ANTONIO GALLENGA

Nijni-Novgorod, or Lower New-town, is older than Moscow, and only not so old as Novgorod the Great, which was a contemporary of Venice, and was still new when the semi-fabulaus Ruric and his Varangians are supposed to have given their name to Russia.

Nijni-Novgorod, which everybody here calls simply "Nijni," dates from 1222; and mention of its fair occurs, we are told, in 1366, since which epoch its celebration has suffered very rare and only violent interruption.

To understand why this venerable spot should have been for so many years, and should be still, so extensively favoured by the world's trade, it is hardly necessary to see it. We only need bear in mind that Nijni lies near the confluence of the Oka and the Volga, two of the greatest rivers of this Russia which alone of all countries of Europe may be said to have great rivers; the Volga having a course of 2,320 miles, and the Oka, a mere tributary, of 850 miles.

It is the position which the SaÖne and the Rhone have made for Lyons; the position for which St. Louis is indebted to the Mississippi and Missouri; the position which Corientes will soon owe to the Parana and the Paraguay.

Nijni lies at the very centre of that water communication which joins the Caspian and the Black Sea to the White Sea and the Baltic, and which, were it always summer, might almost have enabled Russia to dispense with roads and railroads.

But Nijni is, besides, the terminus of the railway from Moscow. That line places this town and its fair in communication with all the lines of Russia and the Western World, while the Volga, with its tributary, the Kama, leads to Perm, and the Pass of the Ural Mountains, and the vast regions of Siberia and Central Asia.

Nijni-Novgorod is thus one of the most important links between the two great continents, the point of contact between Asiatic wealth and European industry; and its fair the best meeting-place for the interchange of commodities between the nations that still walk, ride, or row at the rate of three to five miles an hour, and those who fly on the wings of steam at the rate of thirty to fifty.

The site of Nijni is somewhat like what I still remember of St. Louis after a seventeen years' interval. We travelled from Moscow over a distance of 273 miles in thirteen hours. For the last hour or two before we reached our journey's end, we had on our right the river Oka and a hilly ridge rising all along it and forming its southern bank.

On alighting at the station we drove through a flat, marshy ground, intersected by broad canals, to a triangular space between the Oka and the Volga at their confluence, where the fair is held.

We went through the maze of bazaars and market buildings, of rows of booths, shops and stalls, eating and drinking sheds, warehouses and counting-houses. We struggled through long lines of heavy-laden country carts, and swarms of clattering droskies, all striving to force their way along with that hurry-skurry that adds to confusion and lessens speed; and we came at last to a long pontoon bridge, over which we crossed the Oka, and beyond which rises the hill-range or ravine, on the top and at the foot of which is built the straggling town of Nijni-Novgorod.

Nijni-Novgorod is a town of 45,000 inhabitants, and, like most Russian towns, it occupies a space which could accommodate half a million of people. Like many old Russian towns, also, it is laid out on the pattern of Moscow, as far as its situation allowed; and, to keep up the resemblance, it boasts a Kremlin of its own, a grim, struggling citadel with battlemented walls and mediÆval towers over its gates, with its scores of Byzantine churches, most of them with their five cupolas de rigueur, clustering together like a bunch of radishes—one big radish between four little radishes—but not as liberally covered with gilding as those which glisten on the top of sacred buildings in St. Petersburg or Moscow; down the slopes and ravines are woods and gardens, with coffee-houses and eating-houses, and other places of popular entertainment.

It is a town to be admired on the outside and at a distance as a picture, but most objectionable as a residence on account of its marvellous distances and murderous pavement, a stroll on which reminds you of the martyrdom of those holy pilgrims who, to give glory to God, walked with dry peas in their shoes.

The pavements are bad in Nijni town, but worse in Nijni fair, for if in the former all is hard, sharp, uneven flint, in the latter, what is not wood is mud, and what is not mud is dust, for heavy showers alternate with stifling heat; and, after a three hours' drought one would say that these good people, who live half in and half out of a swamp, and who drink anything rather than water, can never spare a poor drop to slake the pulverized clay of their much trodden thoroughfares.

With all these drawbacks, however, and even with the addition of its villainous smells, this is an interesting and striking spot. No place can boast of a more sublime view than one can get here from the Imperial Palace and Terrace, or from the church-domes or spires on the Kremlin; or, even better, from the Esplanade of Mouravief's Folly—a tower erected by the well-known General of that name on the highest and foremost ravine, and on the summit of which he had planned to place a fac-simile of the famous Strassburg clock, but constructed on so gigantic a scale that hours and minutes, the moon's phases, the planets' cycles and all besides, should be distinctly visible from every locality of the town and fair for miles and miles around.

From any of those vantage-grounds on the hill look down. The town is at your feet; the fair—a city, a Babylon of shops—stretches beyond the bridge; the plain, a boundless ocean of green, field and forest, dotted here and there with church-spires and factory-shafts at prodigious distances; and the two broad rivers, bearing the tribute of remote regions from north and south in numberless boats and lighters, and neat gallant steamers; the two streams meeting here at right angles just below the pontoon-bridge where an immense five-domed church of recent construction has been reared to mark and hallow the spot.

Down at the fair, in the centre of its hubbub, rises the governor's summer-place. The governor dwells there with his family during the few weeks of the fair (mid-August to mid-September), coming down hither from the Imperial Palace in the town Kremlin, and occupying the upper floor. The whole basement, the entrance-hall, and all passages—with the exception of a narrow, private, winding staircase—are invaded by the crowd and converted into a bazaar, the noisiest in the fair, where there is incessant life and movement, and music and hurly-burly at every hour between noon and night—a lively scene upon which his Excellency and his guests and friends look down from the balcony after their five o'clock dinner, smoking their cigarettes, and watching the policemen as they pounce like trained hawks on the unwary pick-pockets prowling among the crowd.

Of this immense mass of strangers now in Nijni, the town itself, and especially the upper town, sees and hears but little.

The fair has its own ground, on its own side of the bridge, its own hotels and lodging-houses, its own churches, chapels, theatres, eating, gambling, and other houses, its long straight streets and boulevards, and pleasure as well as business resorts.

It has its fine Chinese Row, though Chinamen have lately discontinued their attendance; it has rich traders' temporary homes, fitted up with comfort, and even taste and luxury; and it has its charity dormitory, a vast wooden shed, built by Court Ignatieff, and bearing his name, intended to accommodate 250 houseless vagrants, but alas! in a place where there must be 20,000, if not 200,000 persons answering that description.

Of women coming to this market the number is comparatively small—one, I should say, for every 100 men; of ladies not one in 10,000, or 100,000.

Of those who muster sufficiently strong at the evening promenade on the Boulevard, indigenous or resident, for the most part, rather the look than the number is formidable; and it is here in Nijni, as it is generally in Russia, that a Mussulman becomes convinced of the wisdom of his Arabian prophet, who invented the yashmak as man's best protection, and hallowed it; for of the charms of most Russian women, blessed are those who believe without seeing!

In working hours only men and beasts are to be seen—a jumble and scramble of men and beasts: car-loads of goods; piles of hogsheads, barrels, bales, boxes, and bundles, merchandise of all kinds, of every shape, colour, or smell, all lying in a mass topsy-turvy, higgledy-piggledy; the thoroughfares blocked up, the foot-paths encumbered; chaos and noise all-pervading; and yet, by degrees, almost imperceptibly, you will see everything going its way, finding its own place; for every branch of trade has, or was at least intended to have, here its appointed abode; and there are Tea Rows; Silversmiths and Calico Streets; Fur Lanes; Soap, Candle, and Caviare Alleys; Photograph, Holy Images, and Priestly Vestments Bazaars; Boot, Slop, Tag and Rag Marts and Depositories—all in their compartments, kin with kin, and like with like; and everything is made to clear out of the way, and all is smoothed down; all subsides into order and rule, and not very late at night—quiet.

The Tartars do the most of the work.

They are the descendants of the old warriors of Genghis Khan and Timour the Lame, of the ruthless savages who for 200 years overran all Russia, spreading death and desolation wherever their coursers' hoofs trod, making slaves of the people, and tributary vassals of their Princes; but, who by their short-sighted policy favoured the rise of that dynasty of Moscow Grand Princes, who presently became strong enough to extend their sway both over Russ and Tartar.

The great merchants of Moscow and St. Petersburg or their representatives and partners come here for a few days, partners and clerks taking up the task by turns, according as business allows them absence from their chief establishments.

They bring here no goods, but merely samples of goods—tea, cotton, woollen and linen tissues, silk, cutlery, jewellery, and generally all articles of European (home Russian) manufacture.

They have most of them good apartments in the upper floors of their warehouses; they see their customers, mostly provincial retail dealers; they show their samples, drive their bargains, receive orders, attend on 'Change (for they have a Bourse at the fair, near the bridge), smoke indoors (for in the streets that indulgence is forbidden all over the fair for fear of fire), lunch or dine together often by mutual invitation.

They are gentlemenly men, young men for the most part (for their elders are at home minding the main business), young Russians or Russified Germans, some of whom adopt and even affect and exaggerate Russian feeling and habits; young men to whom it seems to be a principle that easy-made money should be readily spent; leisurely, business young men, who sit up late and get up later, take the world and its work and pleasure at their ease; understand little and care even less about politics; profess to be neither great readers nor great thinkers; but are, as a rule, free-handed, hospitable, sociable, most amiable, and anything rather than unintelligent men.

Of all the articles of trade which come to court public favour in Nijni, the most important and valuable is tea; and although the Moscow merchants, by the excellence of their sea-faring tea, chiefly imported from Odessa or through England, have almost entirely driven from the market the caravan tea, still about one-tenth of the enormous quantity of tea sold here is grown in the north of China, and comes overland from Kiakhta, the city on the border between the Asiatic-Russian and the Celestial Empire.

I was curious to compare the taste of some of the very best qualities of both kinds, and was brought to the conclusion, confirmed by the opinion of gentlemen interested in the sale of sea-faring tea, that, although some of their own is more high-flavoured and stronger, there is in the Kiakhta tea an exquisite delicacy, which will always receive in its favour a higher price. The difference, I am told, mainly arises from the fact that the caravan tea, exposed to the air during its twelve months' journey in loose and clumsy and much-shaken paper and sheep-skin bundles, gets rid of the tannin and other gross substances, a process of purification which cannot be effected in the necessarily sealed and hermetically-closed boxes in which it reaches Europe by the sea-route; so that if sea-faring tea, like port-wine, easily recommends itself to the taste and nerves of a strong, hard-working man, a dainty, refined lady will give preference to a cup of Kiakhta tea, as she would to a glass of ChÂteau Yquem.

The interest of a European, however, would be chiefly attracted by what is less familiar in his own part of the world; and, short of an actual journey to the remote regions of Siberia and Central Asia, nothing is calculated to give him a more extensive idea of the produce of those Trans-Uralian Russian possessions than a survey of the goods they send here for sale.

What astonishes a stranger at first sight is the quantity. You may walk for hours along yards and sheds, the repositories of iron from Siberia. You pass hundreds of shops of malachite and lapis-lazuli, and a variety of gold and silver work and precious stones from the Caucasus, cut with all the minute diligence of Asiatic skill. You will see Turkish carpets, Persian silks, and above all things the famous Orenburg shawls, so finely knitted, and with such patience that one can (they say, but I have not made the experiment), be made to pass through a lady's ring, though they be so broad on all sides as to wrap the lady all around from head to foot.

One may, besides, have his choice of hundreds and thousands of those delightful curiosities and knickknacks, recommendable less for their quaintness than for the certainty one feels that there is no possible use in the world they may be put to.

There is no novelty at Nijni; no new shape, pattern, or colour just coming out to catch popular favour; no unknown mechanical contrivance; no discovery likely to affect human progress and brought here for the entertainment of the intelligent, un-commercial visitor. There are only the shop-keeper and his customer, though it is a wholesale shop and on a very large scale.

The fair, moreover, has not the duration that is generally allowed for an Exhibition.

Though officially opened on the 27th of July, the fair does not begin in good earnest till the 18th of August; and it reaches its height on the 27th, when accounts are settled, and payments ensue; after which, goods are removed, and the grounds cleared; only a portion of the business lingering throughout September.

About half a score of days, out of the two months during which the fair is held, are all that may have attraction for the generality of strangers. And although many come from all parts of Russia, and from foreign countries, I do not think they tarry here for pleasure beyond two or three days.

It would be interesting to anticipate what change a few weeks will effect in this scene which is now so full of life, bustle, and gaiety; this stage, where so great a variety of human beings from nearly all regions of the world, with their money or money's worth, with their hopes and fears, their greed and extravagance, all their good and evil instincts and faculties at play.

In a few weeks the flags will be furled, the tents struck; the pontoon-bridge removed; the shops closed; hotels, bazaars, and churches, all private and public edifices, utterly deserted and silent; and every house stripped of the last stick of valuable furniture; every door locked, barred, and sealed; the place left to take care of itself.

For autumn rains and spring thaws must set in, when the seven or eight square miles of the ground of the fair, as well as the country to an immense extent, will be under water.