Morning journal and courier., 1884-02-01

black keys included The journey is hard,
 Eeven for the traveller who is lying on thick
 felt mattress in 8 comfortable tarantass, and
 it is easy to conceive what the convict ex-
 periences, who is bound to sit motionless
 for eight or ten hours on the bench of the
 famous vehicle, having but few rags to
 shelter him from snow and rain.
 Happily enough this journey lasts but a few days, ss at Tumen the exiles are en-
 parked on special bsrges, or floating prisons,
 taken in tow by steamers, and in the space
 Of eight or ten days are brought to Tomsk.
 The convict barges are usually so overcrowd- ! ed, and are usually kept in such 8 state of | filthiness, that they have become real nests | of infection. s'Each barge has been built for the transport of 800 convicts and the convoy" wrote the Tomsk correspondent of ! the Moscow Telegraph, on November 15, | 1881; 'the calculation of the size off, the ! barges has not been made, however, accord \ ing to the necessary cubical space, but ac- cording to the interests of the owners of~the ! steamers, NM. Kurbato1f and Ignatoff. These gentlemen occupy for their own purposes two compartments for a hundred men each, and thus eighk-hundred must take the room destined for six-hundred. The ventilation is l very bad, there being no accommodation at ! all for that purpose, and the cabinets are of | an unimaginabie nastiness." He adds that l ''the mortality on these barges is very great, ! especially among the children" and his in | formation Is fully confirmed by official figures I published last year in all newspapers. It ap- | pears from these figures that eight or ten per I cent of the convict passengers died during ! their ten days journey on board these barges; | that is something like sixty to eighty out of ! eight hundred.
 1 'tHere you see," wrote friends of ours who ! have made this passage, 'the reign of death. | Diphtheria and typhus pitilessly cut down the | lives of adults and children, especially these < last. Corpses of children are thrown out ! nearly at each station. The hospital, placed | under the supervision of an ignorant soldier, | is always overcrowded"
 At Tomsk the convicts stop for few days. ! It is easy to conceive what he'll the Tomsk \ prison becomes when the convicts arriving \ every week cannot be sent on to Irkutsk with the same speed, on account Of inundations, or obstacles on the rivers. The prison was ! built to contain 960 souls, but it never holds
 less than 1, 300 to l, 400, and very often ?, POO, I or more. One-quarter of the prisoners ! sick, but the infirmary can shelter only one- ! third, or So, of those who are in need of it; ! and so the sick remain in the same rooms, | upon or beneath the same platforms where ! the remainder are crammed to the amount of | three men for each free place. The shrieks ! of the sick, the cries of the fever-stricken | patients, and the rattle of the dying mix to- ! gether with the jokes and laughter of the prisoners, with the curses of the warders. | The exhalations of this human heap mix with ! those of their wet and filthy clothes and with ! the emanations of the horrible Parasha, ! "You are sufocated es you enter the room, you are fainting and must run back to breathe some fresh air; you must accustom yourself by and by to the horrible emanations which float like Q fog in the river''-such is the ! testimony of a'l those who have entered un- | aYnaPtadIV R 10 far S1 ! room" is still more horrible Here you see.' says 8 Siberian official in charge of the l prisons-M. Mishlo-''hundreds of women and children closely packed together, in such picturp." The families of the convicts re ceive no cloth from the State. Mostly peasant women, who, as a rule, never have more than one dress at once; mostly reduced to starvation as soon as their husbands were taken into custody, they have buckled on their sole cloth when starting from Ark hangelsk or Astrakhan, and after their long peregrinations from one lookup to another after the long years of preliminary detention and months of journey, only rags have re- mained on their shoulders from their weather worn clothes. The naked, emaciated body and the wounded feet appear from beneath the tattered clothes as they are sitting on the I nasty floor, eating the hard black bread re- ceived from compassionate peasants. Amid ! this moving heap of human beings who cover each square foot of the platforms and beneath i them, you perceive the d5 ing child On the knees of his mother, and close by, the new ' born baby. The baby is the delight of, the consolation to these women, each of whom surely has more human feelings than any of the chiefs and warders. It is passed from hand to hand; the best rags are parted with to Scover it's shivering limbs, the tenderest caresses arc for it............uow many have grown up in this way! One of them stands brvra SIn T urTk khapo l kg 70 me the stories she has heard so many times from her mother about the humani of the "sceierates' and the infamy of their s'chiefsn She describes to me the toys that the convicts ma le for her during the inter minable journey-plain toys inspired by eood-hearted humor, and side by side, the miserable proceedings, the eXactions of money, the curses and blows, the whistling l of the whips of the chiefs.
 The prison, however, is cleared by-and. by, as the parties of convicts start to continue their journey. When the season and the 1 state of the rivers permit it, parties of 800 convicts each, with women and children, leave the Tonlsk prison every week, and be- gin their foot journey to Irkutsk and Trans baikalia. track, marked all along by poles to distinguish it from the surrounding plain ploughed and rugged by the passage of thousands of cars, covered with ruts that break down the hardest wheels, runs through
 
 opens the march. Behind them, heavily ad. vance the hard labor convicts, with half shaved heads, wearing gray clothes with a yellow diamond on the back, and open shoes
 worn out by the long journey and exhibiting the tatters in which the wounded feet are wrapped. Each convict wears chain, rivet- ed to his ankles, it's rings being twisted into rags-if the convict has collected enough of aims during his journey to pay the black smith for riveting it looser on his feet. The chain goes up each foot and is suspended to girdle. Another chain closely ties both hands, and a third chain binds together six or eight convicts. Every false movement of any of the pack is felt by all his chain-eompanions; , the feebler is dragged forward by the stronger, and he must not stop: ths way-the etape- is long, and the autumn day is short.
 Soldiers accompany the party on both sides, meditating perhaps the order given at the departure:-"If one of them runs away, | shoot him down. If he is killed, five rubies of reward for you, and dogs death to the dog!" In the you discover a few cars l that ara drawn by the small, attenuated, cat like peasants horses. They are loaded with
 the bags of the convicts, with the sick or | dying. who are fastened by ropes on the top of the load.
 Behind the cars hasten the wives of the convicts; few have found 8 free loaded car, and crouch there when unable to move further; whilst the great number march oen1nQ the car5, IsaulnS tnelf cnuuren Dy tbo hands, or bearing them in their arms. Dressed in rags, freezing under the gusts of the cold wind, cutting their almost naked feet on the frozen ruts, how many of them repeat the words of Avvakum's wife:-'tThess tortures, oh dear, how long will they last?" Tn the rear, comes a second detachment of soldiers who drive with the butt ends of their rifles those women who stop exhausted in the freezing mud of the road. The procession is closed by the car of the commander of the party.
 Late in the afternoon, after having covered some fifteen twenty n1iles, the party
 reaches the etape where it spends the night
 and takes one days rest each three days.
 The etapes were mostly built fifty years ago,
 and after having resisted the inclemenoies of
 the climate, and the passage of hundred
 thousand of conVicts, they have become now
 rotten and foul from top to bottom. The
 old haywood house refuses shelter to thu
 chained travellers brought under it's roof, and
 wind and snow freely enter the interstices
 between it's rotten beams; heaps of snow are
 accumulated in the corners of the rooms.
 The etape was built to shelter 150 convicts;
 that being the average size of parties thirty