Cham Chi-Thaungu for a whole village or country, these had
idols in every hut and every cave. This country, I reckon, was, from the
desert I spoke of last, at least four hundred miles, half of it being
another desert, which took us up twelve days' severe travelling, without
house or tree; and we were obliged again to carry our own 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, which, they told us there, parted Europe from Asia.

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. I also found, which I observed to the Muscovite governors whom
I had an opportunity to converse with, that the poor pagans are not much
wiser, or nearer Christianity, for being under the Muscovite government,
which they acknowledged was true enough--but that, as they said, was none
of their business; that if the Czar expected to convert his Siberian,
Tonguse, or Tartar subjects, it should be done by sending clergymen among
them, not soldiers; and they added, with more sincerity than I expected,
that it was not so much the concern of their monarch to make the people
Christians as to make them subjects.

From this river to the Oby we crossed a wild uncultivated country, barren
of people and good management, otherwise it is in itself a 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 get away. I have nothing material to
say of my particular affairs till I came to Tobolski, the capital city of
Siberia, where I continued some time on the following account.

We had now been 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, as we were bound for
England, to consider how to dispose of ourselves. They told us of
sledges and reindeer to carry us over the snow in the winter time, by
which means, indeed, the Russians travel more in winter than they can in
summer, as in these sledges they are able to run night and day: the snow,
being froze