THE REAL SIBERIA
John Foster Fraser
From Tomsk to Irkutsk - An Unromantic Route - I am Shadowed - My Revenge - Russian Tea - A Land of Pines - The Railway Workmen - Good-Conduct Convicts - The Trans-Siberian Time Table
FROM Tomsk, the present capital of Siberia, to Irkutsk, the future capital, and already called the Paris of Siberia, took three and a half days.
Had I been on the search for adventure I could not have sought, the wide world through, a more unromantic route. We had long bidden good-bye to the prairies, and now ran through a region of forest and heaving countryside, with many rivers to cross, and sighted at last, like a grey-purple cloud humped on the horizon, the gaunt, snow-creviced mountains that wall China.
I have heard this railway journey across Siberia dubbed uninteresting. Maybe it is; but, being of simple tastes, I ceased to find it so.
The weather was as it should be. There was a nip of frost in the early mornings, so that breath puffed hoary. The middle of the day was sunshiny, the sky as blue as Irish eyes, and never a woof of cloud to be seen. There was the fragrance of pine in the air. Then the fall of evening was so still, so impressive; the west ribbed with fire and topped with palest green, the dome of heaven deep azure, and the east, coming, up like a shroud, recalling other days in far Western America.
When I got back from Tomsk to Taiga the junction on the main line, I had a wait of four hours before the post train from Moscow went on.
The stretch of platform in front of the grey-walled, green-roofed station buildings was full of emigrants. They had their bundles thrown into heaps, and they squatted on the ground and used the bundles as back-rests. Maybe my eyes were getting used to the sight of hulking men in red shirts and heavy, long-legged boots and rough sheepskin caps, but these did not look quite so brutal as those I saw at Moscow. They lay about, and slept in ungraceful attitudes. Their wives, with the patience of cows on their plain faces, sat in groups talking quietly and chewing sunflower seeds and spitting out the shells, or fetching hot water from the ever-bubbling public samovar to make tea. In and about them moved a wiry, kindly-faced man, selling cheap copies of the Scriptures.
The children, and there were hundreds of them, were bare-footed, ragged-breeked little savages, supremely happy.
Half-a-dozen boys made themselves into an imaginary train by hitching with one hand to each other's shirt-tail, the other hand playing the part of imaginary wheel, and so went shou-shouing up and down the platform.
There were two lads I particularly noticed. At every station where we halted they jumped out and filled their pockets with stones. The intervals between the stations were occupied with pelting the telegraph poles from the carriage window. The animal called Boy is the same in all climes.
There were many Tartars, ungainly-limbed, sallow-checked, beady-eyed Mongols, in astrakhan hats and padded, quilted frock-coats and short trousers and flip-flapping slippers. They sat on their beds, and looked at each other slothfully and blinkingly.
Then there were the ordinary middle-class Russians, who might have been stodgy Teutons for all the distinction there was in costume.
Colour was given by the men in uniform, the white jackets and the blue trousers and gold decorations and clanging spurs. Every man in Government employ, be he soldier or ticket-collector, wears uniform,and half the men above the peasant class seemed to be officials of some kind.
It was at Taiga I became conscious of the fact I was being watched. I felt the knowledge of the fact creep in somewhere at the back of my neck. I turned hurriedly and caught the departing side-glance of a short, inquisitive-eyed and tufty-bearded gentleman. I knew he was watching me. Maybe he belonged to that mysterious body, the Russian Secret Police. Maybe he thought I was a Soho-Nihilist - though I hope there was nothing suggestive of Soho in my attire, save my old knockabout slouch hat.
I took a stroll to the far end of the platform. He followed and pretended not to be looking when I turned, but when I again passed him I could feel his gaze, like a Rontgen-ray, go into the side of my head.
When the Moscow-Irkutsk post train arrived I hunted out a carriage and prepared to make myself comfortable for four nights. Suddenly the door was jerked open, and as suddenly jerked shut again. It was my little spy. I heard whispering in the next compartment, and when I went into the corridor my spy - I got to regard him as my own particular property after three days - and the conductor came and stared.
Whenever I left my carriage he left his. I couldn't go into the buffet and have a cup of soup without my spy sitting opposite me. If I wandered for ten minutes into the woods to take a photograph, or climbed a bank to get a snapshot of the train, he was near.
Truly, as a spy, he played the game badly. It was all too patent. If I could have really acted suspiciously I would have done so, just to fool him to the top of his bent. All I could think of was to look at embankments, simulating wisdom, as though calculating how much dynamite it would need to blow them into the air, or walk along the line and inspect the rails, as though I had some deep design in mind. But I maintained an air of sublime ignorance that he was on the earth.
It was the evening before we reached Irkutsk, and the train was halting for half-an-hour, when, all at once, there was a row next door. I sprang into the corridor to see.
There were the railway officials ignominiously throwing my spy and his belongings out. The inquisitive little fellow had never seen a foreigner before, and he was travelling first-class with a second-class ticket. He was very petulant at this indignity of ejection. He fretted and fumed. But "out you go and get into a back carriage," was the attitude of the officials. As he picked up his bedding and kettle he looked at me. I could not resist the temptation to give him two broad, slow British winks and then laugh. It was the only revenge I had.
A railway journey such as this I was embarked upon was much like a voyage aboard ship. The passengers struck up acquaintance, and a kind of family feeling prevailed. Like the rest, I jumped from the train in the fresh of the early morning - and how crisp and blood-tingling is the welcome of the young day in Siberia - and ran with my little kettle to the big bubbling samovar that somebody had got ready, and joined the good-natured struggle for hot water.
It was the same each morning. Most of us were sleepy-eyed and uncombed. There were peasant women with baskets, in which were great slabs of that morning's bread, brown and spongy and a little sour, which I fancied. For a penny I got a hunk. The first-class and second-class folk, being more "swagger" than the third-class and fourth-class people - the first and second men wear their shirts tucked in their trousers, and the third and fourth wear theirs outside - often bought fransoozki kleb, which, you understand, means French bread. But for this twopence must be paid. From another old peasant woman I got a pat of butter, cool and delicious, for twopence, and for fourpence I secured a plate of blackberries.
Then back to my carriage, where I have tea and sugar - my packet of tea burst one night and got mixed up with pyjamas, cigars, and shaving tackle - and I squat on the floor and make the most delicious tea in the world.
There is something constitutionally wrong with a man who doesn't like Russian tea - rather weak, with a little lump of sugar and a little slice of lemon, and no milk - and drunk from a tumbler. I - who for several days had no spoon, and not knowing the Russian for "spoon" found a paper-knife an excellent substitute - could write an epic on Russian tea drinking.
Then with the window wide open, while the train rolls slowly through the forest, the engine bellowing with long hollow echoes like a steamer crawling its way up the Mersey in a fog, I drink glasses of tea, many of thein, until I must be "wisibly swellin'," and munch my new bread and new butter, and cat my berries with the dew still upon them. Then a pipe, and a long look upon the never-ending regiments of tree, tall, slim, silver-barked.
For fifty yards or so each side the line was a clearing, and the trunks of the slain stuck up like black knuckles in miles, miles, miles of gorgeous undergrowth. It was as though there was a carpet of virginia creeper as blood-red as the wine of Capri, but with a clear yellow dash now and then, like Moselle, to bring out the brilliance, and with the drab velvety dust of the line between.
Later on we were among pines, nothing but pines, the ground sprinkled with sunlight, but the distances dark as caverns. Here, in the clearing, a fresh crop of firs was springing up, with young limbs as green as a shallow sea, I thought of the millions and millions of Christmas trees they would make.
The fact of being in Siberia often slipped away from my mind. When you go from London to Bournemouth the run through the New Forest does not make you think of Siberia. Yet we kept going all day, all night, several days and nights, through just such a country. It was the continuity of it, the seeming endlessness of it, that brought one with a jerk to realise something of its length.
Though this Trans-Siberian track is a wonder of the world, all built within ten years, the idea of some such a way has filtered through the minds of men for a generation or more. It is interesting that it was an English engineer, with the unkind name of Dull, who, away back in the fifties, thought of a horse railway from Nijni-Novgorod to some port on the Pacific. As there were some four million horses in Siberia, the idea was not a bad one. The Russian Government approved of the plan, and invited estimates of cost. But not a single estimate was sent in, and so Dull's scheme passed to the limbo of might-have-been. Then with the growth of railways in Europe came other Siberian plans, to throw a railway over the Ural mountains to the mining regions. After years of rejection and re-consideration such a line was made. Then other lines were made, chiefly to get into touch with the trading centres in Siberia on the banks of the rivers. And no country in the world has such navigable rivers as Siberia. Look at a fair-sized map, and you will see there is a cobweb of them - the Obi, the Yenisei, the Lena, the Amur, with a hundred tributaries. But like a vision - as we sometimes think it will be possible some day to go to America by airship - kept floating before the brains of engineers the idea of one continuous line from Moscow to the Pacific. Then one morning came the order from the Czar of All the Russias, "Let it be done."
And it was done. And I was now riding over it in as comfortable a carriage as I want anywhere.
The train was certainly slow, so slow and easy that it was possible to shave even when at its topmost express speed of fifteen miles an hour.
The cuttings were few and the banks few. The route of least resistance was followed, and if there were any hump of ground in the way the line went round it rather than through. The result was that the track, for the most part, was just a foot of earth shovelled up from either side. The sleepers or ties were thrown on this, and the rails clamped.
There could not be much speed on a way like this. Now and then the coaches side-rolled in an uncomfortable manner, showing there had been unevenness in the metal-laying. But this was occasionally. As a rule the train was steady, and it was possible to sleep the night through without a single awakening.
Already it has been discovered that the track has not been sufficiently ballasted, and that the rails are altogether too light for the traffic, which is becoming heavy. So, now, for long stretches, the line is being freshly ballasted and relaid. I saw thousands of workmen, broad built, but not tall, with dark, heavily bearded countenances, men of sturdiness. They are all rough-clad. They are hundreds of miles from any town. They are confined to this little open streak, slicing like a knife through the pines.
They stood aside, and rubbing with hairy arms the sweat from their brow, gave a good-natured nod to anybody with head pushed out of the window. They had temporary huts, and yet hardly huts, for they were often nothing more than a slanting roof made of sleepers, beneath which they could crawl and sleep.
I often looked out in the dawn and saw them taking their first meal of tea and brown bread. I never saw them take anything else at any other meal. They lived on tea and brown bread, and didn't look weaklings. Once, or, at the outside, twice a week they had beef at a meal. Their wages were 10d. a day.
It was always a striking scene as darkness came, and when the engine fires threw long shafts of light up to the sky and among the black foliage, to pass a camp of these men by the forest side, their kettles boiling over a heap of crackling twigs, and they themselves lounging on the ground, dead-tired men, and the fire-light playing on their dark Slavonic countenances.
All along the line, for thousands of miles, are good-conduct convicts, who spend their lives in little huts, always a verst apart, and signal with green flags that the road is clear. Many of them looked far above the railway labourers in intelligence. But on the faces of them all was an abiding sadness born of the loneliness of the life they lead, with never the shadow of hope for the future.
At night it is a green lamp that is used. Many an hour towards midnight I stood on the gangway between the carriages and ticked off the green lights as we spun along. Away down the black avenue would appear a tiny green speck. As the carriages rumbled over the metals it would get bigger. Just distinguishable in the darkness was the figure of a man holding the lamp high up. He and his light would be lost the instant it was passed. But when all the train had gone by he turned and showed the light the other way. I instinctively turned and looked ahead again. And yonder in the distance was another tiny green speck.
Just in itself there is nothing much in such a simple signal It is, however, when you think there are thousands of these men, and that a signal started to-day at Moscow runs for eleven days until it is broken on the banks of Lake Baikal, beyond Irkutsk, that the twinkling green lights get a peculiar interest.
There is one thing to be said for the Trans-Siberian Railway - that hardly ever does a train arrive, behind time. Indeed, I have known the train run into a station twenty minutes before time, and as a rule it is five minutes in advance.
At first you find the time-table a Chinese problem. It took me a whole morning to grasp it. First you find your watch doesn't tally with the obvious time of day, and when you look at the station clock that clock is unmistakably hours behind. You see the train is down to arrive at a particular place at a particular time, say half-past seven; but you know it is actually mid-day. There is confusion, which is due to the line running continuously towards the sun.
To keep things in order, however, the railway authorities ignore the sun, and keep Petersburg time. So in Eastern Siberia, when the sun is setting, the station clock will indicate lunch time. Therefore, first of all, the time-table shows Petersburg time. But as every station is about ten miles from the town it is supposed to serve, intending passengers cannot be expected to make a special trip to find railway time. Accordingly, on the time-table is printed in red the local time as well. You personally want local sun time, and, when you have mastered the time-table so far, you set your watch in the morning by the red figures. But when you glance at your watch towards evening you find something wrong, that your watch is quite ten minutes behind local time. You marvel, think your watch has got out of repair, and what a nuisance this is in a country like Siberia. Suddenly, however, you condemn yourself as a dunderheaded idiot for not understanding before that local time is continuously changing.
It is endless worry trying to keep pace. I didn't try. Each morning I just put my watch ten minutes ahead of the local time, and was content with its being correct, there or thereabouts, for the rest of the day.
As the clanging of the station bell gave plenty of warning when the train proposed to go on, the halts were not to be ignored. It was possible to have a pleasant walk. Half the train-load turned out, and, while elders just sauntered about, the younger ones pushed among the undergrowth or dived into the forest, and came back with berries or tangles of bright red creeper. There was a young fellow and his wife travelling in the same corridor car as myself. They were very young, and he was going east to make his fortune. Always when the train stopped they set off hand-in-hand to the woods, and came running back, panting, at the last clang of the bell. But the girl had a bunch of pretty wild flowers. Their carriage must have been a perfect bower.
A fine bridge spans the Yenisei River near Krasnayarsk, a town beyond the great forest and lying in a plain encircled with hills - really a pretty place. A cathedral of swelling proportions gives dignity to it, It cost £70,000, and was presented by a fortunate gold-finder. The same gold-finder gave Krasnayarsk beautiful public gardens, considered the finest in Siberia, though that does not mean much. There is also a museum presented by a rich merchant.
Indeed, in all the great towns of Siberia the men who have amassed wealth - many of them sons of convicts, absolutely ignorant of the outer world, often leading a vicious life - vie with one another in beautifying their native place. The favourite thing is to build a church.
Chapter VIII: The Paris of Siberia
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