Jan. 17, 1903.] 
FOREST AND STREAM, 
43 
fusion worse confounded" by clapping on or merging 
into it a mongrel or nondescript native idea; whence the 
eyesore Muscovite church "standards" of to-day. 
Your writer speaks entirely from personal observa- 
tions, because ha\ing covered the whole of Cibiria and 
Russia — not in a globe-trot of a few weeks, but on, as 
hitherto mentioned, a protracted tour of inspection last- 
ing two years. 
Miliary Buildings. 
Next in size after the grotesque churches, are the 
soldiers' barracks. They are all huge packing-box 
edifices, built square, with .such a profusion of windows 
arranged exactly opposite each other on all four sides, 
that in the distance, when you see the sun setting be- 
hind one of these brick wildernesses, four or five stories 
high, the structure looks like an abandoned ruin, of 
which only the walls remain. 
The barracks accommodate two to three thousand 
troops. At Vladivoctok, on the Pacific, you see a 
dozen of these painfully barren brick edifices, and they 
are enough to give anybody a dolorous first impression 
of the country. You see the same thing at the chief 
towns overland all the way to Peterburg. I have been 
through these barracks, and the interiors are worse still 
— soiled whitewashed walls, benches around all sides on 
which the inmates sit and sleep, long greasy tables at 
which they have their repasts, and downstairs, in the 
yards, are sanitary conditions which pigs even would 
not tolerate. When the inspector makes his "see-him- 
coming" round once a month, things are cleared up a 
bit, then allowed to relapse for another month into the 
unspeakable. 
Of'ic';aI Residences. 
The governors' residences are the next biggest speci- 
mens of building in Cibiria. Some of them are fine, 
built with double walls — leave a Russian and his wife 
and plenty of peculated funds alone for that! The edi- 
fices are either sandstone or freestone, sometimes 
brick, painted white. In some towns^^ where the gov- 
ernor has no chance to steal much, he has to be content 
with a wood residence — comfortable withal. These tim- 
ber buildings are not a particle like our American farm- 
houses. Our thin wood walls would not do at all for 
keeping out the rigors of the Cibirian cold, beginning 
with 20 below zero, centigrade, the middle of Septem- 
ber, reaching 52 below in January (equal to 58 degrees 
Fahr.), and winding up with an icy blizzard the middle 
of April; while the chunk ice on the rivers will not per- 
mit of navigation for a month later. So in this part of 
Russian Asia the house walls are often the actual tree- 
trunks roughly planed down on two sides with hatchets, 
and mortised into each other at the corners. The inter- 
stices are filled up with vermin-breeding vegetable fiber 
refuse (a kind of jute debris), which have given so 
unsavory a reputation for insects to Cibirian houses. 
I was through divers of the governors' palaces. None 
are above three stories in height, many are only two, 
and some wood executive mansions are entirely con- 
fined to the ground floor. There is always one grand 
zala, or salon, for receptions, annual dances, etc.; a 
waiting room, where you await the pleasure of "his 
highness the nabob," and are supposed to arise and 
remain standing when "his almightiness" makes his 
appearance and rapidly rims through his list of callers. 
The governor being usually a soldier, disposes of his 
visitors with refreshing military celerity. Pity our 
American law courts are not handled by soldiers! 
Cibiru > Educat o al Institutions. 
Fourth, architecturally considered, on the list of 
buildings in Cibiria are the schools, seminaries and the 
few technical institutes and museums. These are never 
more than a couple of stories in height. They are 
mostlj' of wood (tree lengths) and plaster, and all have 
double windows, to exclude the cold and prevent con- 
densation of moisture on the glass. This last precau- 
tion is usually a failure, as the joints are not air-tight, 
and consequently air circulates between the outer and 
inner windows. 
Through Ciciri;n Prisons. 
Fifth and next in importance in size of buildings, are 
the hospitals and prisons. My visits thereto, especially 
the latter, have already been described in Forest and 
Stream, and more extensively in the medical press, par- 
ticularly the (Manhattan) Medical News. 
Since it always interests readers, I may repeat that 
George Kennan's exposures in the Century over a 
dozen years ago, did a lot of good. All that he wrote, 
as before pointed out, was true; in fact, not true 
enough; but the conditions he described exist no longer. 
Of course the Russ will not admit the change is due to 
Kennan; but it is significant that Kennan's expose 
sprung a sense of shame into the guilty ones. 
Cibirian DomeLtlc Architecture. 
Now we come to the domi or houses in comracn of 
the Cibirian inhabitants. Rarely are two stories en- 
countered in the townlets; but in the towns, they are 
common enough, and even in places like Ipkytck, 
lakytck, Omck, Kpacnoiapck, you will see some of 
three flights. They are always of wood. Fireplaces or 
stoves, as we know them, are unknown. One big stove 
and oven combined serves to heat a four-roomed house. 
B}^ being placed in the middle of the house, exactly in 
the center of the dividing room-walls, the chambers are 
equally heated simultaneously. I must admit the heat- 
ing and ventilation of Cibirian houses in winter is 
efiicient, with all its crudeness. The home of the poor- 
est Cibirian mujik is better off in this respect than that 
of the fellah of Egypt in the cool (often too cool) sea 
son, or of the atorante of the Chilean Andes, or the 
miserable drafts'^ hut of the walla south of the Hima- 
layas. The Asiatic slaf is often better housed than 
many European peasant families. 
My own range of architectural observations and 
travels has extended from America to Argentina, Al- 
bion to Australia, Canada to China, Hispania to Hel- 
vetia, India to Italia, France and Germany to Mexico, 
and Korea, and from Japan to the whole of northern 
Asia; but in n,o speck on this mundane sphere is there 
less of interest to the builder and architect than in that 
huge part of the globe known as northern Asia. North 
America has its glory in its modern buildings, and the 
prehistoric monuments of the Indians. 
The Trans-Cibirian Railroad. 
A paragraph on this railway, for the edification of 
western travelers across Cibiria. I have already most 
fully described it, technically and generally, illustrated 
with scores of views, in journals like Railway and 
Locomotive Engineering, Manhattan; Railway Age, 
Chicago; Railway Magazine, London, and have had 
to sum up against it in every case. It is throughout a 
second-grade road, and will not for another quarter- 
century even begin to compare with a first-class Ameri- 
can railway. The "quick time" we occasionally read 
of as being done on it — "Mockba to Port Arthur in 
fifteen days" — are only isolated instances of speeding, 
engine and one car. If you were to do the journey, say, 
next summer, it would take you from twenty-two to 
twenty-six days to get through. 
Two Streaks of Rust 5,000 M les Long, 
In the engineering press I have already expressed my 
views of the fate of the trans-Cibirian after a couple of 
decades. It will but serve as an impulse to the con- 
struction of more southerly trans-Asiatic railroad sys- 
tems, free from the. wintry obstructions and rigors of 
the Cibirian climate. This competition would mean 
commercial ruin to the Russian road, and we should 
ere long see its 5,000 miles of track rusting under very 
limited local requirements and military transport. 
As it is, the trans-Cibirian is operated at a heavy loss. 
True, it has all the traffic it can manage, but as this 
traffic is mostly governmental, it does not yield a penny 
of profit. Two-thirds of the passengers are officials — 
of course, traveling on free passes. In short, I do not 
believe the road will in any year for the next twenty 
years, show a margin of profit over operating ex- 
penses — a pretty white elephant indeed. But then it 
must not be forgotten, the trans-Cibirian was built for 
military reasons. Its commercial possibilities were en- 
tirely subsidiary. 
Careful Packing Necessjry, 
Goods traversing Cibiria could not get a rougher 
handling in any other part of the globe. The tarantas 
is the native vehicle of transport for passengers (apart 
from the railroad), and the telega for goods. Neither 
have springs, so the shaking up can be imagined on 
the torture roads. Both these convej'ances are four- 
wheeled, and used only during summer. In winter, it 
is the sani, or sledge. So that, outside of the railroad, 
sporting goods sent to Cibiria will have to be strongly 
packed, and yet easy of inspection in a strongly suspi- 
cious country, where even a sheet of model patterns is 
submitted to the frontier censor before it is allowed to 
pass. It is for this reason that forwarding agents on 
the Russian frontier have a lucrative calling, seeing 
after repacking and forwarding of goods that have been 
dissected by_ the frontier customs. For this, they 
charge the Cibirian merchant an agreed-on rate. 
L. LODIAN. 
[to be continued.] 
A Game Dinner I Did Not Eat. 
Memory is proverbially fickle, but there is perhaps no 
matter about which it so often suffers total eclipse as that 
of the dinners _ we have eaten. Failure to recall the kind 
cf food of which we partook at a given feast, the people 
we met, and the character of the talk constitutes one of 
the surprises of life. It is the more unpleasant because it 
involves a measure of thanklessness of which we would 
not willingly be guilty. We want to remember dinner.s, 
if only out of gratitude to the friendly hosts under 
whose hospitable mahogany we have thrust our legs. 
But endeavor to recall them leads only to a vague and 
indefinite CJusciotisness of this or that dinner. What 
there was to eat, what we .saw, whom we met, what we 
heard have disappeared as if they had never been. If 
any detail remains, it is likely to be the talk; which would 
indicate that it is wdiat we hear, not what we taste and 
see, that abides longest with us. 
It is a curious fact this failure of memory to preserve 
the details of occurrences which at the time were deemed 
of much importance. For unless digestion and that feel- 
ing of comradery common to all men were wholly lack- 
ing, we had when eating these dinners a very definite im- 
pression of their goodness or badness. 
No doubt, however, the very frequency of dinners 
tends to obliterate details from memory. To the ordinai-y 
diner-out dinners come in such rapid succession that the 
details of one runs into another, and so quickly become 
confused and lost. The man who dines diversifiedly — at 
a private party on one evening, at his club the next, and 
again at a quasi-official function — does so too often to 
retain any lasting impression of a particular feast. If 
he dined only on Christmas Day, the diimer might be- 
come immortal. 
Then, too, there is a certain monotony about dinners. 
In the very nature of things, the food itself cannot great- 
ly vai-y. There is the same general foundation upon 
which its superstructure is reared. The difference is 
chiefly in the degree of comfort and content which one 
experiences, in the brightness or dullness of the talk, and 
the character of the decorations. And these depend on 
the composition of the company and the taste of 
the host. Neither the things eaten nor the quality of 
the cooking do much to reinforce the memory of any 
particular feast. 
Of course there are exceptions to this general rule — 
cases where the food is the chief attraction, when what 
is eaten longest endures in recollection. Again, there are 
instances when failure to partake of certain dishes, when 
Ihe mouth, so to speak, was set for special viands and 
disappointment ensued, cling most tenaciously to memory. 
I recall a "poudre" day on that lake in the far north 
from which the continent abandons its northeasterly 
trend and slopes squarely away toward the Frozen Sea. 
Now, a "poudre" day in the open is not a thing to be 
pleasantly remembered. For it means a day on which the 
spirits in your thermometer sink down toward the bulb 
and stay there; when the cutting wind so fills the air 
with frozen snow crystals that all landmarks are lost, 
and the range of vision is limited to your leading dog; 
and when the struggle against cold becomes a fierce fight 
for existence. 
The morning had been pleasant enough. When we left 
our night camp in the pines and descended upon the ice, 
the vvhite expanse rolled away clear and distinct before 
us. The two dog trains held steadily toward the north, 
the drivers, with blanket Capotes pulled close, having lit- 
tle to do. 
It was nof till the first traverse had been covered and 
we emerged from the lee of the projecting point- upon 
which we had taken breakfast to enter the broader ex- 
panse of the lake, that the wind began to rise. At first 
it was a mere breeze, a thing that only twists the smoke 
above the lodge poles. Then miniature coils of snow be- 
g;m to circle over the smooth surface, followed by drifts 
of larger proportions, until _all landmarks were lost in 
the swirLof the tempest. The cold with such a wind was 
intense. To sit in the sledge was to freeze; to run 
against the bitter blast was well-nigh impossible. 
Still we struggled on, the dogs with low-bent heads, 
lhe half-breed drivers muffled to their ears. Nothing 
was visible a dozen yards ahead of the sledges, and our 
shouts to each other were lost in the roar of the storm. 
.After a time the dogs began to give way and to face 
about in the harness. The men kept on from the mere 
impulse of progressiveness and the knowledge that safety 
lay in rapid tnotion. But it was two o'clock in the after- 
noon before we made the projecting headland which 
marked the end of the traverse and climbed up the bank 
amotig the pine trees. 
Now, a pine-clump is not an inviting habitation with 
the snow two feet deep and the temperature at thirty 
below. But, coming out of the wrack and drift of the 
tempest, it was a veritable haven of rest. It was the 
more welcome becaiise in the midst of it was piled high a 
circle of snow, within which the ground had been scraped 
bare, and a good fire of logs burned brightly. Dog gear 
hung in the branches of the scrub; two sledges were clo;e 
at hand, and, standing about the fire, were a Scotch 
"company's" officer and his two Indian drivers. Never 
was greeting more hearty. Even the dogs bayed a wel- 
come, only prevented from becoming warmer by the 
shouts of the men. 
As every camping party in the woods is communistic 
in its tendencies, the snow circle was quickly enlarged 
and piled higher to form a break against the wind. Har- 
ness, extra moccasins, etc., were hung in the trees 
to keep them out of the way of the dogs. Then more 
wood was cut, the ketlle filled with snow and set to boil, 
and provisions unpacked from the sledges. There was 
not much of the '^"er left, but what there was was the 
best of its kind — ^i. -ose nose, briskets and tongues, berry 
pemmican, with steaks of the wood buffalo traded the 
day before from a Chipewyan hunter, and plenty of tea. 
The Scotsman's pots were already boiling merrily. A 
few frozen whitefish were thawing before the fire, to 
be transferred, a little later, to the skillet. Most welcome 
.sight 'of all were the Scotch bannocks, the sweet cakes 
and sugar which the trader had brought from the fort 
at the forks of the river. Indeed, no vagary of the ap- 
petite is more singular than the yearning one develops 
for bread and sugar after a continuous diet of 
pemmican, moose meat, grease and tea. With a bakery 
on every corner, the devotion of the small boy to sweet- 
cikes and crullers is a matter to smile at. But eliminate 
flour and sugar from the bill of fare on a fortnight's 
sledge journey, and the taste of them is a gratification 
one would not lightly forego. 
Of course the dogs were hungry, too. Capitaine had 
eaten his boots, and Mistatim, that thief of the world, had 
been caught gnawing at the lashings of a freight sledge. 
But it was early yet to feed them. So they had been driven 
off, and seeing no sign of dried moose meat cutting, they 
had rolled themselves tip into separate balls on the lee 
of the tree trunks or sat on the top of the snow circle 
watching us, like an audience in an amphitheatre. Not a 
movement escaped them, and when the pots had done 
boiling, and the fragrance of frying fish reached their 
nostrils, excitement and desire to share the feast showed 
in every shining eye and quivering muscle. 
Beyond doubt it was a dinner that the most blase diner- 
out might have longed to eat. Moose nose, trembling 
and opaque as a vegetable conserve; delicious tongues, 
juicy buffalo steaks, fat whitefish hot from the pan, 
pemmican and Saskotoom berries; hard, crisp bannocks, 
round sweet cakes and tea with sugar in it, all spread out 
on a canvas sledge cover. As INIr. Squeers would have 
remarked : "Here's richness !" 
True, save the fish, it all came on the board in one 
course. But refinement of cookery and multiplication of 
courses are only a mockery and delusion to men who 
have tramped fifteen miles in a blinding snowstorm since 
breakfast. Moreover, it fulfilled .Thackeray's idea of a 
dinner, in that its chief object was to feed the guests. 
Flowers, he insisted, had no place in an atmosphere com- 
posed of the fumes of ham and gravy and soup. "Have 
the central ornaments as handsome as you like, but be 
hanged to the roses, I say." 
Now, the' central ornament in this case was the pot 
of moose nose, and the side decorations the six hungry 
men squatted about the cloth. They were very, very 
hungry. And the way they set to promised to reproduce 
the feasts of, say, a century ago, when dinner parties 
began at three in the afternoon and ran their course 
through the whole evening. 
I recall that we had just finished the fish when an 
exclamation of the half-breed drivers called our atten- 
tion to the dogs. It must be confessed that the spectacle 
presented was not a cheering one. For the hungry 
brutes, excited by the savory odors of the meal, and yet 
denied food, had fallen foul of each other, and in an in- 
stant_ were engaged in a general melee. There was no 
divisions into parties, one against the other. Every dog 
did battle on his own account, indifferent whether he 
attacked the head of the foe nearest him or the tail of the 
one in front. The entire snow barricade and the regions 
about it was transformed into a battlefield. The round 
balls at the roots of the trees uncoiled themselves, and, 
leaping into the fray, bit and tore the first adversary 
