I was bemoaning sadly within myself a long, tedious night, passed without sleep, when we came up at daybreak with a caravan of exiles. These poor wretches, dragging their chains afoot, were wearily trudging along, with a long journey before them, to the far end of Eastern Siberia. I had not at that time more pity for assassins and thieves than I have now, and since the day I passed the Russian frontier, conspirators have appeared to me no better, perhaps even worse; still it touched me to the heart to see these unhappy creatures, with a wearisome journey of three thousand leagues before them, and their fate too--if they lived to reach the end of the dreary march--instead of there finding a home to cheer them, to find nothing but a gaol!
A few sledges were following this caravan, and when I inquired why they thus accompanied it, I was briefly informed: “For the invalids and princes.” A phrase that had on reflection a great deal of meaning in it, and suggested very forcibly the formidable power of the Emperor in Russia, a sovereign power before which every subject, from the humblest serf to the highest prince of the realm, must bow down, with their differences almost lost in the equal degree of subjection.
The Emperor, in fact, may without trial condemn any subject to two years’ imprisonment, and even, if he thinks proper to do so, banish him for life.
It occurred to me, as I was watching these poor exiles, that there might be one innocent, and this thought would have made me very uneasy if I had not by this time become too good a Russian subject to venture to entertain it very long.
It is not at all an uncommon occurrence in Siberia to meet travellers afoot. I have seen, it is true, but very few women that recalled to my memory “the Siberian girl” of Xavier de Maistre; if I had, and our road had been in the same direction, I should have offered them perhaps a place in my sledge, just as the peasants of the Ural mountains compassionately helped the heroine, where she became so popular, to reach the end of her painful journey. But I have met men, very often in all kinds of weather and situations, trudging on foot, in spite of the snow and the intense cold, across a dreary extent of country where no human habitation could be seen, in order to reach some remote region with the hope of providing for a domestic want, to accomplish a pilgrimage, or to proceed to some destination under the coercion of the Government.