Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/47

 Rh note that I saw nothing from England, whose business men at present have been too timid in this land, where no one speaks English, to cultivate a trade which Germans, Americans and Swedes are capturing wholesale. On the banks stood groups of fur-clad men discussing the prospects of the breaking of the ice. Some of them were fur traders bound for Turukhansk and the far northern territories bordering the Arctic Sea; some were gold washers and prospectors for the Yenisei district; some were wool and live-stock traders bound for Mongolia or the Upper Yenisei basin. Among them was a yellow-skinned, slit-eyed man, dressed in Russian furs and top boots. He was a Russified Tartar, and his presence there gave the group an Asiatic character.

A little lower down the bank was a timber-yard, where rough boards had been hand-sawn out of great logs. Inquiries which I made from a hairy old Siberian, who turned out to be the "Hosyain," or the "boss," elicited the fact that these great planks, two foot wide and four inches thick, were being sold at what would correspond to the ridiculous price of one penny per cubic foot. I then realized how true it is that the value of an article depends not so much upon what it is, as upon where it is. The same articles in England would be twelve times that value.

That afternoon, in one of the restaurants, I met one person who indicated to my mind that, primitive though it seemed, Krasnoyarsk was not without a progressive element. He was a Russian gentleman, with whom I came in contact quite accidentally. He was managing a gold-dredging enterprise somewhere in the north, and his knowledge of all that was going on in the commercial circles of Central