into the country road through open fields, dazzlingly, blindingly
white. The trotter’s legs seem to move too fast, as if seen in a
cinematograph. The gallopers, free of all weight and held only by the
two traces which fasten them, outrigger fashion, swing on like wild
ponies of the steppe. Crude and massive as the sleigh may look, its
burden is almost nothing on the hard compacted snow. The horses in the
rush through the bracing air seem to be the incarnation of the wind. A
rut in the glistening road does not produce a disjointing shock, for,
as a huntsman’s bullet glances from the skull of a wild boar, so the
sleigh glides into the air and swiftly down again at a long low angle.
It is a fact of “flying.”
The cold is intense. After an hour of riding you have learned a
certain lesson which adds to your experience. Whether the traveler
shall make this winter journey equipped with full camp-kit, portable
stove, folding-forks, thermos bottles, and shell-reloading tools, or
Tatar fashion, with a rifle and a haunch of mutton, is important but
not vital. Let him make sure, however, that the huge all-enveloping
sheepskin overcoat is at hand to supplement the coats beneath, and
that a shaggy sleeping-rug is provided in addition to the blankets.
One obstinate newcomer started with the insistence that a mink-lined
Amerikanski overcoat, with two heavy rugs as lap-robes, would be ample.
After an hour on the road, he turned into a peasant’s hut to thaw out
upon boiling tea, while the driver went back to the town to buy the
hairiest robe and coat obtainable. These were thenceforth worn on top
of the initial outfit. Siberia for a midwinter sledging journey exacts
this tribute of respect.
For versts the winter road follows down along the river between
towering pinnacled rocks, where in summer eagles nest. The cliffs are
vividly spotted with orange and green lichens; below they are fretted
with the scourings of ice brought down in the spring freshets. All
along beside the road are the familiar pine-saplings planted in mounds
by the villagers to guide the way. In the vast monotony and drifting
snows travelers would be lost but for these landmarks. Along the
fertile river valleys hamlets are thick. A cluster of houses is met
every six to ten versts. Presently the road leaves the river and bends
to the left, cutting across fields. When it quits the bank, it climbs
sharply a five-foot ascent. The driver does not even slacken speed.
At the turn he swings the sure-footed ponies suddenly, and takes the
slope, letting the outrigger bring up against a stiff clump of bushes.
There is a crash, the sleigh has caromed off at right angles, nothing
has befallen, and we are on again.
Verst after verst of plateau goes by, with rounded rolling hills
of dimpled snow, treeless, houseless, a barren waste. Then comes a
crest so steep that the horses can only toil up it at a walk, and the
passengers must climb beside them. The forest closes in as the height
is mounted,--white leafless birches and dark green pines. The light
snow is seamed with rabbit-runs, and here and there are the far-spaced
tracks of deer or wild goats.
A mound of stones and a small pole with a Buddhist prayer-flag--for
here is the ancient home of the Buriats--mark the top of the ascent.
There is a moment’s halt while you climb in and the driver tightens
the saddle of the centre horse; then down the giddy descent we sweep,
in full gallop once more. The pines flash past, and you hold your
breath in fear of the smash that must come should a horse fall, should
a trace break, should a side rut swing the sledge over. One is,
however, so close to the ground that an overturn is usually harmless,
save to the clothes and the nervous system, both of which are at a
discount in Siberian sledging. Then too the outrigger arrangement is
such that the craft turns a quarter of the way over and slides on the
supplementary runner until it rights.
The cold is intense. One wipes away the snow from his fur collar, and
the dampness on the handkerchief has caused it to become frozen stiff.
It is a crackling parchment that goes back into the pocket. Eyeglasses
are unwearable, for the rising vapor from one’s breath is caught and
frozen on them in an opaque film. Fingers exposed but a moment become
numb and useless, and uncovering the hand is an agony. Gradually as
you ride, through the great felt boots, the triple flannels, the
camel’s-hair stockings, the fur-lined gloves, the coats and rugs,
the cold begins to bite. You have become fatigued and depressed of a
sudden. The driver points to your cheek, where the marble whiteness is
eating into the flesh, and bids you rub it with snow. An involuntary
shudder grips and shakes you relentlessly from head to foot.
It is time to stop. If you try to go on beyond the next station you
will, if the gods are lenient and you do not freeze, get out nerveless
and trembling, not for hours to rally strength and energy. The chill
will cling, however hot the post-house oven. Even now you are weak,
beaten down, querulous, in a sudden feeble old age. The shudder means
that the human animal is near his endurance limit.
On an urgent call, with special preparations, you may travel for a
hundred hours, night and day, without halt save for change of relays.
Physically, it is possible to fight cold for a time. You can run along
in all your furs beside the horses, you can beat your arms together,
and rub nose and cheeks to keep the blood in motion. You can drink
copious glasses of scalding tea in the post-houses, and live by
stimulants on the road. Through ceaseless vigilance and resolution
you can keep from freezing, even while intense fatigue creeps on and
vitality is going. But the persistent awful shudder is Nature’s red
lantern. Run past it if you must,--it is at your peril.
Dark against the snows, now a low-lying village comes into
sight,--Nijniouboukounskaia,--and among its first log houses is one
bearing the post-horn signboard. A cry rouses the jaded horses to
a gallop, and covered with snow, the sledge sweeps into the yard.
Steaming and frosted white, the animals stand with lowered heads.
Stablemen run to unharness them. Stiff with cold and muffled like a
mummy, you clamber out, and on unsteady legs mount the steps to the
felted door of the posting-inn. In the big bare room, beside the warm
oven, robes and overcoats can be thrown off. A red-capped girl loads
the samovar with glowing brands from the fire, and sets it humming for
tea. Brown bread is produced and eggs, and a great bowl of warm milk.
With these, and the contents of your bag of provisions, can be eked out
a welcome _obeid_.
For the night’s rest one need not seek a bed. There is never a spring
to ease the bones from Verhneudinsk to Kiahta. There was discovered
just once on the journey--at Arbouzarskie--an iron skeleton, bearing
to a spring bed about the relation that the three-toed Pleistocene
prairie trotter holds to a modern horse. The post-keeper had carefully
hewn with his axe five pine planks to cover the gaunt limbs of it. The
voyageur slept on the soft side of these timbers. Bed and board are
synonyms in Siberia.
For a couch there is to-night the narrow wooden law-provided bench,
or--a less precarious perch, and equally resilient--the sanded floor.
For bedding, one has one’s own blankets and coats. What if the shoulder
slept on numbs with one’s weight, or the corner of the soap-box in the
traveling-bag, serving as a pillow, dents the tired head! One draws off
felt boots and some of the outer layers of clothes, rolls the sheepskin
about one, covers the head with a blanket, and sleeps like the forest
bears in their winter dens.
Just before daybreak is the best time to start, so that one can cover
the most road possible while the sun is up. At ten or eleven, an
hour’s stop for lunch is advisable, and then on again until sundown.
It is better not to travel after nightfall, as the cold is so much
more intense. We dedicate the evening to hot tea, and then turn to the
blankets and the bench.
The stretch between Verhneudinsk and Troitzkosavsk, officially rated
at two hundred and eighteen versts, is really somewhat longer. A
run of average record took from 4:20 P.M. Tuesday to 11:30 A.M.
Thursday--forty-three hours and ten minutes. This included all
relaying, seven hours a night for sleeping, dinner and breakfast halts,
two accidents (an overturning and a broken runner), and one calamity--a
Siberian who snored. The actual driving-time, over a road for the most
part hilly, was twenty-two hours, five minutes, or just about ten
versts per hour.
Horses stand always ready, with special men at hand to harness. Drivers
swing on their shaggy greatcoats, and with almost no loss of time one
is out of the shadowed courtyard and on the road again in the dazzling
whiteness of the winter day.
In traveling “post,” however, with relayed sleighs and big empty
guest-rooms, one does not become acquainted with the life along the
way. One has only hurried glimpses of slant-eyed Buriat tribesmen, of
galloping Cossacks, trudging peasants, post-agents, girls who carry in
samovars and silently steal out, rosy-cheeked boys on the streets,
and women at the house-windows. To know the people and see their daily
life one must get away from the beaten highroad, strike out from the
government-regulated inns, and blaze one’s own path into the interior.
First, you get a low passenger-sledge, long enough to admit of
stretching out, and without too many projecting nails on the inside;
then, three good ponies of the hardy Cossack breed, that are never
curried or taken into a stable through the bitterest winter. The best
animals procurable are none too good for climbing the passes away from
the river-courses. The whole outfit can be bought for three hundred
roubles in any of the interior towns.
For drivers, there is a class of _yamshik_ teamsters, who spend their
lives guiding the sledge-caravans which carry the local traffic. One
of these men, Ivan Kurbski, can guide you through a whole province,
and lodge you every evening with some hospitable friend or recommended
host. Whether he has himself been over all the changing by-paths in
the wilderness of the Zabaikalskaia Oblast, or whether he mentally
photographs the directions of his friends regarding each village, is an
unsolved mystery.
[Illustration: SLEDGING SOUTHWARDS]
When the day’s journey is done, Ivan will drive slowly down the crooked
street of the village he has settled upon for the night’s repose,
looking keenly for landmarks visible only to him in this country, where
every village and every house is mate to all the rest. Sometimes he
will ask a question of one of the innumerable urchins. But generally
he seems of himself to hit upon the desired domicile. Day after day
he will take you the sixty versts, lead you to the village stores to
replenish the supply of candles or sugar, bring you surely to food and
shelter at night, and take off all the burden of care for the outcome
of each day’s journey.
If for the third member of your personal suite you can get an old-time
servant to keep the guns clean, build the camp-fires when midday tea
is to be taken out of doors, bring in the baggage and rally the best
resources of each halting-place, you are doubly lucky. You will be
sedulously tended, and be treated partly as a prince, partly as a
helpless baby.
Of this order is Jacov Titoff. Not the smallest personal service that
he can render will you be permitted to do for yourself. The telling
of unpleasant truths will be carefully avoided, however certain the
ultimate revelation. Though honest beyond question, he pays you the
naïve compliment of relying upon your generosity in all the little
matters that concern provisions and petty luxuries. He will open the
package which he is carrying back from the _torgovlia_ to extract
matches and cigarettes for his own delectation, and will rifle
unstintingly the reserve of canned _sardinki_. He cheerfully freezes
himself waiting for deer, and stumbles up miles of snowy mountain
in the beats. He is always in good humor, and without complaint for
whatever comes. He is ready anywhere, at any time, to sleep or drink
vodka.
Thus outfitted and manned, take your place, muffled in furs, and seated
on the felt sleeping-blankets. Guns are at your side, the bag of
provisions is in front, your own little ponies paw the snow. They start
off now, trotting and galloping beneath the _duga_. The air is frosty,
clear, and thrilling as wine; the snow is feathery and uncrusted, as
when it fell months back; bells are jingling, and the driver is crying
his alternate endearments and curses upon the shaggy ponies. Down the
long rock-flanked river valleys, amid birch and pine forests, you will
skim, by unwonted paths, through out-of-the-world villages, to see in
their own homes the red-bloused peasants, the women spinning at the
wheel, the peddlers and priests, the traveling Mohammedan doctors, the
rough Buriats, miners and merchants, along the white way.
The smooth main road is left now for newly broken sledge-trails across
fields and over snow-covered marshland. Every available river is
utilized as a highway, for along its winding length the path, smooth
and level, is marked like a boulevard by the evergreen saplings planted
by villagers to guide the winter traveler. One can pierce the districts
flanking the Chickoya’s gorges, reachable at other seasons only by
breakneck climbs. And one can see the real Siberia.
On this first night of his incumbency, Ivan Kurbski lodges us with
friends. He leaves us for a moment while he enters the yard by the
wicket-gate to make due announcement, and the ponies hang their tired
frost-covered heads. Your own bows under an equal fatigue. But the wait
is very brief. Soon the big double gates of the log-stockaded courtyard
open. The horses of their own accord turn in, and swing up to the steps
of the house. You are handed out like an invalid grand duke, and are
welcomed at the threshold, with a hard hand-shake, by a red-bloused
peasant who ushers you up the steps, across the low-eaved portico, and
through the square felt-padded door into the big living-room.
As we all enter, Ivan and Jacov, caps in hand, bow and make the sign
of the cross toward the grouped ikons high up in the corner opposite
the door. The saints have guarded you on the way--are not thanks
the devoir? Then you, as head of the party, must salute, with a
“_Zdravstvouitie_,” your host, the old _Hazan_ father of the peasant
who, wearing a gray blouse sprayed with vivid flowers at breast and
wrists, sits on a bench beside the window. Now you may sit down beside
the massive table on the other bench, which is built along the whole
length of the log walls, and survey the curious world into which you
have fallen.
A woman of middle age, clad in bright red, is busy with a long hoe-like
instrument pushing pots into a great square oven six feet high, ten
feet to a side, and spotlessly whitewashed. To her right, in the
room beside the oven, is a girl of fifteen or sixteen, rolling brown
rye-dough on a little table, in perilous proximity to a trap-door
leading into some dark nether region. An old bent woman gravitates
between the two. Glancing up, one meets the wondering eyes of three
sleepy blinking urchins, who peer down in solemn interest from a big
cushion-covered shelf, two feet beneath the ceiling. Looking about to
locate the muffled sound of crows and clucks, one discovers, beneath
the oven, a corral of chickens, pecking with perky bills at the
whitewash for lime. On the floor is sitting a little girl crooning some
endless refrain to a baby in a sapling-swung cradle.
“The _gaspadine_ will take _chai_?” asks the patriarch. From the
woman’s room beside the oven the girl brings a samovar. She sets it on
the floor, beside an earthenware jar standing near the door, and dips
out the water to fill it. Then with tongs she takes a long red ember
from a niche cut in the side of the oven, and drops it down the samovar
funnel. Round loaves of frozen rye-bread are brought out and set to
thaw. A plate of eggs is produced from the cellar. One rolls off as
the girl passes, and falls to the floor. Instinctively you start. Not
so the others. The egg has dropped like a stone and rolled away. But
it is quietly picked up and put to boil with the rest. It is frozen so
solidly that there is not even a crack on the shell.
Jacov meanwhile is making earnest inquiry of the “old one.”
“How are your cows, Dimitri Ivan’ich? Your horses, are they well? And
your sheep? All well? And have you had good crops? Is there still
plenty of pasture-land in this village? _Good!_ GOOD!--and how is your
wife?”
Poor withered wife; she is bustling around looking after the children,
and trying to help her daughter-in-law. Not so the “old one,” the
ancient man of the family to whom these courteous questions are
addressed. The patriarch stopped his labors at fifty, and sits
slumbering away his second prospective half-century in honored
idleness. “Everybody works but father!”
The samovar is humming now, and the table is decked with a
homespun-linen cloth ready for the _obeid_. The first formality, as
dinner is about to begin, must be observed. The various members of the
family turn, one after another, toward the ikons, reverently crossing
themselves. Then the host produces a bottle of a colorless liquid,
shakes it up and down, and brings the bottom sharply against his palm.
The cork shoots out, and he pours into a little glass a drink of the
national beverage, vodka, which one is supposed to swallow at a gulp.
Every time a guest enters, a bottle of vodka is brought out, costing
49¼ kopecks, half the average day-laborer’s pay in this district. On
feast-days the visitors go from house to house drinking,--and these
_prasdniks_ number some fifty-two days in the Russian year. Every
business deal is baptized with vodka. Every family festival, the
return of a son from the army, the marriage of a daughter,--all are
vodka-soaked. As one passes through villages on a saint’s day, he
may meet a dozen reeling figures and hear the maudlin songs from the
courtyards where the men have gathered. The part played by vodka in the
people’s life is appalling.
In the house now, all, beginning with the “old one,” partake of this
stimulant, solemnly gulping down their fiery potions. Then the family
sits down in due rank and order, the “old one” in the cosiest corner,
with the samovar convenient to his hand. You, as the guest, are beside
him on the bench that lines the wall, then comes Jacov, next the son,
then Ivan Kurbski the _yamshik_, and on stools along the inner side of
the table, the grandmother and assorted infants. The mother alternates
between the table and the oven.
The samovar is tapped for tea as the first course of the evening. For
all who come, tea is the obligatory offering, in a cup if the visitor
be familiar, but for special honor in a glass with a ragged lump of
sugar hammered from a big cone-shaped loaf. This one nibbles as he
drinks, for sugar is a luxury, not to be used extravagantly. The brown
rye-bread, which has been thawed at the gaping oven-door, is next
brought out, and raw blubber-like fat pork, in little squares, eaten
as butter, and boiled potatoes, and the boiled eggs, curdled from the
freezing.
At Little Christmas, the _prasdnik_ day which comes in early January,
_pelmenis_, or dumplings, egg-patties (grease-cooked), and meat will
be served, with cranberries and white bread. In Butter-Week everybody
gorges on buttered _blinnies_, or pancakes, garnished with sour cream.
Even a substance showing rudimentary traces of a common ancestry with
cake may be produced.
As the shadows of the northern evening close down, a piece of candle
is lighted to-night in our honor. Generally the burning brands for the
samovar, propped in a niche cut at the height of a man’s shoulder in
the outer edge of the oven, throw the only light. Presently the candle
is used up and the brands give a fitful flame, leaving the corners
black as Erebus.
From the baby’s cradle comes now a plaintive cry, and one of the little
girls goes over to dandle it. Up and down, to and fro, for hours
together she works, singing her monotonous lullaby. The children, who
have been lifted down from their eyrie above the oven, play on the
sanded floor. The men remain oblivious and smoke their pipes, letting
fall an occasional word, which comes forth muffled from their great
beards.
Ox-like, all sit for a while, sipping occasional cups of tea. Then the
woman and the girl go out and get wood, remove the pots from inside the
oven, and build up a roaring fire. The children are rolled up for sleep
in their little blankets on the floor. The men reach for their furs and
felts. They go to the left of the oven, the women to the right, and
the children are between, making a long row in front of the fire. Soon
all are sunk in heavy sleep. The little girl alone sits up to rock the
baby. As you doze off in the genial warmth of the newly-stoked oven she
is still crooning her lullaby in the dim fitful light of the firebrands.
Through the long night all lie like logs. Toward morning, as the oven’s
heat dies down and the bitter cold creeps in, sleep becomes uneasy. One
stirs and then another. Finally the woman rises and wakes the girl, and
they go out into the cold for wood and water. Presently the men bestir
themselves, get up, and wait for their tea. The rising sun of another
day casts its rays through the windows.
As the sleepers one by one arise and stretch, their blankets are folded
by the watchful woman of the house, and thrust up on the children’s
shelf. Some of the men go across the room and let the water from the
little brass can in the corner trickle over their hands. Some do not do
even this.
For the outlander of washing proclivities, peculiar problems are
offered by a country of no wash-bowls, no soap, only occasional towels,
and the tea samovar as the only source of hot water, a copious draft
on which not only postpones breakfast but compels some of the women of
the family to go out and chop ice for a new supply. Necessity evolves
the tea-tumbler toilet method as our solution. You borrow one of the
precious tea-glasses from the old woman, fill it to overflowing with
warm water from the samovar, and prop it up on the window-sill. The top
inch of water is absorbed into a sponge which is put aside for future
use. Into the remaining two and a half inches a soaped handkerchief is
dipped, with which one washes one’s face, touching tenderly the spots
recently frozen. The reserved sponge will do to rinse off the detritus
of this first operation. Two and a quarter inches of water are left, of
which half an inch may be poured over the tooth-brush. With an inch and
three quarters left, one has ample to lather for a shave, as well as to
wet the nail-brush which is to scrub one’s hands that will be rinsed
with the sponge. Half an inch remains finally to clean the brushes and
razors. “There you are!” With two glasses one may have a bath.
When the breakfast of rye-bread and tea is ended, the men go out to
their various winter tasks, of which the most serious is felling trees
in the forests, cutting them up, and getting home the wood. The women
keep stolidly at their cooking, cleaning, child-tending, and turn to
the spinning-wheel and hand-loom when other work does not press.