Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/212

190 rows upon benches in the shade of the houses, talking, flirting, and eating melon seeds, or, after the sun had gone down, danced in the streets to the music of fiddles and triangular guitars.

The farther we went up the Írtish the hotter became the weather and the more barren the steppe, until it was easy to imagine that we were in an Arabian or a north African desert. The thermometer ranged day after day from 90° to 103° in the shade; the atmosphere was suffocating; every