Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/210



BRIDLE PATHS OF THE ALTÁI

N Saturday, July 18th, after having inspected the city prison, obtained as much information as possible concerning the exile system, and made farewell calls upon our friends, we provided ourselves with a new padarózhnaya and left Semipalátinsk with three post-horses for the mountains of the Altái. The wild alpine region that we hoped to explore lies along the frontier of Mongolia, about 350 miles east of Semipalátinsk and nearly 600 miles due south from Tomsk. The German travelers Finsch and Brehin went to the edge of it in 1876, but the high snowy peaks of the Katúnski and Chúiski Alps, east of the Altái Station, had never been seen by a foreigner, and had been visited by very few Russians.

For nearly two hundred versts, after leaving Semipalátinsk, we rode up the right bank of the Írtish, through a great rolling steppe of dry, yellowish grass. Here and there, where this steppe was irrigated by small streams running into the Írtish, it supported a luxuriant vegetation, the little transverse valleys being filled with wild roses, hollyhocks, goldenrod, wild currant and gooseberry bushes, and splendid spikes, five feet in height, of dark-blue aconite; but in most places the great plain was sun-scorched and bare. The Cossack villages through which we passed did not differ materially from those between Semipalátinsk and Omsk, except that their log houses were newer and in better repair, and their inhabitants seemed to be wealthier and more