Page:The Boy Travellers in the Russian Empire.djvu/405

Rh found in quantities of any consequence, and when you look at a piece of this beautiful oxide of copper you can be almost absolutely certain that it came from the neighborhood of Ekaterineburg. A mass of malachite weighing more than four hundred tons was found there about the middle of the present century, the largest single piece ever discovered.

"At the boundary between European and Asiatic Russia there is a stone monument with the word EUROPE on one side and ASIA on the other. It is only seventeen hundred feet above the level of the sea, and was erected to commemorate the visit of the Emperor Alexander I. to his Siberian dominions. I stepped from the sleigh and stood for a few moments with a foot in either continent, but though I made careful observation I could not discover any difference between the soil, climate, productions, manners, customs, or social conditions of the Occident and Orient of the Old World.

"Down the Western slope of the Urals we drove as fast as our horses could carry us, making brief halts to change horses at the stations, jumping oukhabas that threatened to shake us and our vehicles to pieces, repelling the advances of beggars that solicited us at every stopping-place, riding sometimes for many miles at a time between double rows of birch-trees which the Government has planted to mark the roads and prevent the snow from drifting, and now and then coming temporarily to grief through the breaking of our harness. We found the stations more numerous and more commodious than in Asiatic Russia, the country more densely peopled, and as the days of fasting had given way to days of feasting, we found an abundance of provisions wherever we stopped. We carried now only our tea and sugar, as everything else was easy to procure.

"We passed through Perm at night and in a snow-storm, and my recollections of the place are consequently few. From Kazan my road lay along the frozen surface of the Volga to Nijni Novgorod, where the sleigh-ride was to terminate.

"Sometimes the sleigh was left on the ice of the river while the drivers went to the station on the bank to change horses, and sometimes it was driven up the sloping road and then down again. Going up was all right, but descending was occasionally perilous.

"The sleigh manifested a tendency to go faster than the horses; there was usually no protecting wall or rail at the outer edge of the slope, and more than once we narrowly escaped being pitched down a steep cliff of frozen earth to the solid ice fifty or a hundred feet below. At such times the way of safety lay in forcing the horses ahead, in the hope that they would overcome the sideling motion of the sleigh. As there was a chance