and Russia fighting. I weighed it up in my mind as I waited at
Semipalatinsk, and more than once I asked myself whether I had not
better give up my journey onward and go straight to Western Russia.
But, deciding I did not want to write war correspondence, I concluded
I would continue my way, and rest as I had intended--on the verdant
Altai. So I left Semipalatinsk and went in a little steamer up the
narrowing and rocky river, past wooded islands, grey moors, and emerald
marshes. It was a long though not monotonous river journey. We stopped
at elementary wooden landing-stages beside small hamlets, bought
eggs, fish, fruit from peasant women and children, backed out into
midstream again, making our big wave that went washing along the banks
and drenching incautious boys and girls; we beat up the water with
our paddle, turned, saw ourselves clear of the pier, and a widening
stretch of water between us and the bank, found our course between the
buoys, avoided the weirs and the shallows. Morning became hot noon,
and the afternoon and twilight time came on, and then luminous starry
night, and again morning and hot noon. We stopped at the little town
of Ust-Kamennygorsk, the headquarters for several mining camps, a bit
of qualified civilisation not unknown to British mining engineers.
We had on board a couple of priests, a commercial traveller, some
workmen coming back from doing a job, and two dozen raw Cossacks who
had been ordered to serve on the Chinese frontier--rather interesting
to reflect now how they were travelling away from the place where
they would be needed. At that time all the preparations for war were
going on apace in Germany; the roads were full of horses newly bought
by the Government, the trains full of stores; at the military camps
the last manœuvres were being worked out with full regiments and the
complete panoply of war. We in the steamboat were all travelling the
wrong way, away from the interest of the world--the centre--up-stream
on the fast-flowing river, against the currents and the tendencies.
A month later all would come back, forced by the declaration of war.
Still, little we recked. We had a holiday spirit. There were several
high-school girls and girl students on board--_gimnasistki_ and
_kursistki_--and the deck was vocal with their chattering and laughing.
They were a charming contrast to rough Siberia. The deck passengers
drank vodka and sang. Down below deck was a public stove, and there
sizzled a score of pots--pots with jam, with eggs, with fish, with
chickens, with milk. I made my coffee there, and would frequently see
it rising at the boil and be unable to pick the pot out for others
tending their fish-soup and women taking the scum off their strawberry
jam. At each little village people bought things to cook, so that at
times you might have thought it was a sort of cooking expedition.
[Illustration: KIRGHIZ PRAYING]
So we went on at this momentous time in history. The river became more
rapid and difficult to navigate; it serpentined through wild gorges,
where the rocks were broken and ragged and squared and angular. The
steep cliffs were full of detail that was delicious to the eye. Where
the cliffs were not so steep Nature had clothed their nakedness with
mould and grass. We passed from placid stretches which seemed to throw
the rays of the sun back on the ship, the people and the sky, and we
entered the intense cold shadow of high, sheer rocks. The water became
green and shadowy. The scenery changed every moment as we went round
a new bend of the river and entered new territory through forbidding
gates of rock. Frequently we found ourselves in foaming cauldrons from
which there seemed to be no exit; we wandered round, travelling as
often north as south, and catching glimpses of sun from all imaginable
quarters, and found loopholes of escape to new reaches. The steamer
seemed a toy beside the huge cliffs on each side, and the sunshine,
when we came into it, seemed sufficient to blind the whole Altai. The
higher we pursued our winding way the higher became the cliffs, till
eventually we had grey crags of several hundred feet hanging over us.
In the earlier gorges the greenness of the vegetation of the hills
was reflected in the river in a deep, shadowy green, but in the later
ones the drear greyness of the cliffs was alone reflected, and the
swift-moving, placid water looked like oil. As far as Gusinaya Pristan
trees--birches--but infrequent ones, and growing in haphazard ways
from clefts in rocks. Besides our panting, puffing steamer, with its
streamer of dense smoke and persistent showers of sparks, there were
only rafts on the river--logs roped together, and peasants standing on
the water-washed floating platforms. They seemed to be very skilful in
managing them. On the banks we saw occasional tents and fishermen’s
tackle, small fires with tripods over them, and old black pots whereby
you guessed that fish were cooking. Occasional hay-making parties also
visible on the wan outskirts of farms. It was a fascinating journey,
and one could not take one’s eyes from the changing scene, the prospect
from door after door as we passed new rocks, the delicious side views,
the clefts and wounds healed with birch trees and greenery, the
battered, jaggy prominences, dull blue, purple, yellow with age and
many weathers.
Everyone watched curiously for the next scene, and the change was so
frequent that no one got tired. Mountains, ridges--the grandeur of
our rock basins multiplied upon us so that we felt we were steadily
ascending a high mountain range by river. Night was wonderful,
especially when we stopped to put some cargo off or to take on wood,
and we got out and walked on the cliffs and the sand; the stars in the
sky had their drips of golden reflection in the river, and the opposite
banks and rocks were majestically silhouetted against the sky. The
navigation of this river is, perhaps, one of the sights of the future.
“Parties will be taken out.” But there is no romance there, no castles,
no ruins--only Nature and the grey tumultuous misery and beauty of a
scarred continent.
XV
THE COUNTRY OF THE MARAL
Malo-Krasnoyarsk, on the Irtish, is a hot, sandy village supporting
itself by agriculture, fishing, and melon growing. It is treeless, no
one seeming to have cared to plant the trees which could so easily have
been grown, and the native Kirghiz are employed making fuel blocks out
of manure. The stacks of these black blocks give an unpleasant odour
when the wind is blowing over them. Otherwise, the Irtish is rather
wonderful--deep and green and swift, with powerful currents.
From Malo-Krasnoyarsk I journeyed along the burnt road and over the
vast stretches of pungent wormwood that grow on the moors. The road
climbed to the mountain ridges of the Narimsky range, and along them
to the Central Altai. I had given up tramping now, and an old man in
a dirty crimson blouse drove me in a cart to Bozhe-Narimsky village,
took me for three shillings, and was ready to drive me to Kosh Agatch,
on the other side of the mountains, if I would say but the word. Kosh
Agatch, according to his reckoning, would be five hundred miles, and
he would have to plan a month’s journey over the mountains, hire extra
horses, and buy provisions. According to him traders made the journey
frequently, especially Tartars and Chinamen, buying maral horns.
On the higher slopes of the Altai the sale of the horns of the maral
deer (_Cervus canadensis asiaticus_) seems to be, if not the chief, at
least the most picturesque means of earning a livelihood. I was making
my way into the maral country. Here the colonists, instead of farming
sheep and cows, farm a species of deer with very valuable horns--the
maral. The horns are not valuable as ornaments, or as bone, or as
drinking vessels, but as medicine. A very curious trade. The Russians
cut off the horns of the deer every spring, boil them, dry them, and
sell them into China, where they sell at the rate of about a shilling
an ounce, and give almost miraculous relief to women in the pains of
childbirth, make it possible for barren women to have children, and
many other things.
“Is it good for that purpose?” I asked of the man who was driving me.
“They say so,” said he, without committing himself.
“But do Russian women use this medicine?”
“No; it’s too expensive.”
“But do they believe in it?”
“No, they don’t need it. They are not like the Kitankas and Mongolians,
who suffer very much. These Chinawomen are like the camels here. The
camels would die out if it were not for the skill the Kirghiz women
have in making them breed. They would die out, but the Kirghiz keep
them going. The same with the Chinawomen; they need the powder of the
maral horn. No Chinawoman of any importance thinks of marrying without
a pair of maral horns in her possession, and if her father be too poor
to purchase them, the husband must. They all use it, and you can buy
the powder in any chemist’s shop in China.”
“Or an imitation?” I suggested.
My driver could not say whether the substance could be imitated. Later
on, on my journey, I saw marals, both on the run and in the immense
maral gardens which the Russians keep in their colony.
Bozhe-Narimsky was a pleasant green corner, with tumbling river,
many willow trees, mosquitoes, marshes. Thence the road went higher
and higher to Maly Narimsky and Tulovka, through districts where
once were forests of great pines and now are only forests of stumps,
through wildernesses of pink mallow and purple larkspur, and over
vast, swelling uplands covered with verdure, finally to within sight
of gleaming streaks of snow and ice, the glaciers of the central
range. Bozhe-Narimsky, Maly Narimsky, Tulovka, Medvedka, Altaiskaya,
Katun-Karagai were the names of the Russian villages and Cossack
stations on the way up. Most of them were well-established settlements,
for this territory is Siberia, and not what is called Russian Central
Asia. It has been in Russian hands a long while, and only the fact
that Russia is so vast, and there is so much room for the overflow
of population, explains the backwardness of the colonisation of the
Altai. Russia has never had any enemies worth the name here, and has
very little to fear unless the Chinese ever turn bellicose. The only
people who stood in her way were the mild nomads, the Kalmeeks and the
Kirghiz. These had unrecognised rights to certain valleys, springs,
winter pastures, summer pastures, and they walled off their discoveries
with stones and boulders, never dreaming anyone would think of annexing
them. But when the Russian generals came riding down the valleys with
their engineers, saying, “Fix me a village here and a village there,
and give us twenty villages along the length of that valley,” no
Kirghiz or Kalmeek had the spirit to say nay, and with a melancholy
smile they crept away, leaving the fields to those who must take them.
Near Tulovka I saw the first marals, six speedy deer running ahead
of as many horsemen, just outrunning their horses, but not disposed
to race out of sight and get lost. The horsemen, who were Cossacks,
carried lassos in their hands, and I rather wondered why they did not
shoot the deer and have done with their hunting. A villager put me
right, however.
“These are not wild deer, but escaped ones,” said he. “There are no
wild deer left; they have all been caught now. No one has seen a wild
maral for fifteen years. They have all been caught and put in gardens,
and now we breed them. If they shoot these marals they lose six good
breeders. A buck maral is worth two hundred roubles. It’s a sad day for
the man who has lost these. It is very difficult to catch them, they
are very crafty; and then one doesn’t want to injure their horns in
taking them. They generally have to ride them down until they are dead
beat; no use frightening them; just keep them on the move and give them
no rest.”
At Medvedka I stayed with an old man who kept a maral farm. My host was
a comical fellow, somewhat over six feet high, with long hair, bushy
beard, kind and gentle eyes--a giant’s shoulders, an ogre’s stomach,
but the walk and manners of a child. His great pine log house had a
threshold so large that you might almost call it a veranda but that
peasants do not have verandas. There were steps up to it, and then a
long covered way, one side of which was the log wall of the house,
in which peeped wee glass windows; the other side was a solid little
railing, where you could lean and watch the pigs, the turkeys, the
geese, the horses and dogs in the big farm-bounded farmyard. Beyond
the yard and the pasture stretched upward the voluminous and irregular
mountain-side, deep in a tangle of shadowy undergrowth and made
majestical by mighty firs. The gloom and splendour of the mountains
brooded over the big log house.
[Illustration: IN THE ALTAI: KIRGHIZ TOMBS NEAR MEDVEDKA]
On the veranda were a whole series of green, many-branching antlers
just sawn away from heads of marals--an unusual sight in any cottage.
They were velvety and hairy; if you touched them you found them soft.
Not the antlers hunters bring home and hang on their walls, nothing
hard or sharp or fearsome, but gentle, rounded and smooth-knobbed,
unripened antlers, sawn off from a stag’s head with a saw.
Mikhail Nikanorovitch, mine host, took me up to his maral farm, a tract
of mountain-side many acres in extent, fenced in by a gigantic paling,
the posts of which were eight or nine feet high and very solid. The
maral is a magnificent jumper, and has been known to clear eight feet
upon occasion and get away. As the farmer has to buy the posts from
the Government, the construction of a _maralnik_, as they call it, is
not without considerable expense for the peasants. Quite a small place
would cost two hundred roubles.
Mikhail and I stumped up the mountain-side quite a height till we came
to his wild enclosure. Mine host called the deer as his peasant wife
might have called chickens to their food, and they came fluttering
towards him to be fed, but, spying me, stopped short, sniffed the air,
then turned and fled to the wildernesses of their prison.
“In the summer they are in this big place,” said Mikhail, “but in late
autumn, before the snows, we drive them into a smaller place, and we
feed them there all the winter. It is in this smaller place that we saw
off the horns in the early summer.”
He took me along to the shed where the horns were sawn off.
“We make the first cutting only when the calf has reached its third
year. We cut off the horns in June and the beginning of July--when the
antlers are most developed and so worth most. If we leave them later
they harden and are no use. They would then have to be allowed to bear
their horns till next spring, when in any case they shed them.”
“What happens to those who have had their antlers sawn off; do they
shed the stumps?” I asked.
“Yes, they shed their stumps. That is in April or May; and then they
change their coats and are generally in a bad state of health.”
He described how they managed the animal during the sawing business:
put its fore-legs in a noose, its hind-legs in a noose, threw it on
the ground, bandaged the eyes, someone carefully holding the head and
saving the horns from damage all the time. They sawed off the horn with
an ordinary hand-saw--such a one was lying on a sort of bench in the
shed to which the old fellow had led me--and when the sawing was done
they stopped the bleeding with coaldust and salt, and then tied up the
stump tightly with linen. The blood soon stops flowing, and the maral,
being put at liberty, forgets and scarce knows what he has lost. In
their tamed state the deer have found a sort of alternative destiny,
and the peasants say that often marals which escape in the summer come
back voluntarily to the enclosures for food and shelter in winter-time.
Still, some do finally disappear, and although the villager I met
earlier was of opinion that all the marals had been caught, there must
still be many thousands at large upon the vast and unexplored Altai. In
their wild state they are extremely shy of human beings, and seemingly
with good reason.
Old Mikhail, who was a kind of three-storied man, pottered about,
stooping the whole length of his huge body to pick wild strawberries
and raspberries, and he constantly called out to me to help myself to
fruit. When we got back to the farmhouse I found his wife boiling a
chicken for me in a pail over a bonfire in the garden.
Mikhail showed me where they boiled the horns, and explained the
process of preservation. There were enormous coppers for the boiling.
The horns were put into boiling brine, just dipped in and taken out
several times. The difficulty was to immerse them and yet not touch the
metal sides of the pots. If the sides were touched the delicate skin
might easily be frayed. After the immersion the horns were exposed in
the open air. They dried fairly rapidly, and lost weight; by the time
they would be ready for sale they would have lost half their original
weight. In the late summer and autumn Chinese and Tartar merchants
appeared and made great deals in maral horns throughout the whole
district. In China the substance of the horn is known as _ludzon_.
Mikhail was an extraordinarily hospitable type of peasant, and heaped
plenty on the table that evening--a great crust of honeycomb, for he
kept his own bees and possessed a hill-side dotted with white hives;
wooden basins full of berries; butter--and butter is rare enough in
peasants’ houses; and soup and chicken and white bannocks. We had an
amusing talk about England. He had never seen a train, the sea, an
Englishman, or a German or a Frenchman, or, indeed, any race but
Russian, Kirghiz, Chinamen, Tartars, Kalmeeks. We compared the prices
of things, and he was greatly alarmed at the cost of meat in England. I
made him wonder more and more.
“Now, for instance, a hare,” said I. “I do not suppose they cost much
here, but in our country we pay six or seven shillings for one at
Christmas.”
Mikhail was astonished.
“What, for the skin?” asked he.
“Oh, no; we don’t value the skin--throw it away or sell it to the
rag-and-bone man for twopence.”
“You don’t mean to say you pay that for a hare. Now, here we keep the
skin to sell and throw away the flesh. It’s good enough for hogs. I
never thought of a hare having a price as food. I don’t know that I
could say what was the price of hare’s flesh here. We throw it away.”
He played with the idea, and then eventually inquired of me whether it
were possible to get an iced freight-truck from Omsk to London, and
what would it cost.
I could not say.
“Well,” said Mikhail, “supposing we put a nominal price of two copecks
(a halfpenny) a hare exported from here, we could make a big profit,
and it seems to me they could be got to London, and there would be a
big profit for every one concerned.”
I promised to give the matter my consideration, and he was so much in
earnest that, despite the fact he had never seen a train and could
neither read nor write, he made me note his address carefully and take
it to England, where I could give it to a _commersant_, and he would
contrive matters.
“Tell him,” said he, “that we can let him have ten hares for a rouble.
Good night.”
I was getting ready to lie down. Some overcoats had been spread on the
floor for me.
“Tell him there’s no end to the number of hares to be had here. Good
night,” said he again.
And after I had lain down he came to me again and said:
“Are you comfortable? There was a man here once who made his fortune
exporting _sarka_ skins. Good night.”
Next morning he gave me a large metal pot of honey and black currants
mixed, as a present, and he drove me to Altaiskaya Stanista, the top of
the Altai, himself.
XVI
THE DECLARATION OF WAR
It is a fine mountain road from Medvedka to Altaiskaya, over mighty
open upland where the great firs grasp the earth with talon-like
roots. Here and there along the road are Kirghiz tombs enclosed by
rude hurdles, reminding one of the palings of the maral gardens. An
occasional Russian hut, a mountain stream pouring across a road,
forests of stumps, and again forests of those giant firs standing as
against the wind--storm trees, broad at base, needle-pointed at the
apex, every branch a strong son.
At Altaisky I proposed to stay a few weeks, and then cross the
mountains to the Kosh Agatch road, northward toward Biisk; but
the tidings of war came across my plan here, and farther than the
Altai I did not go. But I had a quiet fortnight in a wonderful
spot--Altaiskaya, opposite Mount Belukha, one of the great snow peaks
that stand on sentry here between China and Siberia, and I walked and
climbed. It would be a splendid place in which to spend a whole summer.
There are places that are so placid and beautiful that you exclaim:
“Good heavens, this is a very paradise!” When you have been there a day
you want to stay there for ever, or to go away and to return and return
again. So it was at little Bobrovo on the Dwina, so again at Altaisky.
I thought to myself I shall come here again and spend six months, and
write a long and interesting story. And I will ask “Pan” to come, and
he also will come and write a wonderful story. “Pan” is an English
friend, a great, tall, gentle, quick-scented human, a dear mortal who
snuffs the air with his nose and can tell you thereby what has happened
in a place any time this three weeks past.
Altaiskaya was full of the freshness of youth, and the air gave
you wings and its valleys were full of wonderful flowers. I have a
long-acquired habit of associating a certain phrase in the Lord’s
Prayer with the most beautiful thing I have seen during the day, and if
I have seen nothing beautiful, and have been leading a dull life in a
town, my mind goes roving back to certain wondrous sights in the past.
Most frequently of all it goes to the wastes, covered with crimson
poppies, in Russian Central Asia, and occasionally to the verdure and
splendour of the Altai and the delphiniums there, the blue, purple and
yellow monkshood, the China-blue larkspurs, blue and purple larkspurs.
A wonderful place for flowers. Here are sweeps of blue sage, mauve
cranesbills poking everywhere, saffron poppies, grass of Parnassus,
campanula, pink moss flowers and giant thistle-heads, gentian, Siberian
iris.
Just outside the Cossack settlement it was late summer, and the glossy
peony fruits were turning crimson from green, opening to show rows of
black teeth--seeds. But as you climbed upward toward the snow the
season changed, and it was possible to recover the lost spring.
The southern side of the mountains seemed to be very bare, but our
side, the northern one, was green. It was comparatively easy to
reach districts where it might be thought no foot of man had ever
trod--primeval moss-grown forest, where were no tracks, no flowers,
nothing but firs and moss. Numberless trees had fallen, and the moss
had grown over them, and, in climbing through, one helped oneself from
tree to tree, balancing and finding a footing. Above this jungle was a
stretch of steep mountain-side sparsely grown with young firs, and then
grey, barren, slippery rock. Wonderful shelves and chasms, fissures,
precipices, and ways up without ways down, boulder-strewn tracks and
founts of bubbling water, milk-white streams, crystal streams.
I was housed very well with a prosperous Cossack family, and, except
for the fact that there was a terrible monotony in their dinners, had
no reason to complain. Every evening when I returned there was beef
“cutlets,” white scones and butter, a jug of milk, and the samovar. The
whole family was in the fields hay-making all day, and were indisposed
to give time to cooking.
[Illustration: ALTAISKA _STANITSA_: VIEW OF MOUNT BIELUKHA]
Most days I spent by the side of a little mountain river, where I
built a sort of causeway out of rocks, diverted the channel, made a
deep bathing-pool--enthralling occupations. Here also I had a bonfire,
made coffee, baked potatoes, cooked red currant jam. Strips of red
currants hung like bunting on some of the bushes, and were so thick
that you could pick a potful in a quarter of an hour. Here also I
sorted out and re-read thirty or forty copies of _The Times_, saved
up for me, with letters, at the post office of Semipalatinsk--all the
details of the political quarrel over Ulster, the resignation of Sir
John French (as he was then called), of Colonel Seely, the vigorous
speeches of Mr. John Ward, the brilliant defences of Mr. Asquith. We
seemed to be running forward silently and smoothly to an exciting
rebellion or civil war in Ireland, and nobody seemed to deplore the
prospect of strife. The Government, nominally in favour of peace at all
costs, were incapable of preventing their opponents obtaining arms,
and were, therefore, allowing their friends to arm. On the whole we
seemed to be tired of the dull blessings of peace, out of patience with
peace. Yet we were not ready for the strife that was coming, though
certainly in a mood to take arms. It is astonishing that with our many
international characters--those diplomatical journalists of ours--we
did not know what was coming, or no one was at pains to undeceive us.
Journalists abroad, even if they are out of touch with Courts and are
uninfluential, have yet much greater opportunities for understanding
international situations than Foreign Offices. Why is it that they
nearly always mislead? In our country a certain glamour overspreads
the personality of the polyglot who writes of foreign Courts and
foreign policies, but as an observer of the Press for many years I can
give it as my opinion that, as a nation, we do not gain much from
the pens of those journalists who run in and out of chancelleries and
are well known at foreign Courts. In any case, as regards those who
dealt specially with Germany, Austria and the Balkans at the time of
the outbreak of war, they were either blind or ignorant, which is
unthinkable, or mixed up somehow in the great German intrigue.