Amador ledger., 1904-05-13
SIBERIA IN WINTER.
ARCTIC GOLD AND lCINESS REIGN
FOR FOUR MONTHS.

Vladivostok Then Is Frozen Stiff,
World of Black and Deadly Frost.
The Way Frozen Food Is Displayed
In the Bazaar-Coast Sledge Racing.
Imagine a black world frozen stiff,
and that is Vladivostok in winter.
Wherever water once flowed, in bay
or harbor, 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 i'm
mediate hills behind the town are all
as bare as a mans hand. Once behind
these hills the endless rolling plain be-
gins, which is Siberia, says Herbage
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 a 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 it's way it is
more impressive. The earth freezes
deep many feet down and is as hard as
iron The whole harbor turns a 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 day. Twelve hours Of
an ordinary winters day is often suffi-
cient to block the passage. And all
this in a town in the same parallel as
Marseilles.
To those who have never expert
enced it real arctic cold is almost in
conceivable. They cannot grasp the
difference between 10 and so degrees
of frost. 1t remains to them merely
one of numbers. Indeed when once
the winter has gone it is sometimes
difficult to remember really how cold
1t 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 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
ters until the afternoon. The word
CUTTERS" is used simply to designate
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
whisky as a modest "bitters" 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 of
ten used for this purpose. 1t is quite
astonishing the partiality for such
things as oily sardines that one devel-
ops.
In the winter time the bazaar is real
ly 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 Vladivos-
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 1t.
The great sport of Vladiyostok 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
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
to put this on. is always liable to come
uhdone and If undone is very danger
ous. An English lady once related to
me with horror how she was taken
for drive in Vladivostok and the
hotse and carriage just went over ev-
erything-walls, banks or whatever
came III the way. 1t is quite true,
h,,s5idn horca dooo ond ~ vo,, bavo