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Updated: July 2, 2025
This brightness, this noise as of a great song of life, was like an irony, like scorn levelled at the deathbed of this living corpse.... Meanwhile Kowalski had begun to speak. 'Long ago, he said 'it must be about forty years I was exiled to the steppes of Orenburg. I was young and strong, I trusted in God and had confidence in men and in myself.
At Sizeran he left civilisation and railways behind him, and rode on a sleigh to Orenburg, a distance of four hundred and eighty miles. At Orenburg he engaged a Tartar servant, and another stretch of eight hundred miles on a sleigh brought him to Fort No. 1, the outpost of the Russian army facing the desert of Central Asia.
Here the railroad was to pass, and it was said that in two years' time there would be railway communication, not only between Samara and the capital, but even as far as Orenburg. Presently the scenery became very picturesque as we raced over the glistening surface, which flashed like a burnished cuirass beneath the rays of the rising sun.
He said they no longer get anything from America, and while the railway was cut at Orenburg by the Cossacks, they naturally could get no cotton from Turkestan. In fact, last autumn they had calculated that they had only enough material to keep the factories going until December. Now they found they could certainly keep going to the end of March, and probably longer.
Father Garassim and his wife bade me good-bye. "Except you, poor Marya has no longer any protector or comforter," said the priest's wife. At Orenburg I was in safety, but the town was soon besieged, and I could not persuade the general to sally out and attack the rebels.
Then, under the coat of dirt, under his rags and an old Orenburg shawl, I really saw something familiar. "Perhaps we met," I said. "Petrograd?" "Yes, indeed," he bowed his old head and sighed. "I used to go very often to the French Theatre. You remember 'L'Aiglon? Can I chat with you a bit? This silence is simply killing me. Four months of silence!
At last he finished his letter, put it with my commission into the same cover, took off his spectacles, called me, and said "This letter is addressed to Andréj Karlovitch R., my old friend and comrade. You are to go to Orenburg to serve under him." All my brilliant expectations and high hopes vanished.
I started my journey across the Kirghiz Steppe in November, 1893, from Orenburg on the Ural River, which for some distance forms the boundary between Asia and Europe. I travelled in a stout tarantass, the common means of conveyance on Russian country roads; it consists of a sort of a box on two bars between the wheel axles, with a hood but no seat.
Sometimes our famished infantry took the field, but the depth of the snow prevented action with any success against the flying cavalry of the enemy. The artillery thundered vainly from the height of the ramparts, and in the field guns could not work because of the weakness of the worn-out horses. This is how we made war, and this is what the officials of Orenburg called prudence and foresight.
The body of a handsome young peasant woman, called Marthe Popenkoff, was found in a lonely part of the road, between Orskaia and Orenburg, with the skin of her face and body shockingly torn and lacerated, but without there being any wounds deep enough to cause her death, which the doctor attributed to syncope.
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