Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/72

42 there. The only place in Asia where Europeans might profitably settle, in his opinion, was Southern Siberia, where there is a European white population with a uniform standard of living, so that all can compete on more or less equal terms. This interested me not a little, especially in connexion with what I heard and saw later in Mongolia.

We set out from Achinsk one April afternoon with two tarantasses and three baggage carts. The tarantasses in this part of Siberia are carts with wicker framework, not unlike open baskets on four wheels, in which two people can just squat or lie down. We said good-bye to the railway, which we were not destined to see again for many months, and crawled southward, bumping over half-frozen ruts and staggering over half-melted snow and black, slimy mud. The so-called post road, which was only a much-used track, led across undulating country covered with open forest of birch, spruce, and Siberian and Scotch pine, called by the Siberians the "taiga."

We passed many places where clearings had been made in the hollows of little valleys, and here the Government surveyors had been at work setting out plots of land for new immigrants who were to arrive from old Russia that summer. Several of these new-comers were already there and had begun constructing their houses, preparatory to ploughing up a bit of land as soon as the snow melted. These immigrants had received from the Government Immigration Bureau 200 roubles in cash and enough seed corn to sow ten acres. Loans of this description are always repayable without interest, in instalments extending over thirty years, beginning