Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/375

Rh different sorts and go by many different names; but they all sell vódka, and, to a great extent, they are responsible for the dirty, slovenly, and poverty-stricken appearance of the peasant villages on the great Siberian road. There are thirty rum-shops to every school throughout Western Siberia, and thirty-five rum-shops to every school throughout Eastern Siberia; and in a country where there exists such a disproportion between the facilities for education and the facilities for intoxication, one cannot reasonably expect to find clean, orderly, or prosperous villages.

The graveyards belonging to the Siberian settlements sometimes seemed to me much more remarkable and noteworthy than the settlements themselves. Near one of the villages that we passed in this part of our journey, I noticed a cemetery in which nearly half the graves were marked by jet-black, three-armed, wooden crosses, covered with narrow A-shaped roofs, and surrounded by red, green, blue, and yellow picket-fences. Some of the peculiar black crosses bore the English letters "I. H. S." on one of the arms, while others had painted on them in white the figure of Christ crucified—the legs being made extraordinarily long and thin so as to occupy the whole length of the upright shaft. Anything more remarkable than one of these ghastly white figures, on a black cross, under a gable roof, with a cheerful red, white, and blue picket-fence around it, I could hardly imagine; but it furnished a striking proof that the Russian love for crude color triumphs even over death. I do not remember to have seen bright colors used in a graveyard in any other part of the world or among any other people.

Harvesting was in progress all along the road between Tomsk and Áchinsk, and in many places the whole population, with the exception of the post-station-master and three or four drivers, had gone to the fields. In one village the only inhabitant whom we saw was a flaxen-haired child about five years of age, dressed in a dirty homespun shirt,