The St. Mary banner. (Franklin, Parish of St. Mary, La.) 1889-1931, 1914-09-19

4 ocean of steppe toward the
rising sun. you will enter a
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 fir 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 a
beast to see or hear; clusters Of mos
quitoes wreathing In spirals up a
glancing Shaft of twilight The silence
Of the grave, writes Bassett Digby in
the New York Tribune.
Yes; pleasant after the shadeless
steppe. d.. 1t must be a deep
wood though. Miles have drawn into
leagues Suddenly night falls. :.
II you find a 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 IL forest now.
Well, to summarize, II you are
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 certain moroseness, a
certain long-faced silence, in your
woodmen hosts. And not improbably
you will have vowed to pause for
day at the frontier of this forest-if
frontier 1t should have, indeed-to lie
on your back on the steppe and gaze
at clouds. You have almost forgotten
what big, spacious cloud looks like.
Out Of the Cedars.
Comes morning when the cedars
and frs thin out and birch coppice en-
sues. Presently the birches thin and
thin. trucking away into a broad down
ward sweep of treeless prairie. A
few leagues ahead glints OF gold and
silver fash 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 river of foam flecked
emerald, the Siberian metropolis.
II you are looking for Occidental
grandevrs (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 II not in actuality, out Of
the awful solitudes Of forest that
hedge her about: then you will not cry
ne upon her for being the capital city
OF Northern Asia and having neither
street-cars nor skyscrapers. few drains
and fewer street lamps, hotels a rire,
In actorless opera house and roads
that are lakes Of mud or drifts OF |
Stif1ing dust.
Facts? Facts? You can't and 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 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
though 10 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
In 1852 Ivan Pakhobov, leader Of =
gang Of Cossacks and ex.
:eeding tough. built q stockaded tim
Der fort at the junction OF the rivers
Angara and Irkut. Altruistic patriot
SIN was less Of q motive OF his than
plumber OF the Boorfat
Mongol fur trappers. He levied trib-
lte on them-extorted loot to the &C.
Of flag waggings. Some
II it may eventually have reached the /
reasury at Moscow. Who knows?
When Professor Gmelin came out.
: 1874. on the pioneer scientific ex- /
'loration OF Northern Asia. he found ,
- log huts 1t Irkutsk. Of which most