To outward view their colonies were rather peculiar. Each village was built with one long, wide street, and the houses were remarkable for the solidity of their construction, for the flourishing gardens that surrounded them, and for their unusual height in this desolate land where, as a rule, nothing but low huts and hovels were to be seen. A house was shared, generally, by three or four believers, and--perhaps owing to their shattered nervous systems--they appeared to live in a state of constant uneasiness, and always kept revolvers at hand. The "brothers" occupied one side of the building, and the "sisters" the other; and while the former practised their trades, or were engaged in commerce, the women looked after the house, and led completely isolated lives. On the arrival of a stranger they would hide, and if he offered to shake hands with one of them, she would blush, saying, "Excuse me, but that is forbidden to us," and escape into the house. The existence of the "sisters" was indeed a tragic one. Deprived of the sweetness of love or family life, without children, and at the mercy of hardened egoists, such as the _skoptzi_ usually became, their sequestered lives seemed to be cut off from all normal human happiness. According to the author of an interesting article on the _skoptzi_ of Olekminsk, which appeared in 1895 in the organ of the then-existing Russian Ethnographical Society, these women were sometimes of an astonishing beauty, and when opportunity offered, as it sometimes did (their initiation not always being quite complete), they would marry orthodox settlers, and leave their so-called "brothers." Cases are on record of women acting in this way, and subsequently becoming mothers, but any such event caused tremendous agitation among the "brothers" and "sisters," similar to that provoked in ancient Rome by the spectacle of a vestal virgin failing in her duty of chastity. Platonic unions between the self-mutilators and the Siberian peasant-women were fairly frequent, so deeply-rooted in the heart of man does the desire for a common life appear to be. The _skoptzi_ loved money for money's sake, and were considered the enemies of the working-classes. Although drawn for the most part from the Russian provinces, where ideas of communal property prevailed, they developed into rigid individualists, and would exploit even their own "brothers." Indeed they preyed upon one another to such an extent that in the village of Spasskoie there were, among a hundred and fifty-two _skoptzi_, thirty-five without land, their portions having been seized from them by the "capitalists" of the village. Their ranks were swelled chiefly by illiterate peasants. As to their religion, it consisted almost exclusively in the practice of a ceremony similar to that of the Valerians, the celebrated early Christian sect who had recourse to self-mutilation in order to protect themselves from the temptations of the flesh.[1]