ment in our blankets and pillows as well as in the crevices and lining of our tárantás, and then it was impossible either to exterminate or to escape them. After throwing away successively two or three suits of underclothing, I abandoned all hope of relief and reconciled myself to the inevitable as best I could. There were insects on my body or in my clothing during the greater part of four months, and when I was able to undress for the first time after our nine-days' journey from Krasnoyársk to Irkútsk, I found myself spotted and blotched from head to foot as if I were suffering from some foul eruptive disease. It is not pleasant, of course, to go into these details, but I wish the reader to understand clearly and definitely what life in an étape is, and what Siberian exile means to a cultivated human being.[1]
I do not know that it is possible to get rid entirely of obnoxious insects in old and sometimes half-decayed buildings through which pass every year thousands of criminals from the lowest social classes. It is possible, however, to keep the étapes decently clean and to provide the exiles, both in the forwarding prisons and on the road, with proper facilities for bathing and for changing and washing their clothing. How far these things are done now I shall try to show in the next chapter.
As we approached the East-Siberian capital, towards the end of the second week in September, the weather finally cleared up, and upon the southeastern horizon, far away in the distance, we caught sight of the blue, ethereal, snow-crowned peaks of Tunká, situated on the frontier of Mongolia near the southern end of Lake Baikál. They were
- ↑ A common method of gambling among criminal convicts in Siberian étapes is to spread down an overcoat or a dirty linen foot-wrapper on the floor of the kámera, and guess at the number of fleas that will jump upon it within a certain length of time. Every convict, of course, backs his guess with a wager. Another method, equally common, is to draw two small concentric circles on one of the sleeping-platforms, put a number of lice simultaneously within the inner circle, and then give all the money that has been wagered on the event to the convict whose louse first crawls across the line of the outer circle. Exiles on the road are not supposed to have playing-cards, but facilities for gambling in the manner above described are never lacking.
