Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/45

Rh date. In general appearance it was not unlike the outskirts of a mining town in North-East Canada that I remembered visiting some years before.

The hotels are like great two-storeyed barns, one of which we selected after a verbal conflict with the owner about the value of his rooms. One can generally obtain a room for a couple of roubles a night in a tolerable state of cleanliness, even in these wilder parts of Russia, but in this case we soon discovered that as far as back premises and so-called lavatories were concerned, the less we saw of them the better. For my part I decided, on inspection, to perform my morning and evening toilets in the Yenisei River, about half-a-mile away on the outskirts of the town.

One can generally get a fair idea of certain aspects of human life in a town like Krasnoyarsk by spending a few hours a day in one of the most frequented restaurants. As a boy I had always thought of Siberia as a country inhabited by fur-clad hunters, dwelling for months in snowed-up log-houses, or by exiles chained to barrows in the galleries of the gold mines till they fell dead of cold and exhaustion. These impressions received a rude shock when I beheld the type of humanity in the restaurant under our hotel, which styled itself "The Pride of Old Russia." Here were commercial travellers from old Russia, selling anything from peppermint lozenges to pianos, sitting chattering in groups over glasses of cognac and vodka; mining prospectors who had returned from up country, and gold washers fresh from the lower reaches of the Yenisei, Jewish fur traders and salt-fish dealers. Those who had been making money at gold dredging or such occupations