We left Tumen about eight o’clock in the morning. Constantine, thoroughly familiar with Siberian customs, had put into the sledge several bottles of champagne, to provide for what was about to take place. The precaution was good, but the supply, alas! insufficient.
To open a bottle of champagne is in Siberia the greatest luxury that can be paraded before admiring eyes. This is the consequence of its high price and the caprice of fashion. In America, it is said that “the keeping of the proprieties is as indispensable as clean linen”[7]; here, perhaps, if doing the right thing to do be considered as one of them, the clean linen would have to give way to the proprieties. A dinner, a fête, an anniversary, or any like ceremony in Siberia without champagne, would be marked as being wanting in its most necessary element; and it is certainly not here that common-sense is so robust as to disregard the whimsical consensus of opinion that holds the civilized world in subjection à la mode, from Indus to the Pole.
[7] Emerson.
About six hours after we had left Tumen, we arrived at a place where we had to take different roads. M. Pfaffius, Mrs. Grant, and Madame Nemptchinof, were going to take the road to Tomsk, whilst I had to turn a little more to the south. In order to defeat this project, Mrs. Grant had recourse to a little manœuvre, which very nearly turned Constantine’s head. With a view to dissuading the latter from yielding to my plan, Mrs. Grant had taken her place in the closed sledge of Madame Nemptchinof; then she had arranged to bring Ivan and her young companion together, by making them mount side by side. Constantine, who was apparently smitten with the charms of the young English lady, seeing her en tête-à-tête with Ivan, seized a bottle of champagne, and cutting the wire, directed the cork at his rival’s head, which Miss Campbell carefully shielded with her great fur glove; then the fire commenced on all sides, whilst I wondered what unseasonable and scandalous bacchanals were about to be inaugurated with so much uncorked wine. Happily, however, we tasted but a very moderate quantity. Then all my companions, in conformity with an ostentatious custom in Siberia, dismounted from their vehicles, each of them holding two bottles, and, advancing before my horses a few paces, poured the precious beverage on the snowy ground, just at the spot the skates of my sledge were destined to pass over. I scrupulously performed the same ceremony, a ceremony too solemn to be profaned with a laugh, which I could hardly repress, and then I took leave of this very agreeable caravan, but not without the prospect of meeting again, either at Tomsk, Irkutsk, or Kiachta.
As we resumed our way, but now in different directions, I heard a few more detonations of corks; and when the sound of the bells had died away and all had vanished from sight, Constantine looked at me most piteously. The tête-à-tête had evidently left some rankling effect in his breast that would have resisted any attempt at consolation had I ventured on so delicate a task; for, as far as I could see, he had received no encouragement whatever from Miss Campbell, and as, in this instance, the wounds of self-esteem and slighted love could not be salved with this same remedy, having no other to offer, I left the malady to cure itself.
What struck me all at once on this route was its absolute solitude. The carrying sledges bringing tea and other merchandise from China and the products of the Trans-Baikal to Nijni-Novgorod avoid passing by Omsk; it would be going out of the way to no purpose. It is therefore a rare occurrence to fall in with a sledge in this district. The snow, besides, is scarcely sufficiently beaten down to admit of an easy march. Here, in the absence of such movement, one is oppressed with an impression of wild waste, cheerless immensity, mournful silence. Gradually, vegetation diminishes, becomes more scattered and stinted, then disappears altogether, and the traveller enters at last on the great steppes.
But how changed during summer! Then the steppe is an immense prairie, whose rich, curly grass soothes the eye with its refreshing tint, and protects the body from jolting with its luxuriant bed.
And in winter, it is a vast plain rendered level and white by the snow with which it is covered. The French language, unfortunately, is here again insufficient to explain in a word the character of its outline. We call La Beauce a flat country; now the steppe in its snowy dress is not like La Beauce; neither is it level like the Mediterranean in calm weather, nor like the bed of a river. The surface of the steppe is strictly horizontal throughout. But Providence—as if to compensate in some measure to the eye of the artist for the absence of interesting scenery—has diffused, it is true, over this bare country, some of the finest effects of light with which any land is beautified and resplendent. And yet, in spite of this attraction, however varying and diversified, its joyless aspect preys on the mind of the traveller who enters on such a desert.
We had passed Ischim at nine in the morning; about five in the evening, we had again changed horses, when it was quite dark, and wearied with fatigue, I had fallen asleep. Suddenly I was awoke with a start by a fearful shock that had as suddenly roused Constantine. Our yemschik had gone astray in this frightful wilderness. The absence of the moon and the veiling of the stars with heavy snow clouds were together the cause of this misadventure. His fear of being underrated, and perhaps of animadversion, had hindered him from avowing immediately his awkwardness and blundering, and for three hours at least, he had been wandering about, where chance led him, with the hope of finding his way again—a hope poor indeed when he had lost all idea of direction and every vestige of landmark. The fall into a pit, concealed by the snow, which we had just experienced, obliged him now to avow his blunder.
Constantine and I unrolled ourselves from our blankets, got down, and set to work, with lantern in hand, to find the road. On looking round, we contemplated the spectacle of our sledge and horses almost buried in the snow, and it was one of dire significance. Of the sledge the only part visible was the hood, and of the horses little more than their shoulders and heads.