TOMSK CAPITAL OF SIBERIA. 277 



the untold mineral wealth of which it is known to be 

 possessed comes to be extracted from the bosom of the 

 earth, and it requires no great powers of perception to 

 perceive to whom the bulk of it will fall. 



Such in brief is the Government of Tomsk, a vast 

 territory embracing some of the richest and most pros- 

 perous tracts of Siberia, or rather, I should perhaps say, 

 those parts of Tomsk which I had opportunities of 

 visiting. I have given some description of the country 

 and its people ; it remains for me before concluding this 

 chapter to say a few words about its capital. 



Tomsk — so called from its situation on the river 

 Tom — has a mystery of its own, but it is in 

 no way connected with the railway. The so-called 

 mystery of the railway, — why Tomsk, the univer- 

 sity town, the most populous city in Siberia, and 

 prospective capital of 5,000,000 square miles of terri- 

 tory, was severely left on one side when the great rail- 

 way came to be built, — is in reality no mystery at all, 

 least of all to the inhabitants of the city concerned. 

 The said inhabitants were proud — their position they 

 thought was unassailable — and they shouted defiance at 

 the engineers when they demanded their price for in- 

 cluding Tomsk in their scheme of railway construction. 

 But they forgot that they were in Russia and were 

 dealing with Russian engineers, so Tomsk was left out 

 in the cold, and is to this day left at the terminus of 

 a branch 59 miles from the main line. Now they would 

 willingly give twice the amount originally demanded, 

 but it is too late. The whole business is not a creditable 

 one, and casts a serious reflection on the honour of the 

 engineers who built the line, and perhaps the less said 

 about it the better. 



The real mystery of Tomsk centres round the tomb of 

 a pious hermit, one Feodor Kuzmitch, who died in 1864, 



