START FOR ST. PETERSBURG ROUTE TO YAKUTSK--A TUNGUSE ENCAMPMENT--
CROSSING THE STANAVOI MOUNTAINS--SEVERE COLD--FIRE-LIGHTED SMOKE
PILLARS--ARRIVAL IN YAKUTSK
When we reached Okhotsk, about the middle of September, I found a
letter from Major Abaza, brought by special courier from Yakutsk,
directing me to come to St. Petersburg by the first winter road. The
_Onward_ sailed for San Francisco at once, carrying back to home and
civilisation all of our employees except four, viz., Price, Schwartz,
Malchanski, and myself. Price intended to accompany me to St.
Petersburg, while Schwartz and Malchanski, who were Russians, decided
to go with us as far as Irkutsk, the east-Siberian capital.
Snow fell in sufficient quantities to make good sledging about the 8th
of October; but the rivers did not freeze over so that they could be
crossed until two weeks later. On the 21st of the month, Schwartz and
Malchanski started with three or four light dog-sledges to break a
road through the deep, freshly fallen snow, in the direction of the
Stanavoi Mountains, and on the 24th Price and I followed with the
heavier baggage and provisions. The whole population of the village
turned out to see us off. The long-haired priest, with his cassock
flapping about his legs in the keen wind of a wintry morning, stood
bareheaded in the street and gave us his farewell blessing; the
women, whose hearts we had made glad with American baking-powder and
telegraph teacups, waved bright-coloured handkerchiefs to us from
their open doors; cries of "Good-bye!" "God grant you a fortunate
journey!" came to us from the group of fur-clad men who surrounded our
sledges; and the air trembled with the incessant howls of a hundred
wolfish dogs, as they strained impatiently against their broad
sealskin collars.
"Ai! Maxim!" shouted the ispravnik to our leading driver, "are you all
ready?"
"All ready," was the reply.
"Well, then, go, with God!" 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, passes 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, sparsely 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 passes, 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 shaggy 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
shifting 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 retarded 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
God, with never-ending space 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 hoarse 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 breasts 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 hardships 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 pass 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 masses 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 passed, 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 God!" 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 shaggy 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.
[Illustration: Travelling Bag made of Reindeer skin]