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 Onward1 sailed for San Francisco at once, carrying back to home and civilisation2 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, decided3 to go with us as far as Irkutsk, the east-Siberian capital.
Snow fell in sufficient quantities to make good sledging4 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-sledges5 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 blessing6; 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 incessant7 howls of a hundred wolfish dogs, as they strained impatiently against their broad sealskin collars.
"Ai! Maxim8!" 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 spiked9 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 domes10, and the grey, unpainted log houses of the dreariest11 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, ascends12 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 descends13 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 standing14 for an abstraction. The thing symbolised has no more real, tangible15 existence than a meridian16 of longitude17. It is simply lineal extension in a certain direction. The country back of Okhotsk, for a distance of six hundred miles, is an unbroken wilderness18 of mountains and evergreen19 forests, sparsely20 inhabited by Wandering Tunguses, with here and there a few hardy21 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 subdued22 by the axe23 and spade of civilisation. It is now, as it always has been, a wild, primeval land of snowy mountains, desolate24 steppes, and shaggy pine forests, through which the great arctic rivers and their tributaries25 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 nomads27 known to the Russians as Tunguses. Living originally, as they did, in skin tents, moving constantly from place to place, and earning a scanty28 subsistence by breeding reindeer29, they were easily persuaded by the Russian Government to encamp permanently30 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 exempted31 from the annual tax levied32 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 computed33 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 retarded34 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 dreary35 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 moss36 will grow, stand the four or five small, grey reindeerskin tents which make up the nomad26 encampment. There are no trees or shrubs37 around them to shut out a part of the sky, limit the horizon, or afford the least semblance38 of shelter to the lonely settlement, and there is no wall or palisade to fence in and domesticate39 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 trampled40 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 ravens41—the scavengers of Tunguse encampments—flap heavily past with hoarse42 croaks43 to a patch of blood-stained snow where a reindeer has recently been slaughtered44; and in the foreground, two or three grey, wolfish dogs with cruel, light-coloured eyes, are gnawing45 at a half-stripped reindeer's head. The thermometer stands at forty-five degrees below zero, Fahrenheit46, and the breasts of deer, ravens, and dogs are white with frost. The thin smoke from the conical fur tents rises perpendicularly47 to a great height in the clear, still air; the ghostly mountain peaks in the distance look like white silhouettes48 on a background of dark steel-blue; and the desolate snow-covered landscape is faintly tinged49 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 salute50 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, bustling51, 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 spotted52 reindeerskin coats, pushed westward53, through snow-choked mountain ravines, toward the river Aldan. Our progress, for the first two weeks, was slow and fatiguing54 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 ascended55 the Stanavoi range, steadily56 increased in intensity57 until it became so severe as to endanger life, and day after day we plodded58 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 exhausted59, and the sharp ivory goads60 of our Tunguse drivers were red with frozen blood. Sometimes we bivouacked at night in a wild mountain gorge61 and lighted up the snow-laden forest with the red glare of a mighty62 camp-fire; sometimes we shovelled63 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 blizzard64. Hardened as we were by two previous winters of arctic travel, and accustomed as we were to all the vicissitudes65 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 mercurial66 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 tangled67 masses of frosty wire; eyelids68 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 extremities69 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 monotonous70 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 ridge71 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 luminous72 mist, like pillars of fire in the wilderness of the Exodus73.
"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 farmhouses74; and they stood so vertically75 in the cold, motionless air of the arctic night that they were lighted up, to their very summits, by the hearth-fires underneath76. 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 fully77 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 armour78 of furs; mirrors, beds and clean linen79 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 fragrant80 Kiakhta tea on a table beside us, and pictures on the wall over our heads. The house, it is true, had slabs81 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 ponies82 to our Okhotsk dog-sledges, we drove swiftly westward, to the unfamiliar83 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 mattresses85, 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 mattress84 and luxuriously86 exploring, with bare feet, the smooth cool expanses of linen sheeting.
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1
onward
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| adj.向前的，前进的；adv.向前，前进，在先 | |
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civilisation
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| n.文明，文化，开化，教化 | |
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decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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sledging
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| v.乘雪橇( sledge的现在分词 )；用雪橇运载 | |
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sledges
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| n.雪橇，雪车( sledge的名词复数 )v.乘雪橇( sledge的第三人称单数 )；用雪橇运载 | |
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blessing
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| n.祈神赐福；祷告；祝福，祝愿 | |
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incessant
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| adj.不停的，连续的 | |
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maxim
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| n.格言，箴言 | |
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spiked
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| adj.有穗的；成锥形的；有尖顶的 | |
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domes
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| n.圆屋顶( dome的名词复数 )；像圆屋顶一样的东西；圆顶体育场 | |
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dreariest
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| 使人闷闷不乐或沮丧的( dreary的最高级 )； 阴沉的； 令人厌烦的； 单调的 | |
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ascends
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| v.上升，攀登( ascend的第三人称单数 ) | |
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descends
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| v.下来( descend的第三人称单数 )；下去；下降；下斜 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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tangible
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| adj.有形的，可触摸的，确凿的，实际的 | |
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meridian
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| adj.子午线的；全盛期的 | |
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longitude
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| n.经线，经度 | |
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wilderness
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| n.杳无人烟的一片陆地、水等，荒漠 | |
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evergreen
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| n.常青树；adj.四季常青的 | |
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sparsely
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| adv.稀疏地；稀少地；不足地；贫乏地 | |
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hardy
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| adj.勇敢的，果断的，吃苦的；耐寒的 | |
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subdued
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| adj. 屈服的，柔和的，减弱的 动词subdue的过去式和过去分词 | |
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axe
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| n.斧子；v.用斧头砍，削减 | |
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desolate
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| adj.荒凉的，荒芜的；孤独的，凄凉的；v.使荒芜，使孤寂 | |
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tributaries
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| n. 支流 | |
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nomad
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| n.游牧部落的人，流浪者，游牧民 | |
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nomads
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| n.游牧部落的一员( nomad的名词复数 )；流浪者；游牧生活；流浪生活 | |
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scanty
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| adj.缺乏的，仅有的，节省的，狭小的，不够的 | |
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reindeer
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| n.驯鹿 | |
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permanently
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| adv.永恒地，永久地，固定不变地 | |
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exempted
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| 使免除[豁免]( exempt的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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levied
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| 征（兵）( levy的过去式和过去分词 )； 索取； 发动（战争）； 征税 | |
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computed
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| adj.[医]计算的，使用计算机的v.计算，估算( compute的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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retarded
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| a.智力迟钝的，智力发育迟缓的 | |
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dreary
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| adj.令人沮丧的，沉闷的，单调乏味的 | |
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moss
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| n.苔，藓，地衣 | |
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shrubs
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| 灌木( shrub的名词复数 ) | |
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semblance
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| n.外貌，外表 | |
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domesticate
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| vt.驯养；使归化，使专注于家务 | |
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trampled
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| 踩( trample的过去式和过去分词 )； 践踏； 无视； 侵犯 | |
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ravens
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| n.低质煤；渡鸦( raven的名词复数 ) | |
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hoarse
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| adj.嘶哑的，沙哑的 | |
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croaks
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| v.呱呱地叫( croak的第三人称单数 )；用粗的声音说 | |
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slaughtered
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| v.屠杀，杀戮，屠宰( slaughter的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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gnawing
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| a.痛苦的，折磨人的 | |
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Fahrenheit
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| n./adj.华氏温度；华氏温度计(的) | |
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perpendicularly
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| adv. 垂直地, 笔直地, 纵向地 | |
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silhouettes
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| 轮廓( silhouette的名词复数 )； （人的）体形； （事物的）形状； 剪影 | |
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tinged
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| v.（使）发丁丁声( ting的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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salute
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| vi.行礼，致意，问候，放礼炮；vt.向…致意，迎接，赞扬；n.招呼，敬礼，礼炮 | |
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bustling
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| adj.喧闹的 | |
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spotted
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| adj.有斑点的，斑纹的，弄污了的 | |
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westward
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| n.西方，西部；adj.西方的，向西的；adv.向西 | |
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fatiguing
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| a.使人劳累的 | |
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ascended
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| v.上升，攀登( ascend的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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steadily
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| adv.稳定地；不变地；持续地 | |
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intensity
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| n.强烈，剧烈；强度；烈度 | |
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plodded
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| v.沉重缓慢地走（路）( plod的过去式和过去分词 )；努力从事；沉闷地苦干；缓慢进行（尤指艰难枯燥的工作） | |
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exhausted
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| adj.极其疲惫的，精疲力尽的 | |
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goads
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| n.赶牲口的尖棒( goad的名词复数 )v.刺激( goad的第三人称单数 )；激励；（用尖棒）驱赶；驱使（或怂恿、刺激）某人 | |
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gorge
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| n.咽喉，胃，暴食，山峡；v.塞饱，狼吞虎咽地吃 | |
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mighty
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| adj.强有力的；巨大的 | |
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shovelled
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| v.铲子( shovel的过去式和过去分词 )；锹；推土机、挖土机等的)铲；铲形部份 | |
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blizzard
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| n.暴风雪 | |
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vicissitudes
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| n.变迁，世事变化；变迁兴衰( vicissitude的名词复数 )；盛衰兴废 | |
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mercurial
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| adj.善变的，活泼的 | |
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tangled
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| adj. 纠缠的，紊乱的 动词tangle的过去式和过去分词 | |
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eyelids
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| n.眼睑( eyelid的名词复数 )；眼睛也不眨一下；不露声色；面不改色 | |
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extremities
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| n.端点( extremity的名词复数 )；尽头；手和足；极窘迫的境地 | |
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monotonous
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| adj.单调的，一成不变的，使人厌倦的 | |
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ridge
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| n.山脊；鼻梁；分水岭 | |
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luminous
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| adj.发光的，发亮的；光明的；明白易懂的；有启发的 | |
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exodus
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| v.大批离去，成群外出 | |
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farmhouses
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| n.农舍，农场的主要住房( farmhouse的名词复数 ) | |
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vertically
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| adv.垂直地 | |
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underneath
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| adj.在...下面，在...底下；adv.在下面 | |
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fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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armour
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| （=armor）n.盔甲；装甲部队 | |
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linen
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| n.亚麻布，亚麻线，亚麻制品；adj.亚麻布制的，亚麻的 | |
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fragrant
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| adj.芬香的，馥郁的，愉快的 | |
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slabs
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| n.厚板，平板，厚片( slab的名词复数 )；厚胶片 | |
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ponies
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| 矮种马，小型马( pony的名词复数 )； ￡25 25 英镑 | |
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unfamiliar
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| adj.陌生的，不熟悉的 | |
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mattress
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| n.床垫，床褥 | |
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mattresses
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| 褥垫，床垫( mattress的名词复数 ) | |
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luxuriously
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| adv.奢侈地，豪华地 | |
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