a mere pittance of three or four roubles a month, and live in a wretched hovel made of boughs and earth, which throughout the year is warmed, lighted, and filled with smoke by an open fire on the ground.
On the second day after our departure from Ekaterínburg, as we were passing through a rather open forest between the villages of Márkova and Tugulímskaya, our driver suddenly pulled up his horses, and turning to us said, "Vot granítsa" [Here is the boundary]. We sprang out of the tárantás and saw, standing by the roadside, a
square pillar ten or twelve feet in height, of stuccoed or plastered brick, bearing on one side the coat-of-arms of the European province of Perm, and on the other that of the Asiatic province of Tobólsk. It was the boundary post of Siberia. No other spot between St. Petersburg and the Pacific is more full of painful suggestions, and none has for the traveler a more melancholy interest than the little opening in the forest where stands this grief-consecrated pillar. Here hundreds of thousands of exiled human beings—men, women, and children; princes, nobles, and peasants—have bidden good-by forever to friends, country, and home. Here, standing beside the square white boundary post, they have, for the last time, looked backward with love and grief at their native land, and then, with tear-blurred eyes and heavy hearts, they have marched away into Siberia to meet the unknown hardships and privations of a new life.
No other boundary post in the world has witnessed so much human suffering, or been passed by such a multitude of heart-broken people. More than 170,000 exiles have traveled this road since 1878, and more than half a million since the beginning of the present century. In former years, when exiles were compelled to walk from the places of their arrest to the places of their banishment, they reached the Siberian boundary post only after months of toilsome marching along muddy or dusty roads, over forest-clad mountains, through rain-storms or snow-storms, or in bitter cold. As the boundary post is situated about half-way between the last European and the first Siberian étape, it has always been customary to allow exile parties to stop here for rest and for a last good-by to home and country. The Russian peasant, even when a criminal, is deeply attached to his native land; and heart-rending scenes have been witnessed around the boundary pillar when such a party, overtaken, perhaps, by frost and snow in the early autumn, stopped here for a last farewell. Some gave way to unrestrained grief; some comforted the weeping; some knelt and pressed their faces to the loved soil of their native country, and collected a little earth to take with them into 
At last the stern order "Stróisa!" [Form ranks!] from the under officer of the convoy put an end to the rest and leave-taking, and at the word "March!" the gray-coated troop of exiles and convicts crossed themselves hastily all together, and, with a confused jingling of chains and leg-fetters, moved slowly away past the boundary post into Siberia.
Until recently the Siberian boundary post was covered with brief inscriptions, good-bys, and the names of exiles scratched or penciled on the hard cement with which the pillar was originally overlaid. At the time of our visit, however, most of this hard plaster had apparently been pounded off, and only a few words, names, and initials remained. Many of the inscriptions, although brief, were significant and touching. In one place, in a man's hand, had been written the words "Prashchái Márya!" [Good-by, Mary!] Who the writer was, who Mary was, there is nothing now left to show; but it may be that to the exile who scratched this last farewell on the boundary pillar "Mary" was all the world, and that in crossing the Siberian line the writer was leaving behind him forever, not only home and country, but love.
After picking a few flowers from the grass at the base of the boundary pillar, we climbed into our carriage, said "Good-by" to Europe, as hundreds of thousands had said good-by before us, and rode away into Siberia.
- ↑ Almost every foreign traveler who has made a serious attempt to study Russian life and has gone for that purpose into the country has been arrested at least once. Lansdell, the English clergyman, was arrested near this same city of Perm in 1882, as a distributor of revolutionary pamphlets [Athenæum, September 16, 1882]; Mackenzie Wallace was arrested "by mistake" on the bank of the Pruth as he returned from Austria in 1872 [Wallace's Russia, page 209]; and even the great German scientist, Baron von Humboldt, did not wholly escape suspicion. The Russian historical review Rússkaya Stariná has recently published a letter from a police prefect in the little Siberian town of Ishím, written in 1829, when Humboldt was in that part of the empire making scientific reseaches. The letter, which is addressed to the governor-general, is as follows:
"A few days ago there arrived here a German of shortish stature, insignificant appearance, fussy, and bearing a letter of introduction from your Excellency to me. I accordingly received him politely; but I must say that I find him suspicious, and even dangerous. I disliked him from the first. He talks too much and despises my hospitality. He pays no attention to the leading officials of the town and associates with Poles and other political criminals. I take the liberty of informing your Excellency that his intercourse with political criminals does not escape my vigilance. On one occasion he proceeded with them to a hill overlooking the town. They took a box with them and got out of it a long tube which we all took for a gun. After fastening it to three feet they pointed it down on the town and one after another examined whether it was properly sighted. This was evidently a great danger for the town which is built entirely of wood; so I sent a detachment of troops with loaded rifles to watch the German on the hill. If the treacherous machinations of this man justify my suspicions, we shall be ready to give our lives for the Tsar and Holy Russia. I send this despatch to your Excellency by special messenger."
A letter more characteristic of the petty Russian police officer was never penned. The civilized world is to be congratulated that the brilliant career of the great von Humboldt was not cut short by a Cossack bullet or a police saber, while he was taking sights with a theodolite in that little Siberian town of Ishím.
- ↑ The precise quantities of the principal minerals taken from the mines of the Urál, in the province of Perm, in 1884, are as follows:
The number of zavods or "works" in the province, including blast-furnaces, pre-rolling-mills, and manufactories, exceeds one hundred; and in the production of wrought iron, chrome iron, platinum, and copper Perm takes first rank among the provinces of the empire.PRODUCTION OF PRODUCTION OF Russia as a whole: Province of Perm: Russia as a whole: Province of Perm: Lbs. Lbs. Short Tons. Short Tons. Gold 78,408 10,944 Iron 559,901 280,082 Platinum 4,932 4,932 Coal 4,318,583 139,014 Copper 13,668,732 6,652,988 Manganese 24,323 15,845 Salt 1,179,023 277,048 - ↑ About the time that we passed through Ekaterínburg, the censorship of one of these papers—the "Week"—was transferred to Moscow. This compelled the editor to send to Moscow,in advance, a proof of every item or article that he desired to use; and as the distance from the place of publication to the place of censorial supervision and back was about 1500 miles, the "Week's" news was sometimes three weeks old before it ceased to be dangerous. By this time, of course, it had ceased to be interesting. Whether the paper survived this blow or not, I am unable to say. The two numbers of it that appeared while we were in that part of the empire contained nothing but advertisements. The editor, I presume, was waiting for the expurgated proofs of his local and telegraphic news to get back from Moscow; and it probably did not occur to him to fill up his reading columns with a few of the titles of the Autocrat of all the Russias, or a chapter or two of genealogies from the Old Testament.
The other newspaper in Ekaterínburg is called "The Active Correspondent," but how any "correspondent" ventures to be "active" in a country where mental activity is officially regarded as more dangerous to the state than moral depravity, I do not know. I invite the attention of the reader to the list of periodicals that have been punished or suppressed on account of their "pernicious activity" since the accession to the throne of Alexander III. It includes every newspaper published in Siberia. See Appendix B.
- ↑ Loungers and idlers in Russian villages, and in municipal parks, sometimes sit for hours on wooden benches in the shade, watching the passers-by, or talking with one another, while they shell and eat the seeds of the water-melon and the great Russian sunflower.