Tent Life in Siberia Part 20

"Ai! Maxim!" shouted the ispravnik to our leading driver, "are you all ready?"

"All ready," was the reply.

"Well, then, go, with G.o.d!" and, amid a chorus of good wishes and good-byes from the crowd, the spiked sticks which held our sledges were removed; the howls instantly ceased as the dogs sprang eagerly into their collars, and the group of fur-clad men, the green, bulbous church domes, and the grey, unpainted log houses of the dreariest village in all Siberia vanished behind us forever in a cloud of powdery snow.

The so-called "post-road" from Kamchatka to St. Petersburg, which skirts the Okhotsk Sea for more than a thousand miles, pa.s.ses through the village of Okhotsk, and then, turning away from the coast, ascends one of the small rivers that rise in the Stanavoi Mountains; crosses that range at a height of four or five thousand feet; and finally descends into the great valley of the Lena. It must not be supposed, however, that this "post-road" resembles anything that we know by that name. The word "road," in north-eastern Siberia, is only a verbal symbol standing for an abstraction. The thing symbolised has no more real, tangible existence than a meridian of longitude. It is simply lineal extension in a certain direction. The country back of Okhotsk, for a distance of six hundred miles, is an unbroken wilderness of mountains and evergreen forests, spa.r.s.ely inhabited by Wandering Tunguses, with here and there a few hardy Yakut squirrel hunters.

Through this wilderness there is not even a trail, and the so-called "road" is only a certain route which is taken by the government postilion who carries the yearly mail to and from Kamchatka. The traveller who starts from the Okhotsk Sea with the intention of going across Asia by way of Yakutsk and Irkutsk must make up his mind to be independent of roads;--at least for the first fifteen hundred miles.

The mountain pa.s.ses, the great rivers, and the post-stations, will determine his general course; but the wilderness through which he must make his way has never been subdued by the axe and spade of civilisation. It is now, as it always has been, a wild, primeval land of snowy mountains, desolate steppes, and s.h.a.ggy pine forests, through which the great arctic rivers and their tributaries have marked out the only lines of intercommunication.

The worst and most difficult part of the post-route between Okhotsk and Yakutsk, viz., the mountainous part, is maintained by a half-wild tribe of arctic nomads known to the Russians as Tunguses. Living originally, as they did, in skin tents, moving constantly from place to place, and earning a scanty subsistence by breeding reindeer, they were easily persuaded by the Russian Government to encamp permanently along the route, and furnish reindeer and sledges for the transportation of couriers and the imperial mails, together with such travellers as should be provided with government orders, or "podorozhnayas." In return for this service they were exempted from the annual tax levied by Russia upon her other Siberian subjects; were supplied with a certain yearly allowance of tea and tobacco; and were authorised to collect from the travellers whom they carried a fare to be computed at the rate of about two and a half cents per mile for every reindeer furnished. Between Okhotsk and Yakutsk, along the line of this post-route, there are seven or eight Tunguse encampments, which vary a little in location, from season to season, with the s.h.i.+fting areas of available pasturage, but which are kept as nearly as possible equidistant from one another in a direct line across the Stanavoi range.

We hoped to make the first post-station on the third day after our departure; but the soft freshly fallen snow so r.e.t.a.r.ded our progress that it was nearly dark on the fourth day before we caught sight of the little group of Tunguse tents where we were to exchange our dogs for reindeer. If there be, in "all the white world," as the Russians say, anything more hopelessly dreary than one of the Tunguse mountain settlements in winter, I have never seen it. Away up above the forests, on some elevated plateau, or desolate, storm-swept height, where nothing but berry bushes and arctic moss will grow, stand the four or five small, grey reindeerskin tents which make up the nomad encampment. There are no trees or shrubs around them to shut out a part of the sky, limit the horizon, or afford the least semblance of shelter to the lonely settlement, and there is no wall or palisade to fence in and domesticate for finite purposes a little corner of the infinite. The grey tents seem to stand alone in the great universe of G.o.d, with never-ending s.p.a.ce and unbounded desolation stretching away from their very doors. Take your stand near such an encampment and look at it more closely. The surface of the snowy plain around you, as far as you can see, has been trampled and torn up by reindeer in search of moss. Here and there between the tents stand the large sledges upon which the Tunguses load their camp-equipage when they move, and in front is a long, low wall, made of symmetrically piled reindeer packs and saddles. A few driving deer wander around, with their noses to the ground, looking for something that they never seem to find; evil-looking ravens--the scavengers of Tunguse encampments--flap heavily past with hoa.r.s.e croaks to a patch of blood-stained snow where a reindeer has recently been slaughtered; and in the foreground, two or three grey, wolfish dogs with cruel, light-coloured eyes, are gnawing at a half-stripped reindeer's head.

The thermometer stands at forty-five degrees below zero, Fahrenheit, and the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of deer, ravens, and dogs are white with frost. The thin smoke from the conical fur tents rises perpendicularly to a great height in the clear, still air; the ghostly mountain peaks in the distance look like white silhouettes on a background of dark steel-blue; and the desolate snow-covered landscape is faintly tinged with a yellow glare by the low-hanging wintry sun. Every detail of the scene is strange, wild, arctic,--even to the fur-clad, frost-whitened men who come riding up to the tents astride the shoulders of panting reindeer and salute you with a drawling "Zdar-o-o-va!" as they put one end of their balancing poles to the ground and spring from their flat, stirrupless saddles. You can hardly realise that you are in the same active, bustling, money-getting world in which you remember once to have lived. The cold, still atmosphere, the white, barren mountains, and the great lonely wilderness around you are all full of cheerless, depressing suggestions, and have a strange unearthliness which you cannot reconcile or connect with any part of your pre-Siberian life.

At the first Tunguse encampment we took a rest of twenty-four hours, and then, exchanging our dogs for reindeer, we bade good-bye to our Okhotsk drivers and, under the guidance of half a dozen bronze-faced Tunguses in spotted reindeerskin coats, pushed westward, through snow-choked mountain ravines, toward the river Aldan. Our progress, for the first two weeks, was slow and fatiguing and attended with difficulties and hards.h.i.+ps of almost every possible kind. The Tunguse encampments were sometimes three or four days' journey apart; the cold, as we ascended the Stanavoi range, steadily increased in intensity until it became so severe as to endanger life, and day after day we plodded wearily on snowshoes ahead of our heavily loaded sledges, breaking a road in three feet of soft snow for our struggling, frost-whitened deer. We made, on an average, about thirty miles a day; but our deer often came in at night completely exhausted, and the sharp ivory goads of our Tunguse drivers were red with frozen blood. Sometimes we bivouacked at night in a wild mountain gorge and lighted up the snow-laden forest with the red glare of a mighty camp-fire; sometimes we shovelled the drifted snow out of one of the empty _yurts_, or earth-covered cabins, built by the government along the route to shelter its postilions, and took refuge therein from a howling blizzard. Hardened as we were by two previous winters of arctic travel, and accustomed as we were to all the vicissitudes of northern life, the crossing of the Stanavoi range tried our powers of endurance to the uttermost. For four successive days, near the summit of the pa.s.s on the western slope, mercury froze at noon. [Footnote: We had only a mercurial thermometer, so that we did not know how much below -39 the temperature was.] The faintest breath of air seared the face like a hot iron; beards became tangled ma.s.ses of frosty wire; eyelids grew heavy with long snowy fringes which half obscured the sight; and only the most vigorous exercise would force the blood back into the benumbed extremities from which it was constantly being driven by the iron grasp of the cold. Schwartz, the oldest member of our party, was brought into a Tunguse encampment one night in a state of unconsciousness that would soon have ended in death, and even our hardy native drivers came in with badly frozen hands and faces. The temperature alone would have been sufficient evidence, if evidence were needed, that we were entering the coldest region on the globe--the Siberian province of Yakutsk. [Footnote: In some parts of this province the freezing point of mercury, or about forty degrees below zero Fahrenheit, is the average temperature of the three winter months, and eighty-five degrees below zero have sometimes been observed.]

In a monotonous routine of walking on snowshoes, riding on reindeer-sledges, camping in the open, or sleeping in smoky Tunguse tents, day after day and week after week pa.s.sed, until at last we approached the valley of the Aldan--one of the eastern tributaries of that great arctic river the Lena. Climbing the last outlying ridge of the Stanavoi range, one dark, moonless evening in November, we found ourselves at the head of a wild ravine leading downward into an extensive open plain. Away below and in front, outlined against the intense blackness of the hills beyond the valley, rose four or five columns of luminous mist, like pillars of fire in the wilderness of the Exodus.

"What are those?" I inquired of my Tunguse driver.

"Yakut," was the brief reply.

They were columns of smoke, sixty or seventy feet in height, over the chimneys of Yakut farmhouses; and they stood so vertically in the cold, motionless air of the arctic night that they were lighted up, to their very summits, by the hearth-fires underneath. As I stood looking at them, there came faintly to my ears the far-away lowing of cattle.

"Thank G.o.d!" I said to Malchanski, who at that moment rode up, "we are getting, at last, where they live in houses and keep cows!" No one can fully understand the pleasure that these columns of fire-lighted smoke gave us until he has ridden on dog- or reindeer-sledges, or walked on snowshoes, for twenty interminable days, through an arctic wilderness.

It seemed to me a year since our departure from Okhotsk; for weeks we had not taken off our heavy armour of furs; mirrors, beds and clean linen were traditions of the remote past; and American civilisation, as we looked back at it across twenty-seven months of barbarism, faded into the unreal imagery of a dream. But the pillars of fire-lighted smoke and the lowing of domestic cattle were a promise of better things.

In less than two hours, we were sitting before the glowing fireplace of a comfortable Yakut house, with a soft carpet under our feet; real crockery cups of fragrant Kiakhta tea on a table beside us, and pictures on the wall over our heads. The house, it is true, had slabs of ice for windows; the carpet was made of deerskins; and the pictures were only woodcuts from _Harper's Weekly_ and _Frank Leslie's_; but to us, fresh from the smoky tents of the Tunguses, windows, carpets, and pictures, of any kind, were things to be wondered at and admired.

Between the Yakut settlements on the Aldan and the town of Yakutsk, there was a good post-road--really a road; so, harnessing s.h.a.ggy white Yakut ponies to our Okhotsk dog-sledges, we drove swiftly westward, to the unfamiliar music of Russian sleigh-bells, changing horses at every post-station and riding from fifteen to eighteen hours out of the twenty-four.

On the 16th of November, after twenty-three days of continuous travel, we reached Yakutsk; and there, in the house of a wealthy Russian merchant who threw his doors open to us with warm-hearted hospitality, we washed from our bodies the smoke and grime of Tunguse tents and _yurts_; put on clean, fresh clothes; ate a well cooked and daintily served supper; drank five tumblers of fragrant overland tea; smoked two Manila cheroots; and finally went to bed, excited but happy, in beds that were provided with hair mattresses, fleecy Russian blankets, and linen sheets. The sensation of lying without furs and between sheets in a civilised bed was so novel and extraordinary that I lay awake for an hour, trying experiments with that wonderful mattress and luxuriously exploring, with bare feet, the smooth cool expanses of linen sheeting.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Travelling Bag made of Reindeer skin]

CHAPTER XL

THE GREATEST HORSE-EXPRESS SERVICE IN THE WORLD--EQUIPMENT FOR THE ROAD--A SIBERIAN "SEND-OFF"--POST TRAVEL ON THE ICE--BROKEN SLEEP--DRIVING INTO AN AIR-HOLE--REPAIRING DAMAGES--FIRST SIGHT OF IRKUTSK

We remained in Yakutsk only four days--just long enough to make the necessary preparations for a continuous sleigh-ride of five thousand one hundred and fourteen miles to the nearest railway in European Russia. The Imperial Russian Post, by which we purposed to travel from Yakutsk to Nizhni Novgorod, was, at that time, the longest and best organised horse-express service in the world. It employed 3000 or 4000 drivers, with twice as many _telegas, tarantases_ and sleighs, and kept in readiness for instant use more than 10,000 horses, distributed among 350 post-stations, along a route that covered a distance as great as that between New York City and the Sandwich Islands. If one had the requisite physical endurance, and could travel night and day without stop, it was possible, with a courier's "podorozhnaya"

(po-do-rozh'-na-yah), or road-ticket, to go from Yakutsk to Nizhni Novgorod, a distance of 5114 miles, in twenty-five days, or only eleven days more than the time occupied by a railway train in covering about the same distance. Before the establishment of telegraphic communication between China and Russia, imperial couriers, carrying important despatches from Peking, often made the distance between Irkutsk and St. Petersburg--3618 miles--in sixteen days, with two hundred and twelve changes of horses and drivers. In order to accomplish this feat they had to eat, drink, and sleep in their sleighs and make an average speed-rate of ten miles an hour for nearly four hundred consecutive hours. We did not expect, of course, to travel with such rapidity as this; but we intended to ride night and day, and hoped to reach St. Petersburg before the end of the year.

With the aid and advice of Baron Maidel, a Russian scientist who had just come over the route that we purposed to follow, Price and I bought a large open _pavoska_ or Siberian travelling sleigh, which looked like a huge, burlap-covered baby-carriage on runners; had it brought into the courtyard of our house, and proceeded to fit it up for six weeks' occupancy as a bedchamber and sitting-room. First of all, we repacked our luggage in soft, flat, leather pouches, and stowed it away in the bottom of the deep and capacious vehicle as a foundation for our bed. We then covered these flat pouches with a two-foot layer of fragrant hay, to lessen the shock of jolting on a rough road; spread over the hay a big wolfskin sleeping-sack, about seven feet in length and wide enough to hold our two bodies; covered that with two pairs of blankets; and finally lined the whole back part of the sleigh with large, soft, swan's-down pillows. At the foot of the sleeping-sack, under the driver's seat, we stowed away a bag of dried rye-bread, another bag filled with cakes of frozen soup, two or three pounds of tea, a conical loaf of white sugar, half a dozen dried and smoked salmon, and a padded box containing teapot, tea-cannister, sugar-jar, spoons, knives and forks, and two gla.s.s tumblers. Schwartz; and Malchanski bought another _pavoska_ and fitted it up in similar fas.h.i.+on, and on the 19th of November we obtained from the Bureau of Posts two _podorozhnayas_, or, as Price called them, "ukases,"

directing every post-station master between Yakutsk and Irkutsk to furnish us, "by order of his Imperial Majesty Alexander Nikolaivitch, Autocrat of All the Russias," etc., etc., six horses and two drivers to carry us on our way.

In every part of the world except Siberia it is customary to start on a long journey in the morning. In Siberia, however, the proper time is late in the evening, when all your friends can conveniently a.s.semble to "provozhat," or, in colloquial English, give you a send-off.

Judging from our experience in Yakutsk, the Siberian custom has the support of sound reason, inasmuch as the amount of drinking involved in the riotous ceremony of "provozhanie" unfits a man for any place except bed, and any occupation more strenuous than slumber. A man could never see his friend off in the morning and then go back to his business. He would see double, if not quadruple, and would hardly be able to speak his native language without a foreign accent. When the horses came from the post-station for us, at ten o'clock on the evening of November 20th, we had had one dinner and two or three incidental lunches; had "sampled" every kind of beverage that our host had in the house, from vodka and cherry cordial to "John Collins" and champagne; had sung all the songs we knew, from "John Brown's Body"

in English to "Nastoichka travnaya" in Russian; and Schwartz and Malchanski were ready, apparently, to make a night of it, send the horses back to the station, and have another _provozhanie_ the next day. Price and I, however, insisted that the Czar's ukase to the station-masters was good only for that evening; that if we didn't take the horses immediately we should have to pay demurrage; that the curfew bell had rung; that the town gates would close at ten thirty sharp; and that if we didn't get under way at once, we should probably be arrested for riotous disturbance of the peace!

We put on our _kukhlankas_ and fur hoods at last; shook hands once more all around; and finally got out into the street;--Malchanski dragging Schwartz off to his sleigh singing the chorus of a Russian drinking song that ended in "Ras-to-chee'-tel-no! Vos-khe-tee'-tel-no!

Oo-dee-vee'-tel-no!" We then drank a farewell stirrup cup, which our bareheaded host brought out to us after we had taken our seats, and were just about to start, when Baron Maidel shouted to me, with an air of serious concern, "Have you got a club--for the drivers and station-masters?"

"No," I replied, "I don't need a club; I can talk to them in the most persuasive Russian you ever heard."

"Akh! Neilza!" ("Impossible") he exclaimed. "It is impossible to go so! You must have a club! Wait a minute!" and he rushed back into the house to get me a bludgeon from his private armory. My driver, meanwhile, who evidently disapproved, on personal grounds, of this suggestion, laid his whip across his horses' backs with a cry of "Noo, rebatta!" ("Now then, boys") and we dashed away from the house, just as the Baron reappeared on the steps brandis.h.i.+ng a formidable cudgel and shouting: "Pastoy! Neilza!" ("Stop, it's impossible.") "You can't go without a club!" When we turned a neighbouring corner and lost sight of the house, our host was waving a bottle in one hand and a lighted candle in the other; Baron Maidel was still gesticulating on the steps, shouting: "Neilza! Hold on! Club! For your drivers! It's impossible to go so!" and the little group of "provozhatters" on the sidewalk were laughing, cheering, and shouting "Good-bye! Good luck!

With G.o.d!"

We dashed away at a gallop through the snow-drifted streets, past earth-banked _yurts_ whose windows of ice were irradiated with a warm glow by the open fires within; past columns of luminous smoke rising from the wide chimneys of Yakut houses; past a red stuccoed church upon whose green, balloon-shaped domes golden stars glittered in the frosty moonlight; past a lonely graveyard on the outskirts of the city; and finally down a gentle decline to the snow-covered river, which had a width of nearly four miles and which stretched away to the westward like a frozen lake surrounded by dark wooded hills. Up this great river--the Lena--we were to travel on the ice for a distance of nearly a thousand miles, following a sinuous, never-ending line of small evergreen trees, which had been cut in the neighbouring forests and set up at short intervals in the snow, to guide the drivers in storms and to mark out a line of safety around air-holes and between areas of thin ice or stretches of open water. I fell asleep, shortly after leaving Yakutsk, but was awakened, two or three hours later, at the first post-station, by the voice of our driver shouting: "Ai!

Boys! Out with the horses--lively!" Two of us then had to alight from our sleighs, go into the post-station, show our _podorozhnayas_ to the station-master, and superintend the harnessing of two fresh teams.

Getting back into my fur bag, I lay awake for the next three hours, listening to the jangle of a big bell on the wooden arch over the thill-horse's back, and watching, through frosty eyelashes, the dark outlines of the high wooded sh.o.r.es as they seemed to drift swiftly past us to the eastward.

The severest hards.h.i.+p of post travel in eastern Siberia in winter is not the cold, but the breaking up of all one's habits of sleep. In the first stages of our journey, when the nights were clear and the river ice was smooth and safe, we made the distances between stations in from two to three hours; and at the end of every such period we were awakened, and had to get out of our warm fur bags into a temperature that was almost always below zero and sometimes forty or fifty degrees below. When we got back into our vehicles and resumed our journey, we were usually cold, and just as we would get warm enough to go to sleep, we would reach another station and again have to turn out.

Sleeping in short s.n.a.t.c.hes, between s.h.i.+vers, to the accompaniment of a jangling dinner-bell and a driver's shouts, and getting out into an arctic temperature every two or three hours, night and day, for a whole week, reduces one to a very f.a.gged and jaded condition. At the end of the first four days, it seemed to me that I should certainly have to stop somewhere for an unbroken night's rest; but man is an animal that gets accustomed to things, and in the course of a week I became so used to the wild cries of the driver and the jangle of the thill-horse's bell that they no longer disturbed me, and I gradually acquired the habit of sleeping, in brief cat-naps, at all hours of the day and night. As we ascended the river, the moon rose later and later and the nights were often so dark that our drivers had great difficulty in following the line of evergreen trees that marked the road. Finally, about five hundred miles from Yakutsk, a particularly reckless or self-confident driver got off the road, went ahead at a venture instead of stopping to look for the evergreen trees, and just after midnight drove us into an air-hole, about a quarter of a mile from sh.o.r.e, where the water was thirty feet deep. Price and I were fast asleep, and were awakened by the cras.h.i.+ng of ice, the snorting of the terrified horses, and the rush of water into the sleigh. I cannot remember how we got out of our fur bags and gained the solid ice. I was so bewildered by sleep and so completely taken by surprise that I must have acted upon blind impulse, without any clear consciousness of what I was doing. From subsequent examination of the air-hole and the sleigh, I concluded that we must have jumped from the widely extended outriggers, which were intended to guard against an accidental capsize, which had a span of ten or twelve feet, and which rested on the broken ice around the margin of the hole in such a way as to prevent the sleigh from becoming completely submerged. But be that as it may, we all got out on the solid ice in some way, and the first thing I remember is standing on the edge of the hole, staring at the swimming, snorting horses, the outlines of whose heads and necks I could just make out, and wondering whether this were not a particularly vivid and terrifying nightmare. For an instant, I could not be absolutely sure that I was awake. In a moment, the other sleigh, which was only a short distance behind, loomed up through the darkness and its driver shouted to our man, "What's the matter?"

"Oootonoole!" ("We got drowned") was the reply. "Get out your ropes, quick, while I run to the sh.o.r.e for some driftwood. The horses will freeze and sink in a few minutes. Akh! My G.o.d! My G.o.d! What a punishment!" and, tearing off his outer fur coat, he started at a run for the sh.o.r.e. I did not know what he expected to do with driftwood, but he seemed to have a clear vital idea of some sort, so Price and I rushed away after him. "We must get a tree, or a small log," he explained breathlessly as we overtook him, "so I can crawl out on it and cut the horses loose. But G.o.d knows," he added, "whether they'll hold out till we get back. The water is killing cold." After a few minutes on the snowy beach, we found a long, slender tree-trunk that our driver said would do, and began to drag it across the ice. Our breath, by this time, was coming in short, panting gasps, and when Schwartz, Malchanski, and the other driver, who ran to our a.s.sistance, took hold of the heavy log, we were on the verge of physical collapse.

When we got back to the air-hole, the horses were still swimming feebly, but they were fast becoming chilled and exhausted, and it seemed doubtful whether we should save them. We pushed the log out over the broken edge of the ice, and five of us held it while our driver, with a knife between his teeth and a rope about his shoulders, crawled out on it, cut loose one of the outside horses and fastened the line around its neck. He then crept back, and we all hauled on the line until we dragged the poor beast out by the head. It was very much exhausted and badly sc.r.a.ped by the sharp edge of the ice, but it had strength enough to scramble to its feet. We then cut loose and hauled out in the same way the outside horse on the other side. This one was nearly dead and made no attempt to get up until it had been cruelly flogged, but it struggled to its feet at last. Cutting loose the thill-horse was more difficult, as its body was completely submerged and it was hard to get at the rawhide fastening that held the collar, the wooden arch, and the thills together, but our plucky driver succeeded at last, and we dragged the half-frozen animal out. Rescue came for him, however, too late. He could not rise to his feet and died, a few moments afterward, from exhaustion and cold. Fastening ropes to the half-submerged sleigh and harnessing to it the horses of the other team, we finally pulled that up on the ice. Leaving it there for the present, we made traverses back and forth across the river until we found the line of evergreen trees, and then started for the nearest post-station--Price and I riding with Malchanski and Schwartz while our driver followed with the two rescued horses. When we reached the post-station, which was about seven miles away, it was between three and four o'clock in the morning; and, after rousing the station-master and sending a driver with a team of fresh horses after the abandoned sleigh, we drank two or three tumblerfuls of hot tea, brought in blankets and pillows from the sleigh of Schwartz and Malchanski, and went to bed on the floor. As a result of this misadventure, our homeward progress was stopped, and we had to stay at the village of Krestofskaya two days, while we repaired damages. Our sleigh, when it came in that morning, was a ma.s.s of ice; our fur bag, blankets, pillows, and spare clothing were water-soaked and frozen solid; and the contents of our leather pouches were almost ruined.

By distributing our things among half a dozen houses we succeeded in getting them thawed out and dried in time to make another start at the end of the second day; but after that time I did not allow myself to fall asleep at night. We had escaped once, but we might not be so fortunate again, and I decided to watch the line of evergreen bushes myself. When we lost the road in the darkness afterward, as we frequently did, I made the driver stop and searched the river myself on foot until I found it. The danger that I feared was not so much getting drowned as getting wet. In temperatures that were almost continuously below zero, and often twenty or thirty degrees below, a man in water-soaked clothing would freeze to death in a very short time, and there were so many air-holes and areas of thin ice that watchfulness was a matter of vital necessity.

Day after day and night after night we rode swiftly westward, up a river that was always more than a mile in width and often two or three; past straggling villages of unpainted log houses clinging to the steep sides of the mountainous sh.o.r.es; through splendid precipitous gorges, like those above the Iron Gate of the Danube; along stretches of flat pasture land where s.h.a.ggy, white Yakut ponies were pawing up the snow to get at the withered gra.s.s; through good-sized towns like Kirinsk and Vitimsk, where we began to see signs of occidental civilisation; and finally, past a stern-wheel, Ohio-River steamboat, of primitive type, tied up and frozen in near the head of navigation at Verkholensk. "Just look at that steamer!"

cried Price, with an unwonted glow of enthusiasm in his boyish face.

"Doesn't that look like home?" At Verkholensk we abandoned the Lena, which we had followed up almost to its source, and, leaving the ice for the first time in two weeks, we started across country in a line nearly parallel with the western coast of Lake Baikal. We had been forty-one days on the road from Okhotsk; had covered a distance of about 2300 miles, and were within a day's ride of Irkutsk.

One bright suns.h.i.+ny morning in early December, from the crest of a high hill on the Verkholensk road, we got our first view of the east-Siberian capital--a long compact ma.s.s of wooden houses with painted window-shutters; white-walled buildings with roofs of metallic green; and picturesque Rus...o...b..zantine churches whose snowy towers were crowned with inverted balloons of gold or covered with domes of ultramarine blue spangled with golden stars. Long lines of loaded sledges from the Mongolian frontier could be seen entering the city from the south; the streets were full of people; flags were flying here and there over the roofs of government buildings; and from the barracks down the river came faintly the music of a regimental band.

Our driver stopped his horses, took off his hat, and turning to us, with the air of one who owns what he points out, said, proudly, "Irkutsk!" If he expected us to be impressed--as he evidently did--he was not disappointed; because Irkutsk, at that time and from that point of view, was a very striking and beautiful city. We, moreover, had just come from the desolate moss tundras and wild, lonely forests of arctic Asia and were in a state of mind to be impressed by anything that had architectural beauty, or indicated culture, luxury, and wealth. We had seen nothing that even remotely suggested a city in two years and a half; and we felt almost as if we were Gothic barbarians gazing at Rome. It did not even strike us as particularly funny when our Buriat driver informed us seriously that Irkutsk was so great a place that its houses had to be numbered in order to enable their owners to find them! To us, fresh from Gizhiga, Penzhina, and Okhotsk, a city with numbered houses was really too remarkable and impressive a thing to be treated with levity, and we therefore received the information with proper awe and in silence. We could share the native feeling, even if numbered houses had once been known to us.

Twenty minutes later, we dashed into the city at a gallop, as if we were imperial couriers with war news; rushed at break-neck speed past markets, bazaars, telegraph poles, street lamps, big shops with gilded sign-boards, polished droshkies drawn by high-stepping Orloff horses, officers in uniform, grey-coated policemen with sabres, and pretty women hooded in white Caucasian _bashliks_; and finally drew up with a flourish in front of a comfortable-looking stuccoed hotel--the first one we had seen in more than twenty-nine months.

CHAPTER XLI

A PLUNGE INTO CIVILISATION--THE n.o.bLES' BALL--SHOCKING LANGUAGE-- SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLISH--THE GREAT SIBERIAN ROAD--Pa.s.sING TEA CARAVANS--RAPID TRAVEL--FIFTY-SEVEN HUNDRED MILES IN ELEVEN WEEKS--ARRIVAL IN ST. PETERSBURG

At Irkutsk, we plunged suddenly from a semi-barbaric environment into an environment of high civilisation and culture; and our attempts to adjust ourselves to the new and unfamiliar conditions were attended, at first, with not a little embarra.s.sment and discomfort. As we were among the first Americans who had been seen in that Far Eastern capital, and were officers, moreover, of a company with which the Russian Government itself had been in partners.h.i.+p, we were not only treated with distinguished consideration, but were welcomed everywhere with warm-hearted kindness and hospitality; and we found it necessary at once to exchange calls with high officials; accept invitations to dinner; share the box of the Governor-General's chief of staff at the theatre, and go to the weekly ball of the "n.o.ble-born" in the hall of the "Blagorodnaya Sobrania," (a.s.sembly of n.o.bles). The first difficulty that we encountered, of course, was the lack of suitable clothing. After two and a half years of campaigning in an arctic wilderness, we had no raiment left that was fit to wear in such a city as Irkutsk, and--worse than that--we had little money with which to purchase a new supply. The two hundred and fifty dollars with which we left Okhotsk had gradually dribbled away in the defrayment of necessary expenses along the road, and we had barely enough left to pay for a week's stay at the hotel. In this emergency we fell back upon our telegraph-company uniforms. They had been soaked in the Lena, frozen into ma.s.ses of ice, and stretched all out of shape in the process of wringing and drying at Krestofskaya; but we got an Irkutsk tailor to press them and polish up the tarnished gilt b.u.t.tons, and after spending most of the money we had left in the purchase of new fur overcoats to replace the dirty, travel-worn _kukhlankas_ in which we had arrived, we got ourselves up in presentable form to call on the Governor-General.

The severest ordeal through which we had to pa.s.s, however, was the dance at the hall of the Blagorodnaya Sobrania to which we were escorted by General Kukel (koo'-kel), the Governor-General's chief of staff. The s.p.a.cious and brilliantly lighted apartment, draped with flags and decorated with evergreens; the polished dancing-floor; the crash and blare of the music furnished by a military band; the beautiful women in rich evening toilettes; and the throng of handsome young officers in showy and diversified uniforms, simply overwhelmed us with feelings of mingled excitement and embarra.s.sment. I felt, myself, like a uniformed Eskimo at a Charity Ball, and should have been glad to skulk in a corner behind the band! All I wanted was an opportunity to watch, un.o.bserved, the brilliant picture of colour and motion, and to feel the thrill of the music as the band swept, with wonderful dash, swing, and precision, through the measures of a spirited Polish mazurka. General Kukel, however, had other views for us, and not only took us about the hall, introducing us to more beautiful women than we had seen, we thought, in the whole course of our previous existence, but said to every lady, as he presented us: "Mr. Kennan and Mr. Price, you know, speak Russian perfectly." Price, with discretion beyond his years, promptly disclaimed the imputed accomplishment; but I was rash enough to admit that I did have some knowledge of the language in question, and was forthwith drawn into a stream of rapid Russian talk by a young woman with sympathetic face and sparkling eyes, who encouraged me to describe dog-sledge travel in north-eastern Asia and the vicissitudes of tent life with the Wandering Koraks. On this conversational ground I felt perfectly at home; and I was succeeding, as I thought, admirably, when the girl suddenly blushed, looked a trifle shocked, and then bit her lip in a manifest effort to restrain a smile of amus.e.m.e.nt not warranted by anything in the life that I was trying to describe. She was soon afterward carried away by a young Cossack officer who asked her to dance, and I was promptly engaged in conversation by another lady, who also wanted "to hear an American talk Russian." My self-confidence had been a little shaken by the blush and the amused smile of my previous auditor, but I rallied my intellectual forces, took a firm grip of my Russian vocabulary, and, as Price would say, "sailed in." But I soon struck another snag. This young woman, too, began to show symptoms of shock, which, in her case, took the form of amazement. I was absolutely sure that there was nothing in the subject-matter of my remarks to bring a blush to the cheek of innocence, or give a shock to the virgin mind of feminine youth, and yet it was perfectly evident that there was something wrong. As soon as I could make my escape, I went to General Kukel and said: "Will you please tell me, Your Excellency, what's the matter with my Russian?"

"What makes you think there's anything the matter with it?" he replied evasively, but with a twinkle of amus.e.m.e.nt in his eyes.

"It doesn't seem to go very well," I said, "in conversation with women. They appear to understand it all right, but it gives them a shock. Is my p.r.o.nunciation so horribly bad?"

"You speak Russian," he said, "with quite extraordinary fluency, and with a-a-really interesting and engaging accent; but--excuse me please--shall I be entirely frank? You see you have learned the language, under many disadvantages, among the Koraks, Cossacks, and Chukchis of Kamchatka and the Okhotsk Sea coast, and--quite innocently and naturally of course--you have picked up a few words and expressions that are not--well, not--"

"Not used in polite society," I suggested.