Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/422

400 laces; they are so low that they fill with mire and water and are constantly sticking fast or coming off in mud-holes; and on such a road as that between Áchinsk and Krasnoyársk scores of convicts either remove their shoes and hang them around their necks, or throw them away altogether, and walk for days at a time with bare feet, through mud whose temperature is little above the freezing-point.

As the party, wet, tired, and hungry, approaches one of the little log villages that lie along its route, the stárosta, or chief of the artél, asks the convoy officer to allow them to sing the "begging song" as they pass through the settlement. The desired permission is granted; certain prisoners are designated to receive the expected alms; the convicts all remove their gray caps; and entering the village with a slow, dragging step, as if they hardly had strength enough to crawl along, they begin their mournful appeal for pity.

I shall never forget the emotions roused in me by this song when I heard it for the first time. We were sitting, one cold, raw, autumnal day, in a dirty post-station on the great Siberian road, waiting for horses. Suddenly my attention was attracted by a peculiar, low-pitched, quavering sound which came to us from a distance, and which, although made apparently by human voices, did not resemble anything that I had ever before heard. It was not singing, nor chanting, nor wailing for the dead, but a strange blending of all three. It suggested vaguely the confused and commingled sobs, moans, and entreaties of human beings who were being subjected to torture, but whose sufferings were not acute enough to seek expression in shrieks or highpitched cries. As the sound came nearer we went out into the street in front of the station-house and saw approaching a chained party of about a hundred bare-headed convicts, who, surrounded by a cordon of soldiers, were marching slowly through the settlement, singing the "exiles' begging song." No attempt was made by the singers to pitch their voices in harmony, or to pronounce the words in unison;