Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/84

62 larches, and pines, and you come out at last into the more open, fertile, and arable zone of southern Siberia. This beautiful and picturesque country presents, at least in summer, nothing that would even remotely suggest an arctic region. The soil is a rich, black loam, as fertile as the soil of an English garden; flowers grow everywhere in the greatest profusion; the woods are full of rhododendron, wild cherry, and flowering acacia; the country is neither all plain nor all forest, but a blending of both; it is broken just enough by hills and mountains to give picturesqueness to the landscape; and during half the year it is fairly saturated with golden sunshine. I do not wish, of course, to convey the idea that in this country it is always summer. Southern Siberia has a winter and a severe one, but not, as a rule, much severer than that of Minnesota, while its summer is warmer and more genial than that of many parts of central Europe. A glance at the map is sufficient to show that a considerable part of Western Siberia lies farther south than Nice, Venice, or Milan; and that the southern part of the Siberian territory of Semiréchinsk is nearer the equator than Naples. In a country that stretches from the latitude of Italy to the latitude of central Greenland, one would naturally expect to find, and as a matter of fact one does find, many varieties of climate and scenery. On the Taimir peninsula, east of the gulf of Ob, the permanently frozen ground thaws out in summer to a depth of only a few inches, and supports only a scanty vegetation of berry-bushes and moss; while in the southern part of Western Siberia water-melons and cantaloupes are a profitable crop; tobacco is grown upon thousands of plantations; and the peasants harvest annually more than 50,000,000 bushels of grain. In the fertile and arable zone of southern Siberia there are a dozen towns that have a higher mean temperature for the months of June, July, and August than the city of London. In fact, the summer temperature of this whole belt of country, from the Uráls to the Pacific, averages six