Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/273

Rh arctic exploring steamer Jeannette. At the time of Dr. Biéli's banishment, his wife, a beautiful young woman, twenty-four or twenty-five years of age, was expecting confinement, and was therefore unable to go to Siberia with him. As soon as possible, however, after the birth of her child, and before she had fully recovered her strength, she left her nursing baby with relatives and started on a journey of more than 6000 miles to join her husband in a village situated north of the arctic circle and near the Asiatic pole of cold. She had not the necessary means to make such a journey by rail, steamer, and post, as Lieutenant Schuetze made it in 1885-86, and was therefore forced to ask permission of the Minister of the Interior to travel with a party of exiles. As far as the city of Tomsk in Western Siberia both political and common-criminal exiles are transported in convict trains or barges. Beyond that point the common criminals walk, and the politicals are carried in telégas, at the rate of about sixty miles a week, stopping in an étape every third day for rest. At this rate of progress Mrs. Biéli would have reached her husband's place of exile only after sixteen months of incessant hardship, privation, and suffering. But she did not reach it. For many weeks her hope, courage, and love sustained her, and enabled her to endure without complaint the jolting, the suffocating dust, the scorching heat, and the cold autumnal rains on the road, the bad food, the plank sleeping-benches, the vermin, and the pestilential air of the étapes; but human endurance has its limits. Three or four months of this unrelieved misery, with constant anxiety about her husband and the baby that, for her husband's sake, she had abandoned in Russia, broke down her health and her spirit. She sank into deep despondency and eventually began to show signs of mental aberration. After passing Krasnoyársk her