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As soon as the vehicles were seen coming along the straight level road, the first set of horses were brought out, and the leading tarantass was ready to proceed in two or three minutes. The other horses were changed as quickly, and in less than ten minutes from their arrival the whole were on their way again.
I finally arranged with a Russian trader for a tarantass and baggage cart to take me the two hundred and twenty-five miles to the head of river navigation beyond Kiakhta.
The silence would have been complete but for the grindings of the wheels of the tarantass over the road, the creaking of the axles, the snorting of the horses, and the clattering of their iron hoofs among the pebbles, sparks flying out on every side. The road was perfectly deserted.
The iemschik leapt from his seat and seized the horses' heads, for terrible danger threatened the whole party. The tarantass was at a standstill at a turning of the road, down which swept the hurricane; it was absolutely necessary to hold the animals' heads to the wind, for if the carriage was taken broadside it must infallibly capsize and be dashed over the precipice.
He knew that a Russian driver never even tries to avoid either stones, ruts, bogs, fallen trees, or trenches, which may happen to be in the road. He was used to all that. His companion ran a risk of being hurt by the violent jolts of the tarantass, but she would not complain. For a little while Nadia did not speak.
In other localities the stagnant waters through which the road lay had been avoided, not by bridges, but by tottering platforms ballasted with thick layers of clay, whose joists shook like a too weak plank thrown across an abyss. Some of these platforms extended over three hundred feet, and travelers by tarantass, when crossing them have experienced a nausea like sea-sickness.
Constant changing is a great trouble, especially if one has much baggage. In a wet or cold night when you have settled comfortably into a warm nest, and possibly fallen asleep, it is an intolerable nuisance to turn out and transfer. To remedy this evil one can buy a tarantass, a vehicle on the general principle of the telyaga, but larger, stronger, and better in every way.
Six hours afterwards the two vehicles, the tarantass preceding the telga, arrived at Ekaterenburg, nothing worthy of note having happened in the descent. The first person the reporters perceived at the door of the post-house was their iemschik, who appeared to be waiting for them.
Here was the death-bed of their freedom and they were swallowed up by mighty Russia. I have crossed Turkestan many times by rail, in tarantass, and on horseback. I have strolled for weeks through the narrow picturesque streets and the gloomy bazaars of the old town called Bukhara, the "Blessed."
The tarantass encountered neither pedestrians nor horsemen, nor a vehicle of any description, in the narrow defiles of the Ural, on this threatening night. Not even the fire of a charcoal-burner was visible in the woods, not an encampment of miners near the mines, not a hut among the brushwood.
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