Siberia and the Exile System/Volume 1/Chapter VI
CHAPTER VI
FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF POST TRAVEL
THE traveler who desires to go from Tiumén to Eastern Siberia has a choice of three widely different routes; namely, first, the northern or river route down the Írtish and up the Ob by steamer to Tomsk; second, the middle or winter route, which follows the great Siberian post road through Omsk, Káinsk, and Koliván; and third, the southern or steppe route, via Omsk, Pavlodár, Semipalátinsk, and Barnaül. Each of these routes has some advantage not possessed by either of the others. The middle route, for example, is the shortest, but it is also the most traveled and the best known. The northern route is less familiar, and in summer is more comfortable and convenient; but it takes one through an uninteresting, thinly inhabited, sub-arctic region.
I decided, after careful consideration, to proceed from Tiumén to Tomsk through the steppes of the Írtish by way of Omsk, Pavlodár, Semipalátinsk, Ust-Kamenogórsk, and Barnaül. This route would take us through the best agricultural part of the provinces of Tobólsk and Tomsk, as well as the districts most thickly settled by exiles; it would enable us to see something of the Mohammedan city of Semipalátinsk and of the great nomadic and pastoral tribe of natives known as the Kírghis; and finally it would afford us an opportunity to explore a part of the Russian Altái—a high, picturesque, mountainous region on the Mongolian frontier, which had been described to me by Russian army officers, in terms of enthusiastic admiration, as "the Siberian Switzerland." I had, moreover, another reason for wishing to keep as far away as possible from the regular through routes of travel. I supposed when we left St. Petersburg that we should be obliged to go from Tiumén to
ENLARGED MAP OF ROUTE FROM
TIUMÉN TO SEMIPALÁTINSK.
Tomsk either by steamer or over the great Siberian road. The Minister of the Interior understood that such would be our course, and he caused letters to be written to all the local officials along these routes, apprising them of our coming and furnishing them with such instructions concerning us as the circumstances seemed to require. What these instructions were I could never ascertain; but they anticipated us at every important point on the great Siberian road from Tiumén to the capital of the Trans-Baikál. In Eastern Siberia the local authorities knew all about us months before we arrived. I first became aware of these letters and this system of official surveillance at Tiumén; and as they seemed likely to interfere seriously with my plans,—particularly in the field of political exile,—I determined to escape or elude them as far as possible, by leaving the regular through route and going into a region where the authorities had not presumably been forewarned of our coming. I had reason afterward to congratulate myself upon the exercise of sound judgment in making this decision. The detour to the southward brought us not only into the part of Siberia where the political exiles enjoy most freedom, and where it is easiest to make their acquaintance, but into a province which was then governed by a liberal and humane man.
On the morning of Tuesday, June 30, having made our farewell calls, purchased a tárantás, and provided ourselves with a padarózhnaya, or order for horses, we left Tiumén for Semipalátinsk by the regular Government post. The Imperial Russian Post is now perhaps the most extensive and perfectly organized horse-express service in the world. From the southern end of the peninsula of Kamchátka to the most remote village in Finland, from the frozen, windswept shores of the arctic ocean to the hot, sandy deserts of Central Asia, the whole empire is one vast network of post routes. You may pack your portmanteau in Nízhni Nóvgorod, get a padarózhnaya from the postal department, and start for Petropávlovsk, Kamchátka, seven thousand miles away, with the full assurance that throughout the whole of that immense distance there will be horses, reindeer, or dogs ready and waiting to carry you on, night and day, to your destination. It must, however, be borne in mind that the Russian post route is a very different thing from the old English post route, and that the Russian horse express differs widely, not only from our own western "pony express," but from the horse expresses of most other countries. The characteristic feature of the west European and American systems is the stage-coach or diligence, which leaves certain places at certain stated hours, or, in other words, runs upon a prearranged time schedule. It is precisely this feature that the Russian system does not have. There are, generally speaking, no stage-coach lines in Russia; the vehicles that carry the mails do not carry passengers, and, away from the railroads, there is no such thing as traveling upon a fixed time schedule. You are never obliged, therefore, to wait for a public conveyance which leaves at a certain stated hour, and then go through to your destination in that conveyance, stopping when it stops and starting when it starts, without regard to your own health, comfort, or convenience. On the contrary, you may ride in your own sleigh or carriage, and have it drawn by post horses. You may travel at the rate of 175 miles in twenty-four hours, or twenty-four miles in 175 hours, just as you feel inclined. You may stop when you like, where you like, and for as long a time as you like, and when you are ready to move on you have only to
order out your horses and get into you vehicle. It makes no difference in what part you may wish our to go. Send your padarózhnaya to the nearest post station, and in twenty minutes you will be riding away at the rate of ten miles an hour, with your postal order in your pocket and a hundred relays of fresh horses distributed at intervals along your route.
The established rate of payment for transportation over the post routes of Western Siberia seems to an American absurdly low. It amounts, including the compensation of the driver, to 118 cent per mile for every horse, or of 338 cents per mile for the usual tróika, or team of three. In other words, two persons can travel in their own carriage with a team of three horses a distance of twenty miles for 68 cents, or 34 cents each. I used to feel almost ashamed sometimes to wake up a driver at a post station, in the middle of a stormy night, compel him to harness three horses and drive us twenty miles over a dark, miry, and perhaps dangerous road, and then offer him for this service the pitiful sum of 68 cents. Trifling and inadequate, however, as such compensation may seem, it is large enough to tempt into this field of enterprise hundreds of peasant farmers who compete with the Government post by furnishing what are known as vólni or "free" horses, for the transportation of travelers from one village to another. As these free horses are generally better fed and in better condition than the overdriven animals at the post stations, it is often advantageous to employ them; and your driver, as you approach a village, will almost always turn around and inquire whether he shall take you to the Government post station or to the house of a "friend." Traveling with drushkí, or "friends," costs no more than traveling by post, and it enables one to see much more of the domestic life of the Siberian peasants than one could see by stopping and changing horses only at regular post stations.
The first part of our journey from Tiumén to Omsk was comparatively uneventful and uninteresting. The road ran across a great marshy plain, full of swampy lakes, and covered with a scattered growth of willow and alder bushes, small birch-trees, and scrubby firs and pines, which in every direction limited the vision and hid the horizon line. All this part of the province of Tobólsk seems to have been, within a comparatively recent geological period, the bottom of a great inland sea which united the Caspian and the Sea of Aral with the arctic ocean, along the line of the shallow depression through which now flow the rivers Írtish and Ob. Everywhere between Tiumén and Omsk we saw evidences, in the shape of sand-banks, salt-marshes, beds of clay, and swampy lakes, to show that we were traveling over a partly dried up sea bottom.
About a hundred versts from Tiumén, just beyond the village of Zavódo-ukófskaya, we stopped for two hours early in the evening at the residence and estate of a wealthy Siberian manufacturer named Kolmakóf, to whom I had a letter of introduction from a Russian friend. I was surprised to find in this remote part of the world so many evidences of comfort, taste, and luxury as were to be seen in and about Mr. Kolmakóf's house. The house itself was only a two-story building of logs, but it was large and comfortably furnished, and its windows looked out over an artificial lake, and a beautiful garden, with winding walks, rustic arbors, long lines of currant and raspberry bushes, and beds of flowering plants. At one end of this garden was a spacious conservatory, filled with geraniums, verbenas, hydrangeas, cactuses, orange and lemon trees, pine-apples, and all sorts of tropical and semi-tropical shrubs, and near at hand was a large hot-house full of cucumbers and ripening cantaloupes. In the middle of the garden stood a square building, sixty feet long by forty or fifty feet wide, which was composed almost entirely of glass, which had no floor except the earth, and which served, Mr. Kolmakóf said, as a sort of winter garden and a place of recreation during cold or stormy weather. In this miniature Crystal Palace stood a perfect grove of bananas and young palms, through which ran winding walks bordered by beds of flowers, with here and there amidst the greenery a comfortable lounging-place or rustic seat. The trees, flowers, and shrubs were not planted in tubs or pots, but grew directly out of the earthen floor of the greenhouse, so that the effect was almost precisely that of a semi-tropical garden enclosed in glass.
"Who would have thought," said Mr. Frost, as he threw himself into one of the rustic seats beside a bed of blossoming verbenas, "that we should come to Siberia to sit under palm-trees and in the shade of bananas?"
After a walk through the spacious wooded park which adjoined the garden, we returned to the house, and were served with a lunch or cold supper consisting of caviar, pickled mushrooms, salmon, cold boiled fowl, white bread, sweet cakes, and wild strawberries, with vódka, two or three kinds of wine, and tea.
It had grown quite dark when, about eleven o'clock, the horses that we had ordered in the neighboring village arrived, and, bidding our courteous host good-by, we climbed into the tárantás and set out for a long, dark, and dreary night's ride. The road, which had never been good, was in worse condition than usual, owing to recent and heavy rains. Our driver urged four powerful horses over it at break-neck speed, and we were so jounced, jolted, and shaken that it was utterly impossible to get any sleep, and difficult enough merely to keep our seats in the vehicle. Early in the morning, sleepy, jaded, and exhausted, we reached the village of Nóvo Zaímskaya, entered the little log-house of our driver's "friend," threw ourselves on the bare floor, where half a dozen members of the friend's family were already lying, and for two or three hours lost consciousness of our aching spinal columns in the heavy, dreamless slumber of physical exhaustion.
Throughout the next day and the following night we traveled, without rest, and of course without sleep, over a terribly bad steppe road, and at six o'clock Thursday morning arrived in a pelting rain-storm at the circuit town of Ishím. No one who has not experienced it can fully realize the actual physical suffering that is involved in posting night and day at high speed over bad Siberian roads. We made the 200 miles between Tiumén and Ishím in about thirty-five hours of actual travel, with only four hours of sleep, and were so jolted and shaken that every bone in our bodies ached, and it was with difficulty that we could climb into and out of our mud-bespattered tárantás at the post stations.
It had been our intention to make a short stop at Ishím, but the bad weather discouraged us, and, after drinking tea at a peasant's house on the bank of the Ishím River, we resumed our journey. As we rode out of the town through a thin forest of birch-trees, we began to notice large numbers of men, women, and children plodding along on foot through the mud in the same direction that we were going. Most of them were common muzhíks with trousers inside their boots and shirt-flaps outside their trousers, or sunburned peasant women in red and blue gowns, with white kerchiefs over their heads; but there were also a few pedestrians in the conventional dress of the civilized world, who manifestly belonged to the higher classes, and who even carried umbrellas.
About four miles from the town we saw ahead a great crowd of men and women marching towards us in a dense, tumultuous throng, carrying big three-armed crosses, white and colored banners, and huge glass lanterns mounted on long black staves.
"What is that?" I inquired of the driver.
"The Mother of God is coming home," he replied, with reverent gravity.
As they came nearer I could see that the throng was densest in the middle of the muddy road, under what seemed to be a large gilt-framed picture which was borne high in air at the end of a long, stout wooden pole. The lower end of this pole rested in a socket in the middle of a square framework which had handles on all four sides, and which was carried by six bareheaded peasants. The massive frame of the portrait was made either of gold or of silver gilt, since it was manifestly very heavy, and half a dozen men steadied, by means of guy ropes, the standard which supported it, as the bearers, with their faces bathed in perspiration, staggered along under their burden. In front of the picture marched a bareheaded, long-haired priest with a book in his hands, and on each side were four or five black-robed deacons and acolytes, carrying embroidered silken banners, large three-armed gilt crosses, and peculiar church lanterns, which looked like portable street gas-posts with candles burning in them. The priest, the deacons, and all the bareheaded men around the picture were singing in unison a deep, hoarse, monotonous chant as they splashed along through the mud, and the hundreds of men and women who surged around the standard that supported the portrait were constantly crossing themselves, and joining at intervals in the chanted psalm or prayer. Scores of peasant women had taken off their shoes and stockings and slung them over their shoulders, and were wading with bare feet and legs through the black, semi-liquid mire, and neither men nor women seemed to pay the slightest attention to the rain, which beat upon their unprotected heads and trickled in little rivulets down their hard, sunburned faces. The crowd numbered, I should think, four or five hundred persons, more than half of whom were women, and as it approached the town it was constantly receiving accessions from the groups of pedestrians that we had overtaken and passed.
Since entering Siberia I had not seen such a strange and medieval picture as that presented by the black-robed priest and acolytes, the embroidered banners, the lighted lanterns, the gilded crosses, and the great throng of bareheaded and bare-legged peasants, tramping along the black, muddy road through the forest in the driving rain, singing a solemn ecclesiastical chant. I could almost imagine that we had been carried back to the eleventh century and were witnessing the passage of a detachment of Christian villagers who had been stirred up and excited by the eloquence of Peter the Hermit, and were marching with crosses, banners, and chanting to join the great host of the crusaders.
When the last stragglers in the rear of the procession had passed, and the hoarse, monotonous chant had died away in the distance, I turned to Mr. Frost and said, "What do you suppose is the meaning of all that?"
"I have n't the least idea," he replied. "It is evidently a church procession, but what it has been doing out here in the woods I can't imagine."
By dint of persistent questioning I finally succeeded in eliciting from our driver an intelligible explanation of the phenomenon. There was, it appeared, in one of the churches of Ishím, a very old ikón, or portrait of "the Mother of God," which was reputed to have supernatural powers and to answer the prayers of faithful believers. In order that the country people who were unable to come to Ishím might have an opportunity to pray to this miracle-working image, and to share in the blessings supposed to be conferred by its mere presence, it was carried once a year, 
Rain fell at intervals throughout the day Thursday, but we pushed on over a muddy steppe road in the direction of Tiukalínsk, changing horses at the post stations of Borófskaya, Tushnalóbova, Abátskaya, and Kamishénka, and stopping for the night at a peasant's house in the village of Orlóva. In the sixty hours which had elapsed since our departure from Tiumén we had traveled 280 miles, with only four hours of sleep, and we were so much exhausted that we could not go any farther without rest. The weather during the night finally cleared up, and when we resumed our journey on the following morning the sun was shining brightly in an almost unclouded sky, and the air was fresh, invigorating, and filled with fragrant odors.
Although the road continued bad, the country as we proceeded southward and eastward steadily improved in appearance, and before noon we were riding across a beautiful, fertile, and partly cultivated prairie, which extended in every direction as far as the eye could reach, with nothing to break the horizon line except an occasional clump of small birch-trees or a dark-green thicket of willow and alder bushes. The steppe was bright with flowers, and here and there appeared extensive tracts of black, newly plowed land, or vast fields of waving grain, which showed that the country was inhabited; but there was not a fence, nor a barn, nor a house to be seen in any direction, and I could not help wondering where the village was to which these cultivated fields belonged. My curiosity was soon to be satisfied. In a few moments our driver gathered up his muddy rope reins, braced himself securely in his seat, threw out behind and above his head the long, heavy lash of his short-handled knut, and bringing it down with stinging force across the backs of his four horses shouted, in a high falsetto and a deep bass, "Heekh-ya-a-a!" The whole team instantly broke into a frantic, tearing gallop, which made me involuntarily hold my breath, until it was suddenly jounced out of me by a terrific jolt as the tárantás, going at the rate of fifteen miles an hour, dropped into a deep rut and rebounded with tremendous force, throwing me violently out of my seat, and making my head and back throb with the shock of the unexpected concussion. I needed no further evidence that we were approaching a village. A Siberian team never fully shows what it can do until it is within half a mile of its destination, and then it suddenly becomes a living tornado of energy. I shouted to the driver, "Pastói! Tíshei! "[Hold on! Don't go so fast!] but it was of no use. Both driver and horses knew that this was the final spurt, and exerted themselves to the utmost, the horses laying back their ears and tearing ahead as if pursued by a prairie fire, while the driver lashed them fiercely with his heavy knut to an accompaniment of shrill, wild cries, whoops, whistles, and shouts of "Ya-a-a-va!" "Ay durak!" "Noo-oo-oo!" (with a falling inflection) "Heekh-ya-a-a!" All that we could do was to shut our eyes, trust in Providence, and hold on. The tárantás was pelted with a perfect storm of mud from the flying hoofs of four galloping horses, and if, putting out my head, I opened my mouth to expostulate with the driver, I ran great risk of having it effectually closed by a teacupful of tenacious black mire, thrown like a semi-liquid ball from the catapult of a horse's hoof. In a moment we saw, barring the way ahead, a long wattled fence extending for a mile or more to the right and left, with a narrow gate at the point where it intersected the road. It was the fence which inclosed the pasture ground of the village that we were approaching. As we dashed, with a wild whoop from our driver, through the open gateway, we noticed beside it a
curious half-underground hut, roofed partly with bushes and partly with sods, out of which, as we passed, came the village gate-keeper—a dirty, forlorn-looking old man with inflamed eyes and a long white beard, who reminded me of Rip Van Winkle after his twenty years' sleep. While he was in the act of bowing and touching the weather-beaten remains of what was once a hat, we whirled past and lost sight of him, with a feeling of regret that we could not stop and take a photograph of such a wild, neglected picturesque embodiment of poverty and wretchedness clothed in rags. Just inside the gate stood an unpainted sign-post, upon the board of which had been neatly inscribed in black letters the words
Village of Krutaya.
Distance from St. Petersburg, 2992 versts.
Distance from Moscow, 2526 versts.
Houses, 42. Male souls, 97.
Between the gate and the village there was a grassy common about half a mile wide, upon which were grazing hundreds of cattle and sheep. Here and there stood a huge, picturesque windmill, consisting of a small gable-roofed house with four enormous wind-vanes mounted on a pivot at the apex of a pyramid of cross-piled logs. Beyond the windmills appeared the village, a small collection of gray, weather-beaten log-houses, some with roofs of boards, some with a roofing of ragged birch-bark held in place by tightly lashed poles, some thatched with straw, and some the flat roofs of which had been overlaid with black earth from the steppe and supported a thrifty steppe flora of weeds, buttercups, and wild mustard. Through this cluster of gray log-houses ran one central street, which had neither walks nor gutters, and which, from side to side and from end to end, was a shallow lake of black, liquid mud. Into this wide street we dashed at a tearing gallop; and the splattering of the horses' hoofs in the mud, the rumble of the tárantás, and the wild cries of our driver brought the whole population to the windows to see whether it was the governor-general or a special courier of the Tsar who came at such a furious pace into the quiet settlement. Presently our driver pulled up his reeking, panting horses before the court-yard gate of one of his friends and shouted, "Davái loshedéi!" [Bring out the horses!] Then from all parts of the village came, splashing and "thlupping" through the mud, idlers and old men to see who had
arrived and to watch the changing of teams. Strange, picturesque figures the old men were, with their wrinkled faces, matted, neglected hair, and long, stringy, gray beards. Some were bareheaded, some barefooted, some wore tattered sheepskin shúbas and top-boots, and some had on long-tailed butternut coats, girt about the waist with straps or dirty colored sashes. While they assembled in a group around the tárantás, our driver climbed down from his high seat and began to unharness his horses. The owner of the house in front of which we had stopped soon made his appearance, and inquired whether we wished to drink tea or to go on at once. I replied that we desired to go on at once. "Andre!" he shouted to one of his sons, "ride to the pasture and drive in the horses." Andre sprang on a barebacked horse which another boy brought out of the court-yard and galloped away to the village common. In the mean time the assembled crowd of idlers watched our movements, commented upon our "new-fashioned" tárantás, and tried to ascertain from our driver who we were and where were going. Failing to get from that source any precise information, one of them, a bareheaded, gray-haired old man, said to me, "Barin! Permit us to ask—where is God taking you to?" I replied that we were going to Omsk and Semipalátinsk. "A-a-ah!" murmured the crowd with gratified curiosity.
"Where do you condescend to come from?" inquired the old man, pursuing the investigation.
"From America," I replied.
"A-a-ah!" breathed the crowd again.
"Is that a Russian town?" persisted the old man.
"America is n't a town," shouted a bright-faced boy on the outskirts of the crowd. "It 's a country. All the world," he continued mechanically, as if reciting from a school-book, "is divided into five parts, Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and Australia. Russia occupies two-thirds of Europe and one-half of Asia." Beyond this even the school-boy's geographical knowledge did not extend, and it was evident that none of the old inhabitants of the village had even so much as heard of America. A young man, however, who had happened to be in Omsk when the bodies of the dead members of the Jeannette arctic expedition were carried through that city, undertook to enlighten the crowd upon the subject of the Americans, who, he said, "were the wisest people that God had ever created, and the only people that had ever sailed into the great Icy Sea." One of the old inhabitants contended that Russian navigators had also penetrated the Icy Sea, and that although they might not be so "wise" as the Americans, they were quite as good sailors in icy waters. This gave rise to an animated discussion of polar exploration, in the midst of which the young fellow who had been sent after the horses came back with whistle and whoop, driving the animals before him into the court-yard, where they were soon harnessed, and were then brought out and fastened with long rope traces to the tárantás. Our new driver mounted the box, inquired whether we were ready, and gathering up his rope reins shouted "Noo-oo!" to his horses; and with a measured jangle of bells from the arch over the thill-horse's back, and a "splash-spatter-splash" of hoofs in the mud, we rolled out of the settlement.
Such, with trifling variations in detail, was the regular routine of arrival and departure in all of the steppe villages where we changed horses between Tiumén and Omsk. The greater number of these villages were dreary, forlorn-looking places, containing neither yards, walks, trees, grass-plots, nor shrubbery, and presenting to the eye nothing but two parallel lines of gray, dilapidated log-houses and tumble-down court-yard walls rising directly out of the long pool of jet-black mud that formed the solitary street.
It is with a feeling of intense pleasure and relief that one leaves such a village and rides out upon the wide, clean, breezy steppe where the air is filled with the fragrance of clover and the singing of birds, and where the eye is constantly delighted with great sweeps of smooth, velvety turf, or vast undulating expanses of high steppe grass sprinkled in the foreground with millions of wild roses, white marguerites, delicate five-angled harebells, and dark-red tiger-lilies. Between the village of Krutáya and Kalmakóva, on Friday, we rode across a steppe that was literally a great ocean of flowers. One could pick twenty different species and a hundred specimens within the area of a single square yard. Here and there we deserted the miry road and drove for miles across the smooth, grassy plain, crushing flowers by the score at every revolution of our carriage-wheels. In the middle of the steppe I had our driver stop and wait for me while I alighted and walked away into the flowery solitude to enjoy the stillness, the perfumed air, and the sea of verdure through which ran the long, sinuous black line
of the muddy highway. On my left, beyond the road, was a wide, shallow depression six or eight miles across, rising on the opposite side in a long, gradual sweep to a dark blue line of birch forest which formed the horizon. This depression was one smooth expanse of close, green turf dotted with grazing cattle and sheep, and broken here and there by a silvery pool or lake. Around me, upon the higher ground, the steppe was carpeted with flowers, among which I noticed splendid orange asters two inches in diameter, spotted tiger-lilies with strongly reflexed petals, white clover, daisies, harebells, spirea, astragalus, melilotus, and a peculiar flower growing in long, slender, curved spikes which suggested flights of miniature carmine sky-rockets sent up by the fairies of the steppe. The air was still and warm, and had a strange, sweet fragrance which I can liken only to the taste of wild honey. There were no sounds to break the stillness of the great plain except the drowsy hum of bees, the regular measured "Kate-did-Kate-did" of a few katydids in the grass near me, and the wailing cry of a steppe hawk hovering over the nest of some field-mice. It was a delight simply to lie on the grass amidst the flowers and see, hear, and breathe.
We traveled all day Friday over flowery steppes and through little log villages like those that I have tried to describe, stopping occasionally to make a sketch, collect flowers, or talk with the peasants about the exile system. Now and then we met a solitary traveler in a muddy tárantás on his way to Tiumén, or passed a troop of exiles in gray overcoats plodding along through the mud, surrounded by a cordon of soldiers; but as we were off the great through line of travel, we saw few vehicles except the telégas of peasants going back and forth between the villages and the outlying fields.
The part of the province of Tobólsk through which we traveled from Tiumén to Omsk is much more productive and prosperous than a careless observer would suppose it to be from the appearance of most of its villages. The four ókrugs, or "circles,"[1] of Tiumén, Yalútorfsk, Ishím, and Tiukalínsk, through which our road lay, have an aggregate population of 650,000 and contain about 4,000,000 acres of cultivated land. The peasants in these circles own 1,500,000 head of live stock, and produce perhaps two-thirds of the 30,000,000 bushels of grain raised annually in the province. There are held every year in the four circles 220 town and village fairs or local markets, to which the peasants bring great quantities of products for sale. The transactions of these fairs in the circle of Yalútorfsk, for example, amount annually to $2,000,000; in the circle of Ishím to $3,500,000; and in the whole province to about $14,000,000. From these statistics, and from such inquiries and observations as we were able to make along the road, it seemed to me that if the province of Tobólsk were honestly and intelligently governed, and were freed from the heavy burden of criminal exile, it would in a comparatively short time become one of the most prosperous and flourishing parts of the empire.
We drank tea Friday afternoon at the circuit town of Tiukalínsk, and after a short rest resumed our journey with four "free" horses. The road was still muddy and bad, and as we skirted the edge of the great marshy steppe of Barába between Tiukalínsk and Bekísheva, we were so tormented by huge gray mosquitos that we were obliged to put on thick gloves, cover our heads with calico hoods and horse-hair netting, and defend ourselves constantly with leafy branches. Between the mosquitos and the jolting we had another hard, sleepless night; but fortunately it was the last one, and at half-past ten o'clock on the morning of Saturday, July 4th, our tárantás rolled into the streets of Omsk. Both we and our vehicle were so spattered and plastered with black steppe mud that no one who had seen us set out from Tiumén would have recognized us. We had been four days and nights on the road, and had made in that time a journey of 420 miles, with only eleven hours of sleep.
- ↑ An ókrug, or circle, bears something like the same relation to a province that an American county does to a state, except that it is proportionately much larger. The province of Tobólsk, with an area of 590,000 square miles, has only ten ókrugs, so that the average area of these subdivisions is about that of the State of Michigan. If all of the territory north of the Ohio River and the Potomac and east of the Mississippi were one State, and each of the existing States were a county, such State and counties would bear to each other and to the United States something like the same relation which the province and ókrugs of Tobolsk bear to each other and to Siberia. The highest administrative officer in a Siberian province is the governor, who is represented in every ókrug by an isprávnik.