Gloucester County Democrat. (Woodbury, N.J.) 1878-1932, 1904-05-12
SIBERIA In WINTER.
ARCTIC COLD AND lciNEss REIGN
FOR FOUR MONTHS.

Imagine black world frozen stiff,
and that is yladivostok in winter.
Wherever water once flowed, in bay
or harbor, a wide, gray white road now
runs and these are the only two colors
In wide, still world. There are no
trees. The large forests of which the
old travellers wrote have long since
been cut down for fuel, and the inn
mediate hills behind the town are all
as bare as mans hand. Once behind
these hills the endless rolling plain be-
gins, which is Siberia. says Heritage
Edwards in London Black and White.
Directly summer is over all the
wealth of flowers which for five short
months have simply rioted in the land
go black, die out. The earth freezes
stiff Winter has come, and black and
stiff the world remains In Vladivostok
there is little snow Sometimes gray
dust, more like powdered ice than
snow, blows over the land, but for the
most part it is a black, not white,
/ world of frost, and in its way it is
/
deep many feet down and is as hard as
| iron. The whole harbor turns kind
| of dull gray. That, too, is frozen deep
To keep any sort of channel open the
powerful ice breaker has to go through
! its work twice a day Twelve hours of
an ordinary winters day is often suffi-
cient to block the passage And all
! IL: 1lal
Marseilles.
To those who have never expert
enced it real arctic cold is almost in
conceivable They cannot grasp the
difference between 10 and 80 degrees
Of frost II remains to them merely
one of numbers Indeed when once
the winter has gone it is sometimes
difficult to remember really how cold
it was, but during the four severe win
ter months themselves it is a very
solid and serious fact Every night
you go to sleep remembering, if you
are new to such things, that a failure
of the furnace which heats the house
means death You might wake first to
know you were frozen or you might
not In the poorer houses the inhabit
ants sleep on the stoves, and the weak
ones often die. Drunkenness here is
often attended with a swift retribu-
ton, which does not in the least pre-
vent it, and every day in winter people
are taken up frozen from the cutters,
the spirit which is in them only has
tening the freezing, so that the carts
which are always sent round to pick
up the sailors when the crews of the
men-of-war are ashore have to do their
work quickly In the summer time,
when there is not the same need for
hurry, the men often lie about in gut
tiers until the afternoon. The word
"gutters" is used simply to designate a
certain part of the roadway Cutters
as such do not exist The drunken
ness among all classes of Russians is
simply appalling. officers think moth
ing of taking a tumblerful of raw
whisky as a modest 'sbitters" before
dinner
When the wind is not blowing the
cold is endurable, though five fur lined
overcoats are not at all an extraordi-
nary amount of winter wrap. You
wear, of course, fur boots, fur gloves,
fur caps. Women have their skirts
and bodices lined with fur Wildcat,
being both soft and very warm, is off,
ten used for this purpose. 1t is quite
astonishing the Partially for such
things as oily sardines that one deyel-
ops.
In the winter time the bazaar is real
" a sight. Everything is frozen stiff.
The huge, long surgeons from the in
terror stand in rows. on their very, sharp
pointed noses. Baskets full of little
fishes are piled together like chips of
ice. Frozen birds hang down on long
festoons. and the municipality is SPAR
ed one trouble-it never has to make
away with food gone bad" The
bazaar is almost entirely in the hands
of the Chinese, the tall, dark, rough
Chinese of the north, who live wrapped
up in wadded cotton clothes until they
look like bundles of bedding Without
the Chinese and the Japanese yladiyos-
tok would find it hard to exist They
do all the work of the town. The
Russians garrison and govern it. The
Chinese, the Germans, the Japanese
and the other nations trade in it,
The great sport of Vladivostok in the
winter is sledge racing, and when once
the harbor is frozen over a proper
course is marked off, and every one
who owns a horse takes part. A Rus
sian horse is a superior brute. He
stands as high and looks as strong as
a cart horse. but he goes like the wind.
He will walk or he will gallop, but he
does not condescend to do anything be-
tween. His harness is weird and won
derful and very Russian, consisting
primarily of huge wooden half hoop
over the head, the keystone of the
whole structure, which is attached to
the shafts by winding long, thin straps
/ backward and forward. 1t takes hours