CHAP. V. UST-ZYLMA. 41 



to north, about 300 miles from its mouth. Each homestead 

 is a farmhouse with outbuildings, 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 meanders through 

 the village for perhaps two miles, witli numerous side 

 branches, which one might by courtesy call the main street ; 

 but its general appearance 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 Archangel. We found the 

 wooden trottoir all but indispensable 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 dunghill, and would pro- 

 bably 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 unfrequently 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 ia generally 



