Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/152

130 or once in two years, through all the principal villages of the Ishím ókrug, or district. Special services in its honor were held in the village churches, and hundreds of peasants accompanied it as it was borne with solemn pomp and ceremony from place to place. It had been on such a tour when we saw it, and was on its way back to the church in Ishím, where it belonged, and our driver had stated the fact in the simplest and most direct way when he said, "The Mother of God is coming home."

Rain fell at intervals throughout the day Thursday, but we pushed on over a muddy steppe road in the direction of Tiukalínsk, changing horses at the post stations of Borófskaya, Tushnalóbova, Abátskaya, and Kamishénka, and stopping for the night at a peasant's house in the village of Orlóva. In the sixty hours which had elapsed since our departure from Tiumén we had traveled 280 miles, with only four hours of sleep, and we were so much exhausted that we could not go any farther without rest. The weather during the night finally cleared up, and when we resumed our journey on the following morning the sun was shining brightly in an almost unclouded sky, and the air was fresh, invigorating, and filled with fragrant odors.

Although the road continued bad, the country as we proceeded southward and eastward steadily improved in appearance, and before noon we were riding across a beautiful, fertile, and partly cultivated prairie, which extended in every direction as far as the eye could reach, with nothing to break the horizon line except an occasional clump of small birch-trees or a dark-green thicket of willow and alder bushes. The steppe was bright with flowers, and here and there appeared extensive tracts of black, newly plowed land, or vast fields of waving grain, which showed that the country was inhabited; but there was not a fence, nor a barn, nor a house to be seen in any direction, and I could not help wondering where the village was to which these cultivated fields belonged. My curiosity was soon to be