290 



TEE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY. 



allowed for the journey from Moscow to Port Arthur, 

 and fifteen and eleven from the two chief towns in 

 Siberia — namely, Tomsk and Irkutsk. It is to be 

 hoped that the authorities will see their way before 

 long to remove so annoying and unnecessary a limit- 

 ation. 



The following list of fares may be of Interest to the 

 traveller : — 



^ Calais 

 London to J „ 



Port Arthur via j Ostend 



C Calais 

 London to J » 



Vladivostok „ j Ostend 



C Calais 

 London to ; „ 



Peking . • " i Ostend 



What is to be seen in the course of a journey through 

 this far-oif land, from which tales of terror used to 

 come as from some lonely land of inexorable exile, 

 where misery, pain, and death alone awaited its un- 

 happy visitors? Thanks to the Russian railway and 

 the accounts of many modern travellers, such fantastic 

 pictures, depicting Siberia as the country of despair, no 

 longer obtain credence even among the least informed. 

 Convicts and prisons, with an undue share perhaps of 

 human misery and suffering, no doubt exist, but these 

 are far away in the inhospitable regions of Yakutsk, 

 and form but a small part of the Siberia of to-day ; nor 

 do the horrors of the Arctic prison come under the pur- 

 view of the traveller on the railway. The prospect 

 which meets the traveller's gaze is of a very different 

 kind. 



