Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/57

Rh stands beside the railway track on the crest of the Ural mountain divide; while the pillar that marks the Siberian line is situated on the Ekaterínburg-Tiumén post road, more than a hundred miles east of the mountains. The effect of this arrangement of boundaries is to throw a part of the European province of Perm into Asia, and thus to separate Siberia from Russia proper.

Ekaterínburg, which although not the largest is the most cultivated and enterprising town in this part of the empire, is situated on the eastern slope of the Uráls in the Asiatic portion of the province of Perm, about one hundred and fifty miles from the Siberian frontier. It impresses the traveler at once as a city that makes some pretensions to wealth, taste, and cultivation. The well-built and architecturally effective railway station, with its circumjacent lawn and glowing flower-beds, the polished private carriages and droshkies with coachmen in livery that stand behind it, the well-dressed, prosperous looking gentlemen that alight from the train and enter the waiting vehicles, and the white globes of electric lights hanging here and there over the broad streets, are all significant evidences of enterprise, success, and prosperity. And it is not without reason that Ekaterínburg shows signs of wealth. The famous mineral region of which it is the center yields annually about $3,335,000 worth of gold, 5000 pounds of platinum, 6,700,000 pounds of copper, 280,000 tons of pig iron, 140,000 tons of hard coal, 16,000 tons of manganese, and 277,000 tons of salt; to say nothing of quantities of malachite, jasper, beryl, topaz, agate, emeralds, and other precious or semi-precious stones. Of this wealth, which is