Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/178

162 consists in the breaking up and removal of this overlying stratum and the transportation of the "pay gravel," or gold-bearing sand, to the "machine," where it is agitated with water in a sort of huge iron hopper and then allowed to run out with the water into a series of shallow inclined troughs, or flumes, where the "black sand" and the particles of gold fall to the bottom and are stopped by low transverse cleats.

The first placer that we visited is shown in the illustration on page 163. The day was cold and dark, a light powdery snow was falling, and a more dreary picture than that presented by the mine can hardly be imagined. Thirty or forty convicts, surrounded by a cordon of Cossacks, were at work in a sort of deep gravel pit, the bottom of which was evidently at one time the bed of the stream. Some of them were loosening with pointed crowbars the hardpacked clay and gravel, some were shoveling it upon small hand-barrows, while others were carrying it away and dumping it at a distance of 150 or 200 yards. The machine was not in operation, and the labor in progress was nothing more than the preliminary "stripping," or laying bare of the gold-bearing stratum. The convicts, most of whom were in leg-fetters, worked slowly and listlessly, as if they were tired out and longed for night; the silence was broken only by the steady clinking of crowbars, a quick, sharp order now and then from one of the overseers, or the jingling of chains as the convicts walked to and fro in couples carrying hand-barrows. There was little or no conversation except that around a small camp-fire a few yards away, where half a dozen soldiers were crouching on the snowy ground watching a refractory tea-kettle, and trying to warm their benumbed hands over a sullen, fitful blaze. We watched the progress of the work for ten or fifteen minutes, and then, chilled and depressed by the weather and the scene, returned to our vehicle and drove back to the Lower Diggings.