Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/97

Rh on this sight, I thought of the imposing ceremony that I had witnessed at the great Cathedral of Isaaki in St Petersburg a few weeks before; here it was again, though with less pomp and circumstance, in these far-off lands. All over the vast Russian Empire, in many thousands of places, from the Gulf of Finland to the Sea of Okhotsk, this ceremony was being performed at that very hour. Was it not the religion, which the Slavs inherited from the Eastern Empire of Christian Rome on the Bosphorus, that bound them and made them under the guidance of their autocrats the colossal (if unwieldy) national and political entity they have become?

When the religious functions were at last over we were able to set to work at some of our business. The chief means of transport in Siberia is horses, and as we intended crossing the Russo-Chinese frontier, and visiting Mongolia, it was necessary to supply ourselves with a caravan. Ponies from Western and Central Siberia are not so good as those from the Eastern and Trans-Baikal districts, nor are they so hardy as the little ponies from the Mongolian plateau across the frontier to the south. These horses from the Minusinsk country were of the mongrel type, mixed doubtless with all sorts of Tartar, native Siberian and Mongolian breeds, but being chiefly used in the open steppes were not first rate in rough and forest country. However, as it turned out, they were most of them hardy compared with anything in Western Europe, and could endure long stretches without food.

One morning we strolled down to the market-square and found a weekly bazaar going on. Local fairs and markets in these more outlying and isolated