Siberia and the Exile System/Volume 1/Chapter III
CHAPTER III
THE FLOWERY PLAINS OF TOBÓLSK
IN crossing the boundary line between the provinces of Perm and Tobólsk, we entered a part of the Russian empire whose magnitude and importance are almost everywhere underestimated. People generally seem to have the impression that Siberia is a sub-arctic colonial province about as large as Alaska; that it is everywhere cold, barren, and covered during the greater part of the year with snow; and that its sparse population is composed chiefly of exiles and half-wild aborigines, with a few soldiers and Grovernment officials here and there to guard and superintend the ostrógs, the prisons, and the mines. Very few Americans, if I may judge from the questions asked me, fully grasp and appreciate the fact that Siberia is virtually a continent in itself, and presents continental diversities of climate, scenery, and vegetation. We are apt, unconsciously, to assume that because a country is generally mapped upon a small scale it must necessarily occupy only a small part of the surface of the globe; but the conclusion does not follow from the premises. If a geographer were preparing a general atlas of the world, and should use, in drawing Siberia, the same scale that is used in Stieler's "Hand Atlas" for England, he would have to make the Siberian page of his book nearly twenty feet in width to accommodate his map. If he should use for Siberia the scale adopted by Colton, in his "Atlas of the United States," for New Jersey, he would have to increase the width of his page to fifty-six feet. If he should delineate Siberia upon the scale of the British ordnance survey maps of England (the "six-шnch maps") he would be compelled to provide himself with a sheet of paper 2100 feet wide, and his atlas, if laid out open, would cover the whole lower part of New York City from the Battery to Wall street. These illustrations are sufficient to show that if Siberia were charted upon a scale corresponding with that employed in mapping other countries, its enormous geographical extent would be much more readily apprehended, and would appeal much more strongly to the imagination.
Siberia extends in its extreme dimensions from latitude 40.17 (the southern boundary of Semiréchinsk) to latitude 77.46 (Cape Cheliúskin), and from longitude 60 east (the Uráls) to longitude 190 west (Bering strait). It therefore has an extreme range of about 37 degrees, or 2500 miles, in latitude, and 130 degrees, or 5000 miles, in longitude. Even these bare statistics give one an impression of vast geographical extent; but their significance may be emphasized by means of a simple illustration. If it were possible to move entire countries from one part of the globe to another, you could take the whole United States of America from Maine to California and from Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico, and set it down in the middle of Siberia, without touching anywhere the boundaries of the latter territory. You could then take Alaska and all the States of Europe, with the single exception of Russia, and fit them into the remaining margin like the pieces of a dissected map; and after having thus accommodated all of the United States, including Alaska, and all of Europe, except Russia, you would still have more than 300,000 square miles of Siberian territory to spare—or, in other words, you would still leave unoccupied in Siberia an area half as large again as the empire of Germany.[1] The single province of Tobólsk, which in comparison with the other Siberian provinces ranks only fourth in point of size, exceeds in area all of our northern States from Maine to Iowa taken together. The province of Yeniséisk is larger than all of the United States east of the Mississippi River and the territory of Yakútsk is thirteen times as large as Great Britain, thirty-four times as large as the State of Pennsylvania, and might be divided into a hundred and eighty-eight such States as Massachusetts; and yet Yakutsk is only one of eleven Siberian colonies.
A country of such vast extent must necessarily include all varieties of topography and scenery, and all sorts of climate. Disregarding for the present local and partial exceptions, taking climate and topography together and beginning at the arctic ocean, Siberia may be roughly divided into three broad east-and-west zones, or belts of country. They are as follows: 1. The great northern túndra or the treeless region of moss steppes, extending along the whole arctic sea-coast from Nóvaya Zémlaya to Bering strait. 2. The forest region, which, with occasional breaks, occupies a wide belt through the middle of the country from the Urál mountains to the Okhótsk sea. 3. The fertile and arable region which lies along the Central Asiatic and Mongolian frontier, and extends from Ekaterínburg and Órenburg to the coast of the Pacific. The northern and southern boundaries of these great transcontinental belts of country cannot be exactly defined, because they are more or less irregular. In some places, as for example in the valleys of the great rivers, the central forests make deep indentations into the barren region that lies north of them; while in others the northern steppes break through the central forests and even encroach upon the beautiful and fertile region along the southern frontier. Generally speaking, however, the imaginary zones or belts into which I have for convenience divided Siberia correspond with actual physical features of the country.
I will now take up these zones of climate and topography separately and sketch hastily the character of each. 1. The great northern túndra. The northern coast of Siberia, between the southern extremity of Nóvaya Zémlaya and Bering strait, is probably the most barren and inhospitable part of the whole Russian empire. For hundreds of miles back from the arctic ocean the country consists almost entirely of great desolate steppes, known to the Russians as túndras, which in summer are almost impassable wastes of brownish-gray, arctic moss, saturated with water, and in winter trackless deserts of snow, drifted and packed by polar gales into long, hard, fluted waves. The Siberian túndra differs in many essential particulars from all other treeless plains. In the first place, it has a foundation of permanently frozen ground. Underlying the great moss túndras that border the Léna river north of Yakútsk there is everywhere a thick stratum of eternal frost, beginning in winter at the surface of the ground, and in summer at a point twenty or thirty inches below the surface, and extending in places to a depth of many hundred feet. What scanty vegetation, therefore, the túndra affords roots itself and finds its nourishment in a thin layer of unfrozen ground—a mere veneering of arable soil—resting upon a substratum of permanent ice. This foundation of ice is impervious, of course, to water, and as the snow melts in summer the water completely saturates the soil to as great a depth as it can penetrate, and, with the continuous daylight of June and July, stimulates a dense growth of gray, arctic moss. This moss, in course of time, covers the entire plain with a soft, yielding cushion, in which a pedestrian will sink to the knee without finding any solid footing. Moss has grown out of decaying moss, year after year, and decade after decade, until the whole túndra, for thousands of square miles, is one vast, spongy bog. Of other vegetation there is little or none. A clump of dwarf berry-bushes, an occasional tuft of coarse, swamp grass, or a patch of storm-and-cold-defying kedróvnik [Pinus cembra] diversifies perhaps, here and there, the vast, brownish-gray expanse; but, generally speaking, the eye may sweep the whole circle of the horizon and see nothing but the sky and moss.
An observer who could look out upon this region in winter from the car of a balloon would suppose himself to be looking out upon a great frozen ocean. Far or near, he would see nothing to suggest the idea of land except, perhaps, the white silhouette of a barren mountain range in the distance, or a dark, sinuous line of dwarf berry-bushes and trailing pine, stretching across the snowy waste from horizon to horizon, and marking the course of a frozen arctic river. At all seasons, and under all circumstances, this immense border land of moss túndras is a land of desolation. In summer, its covering of water-soaked moss struggles into life, only to be lashed at intervals by pitiless whips of icy rain until it is again buried in snow; and in winter, fierce gales, known to the Russians as púrgas, sweep across it from the arctic ocean and score its snowy surface into long, hard, polished grooves called zastrúgi. Throughout the entire winter, it presents a picture of inexpressible dreariness and desolation. Even at noon, when the sea-like expanse of storm-drifted snow is flushed faintly by the red, gloomy light of the low-hanging sun, it depresses the spirits and chills the imagination with its suggestions of infinite dreariness and solitude; but at night, when it ceases to be bounded even by the horizon because the horizon can no longer be distinguished, when the pale, green streamers of the aurora begin to sweep back and forth over a dark segment of a circle in the north, lighting up the whole white world with transitory flashes of ghostly radiance, and adding mystery to darkness and solitude, then the Siberian túndra not only becomes inexpressibly lonely and desolate, but takes on a strange, half terrible unearthliness, which awes and yet fascinates the imagination.
The climate of this great northern túndra is the severest in the Russian empire, if not the severest in the known world. As you go eastward from the Urál mountains through this barren zone, the mean annual temperature gradually decreases; until, shortly after crossing the river Léna, you reach, in latitude 67.34, on the border of the great túndra, a lonely Yakút settlement called Verkhoyánsk, or the upper settlement of the Yána, a village that is known throughout Siberia, and is beginning to be known throughout the world, as the Asiatic pole of cold. The fact is familiar to most readers that the magnetic pole, and probably the pole of greatest cold, do not coincide with the geographical pole. There are two points in the northern hemisphere, one in the American arctic archipelago and one in northeastern Siberia, where the cold is more severe than in any region lying farther north that has yet been explored. The rian pole of cold is at or near Verkhoyánsk. A long series of Russian observations made at this settlement shows the following mean temperatures: For the whole year, four degrees above zero Fahr.; mean temperature for December, 46 degrees below; for January, 55 degrees below; for February, 54 degrees below; or an average temperature of 51 degrees below zero for the three winter months. In 1869, the thermometer at Verkhoyánsk went repeatedly below -70 degrees, and fell once to -81 degrees Fahr.[2]
Immediately south of the great northern túndra, and extending, with occasional breaks, from the Ural mountains to the Okhótsk sea, lies the second of the three zones into which I have provisionally divided Siberia—the zone of forests. As you go southward from the arctic ocean and get gradually into a less rigorous climate, trees begin to make their appearance. At first there are only a few stunted and storm-twisted larches struggling for existence on the edge of the túndra; but they gradually grow larger and more abundant, pines and firs make their appearance, then birch, willow, and poplar, until at last you enter a vast primeval forest, through which you may travel in a straight line for weeks together. This zone of forests has an area of hundreds of thousands of square miles, and stretches almost entirely across Siberia. Along its northern boundary the climate, although less rigorous than the climate of the túndra, is still severe; but long before you get through to its southern edge, the temperature grows milder, poplars, aspens, elms, and the Tatár maple take the places of firs, larches, and pines, and you come out at last into the more open, fertile, and arable zone of southern Siberia. This beautiful and picturesque country presents, at least in summer, nothing that would even remotely suggest an arctic region. The soil is a rich, black loam, as fertile as the soil of an English garden; flowers grow everywhere in the greatest profusion; the woods are full of rhododendron, wild cherry, and flowering acacia; the country is neither all plain nor all forest, but a blending of both; it is broken just enough by hills and mountains to give picturesqueness to the landscape; and during half the year it is fairly saturated with golden sunshine. I do not wish, of course, to convey the idea that in this country it is always summer. Southern Siberia has a winter and a severe one, but not, as a rule, much severer than that of Minnesota, while its summer is warmer and more genial than that of many parts of central Europe. A glance at the map is sufficient to show that a considerable part of Western Siberia lies farther south than Nice, Venice, or Milan; and that the southern part of the Siberian territory of Semiréchinsk is nearer the equator than Naples. In a country that stretches from the latitude of Italy to the latitude of central Greenland, one would naturally expect to find, and as a matter of fact one does find, many varieties of climate and scenery. On the Taimir peninsula, east of the gulf of Ob, the permanently frozen ground thaws out in summer to a depth of only a few inches, and supports only a scanty vegetation of berry-bushes and moss; while in the southern part of Western Siberia water-melons and cantaloupes are a profitable crop; tobacco is grown upon thousands of plantations; and the peasants harvest annually more than 50,000,000 bushels of grain. In the fertile and arable zone of southern Siberia there are a dozen towns that have a higher mean temperature for the months of June, July, and August than the city of London. In fact, the summer temperature of this whole belt of country, from the Uráls to the Pacific, averages six degrees higher than the mean summer temperature of England. Irkútsk is five degrees warmer in summer than Dublin; Tobólsk is four degrees warmer than London; Semipalátinsk exactly corresponds in temperature with Boston; and Viérni has as hot a summer as Chicago.[3]
To the traveler who crosses the Uráls for the first time in June nothing is more surprising than the fervent heat of Siberian sunshine and the extraordinary beauty and profusion of Siberian flowers. Although we had been partly prepared, by our voyage up the Káma, for the experience that awaited us on the other side of the mountains, we were fairly astonished, upon the threshold of Western Siberia, by the scenery, the weather, and the flora. In the fertile, blossoming country presented to us as we rode swiftly eastward into the province of Tobólsk there was absolutely nothing even remotely to suggest an arctic region. If we had been blindfolded and transported to it suddenly in the middle of a sunny afternoon, we could never have guessed to what part of the world we had been taken. The sky was as clear and blue and the air as soft as the sky and air of California; the trees were all in full leaf; birds were singing over the flowery meadows and in the clumps of birches by the roadside; there were a drowsy hum of bees and a faint fragrance of flowers and verdure in the air; and the sunshine was as warm and bright as that of a June afternoon in the most favored part of the temperate zone.
The country through which we passed between the post stations of Cheremíshkaya and Sugátskaya was a rich, open, farming region, resembling somewhat that part of western New York which lies between Rochester and Buffalo. There were no extensive forests, but the gently rolling plain was diversified here and there by small patches of woodland, or groves of birch and poplar, and was sometimes cultivated as far as the eye could reach. Extensive stretches of growing wheat and rye alternated with wide fields of black plowed land not yet sown, and occasionally we crossed great expanses of prairie, whose velvety greensward was sprinkled with dandelions, buttercups, and primroses, and dotted in the distance with grazing cattle and sheep. Sometimes, for miles together, the road ran through unfenced but cultivated land where men and women in bright-colored dresses were plowing, harrowing, or weeding young grain; sometimes we plunged into a dense cool forest, from the depths of which we could hear the soft notes of shy cuckoos, and then we came out into a great sea of meadow blue with forget-me-nots, where field sparrows and warblers were filling all the air with joyous melody. Flowers met the eye everywhere in great variety and in almost incredible profusion. Never had we seen the earth so carpeted with them, even in California. The roadside was bright with wild roses, violets, buttercups, primroses, marsh-marigolds, yellow peas, iris, and Tatár honeysuckles; the woods were whitened here and there by soft clouds of wild-cherry blossoms, and the meadows were literally great floral seas of color. In some places the beautiful rose-like flowers of the golden trollius covered hundreds of acres with an almost unbroken sheet of vivid yellow; while a few miles farther on, the steppe, to the very horizon, was a blue ocean of forget-me-nots. I do not mean simply that the ground was sprinkled with them, nor merely that they grew in great abundance; I mean that the grass everywhere was completely hidden by them, so that the plain looked as if a sheet of blue gauze had been thrown over it, or as if it were a great expanse of tranquil water reflecting a pale-blue sky. More than once these forget-me-not plains, when seen afar, resembled water so closely as to deceive us both.
Throughout the whole distance from Ekaterínburg to Tiumén, wherever the country was open, the road was bordered on each side by a double or triple row of magnificent silver-birches, seventy or eighty feet in height, set so closely together that their branches interlocked both along the road and over it, and completely shut out, with an arched canopy of leaves, the vertical rays of the sun. For miles at a time we rode, between solid banks of flowers, through this beautiful white-and-green arcade, whose columns were the snowy stems of birches, and whose roof was a mass of delicate tracery and drooping foliage. The road resembled an avenue through an extensive and well-kept park, rather than a great Siberian thoroughfare, and I could not help feeling as if I might look up at any moment and see an English castle, or a splendid country villa. According to tradition these birches were planted by order of the Empress Catherine II., and the part of the great Siberian road which they shade is known as "Catherine's Alley." Whether the object of the great Tsarítsa was to render less toilsome and oppressive the summer march of the exiles, or whether she hoped, by this means, to encourage emigration to the country in which she took so deep an interest, I clo not know; but the long lines of beautiful birches have for more than a century kept her memory green, and her name has doubtless been blessed by thousands of hot and tired wayfarers whom her trees have protected from the fierce Siberian sunshine.
Almost the first peculiarity of a West Siberian landscape that strikes a traveler from America is the complete absence of fences and farm-houses. The cultivated land of the peasants is regularly laid out into fields, but the fields are not inclosed, and one may ride for two or three hours at a time through a fertile and highly cultivated region without seeing a single fence, farm-house, or detached building. The absence of fences is due to the Siberian practice of inclosing the cattle in the common pasture which surrounds the village, instead of fencing the fields that lie outside. The absence of farm-houses is to be explained by the fact that the Siberian peasant does not own the land that he cultivates, and therefore has no inducement to build upon it. With a very few exceptions, all of the land in Siberia belongs to the Crown. The village communes enjoy the usufruct of it, but they have no legal title, and cannot dispose of it nor reduce any part of it to individual ownership. All that they have power to do is to divide it up among their members by periodical allotments, and to give to each head of a family a sort of tenancy-at-will. Every time there is a new allotment, the several tracts of arable land held under the Crown by the commune may change tenants; so that if an individual should build a house or a barn upon the tract of which he was the temporary occupant, he might, and probably would, be forced sooner or later to abandon it. The result of this system of land tenure and this organization of society is to segregate the whole population in villages, and to leave all of the intervening land unsettled. In the United States, such a farming region as that between the Uráls and Tiumén would be dotted with houses, granaries, and barns; and it seemed very strange to ride, as we rode, for more than eighty miles, through a country that was everywhere more or less cultivated, without seeing a single building of any kind outside of the villages.
Another peculiarity of Western Siberia which strongly impresses an American is the shabbiness and cheerlessness of most of its settlements. In a country so fertile, highly cultivated, and apparently prosperous as this, one naturally expects to see in the villages some signs of enterprise, comfort, and taste; but one is almost everywhere disappointed. A West Siberian village consists of two rows of unpainted one-story log-honses with A-shaped or pyramidal roofs, standing directly on the street, without front yards or front doors. Between every two houses there is an inclosed side yard, around which stand sheds, granaries, and barns; and from this side yard or court there is an entrance to the house. The court-yard gate is sometimes ornamented with
carved or incised wood-work, as shown in the above illustration; the window- shutters of the houses are almost always elaborately painted, and the projecting edges of the gable roofs are masked with long strips of carved or decorated board; but with these exceptions the dwellings of the peasants are simple log structures of the plainest type, and a large proportion of them are old, weather-beaten, and in bad repair. The wide street has no sidewalks; it is sometimes a sea of liquid mud from the walls of the houses on one side to the walls of the houses on the other; and there is not a tree, nor a bush, nor a square yard of grass in the settlement. Bristly, slab-sided, razor-backed pigs lie here and there in the mud, or wander up and down the street in search of food, and the whole village makes upon an American an impression of shiftlessness, poverty, and squalor. This impression, I am glad to say, is in most cases deceptive. There is in all of these villages more or less individual comfort and prosperity; but the Siberian peasant does not seem to take any pride in the external appearance of his premises, and pays little attention to beautifying them or keeping them in order. The condition of the whole village, moreover, indicates a lack of public spirit and enterprise on the part of its inhabitants. As long as an evil or a nuisance is endurable, there seems to be no disposition to abate it, and the result is the general neglect of all public improvements. Much of this seeming indifference is doubtless attributable to the paralyzing influence of a paternal and all-regulating Government. One can hardly expect the villagers to take the initiative, or to manifest public spirit and enterprise, when nothing whatever can be done without permission from the official representatives of the Crown, and when the very first effort to promote the general well-being is likely to be thwarted by some bureaucratic "regulation," or the caprice of some local police officer. All that the peasants can do is to obey orders, await the pleasure of the higher authorities, and thank God that things are no worse.
Almost the only indication of taste that one sees in a West Siberian settlement, and the only evidence of a love of the beautiful for its own sake, is furnished by the plants and flowers in the windows of the houses. Although there may not be a tree nor a blade of grass in the whole village, the windows of nine houses out of ten will be filled with splendid blossoming fuchsias, oleanders, cactuses, geraniums, tea-roses, and variegated cinnamon pinks. One rarely finds, even in a florist's greenhouse, more beautiful flowers than may be seen in the windows of many a poor Siberian peasant's dwelling. Owing to some peculiarity in the composition of the glass, these windows are almost always vividly iridescent, some of them rivaling in color the Cesnola glass from Cyprus. The contrast between the black, weather-beaten logs of the houses and the brilliant squares of iridescence that they inclose—between the sea of liquid mud in the verdureless streets and the splendid clusters of conservatory flowers in the windows—is sometimes very striking.
On the walls of many of the log houses in the villages through which we passed were unmistakable evidences of the existence, in Western Siberia, of an organized volunteer fire department. These evidences took the form, generally, of rough pictorial representations, in red paint, of the fire-extinguishing apparatus that the houses contained. On the gable end of one cabin, for example, there would be a rudely drawn outline of a fire-bucket; on another a picture of a ladder; while on a third would appear a graphic sketch of a huge broad-ax that looked red and blood-thirsty enough to have belonged to Ivan the Terrible. In the event of a fire, every householder was expected to make his appearance promptly, armed and equipped with the implement pictorially represented on the wall of his house. I made a careful inventory of the fire-extinguishing apparatus promised by the mural sketches along one village street through which we passed, and found it to consist of seven axes, eleven buckets, three ladders, one sledge-hammer, one barrel mounted on wheels, two pulling-down hooks, and a pair of scissors. Exactly in what way they use scissors in Siberia to put out fires I am unable to explain. I gave the subject a great deal of thought, but arrived only at conjectural conclusions. Mr. Frost was of opinion that the house decorated with the picture of the scissors was the home of the "exchange editor"; but I insisted, as a newspaper man, that the "exchange editor" could not be expected to run to fires, even in as benighted a country as Siberia, and that, moreover, no Russian editor would dare to look at a fire—much less run to one—without written permission from the press-censor, countersigned by the chief of police, and indorsed by the procureur of the Holy Synod and the glávni nachálnik of the Department of Public Safety. In my judgment, therefore, it was probable that the house was the residence of the tailor who cut out and fitted uniforms for the firemen whenever it became necessary for them to act in their official capacity. It would have a very demoralizing tendency, of course, and would unsettle the public mind, if a fire should be extinguished by men who passed buckets in their shirt-sleeves. It was of the utmost importance, therefore, that the firemen should be able to find the house of the duly authorized tailor and get their uniforms made at the earliest possible moment after the sounding of the alarm. I tried to make Mr. Frost see what a terrible state of things would exist if there were no picture of scissors to designate the tailor's house, and the firemen should be unable to find it when a fire had broken out in the next street and they wanted their uniforms cut and fitted instantly. But the graphic picture that I drew of the horrors of such a situation did not seem to touch his callous sensibilities. He had not lived long enough in Russia to really feel and appreciate the importance of getting into a uniform before undertaking to do anything.
As we approached Tiumén we left behind us the open plains and the beautiful farming country that had so much surprised and delighted us, and entered a low, swampy, and almost impenetrable forest, abounding in flowers, but swarming with mosquitoes. The road, which before had been comparatively smooth and dry, became a quagmire of black, tenacious mud, in which the wheels of our heavy tárantás sank to the hubs, and through which our progress was so slow that we were four hours in traversing a single stretch of about eighteen miles. Attempts had apparently been made here and there to improve this part of the route by laying down in the soft, marshy soil a corduroy of logs; but the logs had sunk unequally under the pounding wheels of ten thousand loaded freight wagons, leaving enormous transverse ruts and hollows filled with mud, so that the only result of the "improvement" was to render the road more nearly impassable than before, and to add unendurable jolting to our other discomforts. At last, weary of lurches, jolts, and concussions, we alighted, and tried walking by the roadside; but the sunshine was so intensely hot, and the mosquitoes so fierce and bloodthirsty, that in twenty minutes we were glad to climb back into the tárantás with our hands full of flowers, and our faces scarlet from heat and mosquito bites. Upon comparing our impressions we found that we were unanimously of the opinion that if we had been the original discoverers of this country, we should have named it either Florida or Culexia, since flowers and mosquitoes are its distinctive characteristics and its most abundant products.
At the gate-keeper's lodge of one of the last villages that we passed before reaching Tiumén, we were greeted with the ringing of a large hand-bell. The sound was strangely suggestive of an auction, but as we stopped in front of the village gate the bell-ringer, a bareheaded man in a long black gown, with a mass of flaxen hair hanging over his shoulders and a savings-bank box suspended from his neck, approached the tárantás and called our attention to a large, brownish picture in a tarnished gilt frame resting on a sort of improvised easel by the roadside. It was evidently an ikón or portrait of some holy saint from a Russian church; but what was the object of setting it up there, and what relation it bore to us, we could not imagine. Finally the bell-ringer, bowing, crossing himself, and invoking blessings on our heads, implored us, Khristá rádi [for Christ's sake], to contribute to the support of the holy saint's church, which, it appeared, was situated somewhere in the vicinity. This combination of an auctioneer's bell, a saint's image, a toll-gate, and a church beggar, greatly amused Mr. Frost, who inquired whether the holy saint owned the road and collected toll. The gate-keeper explained that the saint had nothing to do with the road, but the church was poor, and the "noble gentlemen" who passed that way were accustomed to contribute to its support; and (removing his hat) "most of the noble gentlemen remembered also the poor gate-keeper." Of course the two noble gentlemen, with mosquito-bitten faces, rumpled hair, soiled shirt-collars, and mud-bespattered clothing, sitting with noble dignity on a luxurious steamer-trunk in a miry tárantás, could not resist such an appeal as this to their noble sympathies. We gave the gate-keeper a few copper coins with directions to put half of them into the savings bank of the black-robed deacon, and having thus contributed to the support of two great Russian institutions, the church and the grog-shop, we rode on.
Late in the afternoon of Thursday, June 18, we came out of the forest into an extensive marshy plain, tinted a peculiar greenish-yellow by swamp grass and buttercups, and our driver, pointing ahead with his whip, said, "There is Tiumén." All that we could see of the distant city was a long line of pyramidal board roofs on the horizon, broken here and there by the white stuccoed walls of a Government building, or the green-domed belfries and towers of a Russo-Greek church. As we approached it we passed in succession a square marble column marking the spot where the citizens of Tiumén bade good-by to the Grand Duke Vladímir in 1868; a squad of soldiers engaged in target practice, stepping forward and firing volleys by ranks to the accompaniment of a flourish of bugles; a series of long, low sheds surrounded by white-tilted emigrant wagons, and finally, in the suburbs, the famous exile forwarding prison.
There were two or three hotels in the town, but upon the recommendation of our driver we went to the "Rooms for Arrivers," or furnished apartments, of one Koválski, who occupied a two-story brick house near the bank of the river in the eastern part of the city. About six o'clock in the evening we finally alighted from our muddy tárantás in Koválski's court-yard, having made a journey of two hundred and four miles in two days, with eleven changes of horses, and having spent more than forty hours without sleep, sitting in a cramped and uncomfortable position on Mr. Frost's trunk. My neck and spine were so stiff and lame from incessant jolting that I could not have made a bow to the Tsar of all the Russias, and I was so tired that I could hardly climb the stairs leading to the second story of Koválski's house. As soon as possible after dinner we went to bed, and for twelve hours slept the sleep of exhaustion.
- ↑ COMPARATIVE AREAS.
Siberia. Square Miles. Europe. Square Miles. Tobólsk 570,290 France 204,177 Tomsk 333,542 Germany 211,196 Steppe territories 560,324 Great Britain 120,832 Yeniséisk 992,874 Greece 25,014 Irkútsk 309,191 Italy 110,620 Yakútsk 1,517,132 Montenegro 3,630 Trans-Baikál 240,781 Netherlands 12,648 Amúr region 239,471 Portugal 32,528 Maritime territories 730,024 Roumania 48,307 Servia 18,750 Total 5,493,629 Spain 193,199 Am. and Europe. Square Miles. Sweden 170,979 Norway 123,205 U. S. and Alaska 3,501,404 Switzerland 15,892 Austria-Hungary 240,942 European Turkey 125,289 Belgium 11,373 Denmark 14,124 Total 5,184,109 Siberian provinces 5,493,619 The United States, Alaska, and Europe 5,184,109 Difference in favor of Siberia 309,520 - ↑ The record is given by the eminent Russian meteorologist Dr. Woeikof, who vouches for the trustworthiness of the observations, and an account of them may be found in the English scientific journal, Nature, for March 10, 1881. Dr. Búnge, who has recently returned from an expedition to the coast of the arctic ocean and the New Siberian islands, reports a minimum temperature at Verkhoyánsk of -87°; and a previous record of -82° may be found in the Irkútsk newspaper Sibir for September 18, 1883. The best of thermometers, however, at temperature lower than -60° are very inaccurate; and these observations are to be taken with proper allowance for instrumental error. But, even with such allowance, they show that Verkhoyánsk is probably the coldest place on the globe.
- ↑
COMPARATIVE SUMMER TEMPERATURES. Siberia. Fahr. America and Europe. Fahr. Viérni 70.7 Chicago, Ill. 71.3 Blagovéshchensk 68.6 Buffalo, N.Y. 69.0 Semipalátinsk 68.2 Milwaukee, Wis. 68.6 Khabarófka 67.3 Boston, Mass. 68.2 Vladivostók 65.6 Portland, Me. 66.6 Akmolinsk 65.1 Moscow, European Russia 65.0 Omsk 65.1 St. Petersburg 61.0 Barnaúl 63.7 London, England 60.0 Krasnoyársk 63.0 Dublin, Ireland 57.0 Tobólsk 62.4 Tomsk 62.2 Mean summer temperature of 12 Irkútsk 61.5 Siberian cities and towns 65.3 Mean summer temperature in 9 American and European cities. 65.2