The Lepers of Siberia.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume IX, Issue 37, 10 September 1892, Page 911

The Lepers of Siberia.

Is there to l>e no end of horrors in Russia! Kennan had scarcely finished telling us about Siberia when the famine came,

ana now n.ate Marsden. tne nocea r.ngnsn Red Cross sister, has come back from Siberia with a story of the iepris there which simply makes the heart sick. She says they are driven to wretched ““yuurtes,” half buiit. half excavated from the ground, and in these shelters the lepers must live, without any clothing except a few miserable old sheepskins, all through the rigors of the Siberian winter and tbe tropical heat of the summer. These “’yourtes” are always in the most distant parts of the forest, and are hundreds of versts apart, so that anything like superintendence on the part of the authorities is out of the question. The sole food of the lepers is the bark of trees aud small quantities of rotten fish, which their relatives from time to time deposit for them at short distances from the huts. Many are blind and some insane. They are of all ages and in a’.l stages of disease, and in many instances their condition is such that they have lost all semblance of humanity. Incredible as it may appear, some of them have dragged out a loathsome existence in this state for twenty years.