Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/168

146 Caspian Sea to the mountains of the Altái, and who make up more than three-fourths of the population of the steppe territories. The aül consisted of only three or four small kibítkas, or circular tents of gray felt, pitched close together at a distance from the road in the midst of the great ocean-like expanse of dry, yellowish grass which stretched away in every direction to the horizon. There was no path leading to or from the encampment, and the little gray tents, standing alone on that boundless plain, seemed to be almost as much isolated, and as far removed from all civilized human interests, as if they were so many frail skin coracles floating in the watery solitude of the Pacific.

It was evident from the commotion caused by our approach that the encampment had not often been visited. The swarthy, half-naked children, who had been playing out on the grass, fled in affright to the shelter of the tents as they saw our tárantás coming towards them across the steppe; women rushed out to take a startled look at us and then disappeared; and even the men, who gathered in a group to meet us, appeared to be surprised and a little alarmed by our visit. A few words in Kírghis, however, from our Cossack driver reassured them, and upon the invitation of an old man in a red-and-yellow skull-cap, who seemed to be the patriarch of the band, we entered one of the kibítkas. It was a circular tent about fifteen feet in diameter and eight feet high, made by covering a dome-shaped framework of smoke-blackened poles with large overlapping sheets of heavy gray felt. The slightly curved rafters which formed the roof radiated like the spokes of a wheel from a large wooden ring in the center of the dome, and were supported around the circumference of the tent by a skeleton wall of wooden lattice-work in which there was a hinged door. The ring in the center of the dome outlined the aperture left for the escape of smoke and the admission of air, and directly under this aperture a fire was smoldering on the ground inside a circle of flat stones, upon which