Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/32

 8 picturesque mud-walled and straw-thatched cottages of East European Russia. This is some of the richest land of all Western Siberia, being covered with black earth well adapted for cereal and dairy produce and capable of infinite development. It was not difficult to see that this would be some day the Canada of Russia, even if it was not so already.

The steppes in the neighbourhood of Kurgan were our first sight of Siberia. There was nothing to indicate the fact except the railway time-table, from which we learnt that we were now in the administrative area of the Tobolsk Government. Entering the western prairies of Canada from the eastern provinces one has just the same experience as here. In both cases, as one proceeds, one observes that the country becomes gradually less and less developed and the population more and more scanty.

The Urals are a purely geographical and political boundary between European Russia and Siberia, and the same physical and climatical conditions prevail on either side. Even the human element, although less in quantity on the eastern side of the hills, is much the same in quality, judging by what one sees on the railway stations. Hairy Russian peasants clad in fur caps and sheepskins hang listlessly about the wayside stations, waiting perhaps a whole day for a train, for time is never of importance in the East. Bands of immigrants from an eastward-bound train, waiting perhaps for hours at one place, squat about in groups all over the station drinking cups of tea and smoking. A freight train lumbers casually back towards Europe, with live stock, wool and hides on board; and judging by its rate of progress it might take a fortnight to arrive there.