Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/195

 Rh over steppe and through forest. I felt that I had found something at last which indicated European life again. There was the wooden table and chair, the samovar of tea, the baking oven, the baby in the spring cradle suspended from the roof, European clothes, white-skinned faces, and the blue, kindly eyes of a Russian housewife. This class of Siberian frontier trader, at least, had not lost much of his Russian character, and although he was constantly associating with Tartars on terms of equality, he nevertheless retained the material conveniences of Russian peasant life. These Siberian wool traders always bring their wives and families with them, carrying everything by horse caravan. While they are out in the wilds they always look after their personal comfort. Even in the depths of the desert plateaus one can see in the wool traders' huts such articles as jam, biscuits and white bread, luxuries which the natives in their yurts would never see in the whole course of their lives. The food of the native Tartars consists of milk and mutton, and on this, through centuries of custom, they seem to flourish. The Chinaman contents himself with tea and a bowl or two of rice a day, with an occasional delicacy from Central China. But the Siberian must have his cabbage soup, his meat, his dried rusks and his brown bread, and wherever you find him there you will also see some indication of European civilization.

In this little encampment of which I am speaking, all round the Siberian traders' houses and huts, were scattered the felt tents of the Tartar natives. Some of them were on the open steppe, while some nestled inside the little enclosures surrounding the Siberians' houses. Many of these Tartars had become servants