SLEDGING THROUGH SIBERIA.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 2555, 24 November 1888, Page 1 (Supplement)

SLEDGING THROUGH SIBERIA.

" But won't it be cold ?" It is a very inoffensive question, but it grows somewhat monotonous and exasperating when it has been repeated by a score or two of wellintentioned friends in varying tones of remonstrance and warning. It was in tho height of the Shanghai summer, with t.h'* thermometer hijrh up in the nineties, that my future travelling cuinpanion, the lure Mr Charles Joseph Ureu, first expatiated to me upon the entrancing interest and the thrilling and delightful perils of a mid-winter journey through the heart of Asiatic Russia. He was as ignorant of the state of the journey as I was myself ; but a few well-directed inquiries convinced us both that there were no insuperable difficulties, and towards the end of the following December we began to realise the truth of those friendly warnings which we had so ungratefully received. We had arrived in Vladivostok by Japanese mail steamer some weeks before; we had provided ourselves with an outfit of furlined gloves with undivided finger.-, dogskin socks, camel-hair stockings, felt boots, fur caps, and variaus other requisites for keeping out the cold ; and we had invested seventy roubles in ,i sledsre which, if sometimes rude and clumsy, seemed to our inexperienced eyes quite strong enough to convey us and our baggage safely over the five thousand miles or so of ice-bound rivers and snow-clad roads which lay between us and the Bkaterinburg-Tiumen Railway. But tho snow and ice had been unusually late in coming. It is not till the third week in December that a fierce pourga covered the ground with a thick fleece of snow, and oven then the ice stretched but halfway across the magnificent Vladivostok harbour, so that we had to commence our journey by land instead of cutting ucross a piece of the ocean in ,the customary way of westward-bound travellers from the port. Our stay in Vladivostok had been interesting enough. With it host of officers—military, naval, ana civil—all in uniform, its large pigtailol population of Chinese, and its crowds of Corean coolies with their hair bound up in the curious knot on the top of th » head which distinguishes the race, the port presented plenty of interesting sights ; and we had relieved the monotony of our stay with a week's deershooting in the wild, uninhabited country to the northward —a pary of six of us cooped up by night in the little eightfoot square cabin of the sloop Anna, aud by day stalking the deer or tracing the footprints of tigers iu the snow, At

length, after an infinity of troubles and delays, our passports and travel-permits are all in order . our li>ggage is carefully packed in the bottom of the sledge, anil we are stretched out upon it in our furs. On the comfortless box seat the first of our yemshiks curls up his legs as best he may, and the first of our troikagallops away up the hills behind the port. It is wonderful organisation, the posting system of Siberia. All across tincontinent, from the Pacific to the Urals, and between all important towns, at distances varying from eight to thirty miles, are post-stations, where, oil presentation of a pass, the traveller can demand the use of horses and a yemshik, or ■ r driver, to rarry him one stage upon h'S journey. Sometimes, if he was nor, a iv urier, and frequently if he is neither a courier nor a Government offi er. tha may be kept waiting for a few hours or days ; but eventually he will get h s horses at a very low tariff rate. Fraud on the part of the stationmaster is all but impossible. The traveller can live rent free at any station till his horses come, aud though there are no beds, this is a luxury easily dispensed with. As a rule the pruest-rooms at the stations are tolerably clean ; the uoe of the naraovar, or tea-urn, may be had for a few kopeks, and the use of the cooking-stove for a few kopeks more. Fastened behind our sledge was a box containing a sroodly supply of frozen viands ready for thawing at the stations; and, despite the everincreasing cold, Siberian sledging seemed at first an enjoyable and exhiliratinginode of travelling. On the second day after leaving the coast we arrived at a great shallow sheet of water known as the Kbanka Lake. Minature mountain ranges some twenty feet high, formed of jagged masses of ice, stretched away across the smooth surface of the lake, and bore witness to the fury of the storm which had broken up the first ice that formed. The sledging road was marked out by little branches of trees stuck in the ice on either side. We were to see many thousands of these little branches before our journey was done, for on every river and lake, on every steppe and plain, where, in a snowstorm, the road might be obliterated, it is thus distinguished. Hundreds of thousands of branches are used for this purpose, and hundreds of men are employed at the beginning of every winter in thus marking out the roads. From the low banks of the lake the land stretched away for miles and miles without a hill ; and the lonely post-stations, with not another house in sight, and no signs of human life around, with the exception of one or two brokendown slndges, presented a depressing scene of desolation ; and. after seventy miles of sledging on its surface, we were glad to leave the lake behind. For fifteen hundred miles our course now lay alony: the ureat, Amur River and its tributaries. On Christinas Day we I arrived at Khabaravka, the military headquarters of Eastern Siberia; and next j evening we were once more upon the river. The turbid waters at the meeting of the (Jssiri aud Amur had formed huge tumbled blocks of jagged ice ; and over these our three horses, now harno-f-ed tandem, laboriously made their way. Neariug Blagovestcheusk, tho Amur capital, we encountered new troubles from the lack of snow. Stationmasters insisted that we should take to wheeled, springless waggons, and leave our sledge behind. Sometimes five horses dragged us over the frozen, stoney, suowless track, jolting and bumping us till every bone was aching; and at last, when only twelve miles from tfee town, we had to yield to fate, ensconce ourselves in a tarantas, or springless watrson, and leave our sledge to come behind us empty. Five days we remained in Blagovestchensk, revelling in the hospitality of new-made friends, and then once more we took to the ioe, travelling night and day whenever horses could be had, sleeping, despite the cold, in our open-fronted sledge. Day by day the thermometer fell lower, till at last, as wo neared Stretensk. the spirit registered —42 deg. R&auinur, equivalent to—62 Fahr., or 94 deg. of frost. Every yemshik who drove us bore the ssars of frost-bito on his cheeks or no.-e or chin. My own nose did not escape soot free, and my companion, though more fortunate in this respect, had frequently to invoke my assistance to unravel him, his moustache and beard and the fur collar of his coat being welded into an almost inseparable by the conffoaled moisture of his breath. On waking in the morning, wo frequently found our eyelids glued together with ice, and wo had to thaw them with our fingers before we could look about us. Some five weeks' sledging brought us to the shores of the iroxen Baikal Sea Then for thirty miles wc hoard the moaninir of the waves under the ice beneath our sledge, and for half this distance saw the shores fade away behind us till we were nearly out of sight of land. Hence onward our course was constantly impeded by vast caravans of freisht-sledges, bringing tea westward from China, by way of the great Mongolian Desert, or taking Western Russian produce to the East. Day and night the weary-looking horses plodded on, never resting, while frequently the sudden swerving of our hors'-s from the roadway would call our attention to the stiff, frozen carcase ot some poor freight horse which had fallen out from its caravan and linen left to die Soon after lea\iua the Biikal behind we had a foretaste of Western civilisation at. the fine city of Irkutsk ; and a fortnight mote brought us to Tomsk, and still finer capital of Western Siberia. Henceforth horses were good and plentiful, and though the roads were such as human beings never saw outside Siberia, we found it easy to keep up for a week on end an average of over 150 miles a day. It was exactly nine weeks since we had left Vladivostok when at length the lights of Tinmen streets appeared in the distance, and we knew that we had at Inst reached the country of railways. The Humem-Ekaterinburg line is. however, but five hundred miles in lensrth, and we had y«t to sledge some six or seven hundred miles, principally over the waters of the Volga, before reaching Nijni Novgorod, the terminus of the Moscow Railway. During tho nine weeks since leaving the Pacifio wo had sledged over more than four thousand six hundred miles of snow and ice, and had used nearly a thousand horses, changing at upwards of three hundred stations ; and if at times we felt that the interesting: features of the journey had hardly been sufficient to fully compensate us for its monotony and fatigue, at least we had the satisfaction of reflecting that we bad accomplished a feat in which scarcely a Blntrle living Englishman had preceded us.—Lionel F.Gowing, iu the Graphic