Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/323

Rh short days of mid-winter, very soon after dark. I do not wish to be understood as saying that the life of Russian convicts at the Nérchinsk silver mines is an easy one, or that they do not suffer. I can hardly imagine a more terrible and hopeless existence than that of a man who works all day in one of the damp, muddy galleries of the Pokrófski mine, and goes back at night to a close, foul, vermin-infested prison like that of Algachí. It is worse than the life of any pariah dog, but at the same time it is not the sensationally terrible life of the fictitious convict described by Mr. Grenville Murray — the convict who lives night and day underground, sleeps in a rocky niche, toils in hopeless misery under the lash of a pitiless overseer, and is slowly poisoned to death by the fumes of quicksilver. Such things may be effective in a sensational drama, but they are not true. The worst feature of penal servitude in Siberia is not hard labor in the mines; it is the condition of the prisons.

When Mr. Frost, Mr. Nésterof, and I returned from the Pokrófski mine to the village of Algachí it was beginning to grow dark, and the village girls were watering their cows and filling their icy buckets at a curbed spring or well near the zémski kvartír. We drove to the house of Mr. Nésterof for dinner, spent an hour or two in conversation, and devoted the remainder of the evening to writing up notebooks and completing sketches.

Friday morning, November 20th, we bade Mr. Nésterof and Lieutenant-colonel Saltstein good-by, and set out with two horses, a small uncomfortable teléga, and a fresh supply of provisions for the village and mine of Kadáiya, distant from Algachí about ninety miles. The weather was still very cold, the road ran through the same dreary, desolate sea of snow-covered mountains that surrounds the mine of Algachí, and for two days we neither saw nor heard anything of particular interest. At half-past eleven o'clock Friday night, tired, hungry, and half frozen, we reached the village of Donó, forty-six miles from Algachí;