Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/87

Rh I mean that the grass everywhere was completely hidden by them, so that the plain looked as if a sheet of blue gauze had been thrown over it, or as if it were a great expanse of tranquil water reflecting a pale-blue sky. More than once these forget-me-not plains, when seen afar, resembled water so closely as to deceive us both.

Throughout the whole distance from Ekaterínburg to Tiumén, wherever the country was open, the road was bordered on each side by a double or triple row of magnificent silver-birches, seventy or eighty feet in height, set so closely together that their branches interlocked both along the road and over it, and completely shut out, with an arched canopy of leaves, the vertical rays of the sun. For miles at a time we rode, between solid banks of flowers, through this beautiful white-and-green arcade, whose columns were the snowy stems of birches, and whose roof was a mass of delicate tracery and drooping foliage. The road resembled an avenue through an extensive and well-kept park, rather than a great Siberian thoroughfare, and I could not help feeling as if I might look up at any moment and see an English castle, or a splendid country villa. According to tradition these birches were planted by order of the Empress Catherine II., and the part of the great Siberian road which they shade is known as "Catherine's Alley." Whether the object of the great Tsarítsa was to render less toilsome and oppressive the summer march of the exiles, or whether she hoped, by this means, to encourage emigration to the country in which she took so deep an interest, I clo not know; but the long lines of beautiful birches have for more than a century kept her memory green, and her name has doubtless been blessed by thousands of hot and tired wayfarers whom her trees have protected from the fierce Siberian sunshine.

Almost the first peculiarity of a West Siberian landscape that strikes a traveler from America is the complete absence of fences and farm-houses. The cultivated land of the peasants is regularly laid out into fields, but the fields are not