Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/31

 Rh across the Ural mountains, including a considerable tract of country to the east of that range in the watershed of the Tobol River. My impressions of the Urals at five o'clock in the morning from the observation car of the train were the same as those which I experienced when I travelled through the forest country of Northern Sweden, where the ground is rocky and undulating and covered with forest of medium growth. It is as if a strip of this country from North-Western Europe was planted down across the steppes of Eastern Russia.

Soon after the hills are left behind, the railway plunges into the steppes bordering Western Siberia and reaches the town of Chelyabinsk, which is geographically in Siberia, but administratively still in old Russia. Chelyabinsk is becoming an immigrant centre for the eastern part of the Perm Government, and the bonded warehouses of the Russian Imperial Customs give it importance as a distributing centre for commerce from the Far East and from European Russia.

For the next hundred miles eastwards little cultivation is seen. The country is an endless steppe with vegetation indicative of dry conditions, and the only cultivation or sign of human life is seen in patches near the stations. It looks as if the whole country, which is now only a grazing ranch, might be supporting an immense agricultural population. One hundred and eighty miles from Chelyabinsk we reach the town of Kurgan, the first town of importance in Siberia. Here we see greater signs of Russian colonization. Villages of recently arrived immigrants with clean new log-houses, covered with sheet-iron, painted red, appear as a striking contrast to the old