Part 20 (1/2)

”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!