The Great Siberian Railway by Francis E. Clark

The long journey in the _train de luxe_ from Irkutsk to St. Petersburg, especially the Siberian part of the journey, does not afford a great variety of scenery or incident. But, if somewhat monotonous, it is a pleasing and gentle monotony. There is not a mile of desert land in all the five thousand versts between Lake Baikal and the Atlantic, or, for that matter, between the Pacific and the Atlantic, by the way we have travelled.

There are no long stretches of sagebrush plain, such as Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada afford; no "bad lands," such as are found in the Dakotas; no interminable stretches of wearisome, treeless prairies, such as the Canadian Pacific traverses in Manitoba and Assiniboia. There are occasional wide reaches of prairie or meadow land, but trees are always in sight, and for the most part the road passes through a heavily wooded country. Birches abound everywhere, with their graceful white boles, and there are many forests of pine and poplar. The trees in the vicinity of the railway are not large, the "monarchs of the forest," if there ever were any, having been cut off at the advent of the railway.