AMONG THE URAL GOLD-DIGGERS.

ACCORDING to Berard there are no Urals; the mountains are a fiction of the geographers, who wanted a long caterpillar to mark the Asiatic boundary on their maps. The academician, writing in Paris, was judging vulgarly by the height of the alleged mountains. The Urals are certainly not high, but they do exist, and have an extraordinarily distinctive character. They formed a dividing line before the geographers considered the matter at all. They stretch a thousand miles and more from the river Ural to the mouth of the Petchora, and the country on each side of them is plain. Russia is so flat that the peasant calls the mud banks of the Dwina moun- tains, so he may well say the same of the great mounds of

earth and pyramids of rock that we know as the Urals. From time immemorial the peasant has spoken in hushed accents of the great chain of mountains that extends from the merry uplands of Urabk to the forested summits of Zlato-Ust. They are his Himalayas.

The Ural landscape is a novel one. The hills are miscel- laneous. They rise abruptly and look like isolated tents.

They are of the sort that children draw on their slates— triangles. There are no giants shoulder to shoulder, no grand, many-pointed ranges, not even a stretch like our Malverns. And when you come to know the extraordinary composition of the rocks you may say of them all that they are so many pimples and boils of the world. They are, indeed, a widespread sulky eruption of the matter in the depths of the earth.

By virtue of their metallic ores the Urals are the most remarkable mountains in the world. The hills are not earth- coloured here, but manifold, bright, and strange. There are pink mountains that blaze in the sunshine, rust-brown ridges, great teeth of white quartz, gold-studded. In the Urals the scenery of the fairy tale has become actual. You do journey for days through dark woods and emerge at last to see the moon shining on a little silver mountain. You do come to the lodestone mountain and lose all the brads of your boots. You do find forest hermits who live in caves of green marble, and who have collected and hidden away as evil all the lumps of gold that they have found in the wood. Yes, the Ural is a land whence all the monotony of the green earth has gone, where there exists in its stead every rock and metal that men prize as rare and beautiful.

Consequently the Ural is a land suffering from men's gaze. Too many have looked on her greedily, too few with love. She looks back at men hardly. Men also have made her ugly, rending her garment of green, tearing away her masks of loveliness to ravage her gold. D'Annunzio has said, " If you have a thing of beauty, shut it behind seven doors and hide it behind seven curtains," but the truth is, the thing of beauty is always behind the seven doors and the seven curtains. It cannot exist without the doors and curtains. The materialist thinks that by pushing past doors and curtains be can get to it, but when the masks of loveliness have been thrown down all that is behind is a death's head, a passion satisfied, barren gold.

Gold-mining is a sort of rape, a crime by which earth and man are made viler. If I bad doubted of its influence on man I needed but to go to the Ural goldfields. A more drunken, murderous, brother-hating population than that of this district I have not seen in all Russia. It was a great sorrow to see such a delightful peasantry all in debauch. And, reviewing the spoils of the earth on the one band and the debasement of man on the other, there could be but one opinion as to the profit to humanity. As old Chaucer knew even in his day,—

" Curs41 was the time I dar wel says, That men first dide hir swety besynesse To grobbe up metal lurkyng in darknesse, And in the ryveres first gemmes soghte ; Alas ! than sprong up al the cursednesse Of covetyse that first our sorwe broghte."

Not that "covetyse," in any modern sense of personal

covetousness, is a sin of the Russian& The Slays are far too self-sufficient to covet the possessions of another. What gold- mining does induce is the gambler's mania, the constant thought that one can become rich by chance, irresponsibility, abandonment to hope or to despair. Then when the peasant begins to hope too much to find gold, or to search too desperately, he is tempted to steal. There are always great chances for stealing gold. And wealth obtained easily or luckily is squandered readily and haphazard. The miner has no culture, no taste, not even a taste for property and squiredom, so that when at a stroke he gains a hundred or a thousand pounds it is rather difficult to know how to spend

it. His ideal of happiness has been vodka, and all the bliss that money can obtain for him lies in that. The cinemato- graph teaches him that women can be bought, that they can be quarrelled over, and that a cruel and ugly revenge is noble and

striking.

Maas is a gold-mining village of twenty-five thousand inhabitants—it was my poet village, and I had to go there for my letters. It has two churches, four electric theatres, fifteen vodka shops, a score of beer-houses, and many dens where cards are played and women bought and sold to the strains of the gramophone. It is situated in a most lovely hollow among

the hills, and, seen from a distance, it is one of the most beautiful villages of North Russia, but seen from within it is a veritable inferno.

There are in the Urals several villages of the size of Miass: they should all be constituted towns, and a town order should be introduced. As it is, they are not even called villages officially, but factories—this whole immense abode of men and women is called Miass Factory or, in foreign parlance, "Miass Baines," though there is no factory there. Nearly all the gold-mining villages are called "factories."

I stayed a week at an inn in Miass, the chief inn, dirty, ramshackle, expensive. No street of the factory has any

pavement, no road is made, there arc no water-carts, and the whole village is ankle-deep in dust and offal. The wind blew np constantly, great storms of dust or, shall I say, pulverized filth. Even when doors and windows were shut a heavy layer of dust accumulated on everything in my room each day. The heat of noonday was appalling, and the flies buzzed in countless myriads.

From my window I looked out on a large scaffolding of a new batch of shops in process of being built. Here all day

long twenty women walked up and down the building with hods full of bricks, an abominable work for women and girls. I was much surprised to see women as bricklayers and navvies, and I said as much to the innkeeper. He explained that both men and women worked at the gold-washings, and most families were kept up by the woman's earnings as much as by the man's ; indeed, in many cases husband and children were kept by the woman alone. He thought that whenever both man and wife worked for their living in the factory or at the mines it ended in the man being perpetually drunk and the woman having to do all the earning. " The contractors like it," said be ; " the women are just as strong, more reliable, and cheaper."

Whenever I went out from the inn the girls would call out, "Hallo, young man, are you married ?" Sometimes I would stop and talk to one of them, and the others would bawl and giggle and push one another into me.

The women of Russia are very sober, but I have seen many of these bricklayers troubled not by the length but the breadth of the street. I have seen them lying in the dust dead drunk.

Whilst I was in the Urals the shops they were building here came into actual shape, with white stone facings and

window-fronts. In a year or so they will have been raided several times, and the owners will feel themselves well- established firms. Round about them lie higgledy-piggledy

the wooden stalls of the daily fair, and up and down the fair

parade all day the most fearsome and bloodthirsty ruffians, drunken and ragged. Free fights are frequent, the man with a crimson gash on his face a common sight. " Government Wine Shop, No. 9," stands near by, and outside it from dawn to dusk lie drunken beggars waiting for those who have money to purchase drink, and hoping to share a bottle or beg a copper. Further on is one of the cinematograph shows presenting "The Horrors of Life," open from two p.m. on Sundays, and attracting more people than the church does, though the people mostly believe in God and bell.

Strange to say, the factory has its "gardens" and parade ground, and there again the chief amusement is an open-air cinematograph theatre. The gardens are kept fresh by an immense artificial lake which the inhabitants made years ago for the purposes of gold-washing. The lake covers an area of about eight square miles, and the men and women of Miass work on its shores, digging up the gravel, sifting and washing it with iron sieves and buckets of water. The peasants work

in artels, and are paid a shilling a day and a small commission

on the gold they bring in. Formerly they found great quan- tities of the precious metal, but now the whole surface has been sifted, and until mines are bored or new areas taken

in nothing much will be drawn from it. Even when, as occasionally happens, a peasant strikes gold in quantity he

generally manages to secrete it and sell it at the price of

six shillings the zolotnik, either to the bank or to some agent. The district is at present worked by small contractors, staratelni, who employ the labourers, pay them wages, and pay also the Government rent on the land and the royalty on minerals found. Frequently I was taken for a new contractor and prospector, and men came to me to be signed on for work. Everyone tried to whet my appetite by tales of lucky finds and fortunes made, and I was shown the many grand houses built by people who had in time past struck gold and made great piles. And as I wandered about the outskirts of the lake I saw all the abandoned holdings, the old follies, dug up, cut about, rifled, deserted. For miles around, the forest was wounded by great pits dug into the gravel and seven-foot- deep square holes which looked like unused graves. They defaced the countryside, for verdure will not spring from the Ural subsoil, but only from the rich pine-mould above it.

What a place to live in from year-end to year-end! As I lay sleepless in my close room I heard the sobbing of a woman, the occasional smash of a window, riotous shouting and dis- puting, and often at two in the morning the mingled cries of drunken men and women singing, yelling, sobbing in Baccha- nalian processions. To tell all that was happening in Miass in the night would need a Dostoieffskian mind and pen.

Miass, being a village, had only village police, and one went from day to day and week to week without seeing a policeman. No order was kept at all, and the very worst people in the place, who in an ordinary regime would be forced into the back streets or packed into prison well out of sight, were allowed to sprawl over all the most important thoroughfares and give the settle- ment its distinctive appearance.

One evening as I hurried to the post I saw a girl of sixteen lying drunk in the street, and another woman was standing over her, kicking her violently in the ribs. Such a sight explained to me the terrible procession of dead children out of the town. The continual array of children's funerals was a. most afflicting sight. The cemetery lay three vents from the village, and every day one saw the negligent little procession of tawdry coffin and imitation flowers carried from the settle- ment to the grave. It was the saddest vision, child after child making that little journey from the place of its unnecessary birth to the place of nnmourned death.

Then it must not be forgotten that all about lay the most lovely Nature, untrodden forests, pure lakes, innumerable unnamed, beautiful hills, far distances, and silence full of bees bumming and birds singing. It would seem man does not really care for the beauty of this world ; it is something else that he requires, that be seeks, something that he vainly imagines gold will procure—happiness, extra unearthly-, wonderful happiness. And instead he reaps misery, dirt,