CRESCENT AND CROSS 263 



stunted birches, and every fifteen to twenty miles we 

 changed horses at some village built on the banks of a 

 frozen river whose waters find their way into the Ob 

 beneath their thick armour of ice. These villages were 

 almost entirely built of wood, floated down in rafts from 

 the forests on the distant hills. Most of them were 

 Russian, with a large stone or brick church in the centre, 

 and a gilt cross on the steeple. Others were Tatar 

 villages, where the crescent occupied the place of the cross ; 

 and it was somewhat humiliating to us as Christians to 

 find that the cross was too often the symbol of drunkenness, 

 disorder, dilapidation, and comparative poverty, whereas 

 the crescent was almost invariably the sign of sobriety, 

 order, enterprise, and prosperity. The general opinion 

 amongst the better educated Russians with whom I was 

 able to converse was that the chief fault lay with the 

 priests, who encouraged idleness and drunkenness, whilst 

 the Mohammedan clergy threw the whole of their influence 

 into the opposite scale. Living is so extravagantly cheap 

 in this part of the world that the ordinary incentives to 

 industry scarcely exist. We were able to buy beef at 

 twopence per pound, and grouse at sevenpence a brace. 

 We had a very practical demonstration that we were in a 

 land flowing with hay and corn, in the price we paid for 

 our horses. Our sledge was what is called a troika and 

 required three horses. Up to Tiumen these horses had 

 cost us sixpence a mile. On the steppes the price suddenly 

 fell to three-halfpence, i.e., a halfpenny a horse a mile. At 

 one of the villages where we stopped to change horses it 

 was market-day, and we found on inquiry that a ton of 

 wheat might be purchased for the same amount as a 

 hundred-weight cost in England. 



Whilst we were crossing the steppes we saw very few 

 birds. The almost total absence of trees and the depth 



