valley between lofty hills,
noticed a corduroy road made of transverse trunks of trees, as seen in
Canada. Well built water-towers about 30 feet high at all stations for
watering engines. Country looked more thriving here than in European
Russia. Better houses, and bright skies instead of lowering ones. Silver
birch, pines and firs. At various places en route have seen the old
Siberian Road, of bitter memories.

_29th October._--Lovely morning with sharp frost. Saw many small houses
with only roofs above ground. Many tame pigeons and a few magpies, but
hardly any other bird-life. Horses, or rather, ponies, small and poor.
Skirted the river Angara for a long distance in early morning. View
lovely. Water, where not frozen, clear as crystal. Swift current, which,
breaking over boulders, showed that there was no great depth. Saw three
small boys clad in furs fishing through a hole made in the snow-covered
ice. At 11 o'clock reached Irkoutsk, but saw very little of it as the
station is two miles out of the town. At about two o'clock arrived at
Lake Baikal, where we left the train and went on board the ferry boat
"Baikal," a remarkable craft with four funnels and twenty windsails,
three screws aft and one forrard. It was said that she could plough her
way through ice two feet thick at eight miles an hour. I judged her to
be about 260 feet long by 50 wide. She has a good saloon wherein
refreshments of all kinds can be obtained. The bows of this vessel, from
about six feet above the water-line, are wide open, so that as she lay
at the wharf trains can steam into her hold, the metals on board and
those on shore connecting. She has three lines of metals in the hold, so
that three trains, each of about 240 feet in length, can stand abreast.
There were twenty or twenty-one trucks aboard to-day, in three rows of
six or seven trucks each, but no engines. Most of these trucks were
laden with twenty railway metals each, though three or four of them
carried merchandize.

No ice on lake. We cast off at a quarter to three in the afternoon and
reached Missovaia on the other side at 5.35, a distance of only 40
miles, this being the narrowest part of the lake, the length of which
exceeds 300 miles.

The water was clear and of a steel-gray colour. Hills of perhaps 2,000
feet lined either shore as far as the eye could reach. Presently the
setting sun lit up the snow on these mountains with every colour of the
rainbow, and we steamed along,