Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/276

tinent—viz. the Yenisei Government, which, 982,908 square miles in area, comprises the vast country drained by the Yenisei and the Upper Chulim, a tributary of the Obi. The largest town and also the trading and administrative centre for this province is Krasnoyarsk, situated at a point where the railway crosses the Yenisei River. The districts into which the province is subdivided are the Krasnoyarsk and Achinsk districts in the west, the Minusinsk district in the south, the Kansk district in the east, the Yeniseisk district, and lastly the Turukhansk district in the far north. This Turukhansk district comprises two-thirds of the total area of the province, and consists of an immense stretch of 708,000 square miles of stunted forest and toundra, extending to the Arctic Sea, and inhabited by a few hundred native hunters and fishermen. South of these toundras or mossy wastes, between latitudes 54 and 64, there is a forest zone which covers the districts of Yeniseisk, Kansk, Krasnoyarsk and Achinsk. The population of these four districts numbers about 320,000, the greater part of whom are engaged in agriculture. South of the railway, between latitudes 53 and 54, in the Minusinsk district, there is an area of dry steppe surrounded by a zone of black earth which forms a ring between the dry steppe and the forest zones on the Mongolian frontier. In this black earth belt lies the most fertile land in all Central Siberia. Although the area is comparatively small it has a population of more than 200,000, with an average density of about twenty to thirty persons per square mile, which is high for Siberia; and yet large parts of it are quite uninhabited. In 1907 the Government