Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/178

156 closed, and whose steep, pyramidal roofs loomed high and black in the first gray light of dawn. The street was full of soft, drifted sand, in which the hoofs of our horses fell noiselessly, and through which our tárantás moved with as little jar as if it were a gondola floating along a watery street in Venice.

There was something strangely weird and impressive in this noiseless night ride through the heart of a ghostly and apparently deserted city, in the streets of which were the drifted sands of the desert, and where there was not a sound to indicate the presence of