an "assigned place of residence" near the spot where Captain De Long and the sailors of the Jeannette perished from cold and hunger.
When an administrative exile, after weeks or months of travel "by étape," reaches at last the Siberian town or village to which he has been "assigned," and in which he is to be "domiciled," he is conducted to the police-station, is furnished with an identifying document called a vid na zhítelstvo, or "permit to reside," and receives, from the isprávnik or the zasedátel, a printed copy of the "Rules Relating to Police Surveillance." He is informed at the same time that he cannot go outside the limits of the village without permission; that his correspondence is "under control," and that, as a precaution against escape, he will be required to report personally at stated intervals to the chief of police, or will be visited as often as may be necessary by an officer detailed to watch him. His first need, of course, is shelter; and taking his exile passport and his copy of the "Rules" in his hand he goes in search of a "domicile." The fact that he is a political exile is not stated in his "permit to reside," but everybody knows it, — he has been seen to arrive in the village under guard, — and householders are naturally unwilling or reluctant to give him lodgings. A political exile is presumably a dangerous man, and, moreover, a man who is liable to be visited at all hours of the day and night by the police. A peasant villager does not care to have his house invaded every day, and perhaps half a dozen times a day, by a suspicious police officer; and besides that, he (the householder) may be required to watch the movements of his dangerous lodger, and at inconvenient times may be summoned to the police-station to answer questions. In view of these unpleasant possibilities, he thinks it safest not to have anything to do with a person about whom nothing is known except that he is a state criminal under police surveillance. As the tired political goes from house to house, seeking lodgings, and as he finds himself regarded
