Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/77

 Rh gateway opened into a courtyard where the live stock were kept. A stream generally runs behind the village, and the manure from the yards is pitched in heaps along its banks, being carried away each year by the spring floods. Inside we always found the houses neat and clean. There is a large room with a brick stove, taking up perhaps a quarter of the room. In this the family eat, live and sleep, some on the stove, and some on the floor, while a separate small room is kept and reserved for visitors or others who are not members of the family. The rooms are whitewashed, and each member of the family has a steam bath every week, in a hut kept for the purpose outside. The notion that the Russian peasant is habitually dirty is most mistaken. Here, at all events, the average Siberian peasant's house could compete with the best cottages in rural England. The temperature of the rooms is generally rather a trial to such as are not used to extreme cold outside, and sealed windows with a stove inside.

The peasants themselves are pleasant, childlike people, quiet and meditative, but always ready to give or receive information from a stranger if they are well treated. In fact they are like all peasants throughout the world that I have ever met. I have never yet seen any among the white races of mankind that differ very much below the surface.

Continuing our journey we found that fifty miles south of the railway the Chulim River makes a great bend, following the sweep of a long ridge of high land, which is covered with "taiga" or open forest. Across this we had to make our way through snow-drifts and forest tracks. It is one of the outlying ridges of the Kuznetsk Ala Tan, which is itself a