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The material is of so fine a quality that it can be rolled to the thickness of letter paper without breaking. Every thing at the zavod is on a grand scale even to the house of the director, and his facilities for entertaining guests. All was silent at the time of our passage, the workmen being busy with their Christmas festivities.
There are shafts, adits, and levels just as in the mines of Colorado and California. The Russians give the name of priesk to a mine where gold is washed from the earth. The silver mine with its shafts in the solid rock is called a roodnik. As before stated, the word zavod is applied to foundries, smelting works, and manufactories in general.
I met some of these gentlemen during my stay, and was indebted to them for information concerning the manner of working mines and reducing ores. The city contains a handsome array of public buildings, including the mining bureau, the hospital, and the zavod or smelting establishment.
Colonel Filoff invited the doctor and myself to visit the zavod at Barnaool on the second day after our arrival. As he spoke no language with which I was familiar, the colonel placed me in charge of a young officer fluent in French, who took great pains to explain the modus operandi. The zavod is on a grand scale, and employs about six hundred laborers.
Leaving the zavod we were once more among the forests of the Urals, and riding over the low hills that form this part of the range. The road was good, but there were more oukhabas than suited my fancy. I was on constant lookout for the steep road leading over the range, but failed to find it.
He labored all day and most of the night putting in bolts, nuts, screws, and bits of iron in different localities, and astonished me by demanding less than half I expected to pay, and still more by his guilty manner, as if ashamed at charging double. The iron used in repairing my carriage came from Petrovsky Zavod, about a hundred miles southeast of Verkne Udinsk.
Just outside the town we passed a large zavod, devoted to the manufacture of candles. An immense quantity of tallow from the Kirghese steppes undergoes conversion into stearine at this establishment, and the production supplies candles to all Siberia and part of European Russia.
Many of the present inhabitants are exiles or the descendants of exiles, Nerchinsk having been a place of banishment for political and criminal offenders during the last hundred years. Those condemned to work in the mines were sent to Great Nerchinsk Zavod, about two hundred miles away. The town was the center of the military and mining district, and formerly had more importance than at present.
The smelting process continues four months of each year, and during this time about twelve hundred poods of gold are melted and cast into bars. This work, for 1866, was finished a few days before my arrival, and the furnaces were utterly devoid of heat. In the yard at the zavod, I saw a dozen or more sleds, and on each of them there was an iron-bound box filled with bars of gold.
This train was ready to leave under strong guard for St. Petersburg. The morning after my visit to the zavod it was reported that a soldier guarding the sled train had been killed during the night. The incident was a topic of conversation for the rest of my stay, but I obtained no clear account of the affair.
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