All was ready by eleven o’clock the next morning (24th August). A little crowd had assembled in the market-place to witness the strange sight of a couple of Englishmen about to cross Siberia! Madame R———— witnessed the start from the balcony, and her neat little grey-clad figure and pretty face is the last fair vision of the city that I can recall, as having seated ourselves in the tarantass, the yemtschik cracked his whip, the game little horses dashed into their collars, and we rattled away with a loud jangle of bells, past the sunny deserted streets and into the open country. Half an hour later and Irkoutsk, a glittering speck on the dark green horizon, was barely discernible.
[11]. Mr. J. Jameson, an experienced traveller and naturalist, whose sad death from fever, since these pages were written, has added another honoured name to the list of those who have fallen in the cause of science and civilization in Central Africa.
CHAPTER X.
IRKOUTSK TO TOMSK.
Let the reader picture the neighbourhood of Aldershot with its undulating pine-clad hills suddenly transplanted into the depths of the black country lying around Newcastle-on-Tyne. For stone buildings let him substitute filthy, tumble-down houses of unpainted wood, almost undistinguishable at a distance from the dark, greasy soil around them. People these villages with dirty, wild-looking men clad in sheepskins and gaudy-coloured rags, and still dirtier, half-naked women. Conceive a sickly smell (peculiar to Asiatic Russia) of old skins, wood, smoke, turpentine, and sewage, and a Siberian landscape is before you. In fine weather a fine grey dust that creeps into your hair, chokes up eyes and nostrils, and renders life almost unbearable; on a wet day thick, greasy, black mud that is everywhere. In the post-house, in the tarantass, there was no keeping it out. I do not know which was worse——the dust or the mud——perhaps the latter, for it smelt abominably, and stained like ink.
We had looked forward to fine scenery in Siberia, lofty, picturesque ranges, wooded valleys, and glorious panoramas of forest and plain, but were grievously disappointed, for the scenery between Irkoutsk and Tomsk is, with one or two exceptions, intolerably monotonous and depressing. My recollections of that weary journey are neither pleasant nor interesting. Eastern Siberia, as I remember it, is simply one long and varying succession of three colours: Dark green, brown, and yellow——pines, mud, and occasional cornfields. Of the fifty odd villages lying between the capitals of Eastern and Western Siberia, not more than a dozen contained over 400 inhabitants. Save in these villages we saw no signs of life but occasional gangs of prisoners, or a stray tarantass or téléga. The poet’s lines——
“Miles, on miles, on miles, of desolation,
Leagues, on leagues, on leagues, without a change,”
fitly describe the country through which we travelled for three weeks after leaving Irkoutsk.