Irkutsk from a social standpoint seems to offer some advantages too. Government employes, officers, and others regard it as a special favour to get an appointment here. There is a great deal of entertainment, and in the centre of the town is a most pretentious building--the Imperial Opera House. Life is expensive, and the population shows a great tendency to luxury, and even more, what one might call waste. Money is spent easily and uselessly, as is generally the case in growing places and recent settlements. In this respect there is a slight resemblance between Irkutsk and a Western American ranch or an Australian mining town; and in the afternoon, when everybody promenades on the wooden pavements, which run like bridges across and along the muddy streets, the inhabitants show exactly the same variety of origin and of social condition as in those towns beyond the seas. Besides Russian, I hear German spoken. Poles are numerous too, and all the different Baltic provinces have a fair number of representatives. Nearly all the trade is in their hands. Russians are not commercial people as a rule. And there is a large Chinese colony, mostly occupied with the famous overland tea trade _via_ Kiahta. They walk for hours and hours up and down all these endless pathways, and a great many sit, covered with furs, in front of their house doors to see the show. About eight o'clock everything becomes quiet; streets are deserted, doors are closed, shutters fastened, lights extinguished; and there are only the watchmen sauntering slowly from corner to corner, monotonously tapping their wooden rattles to let householders know that they are awake, and to give the robber at the other side of the street time to escape. It is worth while! I should, after all, recommend travellers to stop for a few days in some of the largest Siberian towns, in spite of the rough hotels and the primitive ways; it gives such a definite idea of their buildings, inhabitants, and mode of living, as could never be procured from books. VII TRANS-BAIKALIA I have arrived at the climax of the journey. We are crossing Lake Baikal. It is the most celebrated passage of the whole overland journey; the scenery is fine: an extensive sheet of water, brilliant like a mirror, surrounded by high mountains and majestic rocks; but I am inclined to repeat what I said before about hilly scenery: lake districts do not appeal to me. A sea in its greatness, and a marsh in its diverse variations of colour, are both perfect in their artistic values, only different in conception. The former imposing, like a picture of Meesdag; the latter, hazy like a Corot, each perfect in its style. But a lake, even the prettiest, does not rise above the effects of a chromo-lithograph. Lake Baikal, viewed from the north, loses its banks, and so has the advantage of appearing as an ocean. [Illustration: LAKE BAIKAL "There are some enormous rocks as if thrown in by the hand of a Titan" To face page 52]