cleaned and disinfected after its return from a previous trip to Tomsk, and the air in the cabins was pure and sweet.
The barge lay at a floating landing-stage of the type with which we had become familiar on the rivers Vólga and Káma, and access to it was gained by means of a zigzag wooden bridge sloping down to it from the high bank of the river. When we reached the landing, a dense throng of exiles, about one-third of whom were women, were standing on the bank waiting to embark. They were surrounded by a cordon of soldiers, as usual, and non-commissioned officers were stationed at intervals of twenty or thirty feet on the bridge leading down to the landing-stage. I persuaded Colonel Vinokúrof, inspector of exile transportation for Western Siberia, to delay the embarkment a little, in order that we might take photographs of the exiles and the barge. As soon as this had been accomplished the order was given to "Let them go on board," and the prisoners, shouldering their gray bags, walked one by one down the sloping bridge to the landing-stage. More than three-fourths of the men were in leg-fetters, and for an hour there was a continuous clinking of chains as the prisoners passed me on their way to the barge. The exiles, although uniformly clad in gray, presented, from an ethnological point of view, an extraordinary diversity of types, having been collected evidently from all parts of the vast empire. There were fierce, wild-looking mountaineers from Daghestán and Circassia, condemned to penal servitude for murders of blood-revenge; there were Tatárs from the lower Vólga, who had been sunburned until they were almost as black as negroes; Turks from the Crimea, whose scarlet fezzes contrasted strangely with their gray convict overcoats; crafty-looking Jews from Podólia, going into exile for smuggling; and finally, common peasants in great numbers from all parts of European Russia. The faces of the prisoners generally were not as hard, vicious, and depraved as the faces of
