Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/167

Rh to strengthen a weak frontier line so as to prevent the incursions of hostile or predatory natives, it forcibly colonizes along that line a few hundred or a few thousand families of armed Cossacks. During the last century it formed in this way the "armed line of the Térek," to protect southeastern Russia from the raids of the Caucasian mountaineers, and a similar armed line along the Írtish, to hold in check the Kírghis. The danger that was apprehended from these half-wild tribes long ago passed away, but the descendants of the Cossack colonists still remain in the places to which their parents or their grandparents were transported. They have all the hardy virtues of pioneers and frontiersmen, are ingenious, versatile, and full of resources, and adapt themselves quickly to almost any environment. There are thirty or forty settlements of such Cossacks along the line of the Írtish between Omsk and Semipalátinsk, and as many more between Semipalátinsk and the Altái.

Almost immediately after leaving Omsk we noticed a great change in the appearance of the country. The steppe, which in the province of Tobólsk had been covered either with fresh green grass or with a carpet of flowers, here became more bare and arid, and its vegetation was evidently withering and drying up under the fierce heat of the midsummer sun. Flowers were still abundant in low places along the river, and we crossed now and then wide areas of grass that was still green, but the prevailing color of the high steppe was a sort of old-gold—a color like that of ripe wheat. The clumps of white-stemmed birch trees, that had diversified and given a park-like character to the scenery north of Omsk, became less and less frequent; cultivated fields disappeared altogether, and the steppe assumed more and more the aspect of a Central Asiatic desert.

A few stations beyond Omsk, we saw and visited for the first time an aül [encampment] of the wandering Kírghis, a pastoral tribe of natives who roam with their flocks and herds over the plains of southwestern Siberia from the 10