SNOWS***


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FROM PARIS TO PEKIN OVER SIBERIAN SNOWS.


[Illustration: THE MONASTERY OF TROITSA.

                         [_Frontispiece._]

FROM PARIS TO PEKIN OVER SIBERIAN SNOWS.

A Narrative of a Journey by Sledge over the Snows of European
Russia and Siberia, by Caravan Through Mongolia,
Across the Gobi Desert and the Great Wall,
and by Mule Palanquin Through
China to Pekin.

by

VICTOR MEIGNAN,

Edited from the French by William Conn.

With supplementary notes not contained in the original edition.

[Illustration]

With a Map and Numerous Illustrations from
Sketches by the Author and Others.







London:
W. Swan Sonnenschein and Co.,
Paternoster Square.
1885.

Printed by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Limited, London and Aylesbury.




PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION.


Embarrassed readers, who delight in books of travel, whether for the
recreation or the useful information they afford, are not relieved of
their difficulty when the title of the work, instead of indicating
the nature of the subject, only presents an enigma for them to solve.
How, for instance, is the reader to gauge the nature of the contents
of “Voyage en Zigzag?” It might mean the itinerary of some crooked
course among the Alps, or, perhaps, the log-book of a yacht chopping
about the Channel, or the record of anything but a straightforward
journey. Again, “By Land and Sea” might simply be the diary of a
holiday trip from London to Paris, or a _réchauffé_ of impressions of
a “globe-trotter,” who went to see what everybody talked about that
he also might talk about what he had seen. Then there are a host of
others, such as “Travels West,” “The Land of the North Wind”--which
one has to discover vaguely by ascertaining first where it does not
blow,--“Loin de Paris,” “Dans les Nuages,” “On Blue Water;” all of
which might be strictly applicable to the metropolitan area if the
water were only just a little bluer. But “Voyage Autour de ma Femme”
is still less intelligible. Is it a book of travel at all, or only
a romance, or a _comédie-vaudeville_? It may not be a _fantaisie_
like “Voyage Autour de ma Chambre,” nor even the record of a journey
necessarily performed within four walls, for--though I have not looked
at the book--it may be the narrative of an unsentimental journey, in
which the tourist had taken a holiday trip all around picturesque
Europe and his wife, leaving her at home; or it may be a sentimental
journey as touching as Sterne’s--a kind of circular tour _en petit_,
circumscribed by the ordinary length of the apron-string; in which
event, a very subjective turn of the _impressions de voyage_ would be
evident; and consequently would not suit readers who decidedly prefer
to regard what is presented from the objective side.

The reader will naturally discover from the title of this book the
traveller’s course, but he will at the same time, no doubt, desire to
know something of the character of the book.

It may gratify him to be told that essentially it is a personal
narrative, that cannot fail to interest those who like in a book of
travel a tale of life full of incident and adventure: it is one in
which his sympathies will be awakened and sustained in following the
traveller in his movements from day to day and from place to place, his
imagination being vividly stirred by the illusion that the participator
is, as it were, in the changing scenes and events passing before his
eyes like the tableaux of a diorama. And yet it must not be supposed,
because the writer’s chief object has been to give an interesting
personal narrative, that it is deficient in useful information: far
from it; but