Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/190

 142 frontier where Siberia and Mongolia meet, and on the plateau steppes of the Kemchik, a tributary of the Upper Yenisei, I spent some days in a frontier wool-trading centre. Here I saw the type of Siberian frontiersman to whom I have referred above. The little trading settlement was the first that I had seen since leaving the last Siberian village north of the Sayansk Mountains. Here in an open valley steppe through which a broad, rapid river flowed, surrounded by sparsely timbered hills, I came upon a collection of log-houses, mud huts and felt tents, wherein lived a cosmopolitan crowd of every conceivable race that the adjacent parts of Siberia and Mongolia seem capable of producing. In this no-man's land, which is not administered directly by any political authority, the scum of human society seemed to have drifted in from Siberia on the north and Mongolia on the south. Here one could see the native Tartars of the district, a branch of the Altaians, with high cheek-bones and black slit eyes, betokening no small admixture of Turkish and even Mongol blood. Their encampments of round felt tents or yurts lay scattered indiscriminately about the outskirts of the settlements, surrounded by piles of garbage, where pariah dogs prowled and snarled, and where the native children with diseased skins and running sores grovelled and rolled. They were the true native element of the place, collected round a trading centre where they could exchange their wool and skins. Judging from their appearance, however, their partial absence of clothes, and the filth and disease among them, they appeared to represent the poorest and most miserable of a not very flourishing community. In fact all those natives who could do so