For the first thousand miles, our progress was retarded and our rest greatly broken—­particularly at night—­by tea caravans.  With the establishment of the winter road, in November, hundreds of low, one-horse sledges, loaded with hide-bound boxes of tea that had come across the desert of Gobi from Peking, left Irkutsk, every day, for Nizhni Novgorod.  They moved in solid caravans, a quarter of a mile to a mile in length, and in every such caravan there were from fifty to two hundred sledges.  As the tea-horses went at a slow, plodding walk, their drivers were required, by law, to turn out for private travellers and give the latter the road; but they seldom did anything of the kind.  There were only twelve or fifteen of them to a caravan of a hundred sledges; and as they usually curled up on their loads at night and went fast asleep, it was practically impossible to arouse them and get the caravan out of the middle of the road.  In order to pass, therefore, we ourselves had to turn out and drive three quarters of a mile, or possibly a mile, through the deep soft snow on one side of the beaten track.  This so exasperated our driver that he would give every horse and every sleeping teamster in the whole caravan a slashing cut with his long rawhide whip, shouting, in almost untranslatable Russian, “Wake up!” (Whack.) “Get a move on you!” (Whack.) “What are you doing in the middle of the road there?” (Whack.) “Akh!  You ungodly Tartar pagans!” (Whack.) “GO TO SLEEP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, WILL YOU?” (Whack, whack.) Meanwhile, the strongly braced outrigger of our pavoska, on the caravan side, would strike every one of the tea-sledges, as we passed, and the long series of violent shocks, combined with the rolling and pitching of our vehicle, as it wallowed through the deep snow, would be enough to awaken a man from anything except the last sleep of death.  Usually, we were aroused by our driver’s preliminary shouts when we first came in sight of a caravan; but sometimes we were in such a stupor of sleep that we did not awake until the outrigger collided with the first load of tea and brought us suddenly to consciousness with a half-dazed impression that we had been struck by lightning, or hit by a falling tree.  If we had had to undergo this experience only once or twice in the course of the night, it would not have been so bad; but we sometimes passed half a dozen caravans between sunset and dawn; threw every one of them into disorder and confusion with outrigger and whip; and left behind us a wake of Russian and Tartar profanity almost fiery enough to be luminous in the dark.  Shortly after leaving Tomsk, however, we passed the vanguard of these tea caravans and saw them no more.