provisions, as well water as bread.  After we were out of this desert, and had travelled two days, we came to Janezay, a Muscovite city or station, on the great river Janezay.  This river, they told us, parted Europe from Asia, though our map-makers, as I am told, do not agree to it; however, it is certainly the eastern boundary of the ancient Siberia, which now makes a province only of the vast Muscovite empire, but is itself equal in bigness to the whole empire of Germany.

And yet here I observed ignorance and paganism, still prevailed, except in the Muscovite garrisons.  All the country between the river Oby and the river Janezay is as entirely pagan, and the people as barbarous, as the remotest of the Tartars; nay, as any nation, for aught I know, in Asia or America.  I also found, which I observed to the Muscovite governors, whom I had opportunity to converse with, that the pagans are not much the wiser, or the nearer Christianity, for being under the Muscovite government; which they acknowledged was true enough, but, they said, it was none of their business; that if the czar expected to convert his Siberian, or Tonguese, or Tartar subjects, it should be done by sending clergymen among them, not soldiers; and they added, with more sincerity than I expected, that they found it was not so much the concern of their monarch to make the people Christians, as it was to make them subjects.

From this river to the great river Oby, we crossed a wild uncultivated country; I cannot say ’tis a barbarous soil; ’tis only barren of people, and wants good management; otherwise it is in itself a most pleasant, fruitful, and agreeable country.  What inhabitants we found in it are all pagans, except such as are sent among them from Russia; for this is the country, I mean on both sides the river Oby, whither the Muscovite criminals, that are not put to death, are banished, and from whence it is next to impossible they should ever come away.

I have nothing material to say of my particular affairs, till I came to Tobolski, the capital of Siberia, where I continued some time on the following occasion:—­

We had been now almost seven months on our journey, and winter began to come on apace; whereupon my partner and I called a council about our particular affairs, in which we found it proper, considering that we were bound for England, and not for Moscow, to consider how to dispose of ourselves.  They told us of sledges and rein-deer to carry us over the snow in the winter-time; and, indeed, they have such things, as it would be incredible to relate the particulars of, by which means the Russians travel more in the winter than they can in summer; because in these sledges they are able to run night and day:  the snow being frozen, is one universal covering to nature, by which the hills, the vales, the rivers, the lakes, are all smooth, and hard as a stone; and they run upon the surface, without any regard to what is underneath.