The Prince George's enquirer and southern Maryland advertiser. (Upper Marlborough, Md.) 1882-1925, 1914-09-04

IL
"a have left Russia, journeying
IVA across fat, featureless
"a ocean of steppe toward the
rising sun. you will enter
wood.
Light-heartedly you plunge through
a crevice of that dark wall OF ever
green foliage The cool gloom is
pleasing after the shadeless steppe.
Towering masts of pine and tir and
cedar. Infrequent glimpses OF sky
through chance vents In the ROOF. A
faint dank stencil of rotting logs and
waterlogged moss. Not bird or
beast to see or hear; clusters of mos
quitoes wreathing in spirals UP
glancing shaft of twilight. The silence
of the grave, writes Bassett Digby In
the New York Tribune.
Yes; pleasant after the shadeless
steppe. 1t must be a deep
wood though. Miles have drawn into
leagues. Suddenly night falls.
If you find track in the next three
days, which is improbable, you will
live to celebrate, in some turf-roofed
log hut, your first weeks passage
through this forest-yes, you begin to
call it forest now.
Well, to summarize, if you are a
pretty good walker and have luck you
will be getting near the eastern fringe
of that forest about seventeen weeks
later. Long before that you will cease
to wonder at a certain moroseness, a
certain long-faced silence, in your
woodmen hosts. And not improbably
you will have vowed to pause for a
day at the frontier of this forest-if
frontier it should have, indeed-to lie
on your back on the steppe and gaze
at clouds You have almost forgotten
what a big, spacious cloud looks like.
Out of the Cedars.
Comes a morning when the cedars
and frs thin out and birch coppice en-
sues. Presently the birches thin and
thin, trucking away into broad down
ward sweep of treeless prairie. A
few leagues ahead glints of gold and
silver flash incomprehensively out of
the far distance. Then splashes of
dazzling white, spires and towers and
domes, and a city appears, swept on
three sides by a river of foam-fecked
emerald, the Siberian metropolis.
If you are looking for Occidental
grandeurs (sic), comforts and culture,
approaching this outpost of empire
with the Berlin or the Boston point of
view, you will find Irkutsk crude. To
appreciate her you should come upon
her, mentally if not in actually, out of
the awful solitudes of forest that
hedge her about; then you will not cry
lie upon her for being the capital city
Of Northern Asia and having neithar
street-cars nor skyscrapers, few drains
and fewer street lamps, hotels rire,
an actorless opera house and roads
that are lakes of mud or drifts of
sitting dust.
Facts? Facts? You can't find a
guide book dealing with Siberia, and
you champ your hungry jaws for
facts? No; there are no guide books.
Facts? Oh, well then-Irkutsk, the
capital city of a largish slab of the
worlds dry land, about three times
the size of all Europe, exclusive of
Russia, has $4,000 inhabitants who
labor under the delusion that they are
Europeans; though 70 per cent of the
hairiest are honest enough not to give
the matter much thought, wearing
their shirts outside their trousers and
dwelling in small log huts and bovine
tranquility.
In 1862 Ivan Pakhobov, leader Of
ilibusterins gang of Cossacks and ex-
ceeding tough, built stockaded tim
Der fort at the junction of the rivers
Angara and Irkut. Altruistic patriot
ism was less of motive Of his than
legitimatized plumber of the Booriat
Mongol fur trappers. He levied trib
ute Oh them-extorted loot to the &C.
compartment Of flag waggings. Some
of it may eventually have reached the
treasury at Moscow. Who knows?
When Professor Gmelin came out,
in 1734, on the pioneer scientific ex-
ploration of Northern Asia, he found
939 log huts at Grkutsk, of which most
contained, in addition to a stove and
a bathroom, "une chambre sans fumee
OH en- Sc tient en- famille," which is
more than one can say nowadays. In
1903 the whole of Siberia was placed
under the administration of a COVER
nor general, with residence at Irk-
utsk. Today the city has cathe-
dral-Cur Lady IF kazan-thirty-two
Orthodox Greek churches, sixteen par
ish churches, thirty-five private chap
els attached to residences, some Rom
an Catholic churches, a German Lu-
theran church, forty-nine schools, eigh-
teen charitable institutions, an opera