Dows rue Sitka axp Auun Rivers.
So it was at Stroitinsk, exactly 4,055 milos east of Moscow that I bade good-bye to the twin-thread of steel, winding over hill and plain, called the Groat Siberian Railway.
All along I had inquired whether at Streitinsk I would find a steamer to carry mo down to the Amur that fringes Manchuria. Ignorance was everywhere. Ihere were steamers but whether they ran once a day or once a month—a shrug of the shoulders!
Job's comforters pointed out there had been comparatively little rain for weeks and the Shilka would be nothing more than a sandy gully.
When I got into Trans-Baikalia I was certain there must be a post connection and imagined the railway officials could tell me, No. They knew nothing. Also they were indifferent. Fancy the station master at King's Cross not knowing how long was the journey from London to Edinburgh. Yot at Irkutsk the chief of the railway could not say to a dav how long it took the train to reach Streitinsk. May be three days; possibly four- he didn't think it could be more than five.
"Letters for Viadivostock, China, and Japan are going by my train; how are they taken on from Streitinsk?" I asked.
"By water, I suppose," but don't know: I have never been there."
Tt was not till I reached Streitinsk itself that I learnt a post boat went down stream once every fire days. As luc's would have a boat had gone the day before. So Thad four days to wait in this dreary, bedraggled little town that stands like an ugly grey wart on a beautiful hillside.
Let ma try to describe Streitinsk. Alonz the banks of the Shilka. stretch a hiccledv-pigeledy lot of shanties all unpainted. all with little dirty windows and all with a yard that is more than ankle deep in cattle filth. There is usually a mide fence, but broken. The cows, poor thin brutes and the pigs, ridge backed, flabby and bristled, wander anywhere. On the roadway—which happens, because the weather is fine, to be a six-inch layer of dust instead of a foot-deep mass of slush which it would become if it rained—come campering a herd of Siberian ponies. You get to one side and shut your eyes while they skelter by. You hear strange yells. Slightly raising your eyelids you see, as in 2 fog, tawny-jowled Tartars with huge sheepskin hats about their ears, the wool inside, and with great sheepskin coats, the wool also inside, riding sorry nags and whipping up the straggling ponies with long biting thongs.
At one Spot, behind the string of shanties isa square. There are big, blue painted sign-boards with names on them and now and then a board on which is painted, badly, a fur coat, or a plough, or a kettle, or a cabbage, or a lump of meat, and inside you know you find clothing or agricultural implements or food.
You see one or two dirty moujiks slouching along, or a creaking bullock cart. The place seems deserted. But every now and then your attention is caught by a lady hurrying about in all the finery of Europe. Round the corner spins a Cossack officer—in white linen jacket but distinguishable by the yellow band round his cap and the broad yellow stripe down his trousers—actually riding a bicycle!
Over the place indeed hangs a filthy eastern slothfulness rent, every now and then, with evidence of western ideas. The shops, so dingy from outside, surprise you when once inside. They are big. full of commodities, generally have plenty of attendants, and not infrequently many purchasers, chiefly, judging by their dress, from the far interior. These shops in so wretched a place amaze you until you remember that Streitinsk, like all other towns in Russia with railways and water communication, is the centre of trade for many hundreds of miles round.
'A smile comes to your lips as you noric how the reckoning is done,—with one of those little appliances of coloured beads on wires with which the infant mind at home is beguiled into the first principles of arithmetic ey learning that two blue and two yellow beads count four. The Russian cannot count without this instrument. Mental arithmetic is beyond him. You buy something for sixty kopecks and present a rouble in payment. Ho must clatter his beads backwards and forwards before discovering that the change is forty kopecks.
Siberia is truly the land of distances. I met a man on the train who told me ho had found much advantage since the railway ran near his home. Ho lived fifty miles from the nearest station! With always immense distances to cover the Siberian has not yet realised the advantages of anything being near. I have already given one reason the stations on the Trans-Siberian railway are so far from towns—the insufficiency of the bribes to the engineers to place them nearer—but another reason is that the Siberian doesn't appreciate the use of a station being only two miles off and not ten. To ce ton miles takes longer time than to go two. But what is time? Nothing! The eastern trait in his nature makes him heedless of time. The Britisher who wants something done now and not next week ho regards as a foolish person who gives himself a lot of trouble. The post office at Streitinsk might be in the main square approximately in the middle of the town. It isn't. It is two miles away up the river bank.
Each day in Streitinsk I had a walk throuch the place. I confess its sordidness weighed heavily. One was indeed right out of the world. There were no news-pavers. No news ever comes here. I felt T did not possess sufficient courage to fight against the inertia of the place. There was just the petty community, the trading, the tea drinking, the eating, the sleeping all the year round—and nothing
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.