Irkutsk is in the centre of the gold district, which attracts also a somewhat undesirable class of people. It is not, I think, generally known what a large quantity of gold is found in Siberia, but about five millions worth is annually sent into Russia. This by no means represents all that is found, although the Government requires that it should all pass through Irkutsk, and thence be forwarded to Russia. Smuggling is reported to be extensively carried on, and a considerable Chinese population are credited with the bulk of it. The working of the gold diggings is said by experts to be amazingly primitive. Large fortunes are both made and squandered in Irkutsk. Not only gold but tea is a great source of wealth, although the trade in the latter is by no means so great as it used to be in the old caravan days. At the present time by far the largest quantity of it is sent round by sea; but there are still many Russians who believe that the flavour of the tea is spoilt by sea air, so that the demand for caravan tea continues. It is said that wealth in Irkutsk is estimated by a man’s furs and by a woman’s furs and jewels. Curiously enough Sunday labour is entirely prohibited in this town, and fine and imprisonment may follow the breaking of the law with regard to buying and selling. Trade is greatly hampered throughout the Russian Empire by the corruption of officials, of whom there are an incalculable number; and it is the Jews who form the most successful part of the trading community. There is always a long halt at Irkutsk station, varying from one and a half to two and a half hours, for passengers have to change trains on account of the difference of the line in gauge, and when travelling by the Russian State Express it is necessary to have tickets visé-ed and fresh places allotted. On the International you are saved this because the places are numbered and passengers are required to keep the same number in both trains, so there is no confusion in having the luggage transferred from one to the other. Having to get fresh ones was decidedly tiresome, as there seemed to be no method in the madness of the officials, their knowledge of other languages than their own was almost nil, and their slowness phenomenal. One of our English fellow-passengers seemed to have a great deal to say, and knew no Russian, so he had secured the services of a Chinese waiter from the restaurant car who acted as interpreter with complete success. I do not think I am wrong in saying that the issuing of fresh tickets took more than three-quarters of an hour, and confusion reigned in the train for more than double the time.
During the first two days of our return journey we had suffered from continual snow-storms and a leaden sky, but after leaving Irkutsk the weather improved, and the sun shone most of the time. The land is sparsely inhabited; at the close of the last century the density of population was given in the official census as two to the square mile in the province of Irkutsk. If Siberia be taken as an example of the effects of land nationalisation, few people, I think, will be attracted by it; out of an area of 3,240,000,000 square miles no less than 3,104,000,000 belong to the State. There is only one province, the Amur region, in which land can be purchased. It is the Russian village communities who hold the land when it has been allotted for industrial enterprises. All along the line we were interested in seeing the colonists travelling to their various destinations; they were taken in slow trains densely packed, and when they came to the stations where they had to change they and their belongings were dumped down for an apparently indefinite number of hours on the station, and there they remained, eating and sleeping in the midst of their baggage till it was time to start afresh. There are sheds for them to be housed in when the weather prevents their being out of doors. They seemed to have practically no furniture with them, and some of them were remarkably well dressed in comparison with what one would have expected. They are all obliged to have passports just like foreigners.
Up to the year 1901 there was an average of nearly 20,000 exiles sent yearly to Siberia; many of these exiles settled down and helped to civilise the land. They founded twelve Natural History and Ethnological Museums, besides starting scientific societies. Now the Government has altered the system, and great efforts are being made to send another class of colonists, the political exiles being driven to more uninhabitable regions. It seems a pity that the Russian Empire, which extends over an area of no less than one-sixth of the territorial globe, should leave this fertile land of Siberia, much of it the finest grazing ground in the world, and other parts excellent wheat-growing land, so sparsely inhabited, while it stretches envious hands into Manchuria, the land which China imperatively requires as the natural outlet for her surplus population.
At the railway stations all sorts of queer people are to be seen, the men mostly wearing bright-coloured shirts, and tall red leather, or felt boots; but the nomadic tribes of Buriats, who cultivate parts of the country with great industry and success, are not often to be seen near the railway. The Buriats on the eastern side of Lake Baikal are Buddhists, but those on the west still cling to their original religion—Shamanism. This mainly consists in the worship of gods, called “Ongons,” supposed to protect both house and property. The former are hung up in a box inside the house; the latter, along with the skins of squirrels and other small animals are in a box fastened to the top of a pole, with a little roof over it in the fields. Every man has his own Ongon as soon as he marries, and when he dies it is taken down from the pole and hung up in the woods, where it eventually rots to pieces.
In a most interesting volume the American linguist and ethnologist, Jeremiah Curtin, describes these strange tribes. He tells how he witnessed the Horse Sacrifice, one of the most ancient of Mongol ceremonials, and which is still perpetuated among Buriat clans. He saw it performed in 1900 on a hill called Uhér, about seven miles from Usturdi, which is some forty miles from Irkutsk. There are fifteen large altars on the hill, on which the sacrifices are offered to the Burkans (namely the gods) of the hill. These gods include “The Lofty Clear Heaven,” “The Revered Pure Earth,” “Bull Prince Father,” “Blessed Mother Mist,” “The Creating Great One” (the hedgehog, who is considered by the Buriats to be the wisest of all deities), “Grandfather Bald Head,” “Creator of Cattle,” “Crooked Back,” &c. The different families of the first and second divisions of the clan Ashekhabat have each their own place near one or other of the altars. The leaders of the ceremony invoke all the different deities by name and in turn, while the people pray either aloud or in silence for what they want. Then the horses are killed, and after that they are rapidly skinned and dismembered, the bones being burnt in roaring fires on the fifteen altars. The flesh is boiled in iron kettles, and when it is cooked all the people stand in groups by the altars, receding and advancing towards them at intervals, and reciting the following invocation to the deities, together with any special petitions of their own.
“We pray that we may receive from you a blessing. From among fat cattle we have chosen out meat for you. We have made strong tarasun (a liquor distilled from milk) for you. Let our ulus (villages) be one verst longer. Create cattle in our enclosures; under our blankets create a son; send down rain from high heaven to us; cause much grass to grow; create so much grain that sickle cannot rase it, and so much grass that scythe cannot cut it. Let no wolves out unless wolves that are toothless; and no stones unless stones without sharp corners or edges. Hover above our foreheads. Hover behind our heads. Look on us without anger. Help those of us who forget what we know. Rouse those of us who are sleeping (in spirit). In a harsh year (a year of trouble) be compassion. In a difficult year (a year of want) be kindness (in sense of help). Black spirits lead farther away from us; bright spirits lead hither, nearer; grey spirits lead farther away from us. Burkans lead hither to us. Green grass give in the mouths (of cattle). Let me walk over the first snow. If I am timid be my courage. If I am ashamed, be a proper face to me. Above be as a coverlid, below be as a felt bed to me.”—(“A Journey in Southern Siberia,” page 47.) After this prayer the worshippers all sat down in groups to eat the horse-flesh and drink tarasun, while many vultures hovered round to share the flesh. After this strange sacrifice is ended the Buriats indulge in wrestling.
At Usturdi there is a Russian Orthodox Mission Church, and the Bible Society has undertaken to publish the Gospel of St. Matthew in the Buriat language. It seems strange that such uncivilised beings as those who would take part in the ceremonial described above, should be sufficiently literate to have a use for the Gospel; but it is estimated that all the Buriats in the north, and nearly all those in the south, will be able to read it. The population is about 290,000. The translation has been made by the Irkutsk Translation Committee, and is to be printed in Russ characters, as most of the Buriats are able to understand them. Mr. Curtin mentions a young Buriat whom he met as having studied six years at the Irkutsk gymnasium, and possessing a knowledge of history and science, besides being a considerable reader, so that evidently they are not uninfluenced by education.
The next province through which the railway passes is the Yenisei, which stretches right away up to the Arctic Ocean, and which at once conjures up in one’s mind visions of Merriman’s novels: it is one of the largest provinces in the empire, consisting of 987,186 square miles, but has only an average of one person to the square mile. The city of Krasnojarsk is the largest and most interesting on the railway; there are about 30,000 foreigners living in this district, most of them Tartars; it is the principal seat of Government, and lies just half-way between Moscow and Vladivostock on this wonderful railway. The whole length of the railway is 5449 miles, and with the exception of the 193 miles round Lake Baikal, it was completed in an extraordinarily short space of time, between eight and nine years, at a cost of, roughly speaking, £85,000,000. It is fairly correct to say that it was built at the rate of about a mile a day. At the distance of one verst (namely, two-thirds of a mile) apart, there are guard houses all along the line, each under the care of an ex-convict, who comes out of his house to wave a green flag when the train passes, or more frequently it is a barefooted wife or daughter who does it for him. There is a fine view of Krasnoyarsk from the train as you approach it, for the line makes a wide circular sweep before crossing the River Yenisei, on which it is situated. Of all the noble rivers which flow through Siberia, the Yenisei is the greatest; it rises in the mountains of the distant Chinese province of Kobdo in Mongolia, over 3000 miles from the Arctic Sea, and makes its impetuous way through the mountains of Sagansk, then through the strange, tundra region, with its countless islands and trackless wastes—the great nesting place of myriads of migratory birds, who come there led by some marvellous instinct at the exact time of year when the snow melts, uncovering the berries which form the requisite food for the nestlings. The Yenisei is only navigable for a little over six months of the year, and the ceremony of cutting the ice, which closes its mouth on the Arctic Sea, takes place always on June 10th.
The next province on the route is that of Tomsk, but the principal town, which has the same name, lies to the north of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and is only connected with it by a branch line from Taiga, the nearest point to it on the main line, which is eighty-two versts or, roughly speaking, 54 miles distant. The reason why Tomsk is not on the main line is that the city refused to bribe the surveyors and engineers who planned the route. This accounts for the fact that so many places, which might quite easily have been on the line, are more or less distant from the railway, according to their willingness to pay. It takes four hours by rail from Taiga to Tomsk. It must be most injurious to trade to have such difficulties as these, and such unnecessary ones. Tomsk boasts the only university in Siberia, but this is still incomplete, and has only about 500 students. Education has been discouraged in this as in every part of the Russian Empire, and although the money required for a university at Irkutsk was offered, the Government refused to grant permission for it to be established. The number of schools in 1901 was only 3909 for the whole of Siberia, and the scholars attending them 115,407, while the population was estimated at 5,727,090; these figures need no comment, and my authority for them is Prince Krapotkin.
The only important town in the province on the railway line is Omsk, where we learnt (by telegram) the death of the King. The news came like a thunderclap, and cast a gloom over every English person on the train. What made it doubly trying was the impossibility for weeks to come of getting any further news. The town of Omsk is on the River Irtish. The number of rivers in the country adds greatly to the charm of the journey, and they have been the chief highways of the empire in the past; the bridges over them are remarkably fine. We began to rejoice in the sight of wild flowers once more, and children brought bunches of marigolds and anemones to the stations for sale, but generally they were tied up into tight little bunches without any leaves, and were quite wilted. The main occupation of some of the passengers seemed to be that of putting on fresh clothes, and showing them off at the stations where we had an opportunity at least half-a-dozen times every day of getting a brief constitutional. We learnt that passengers were allowed to visit the luggage van, as on board ship, and get out fresh supplies of dresses, but it did seem rather unnecessary, considering the amount of luggage taken in the carriages.