UST-ZYLMA 37 



including almost always a bath-house. They are 

 irregularly scattered over the ground, sometimes at 

 considerable distances apart, and sometimes in clusters. 

 There is a principal road which one might by courtesy 

 call the main street, which meanders through the village 

 for perhaps two miles, with numerous side branches ; but 

 the general appearance of the place is as if the houses 

 had been strewed about at random, and each peasant 

 had been left to make a road to his nearest neighbour as 

 best he could. Towards the centre of the village there 

 is here and there a wooden causeway, like those in Arch- 

 angel. We found this wooden trottoir all but indis- 

 pensable when the thaw set in. When we reached Ust- 

 Zylma the streets were covered with a thick layer of 

 frozen manure. The yards round the houses were in a 

 still worse condition, and when the sun was hot it was 

 difficult to walk dryshod in consequence of the pools of 

 liquid manure, which filled every depression in the 

 ground, and no doubt very frequently soaked into the 

 wells. This manure makes Ust-Zylma one vast dung- 

 hill, and would probably produce much disease, were it 

 not for the fact that it is frozen for nearly seven months 

 out of the twelve, and is in most years carried away soon 

 after it thaws by the floods of the Petchora, which 

 generally overflows its banks when the snow melts all at 

 once with the sudden arrival of summer. It not un- 

 frequently happens at this season of the year that half 

 the village is under water, and the peasants have to boat 

 from house to house. All the houses are built with this 

 contingency in view. The bottom story is generally low, 

 and consists of a suite of lumber-rooms, where the cattle 

 are often housed in winter. The dwelling-rooms are on 

 the second story, generally reached by a covered flight 

 of stairs outside the house, leading from a porch below 



