Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/80

 50 peasants here could get wood from the forest not far distant, and cultivate cereals; but droughts are occasionally severe, and lines of wells have often to be dug to ensure a water-supply. The central and dryer parts of the basin, however, are hardly habitable for Russian peasants. Here cultivation is not possible, and only stock-raising is carried on by natives, whom we saw now for the first time. These were the Abakansk Tartars, relics of the Turko-Finnish races, who live a nomad life upon these steppes.

Travelling now became easy. We trotted briskly and sometimes gallopped over the open steppes. The clear, dry air, and feeling of freedom which the steppes always engenders was most exhilarating after the forests and snows of the previous days. Although it was Siberia still, everything now had an Oriental feeling about it.

We reached the Yenisei that afternoon and during the evening gallopped on to the next village some fifteen miles away. We crossed rolling downs of dry steppe-land, and here and there were collections of tumuli or so-called kurgans, the burial-mounds of the earliest inhabitants of these districts. Around them were upright stones like obelisks; passing by a forest of these in the evening light is a weird sensation to the traveller.

As darkness came on the grass fires, like little glowing lines on the hills beyond, denoted the presence of Russian colonies, where the peasants were burning the grass of the previous year. The glowing lines advanced, retreated, expanded, dwindled and grew again as the wind blew them hither and thither. They acted as the beacon lights which led us on to the next Russian village, where a colony of Siberians