Show LIFE IN THE POLAR REGIONS A Country Where the Richest Man Cannot Buy Sufficient Food Our costume for both summer and winter is a hideous mixture of native and European dress The European part has generally been made In prison out of pieces I of prison cloth and the native part always al-ways consists of rasrs and it is very difficult 1 diffi-cult to obtain clothing at all You can o < 1 I hardly imagine what an endless worry it is to make caps mittens stockings and all such small things We have to do it all I ourselves and often canaot get either cloth or fur Our worsttrouble however is want of food However hard we work at our fishing however careful we are never nev-er to lose a chance of obtaining any kind of menall the same in summer there are times when we have to actually starve for in summer there is absolutely no meat to be got and to live constantly and exclusively exclu-sively on fish not only affects one with nausea but with some people produces actual fish poisoning We have all come to the conclusion that a sudden change from ordinary food to an exclusive fish diet results in a peculiar form of poisoning not yet known to science In winter when there is meat as well we eat the fish but in summer the mere sight of boiled fish affects many with nausea and vomiting vomit-ing In summer we live on a very small I quantity of flour a little milk from our own cows wild berries and the interminable intermin-able fish The worst time of the year is the beginning of autumn when large quantities quan-tities of food have to bo stored up and the roads are not properly frozen The cows leave off giving milk neither carcasses car-casses nor live cattle are brought Inthe only way out of the difficulty would be togo to-go to sleep for three weeks like the bears But even at the best season of the year we never really have enough to eat we are too poor for thatand even if we were rich it would not hr p usthere is not food enough in the pica You can imagine bow delightful it must be to lie down hungry at night to wake up the next morning still hungrier to wait anxiously for the half rations that go by the name of dinner after dinner to go into the kitchen and carefully gather up all the bitsall the scrapings of pots and pans then to strap ones belt tighter for hunger and wait for supper and so on day after day It is like the life of half starved sailors wrecked on a desert island I havo not spoken of a thousand other conveniences of life for instance artificial arti-ficial light which with us is now the burning question of the moment It has been a bad year so that the cattle are very lean and we cannot get any tallow to make candles We have already bought up and used nearly all the candles there were in the town and now in one more fortnight we must expect to be left candleless in the unbroken night of December It is the aame with everything All our life is mado up of a thousand pitiable wants and hardships hard-ships Altogether our housekeeping is I very original on tho one hand an out of thoway Arctic hole where we ara no bodys business and nobody cares what we do or how we manage on the other our stern jailer nature wao forces us to live quite in prison style to sleep in general gen-eral barracks to eat at a general mess and so on If we did not submit to this we should all have died of cold and hunger before now Another An-other feature of our life is the hard manual man-ual labor labor as of a beast of burden such as even the allenduring Russian peasant has no idea of For instance for two persons to draz a loaded barge along with towing ropes for forty miles is regarded re-garded here as the merest trifle and as there are no sails hero hauling and rowing era the only means of navigation Then there is the autumn fishing standing knee deep in tho water and floating ice and pulling at a frozen rope that cuts your hands until tho blood comes then mowing in the deep swamp mud at the mercy of mosquito often without any food or drink but the water from the bog pools then iii 11 9i j again the hewing of tho trees in winter i and in summer the towing of rafts for I forty miles or more and so on indefinitely Our intellectual life Is no better Fortunately For-tunately we have books in various languages lan-guages Almost all of us road a good deal I many spend whole mouths in reading some even study aerionily But there is no life no encouragement no freshness in I it all nothing to animate the dull mechani i cal cramming up of English words or solv i i ing of mathematicial problems The real i interest of our intellectual life gathers round quite another centre For us the first of all things is the arrival of news j from the outer world Once In three or four months the district post brings us a bundle or two Some of the letters are lost the packages are broken open many things are missing the books torn and soiled at least a third of the pages are gone I from the newspapers and magazines but I I what does that matter The post brings at i least a few numbers of periodicals with I i fresh news or a few new books ic brings to each of us half a dozen letters I from our relatives and friends If you I people in Europe could only know with j what agitation we wait for the coming of I j the post how morbidly impatient we grow I during the last month of expectationwith I with what nervous anxiety we count the hours the minutes 1 The arrival of the I post is a positive epoch in our life It Is a piteous sight when some unfortunate geta nothing the way his lips will begin to quiver and the convulsive efforts he will I make to force a smile and not break down There is a great deal of difference in the J way that people read their letters Soma I rush up seize upon their prey and hurriedly i hur-riedly escape as though afraid that someone I some-one would snatch it from them others col I lect all their letters examine the envelopes envel-opes and seem afraid to open them others again are regular epicures they open their I letters look at the handwriting run through a passage here and there then finally hide their letters until they can get I alone In their own rooms and in the meantime mean-time try to picK up scraps of other peoples i peo-ples newsLetter in Free Russia |