Siberia and the exile system . f our journey to Semipala-tinsk in the night. The steppe over which we approachedthe city was more naked and sterile than any that we hadcrossed, and seemed in the faint twilight to be merely adesert of sun-baked earth and short, dead grass, with hereand there a Iagged bush or a long, ripple-marked dune ofloose, drifting sand. I fell asleep soon after midnight, andwhen I awoke at half-past two oclock Sunday morningday was just breaking, and we were passing a large whitebuilding with lighted lanterns hung against its walls, whichI recognized as a city prison. It w
Siberia and the exile system . f our journey to Semipala-tinsk in the night. The steppe over which we approachedthe city was more naked and sterile than any that we hadcrossed, and seemed in the faint twilight to be merely adesert of sun-baked earth and short, dead grass, with hereand there a Iagged bush or a long, ripple-marked dune ofloose, drifting sand. I fell asleep soon after midnight, andwhen I awoke at half-past two oclock Sunday morningday was just breaking, and we were passing a large whitebuilding with lighted lanterns hung against its walls, whichI recognized as a city prison. It was the tiuremni zdmol;or prison castle of Semipalatinsk. In a few momentswe entered a long, wide, lonely street, bordered by un-painted log-houses, whose board window-shutters were all 15() SIBERIA closed, and whose steep, pyramidal roofs loomed high andblack ill the first gray light of dawn. The street was fullof soft, drifted sand, in which the hoofs of our horses fellnoiselessly, and through which our tdrantds moved with as. WASHrNG CLOTHES IN THE fRTISH. little jar as if it were a gondola floating along a waterystreet in Venice. There was something strangely weirdand impressive in this noiseless night ride through theheart of a ghostly and apparently deserted city, in thestreets of which were the drifted sands of the desert, andwhere there was not a sound to indicate the presence of THE GREAT KIRGHIS STEPPE 157 life save the faint, distant throbbing of a watchmans rat-tle, like the rapid, far-away beating of a wooden stopped at last in front of a two-story building ofbrick, covered with white stucco, which our driver saidwas the hotel SiUr. After pounding vigorously for fiveminutes on the front door, we were admitted by a sleepywaiter, who showed us to a hot, musty room in the secondstory, where we finished our broken nights sleep on thefloor. The city of Semipalatinsk, which has a population ofabout 15,000 Russians, Klrghis, and Tatars, is situated onthe right bank
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1890, booksubjectsiberiarussiadescrip
