246 



THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



ph by Charles E. Beury 



A LANDING ALONG THE VOLGA 



"The idea of Russia's plenty is visualized along the river. Upstream ships are laden 

 within and without with great hampers of fruit. At some small ports there are literally 

 thousands of watermelons on display. Much of the fresh produce must go to waste" (see 

 text, page 264). 



and Mogul, the Golden Horde and the 

 armies of the Czars, have written their 

 stories about this water. The tangled 

 tale of Russia's people and history can 

 best be understood when read in the lei- 

 surely comfort of one of the steamers on 

 the Volga. 



Everybody has heard of Nizhni Nov- 

 gorod, famous chiefly for its cosmopoli- 

 tan annual fair, the greatest in the world, 

 and for the capital place the city has long 

 occupied in the history of Russia. Under 

 normal conditions, Nizhni is only a night's 

 journey in a sleeping car from Moscow. 

 It is the chief city on the Volga and the 

 beginning of navigation for the larger 

 steamers. 



A DESERTED CITY 



So it was at Nizhni that I began a war- 

 time journey down the river, after a 

 dreary day in the city of the great bazaar ; 



for now the grass grows in the fair sec- 

 tion of the Nizhni streets, and the rows 

 upon rows of shops, to the number of 

 about four thousand, are closed as tight 

 as Philadelphia markets on Sunday. 



The war has, for this year at least, put 

 out of business the Nizhni Bazaar, to 

 which for centuries merchants have been 

 coming annually from out of the steppes 

 of Tartary ; from the villages of far 

 Persia ; from the hidden towns of Arabia, 

 and from India, Japan, China, Turkey, 

 and all the lands of Europe. This mar- 

 ket-place has been unique in several par- 

 ticulars, one being that all the goods 

 traded in were actually present on the 

 spot. The annual volume of business is 

 given by one authority as 250 million 

 roubles. 



Now, by those mysterious news cur- 

 rents which baffle understanding, the tid- 

 ings had run to the remotest places of 

 earth that there would be no Nizhni Ba- 



