Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/378

356 made. No matter whether it is in Western Siberia or in Eastern Siberia, whether black bread costs two kopéks a pound or seven kopéks a pound, the exile receives neither more nor less than ten kopéks a day. The result of this is that in Western Siberia he generally has enough food to sustain his strength, while in Eastern Siberia, and particularly in the Trans-Baikál, he often suffers from hunger.

We passed the town of Áchinsk on Tuesday, September 1st, and entered upon the most difficult and exhausting part of our journey. The country suddenly became wilder and more mountainous in its character; the road, for a distance of sixty or seventy miles, ran across a series of high wooded ridges, separated one from another by swampy ravines; rain fell almost incessantly; and it was all that five powerful horses could do to drag our heavy tárantás up the steep hills and through the abysses of tenacious semi-liquid clay in the intervening valleys. Even where the road was comparatively hard, it had been cut into deep ruts and hollows by thousands of obózes, or freight wagons; the attempts that had been made here and there to improve it by throwing tree-trunks helter-skelter into the sloughs and quagmires had only rendered it worse; and the swaying, banging, and plunging of the tárantás were something frightful. An American stage-coach would have gone to pieces on such a road before it had made a single station. In the course of the first night after leaving Áchinsk, I was thrown violently against the sides or the roof of our tárantás at least three or four hundred times. This incessant jolting, added to sleeplessness and fatigue, brought on a racking headache; I was in a shiver most of the night from cold and lack of nourishing food; and when we reached the station of Ibrúlskaya early Wednesday morning, after having made in twenty hours and with four changes of horses a distance of only fifty miles, I felt as if I had been beaten from head to foot with a club and left for dead. Mr. Frost was sick, and had had three severe chills in the night, and he