Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/30

 6 the Tartar and Slav colonies lie side by side and indeed in the same village are often intermingled. A mixed village always has its Greek church and its Tartar mosque, one at each end, as if both were indispensable institutions in the life of the little community. Russian and Tartar have settled down together, but the relics of the old tribal distinction, based upon religion, remain. Religion, however, is not a barrier in everyday life between the Tartar and the Russian. Politically these mixed Tartar-Slav communes of East European Russia are one, and the village elects Tartar or Russian elders according to their personal merits without any religious bias; for bigotry there is none. There are no "Orange lodges," no memories of a battle of the Boyne among these peaceful peasants of Eastern Russia.

Now the train begins to head north-east to Ufa and the steppe-like country continues all the way, showing less and less cultivation and more unoccupied spaces, as we go along. Ufa, a Russian provincial town, is the last to the west of the Ural Mountains. The passage of the Urals, which begins some five or six hours after leaving Ufa, has little romance about it. This geographical dividing-line is in its extremity, where the railway crosses it, a range of low rocky downs. It is the natural division between the low plains of Perm and Ufa on the west and those black earth steppes on its east, which stretch uninterruptedly across Western Siberia for nearly 1200 miles to the mountains and plateaus comprising the Altai uplift.

Siberia does not begin till the Government of Perm has been traversed, and this territory stretches