26 A SUMMER ON THE YENESEl 



backwater beside the village. The owners, who were 

 living in two very dirty chooms on the bank, were 

 timid, especially the women. At the approach of 

 strangers they all dived into their primitive house-boats, 

 and hid there until tempted out by the ofter of kopecks, 

 the value of which they quite realised. 



The Yenesei Ostiaks are of very great interest 

 ethnologically, and are said to be unlike any other tribe 

 in Siberia. One scholar has even' put forward the 

 hypothesis that they belong to the same race as the 

 short-skulled people who lived in Northern Europe before 

 the Germanic immigration. Philologists, however, have 

 given good reasons for supposing that the Ostiaks are 

 nearly related to the present inhabitants of Thibet ; 

 and there seems no doubt that in very early times they 

 immigrated to the middle Yenesei from the south-east, 

 or at least from the south. Formerly they were a fine 

 and warlike race, and gave their Slavonic invaders 

 much trouble before they were subdued. But during 

 the last two hundred years, their strength has declined, 

 and now they are a quiet and inoffensive people, 

 miserably poor, and decimated by the diseases that they 

 have acquired from the white men. At one time there 

 used to be a great annual fair at Imbatskaya, to which 

 hundreds of Ostiaks came to sell fish and furs ; but now 

 the race has dwindled to such an extent that the total 

 number of the whole tribe probably does not now 

 exceed a thousand souls. Soon, no doubt, like other 

 primitive races, they will totally disappear before the 

 advance of Western civilisation. 



Mr. Popham found both the black-throated thrush 



