Siberia and the Exile System

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: between Nizhni Novgorod and the mouth of the Kama, where there ply, during the season of navigation, about 450 steamers. As far down as the so-called Samara bend, the river presents almost everywhere a picture of busy life and activity, and is full of steamers, barges, and great hulks, like'magnified...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: between Nizhni Novgorod and the mouth of the Kama, where there ply, during the season of navigation, about 450 steamers. As far down as the so-called Samara bend, the river presents almost everywhere a picture of busy life and activity, and is full of steamers, barges, and great hulks, like'magnified canal-boats, loaded with goods from eastern Russia, Siberia, and Central Asia. The amount of merchau- WATEH CARHIEH IS A v6LGA RIVER VILLAGE. disc produced, even in the strip of country directly tributary to the Volga itself, is enormous. Many of the agricultural villages, such as Liskovo, which the steamer swiftly passes between Nizhni Novgorod and Kazan, and which seem, from a distance, to be insignificant clusters of unpainted wooden houses, load with grain 700 vessels a year. The scenery of the upper Volga is much more varied and picturesque than one would expect to find along a riverrunning through a flat and monotonous country. The left bank, it is true, is generally low and uninteresting; but on the other side the land rises abruptly from the water's edge to a height of 400 or 500 feet, and its boldly projecting promontories, at intervals of two or three miles, break up the majestic river into long, still reaches, like a series of placid lakes opening into one another and reflecting in their tranquil depths the dense foliage of the virgin forest on one side and the bold outlines of the half-mountainous shore on the other. White-walled churches with silver domes appear here and there on the hills, surrounded by little villages of unpainted wooden houses, with elaborately carved and decorated gables; deep valleys, shaggy with hazel bushes, break through the wall of bluffs on the right at intervals, and afford glimpses of a rich farming country in the interior; and now ...