Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/35

Rh But everything is just the same as on the west of the Urals. Life is even quieter here, and nobody worries about time; the only difference is that everything seems a bit newer, especially the clean log-houses, and the whole country is less populated and less developed.

It was nightfall before the train reached the Ishim-Irtish steppes bordering the province of Akmolinsk. Dry vegetation began here, and gradually the signs of cultivation began to diminish. Looking south from a place called Petropavlovsk on the Ishim River, where the train halts, one sees an immense expanse stretching southwards to the Kirghiz steppes of the Semiretchensk bordering Russian Turkestan. How Asiatic it all seemed! Dry and open steppe, a clear atmosphere, a feeling of freedom which is so characteristic of the Asiatic steppes and so uncharacteristic of what one imagines of Siberia. Looking from the railway one sees a Kirghiz Tartar, surrounded by his flocks grazing on the undulating steppes, and here and there are marshy hollows and saline lakes surrounded by dense banks of rushes and reeds, the haunt of wild fowl. One imagines how away there towards the south is the great unending plain, and no break between here and the sandy deserts, where the Oxus and Sir Darya are swallowed up in the Aral Sea, where the Kirghiz and the Turcomans roam with their flocks, and around whose oasis the Turkish Usbegs and Persian Tadjics have for centuries made their flowery, leafy gardens. All are now under the care and protection of the great white Tsar. I wondered as the train sped eastward whether after my journeys in Siberia and Western China I should