Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/63

Rh and claret, bread and butter, Edam and cream cheese, sardines, fresh lettuce and radishes; and as soon as we had made a beginning by drinking the customary "fifteen drops," and nibbling at the bread, cheese, and radishes, the neat little maid-servant brought to us delicious, hot Pozhárski cutlets with new potatoes. And all this in an unheard-of mining camp in the Asiatic wilderness of the eastern Ural! If I may judge of the expression of my own face from the expression that irradiated the face of my comrade, Mr. Frost, I must have been fairly beaming with surprise, delight, and half-suppressed enthusiasm.

After luncheon Mr. Nesterófski escorted us through what he called the fabrik, a six-stamp quartz mill, where we were shown the whole process of quartz crushing and washing, the amalgamation of the gold, and the roasting of the amalgam to get rid of the mercury. It was substantially the same process that I had already seen in California and Nevada. Gold is obtained, in the Berózef district, both from quartz mines and from open placers; and after we had inspected the quartz-crushing machinery of the fabrik, we were taken, in a sort of Irish jaunting car known as a dalgúshka, to one of the nearest of the placer mines—the Andréyefski prüsk. It was merely an extensive excavation in the midst of the forest, where 150 men and women were hard at work shoveling earth into small one-horse carts for transportation to the "machine." As fast as the carts were loaded they were driven up an inclined plane to the top of a huge iron cauldron, or churn, into which their contents were dumped. In this churn revolved horizontally in different planes half a dozen sharp iron blades, and over the blades fell continually a small stream of water. The auriferous earth, agitated incessantly by the revolving blades and drenched by the falling water, was thoroughly broken up and disintegrated, and it finally made its escape, with the water in which it was partially dissolved, through an opening at the base of the churn. From its place of exit the