ea caravans. With the
establishment of the winter road, in November, hundreds of low,
one-horse sledges, loaded with hide-bound boxes of tea that had come
across the desert of Gobi from Peking, left Irkutsk, every day, for
Nizhni Novgorod. They moved in solid caravans, a quarter of a mile to
a mile in length, and in every such caravan there were from fifty to
two hundred sledges. As the tea-horses went at a slow, plodding
walk, their drivers were required, by law, to turn out for private
travellers and give the latter the road; but they seldom did anything
of the kind. There were only twelve or fifteen of them to a caravan
of a hundred sledges; and as they usually curled up on their loads at
night and went fast asleep, it was practically impossible to arouse
them and get the caravan out of the middle of the road. In order to
pass, therefore, we ourselves had to turn out and drive three quarters
of a mile, or possibly a mile, through the deep soft snow on one side
of the beaten track. This so exasperated our driver that he would
give every horse and every sleeping teamster in the whole caravan
a slashing cut with his long rawhide whip, shouting, in almost
untranslatable Russian, "Wake up!" (Whack.) "Get a move on you!"
(Whack.) "What are you doing in the middle of the road there?"
(Whack.) "Akh! You ungodly Tartar pagans!" (Whack.) "GO TO SLEEP IN
THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, WILL YOU?" (Whack, whack.) Meanwhile, the
strongly braced outrigger of our _pavoska_, on the caravan side, would
strike every one of the tea-sledges, as we passed, and the long series
of violent shocks, combined with the rolling and pitching of our
vehicle, as it wallowed through the deep snow, would be enough to
awaken a man from anything except the last sleep of death. Usually, we
were aroused by our driver's preliminary shouts when we first came in
sight of a caravan; but sometimes we were in such a stupor of sleep
that we did not awake until the outrigger collided with the first load
of tea and brought us suddenly to consciousness with a half-dazed
impression that we had been struck by lightning, or hit by a falling
tree. If we had had to undergo this experience only once or twice
in the course of the night, it would not have been so bad; but we
sometimes passed half a dozen caravans between sunset and dawn; threw
every one of them into disorder and confusion with outrigger and whip;
and left behind us a wake of Russian and Tartar profanity almost
f