Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/93

Rh been made here and there to improve this part of the route by laying down in the soft, marshy soil a corduroy of logs; but the logs had sunk unequally under the pounding wheels of ten thousand loaded freight wagons, leaving enormous transverse ruts and hollows filled with mud, so that the only result of the "improvement" was to render the road more nearly impassable than before, and to add unendurable jolting to our other discomforts. At last, weary of lurches, jolts, and concussions, we alighted, and tried walking by the roadside; but the sunshine was so intensely hot, and the mosquitoes so fierce and bloodthirsty, that in twenty minutes we were glad to climb back into the tárantás with our hands full of flowers, and our faces scarlet from heat and mosquito bites. Upon comparing our impressions we found that we were unanimously of the opinion that if we had been the original discoverers of this country, we should have named it either Florida or Culexia, since flowers and mosquitoes are its distinctive characteristics and its most abundant products.

At the gate-keeper's lodge of one of the last villages that we passed before reaching Tiumén, we were greeted with the ringing of a large hand-bell. The sound was strangely suggestive of an auction, but as we stopped in front of the village gate the bell-ringer, a bareheaded man in a long black gown, with a mass of flaxen hair hanging over his shoulders and a savings-bank box suspended from his neck, approached the tárantás and called our attention to a large, brownish picture in a tarnished gilt frame resting on a sort of improvised easel by the roadside. It was evidently an ikón or portrait of some holy saint from a Russian church; but what was the object of setting it up there, and what relation it bore to us, we could not imagine. Finally the bell-ringer, bowing, crossing himself, and invoking blessings on our heads, implored us, Khristá rádi [for Christ's sake], to contribute to the support of the holy saint's church, which, it appeared, was situated somewhere in the