Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/148

126 Our driver urged four powerful horses over it at break-neck speed, and we were so jounced, jolted, and shaken that it was utterly impossible to get any sleep, and difficult enough merely to keep our seats in the vehicle. Early in the morning, sleepy, jaded, and exhausted, we reached the village of Nóvo Zaímskaya, entered the little log-house of our driver's "friend," threw ourselves on the bare floor, where half a dozen members of the friend's family were already lying, and for two or three hours lost consciousness of our aching spinal columns in the heavy, dreamless slumber of physical exhaustion.

Throughout the next day and the following night we traveled, without rest, and of course without sleep, over a terribly bad steppe road, and at six o'clock Thursday morning arrived in a pelting rain-storm at the circuit town of Ishím. No one who has not experienced it can fully realize the actual physical suffering that is involved in posting night and day at high speed over bad Siberian roads. We made the 200 miles between Tiumén and Ishím in about thirty-five hours of actual travel, with only four hours of sleep, and were so jolted and shaken that every bone in our bodies ached, and it was with difficulty that we could climb into and out of our mud-bespattered tárantás at the post stations.

It had been our intention to make a short stop at Ishím, but the bad weather discouraged us, and, after drinking tea at a peasant's house on the bank of the Ishím River, we resumed our journey. As we rode out of the town through a thin forest of birch-trees, we began to notice large numbers of men, women, and children plodding along on foot through the mud in the same direction that we were going. Most of them were common muzhíks with trousers inside their boots and shirt-flaps outside their trousers, or sunburned peasant women in red and blue gowns, with white kerchiefs over their heads; but there were also a few pedestrians in the conventional dress of the civilized world, who manifestly belonged to the higher classes, and who even carried umbrellas.