The Final Staee. 



natural difficulties which confronted the engineers, but which 

 skill and foresight, coupled with untiring energy, brought into 

 life and being — a work that will be handed down as one of the 

 most gigantic enterprises of our time. 



Siberia has ever been associated with gangs of convicts and 

 bands of exiles doomed to perpetual banishment in the gloomy- 

 recesses of that land of -ice and snow. It has also been regarded 



NEARING THE END OF THE JOURNEY— THE LAST 

 POST-HOUSE. 



as a land of misery and despair, and one unfit for the coloniser and 

 the emigrant. The advent of the railway has, however, swept aside 

 these terrors and opened up a country which possesses unhmited 

 resources. The line runs for six thousand miles, linking east 

 with west — a hne that has brought in its wake momentous 

 changes in the politics of the Far East. 



As I have remarked, Siberia, along the line of its great 

 427 



