Engineering Wonders of the World
Volume III

90 ENGINEERING WONDERS OF THE WORLD. As the grip of frost tightened, a track was marked out by pino trees stuck in th© icc, and a contractor was engaged to keep the road in repair and in a safe state for the passage of the mails. A more dreary track than this 40 miles of frozen road it is impossible to con- ceive, and it may well stand for a type of the little path trodden by the hopeless bands of exiles, goaded by the whips of Cossacks, towards the deadly mines and prison-houses of Sakhalin and Kamchatka. Nor were the dangers of nature alone to be apprehended. So lonely a drive gave every opportunity to the wandering, escaped convicts and roaming outcasts to prey upon the travellers crossing the ice, and robbery and murder were fre- quent. Outrages increased in number with the augmented traffic resulting from the arrival of the Siberian rail-head at Irkutsk and the shores of the lake. Here is a typical case. A gang of convicts marching across the ice observed traces of blood upon th© snow. Examina- tion led to the discovery of the body of a baby girl buried in the snow, but still alive. Inquiries proved that a sledge-driver of bad reputation had set out a few hours previously from the south-eastern shore of the lake to convey two poor women, each of them accom- panied by two little children. This wretch had long been under suspicion, for he had been known on several occasions to set out with a passenger to cross the lake, and to reach home alone long before he could have had time to make the return journey. Further search revealed the bodies of the two women and three children buried in the snow, where the brutal driver had left them after beating them to death with his whip. Until the Circum-Baikal line should be un- dertaken and completed there was no alter- native to the use of sledges for crossing the lake during the quarter of the year this method was available ; but the joint difficulties of the open water of summer, subject to ter- rible storms during which waves are raised to the height of six and seven feet, and the rotten ice of spring and winter, were met by a re- markable combination in one frame of a huge ice-breaker and steam-ferry, equal to con- veying an entire train and at the same time forcing its way through ice up <<Baikal „ to 31 feet in thickness. An order was given to the firm of Sir W. G. Armstrong, Whitworth, and Co., of Newcastle, to build the ice-breaker Baikal, which was taken out in parts and put together, under the superintendence of a Sunderland engineer, at the village of Listvenitchaia by Russian workmen, drawn mainly from St. Petersburg, and acquainted with shipbuilding. The carry- ing through of this difficult enterprise has been described already in a very interesting article. (See Vol. i., pp. 65 foil.) The Baikal proved a complete success, and led to an order for a second vessel of the same type, but of smaller size, the Angara, which also was taken out in sections and constructed on the lake. The cost of the two ice-breakers, of the stages for embarking trains, and of the breakwaters to provide shelter from storms, amounted to £596,250. This large out- lay has been well justified, for, though their occupation as train-carriers ceased upon the opening of the Baikal Ring Railway, the two ice-breakers have been extremely useful in assisting the navigation on the lake. The Trans-Baikal section of the railway took off from the landing-stage at Missovaya on the south-eastern shore, having for its Trans- Baikalia. objective Khabarovsk on the river Amur. Political events profoundly modified the original scheme, and the main line halted abruptly at Stretensk, on the river Chilka, 686 miles from Missovaya, and 4,055 east of Moscow. Thence the journey has to be continued to Khabarovsk by steamer down the Chilka and the Amur, which forms the boundary between Siberia and the Chinese province of Manchuria. At Khabarovsk the frontier turns sharply south-