THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA A MAID OF OLD MUSCOVY (From a painting by Venuga) THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA BY LINDON BATES, Jr. WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY StJ)e tftibersibe p«#* Cambri&oe 1910 COPYRIGHT, I9IO, BY LINDON BATES, JR. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published May iqzo CONTENTS I. The Path of the Cossack i II. The Great Siberian Railway .... 25 III. In Irkutsk 71 IV. Sledging through Transbaikalia . . .114 V. In Tatar Tents 173 VI. The City of the Reborn God .... 220 VII. Russia in Evolution 273 VIII. The Story of the Hordes 322 IX. China 364 ILLUSTRATIONS A Maid of Old Muscovy Frontispiece From a painting by Venuga Yermak's Expedition to Sibir, attacked by the Tatars 8 From a painting by Surikova Church of St. Basil, Moscow 20 Ivan the Terrible blinded its architect that he might never duplicate the masterpiece Bridge over the Irtish 38 Along the Trans-Siberian Railway 38 Dining-Car Saloon — View of the Library ... 46 Cities of New Russia — Tiumen, Tomsk, Perm . . 50 Island of Kaltigei, Lake Baikal 68 Village of Listvianitchnoe, Lake Baikal . . . .68 The Angara River, Irkutsk 76 The Cathedral, Irkutsk 76 A Chapel in Irkutsk 86 Bolshoiskaia, Irkutsk 86 The Bazaar, Irkutsk 90 viii ILLUSTRATIONS The Ice-Breaker, Yermak — Lake Baikal . . • 98 The Organizers of the Chita Republic . . . 108 Baikal Station 116 The Highlands of Transbaikalia 116 Sledging Southwards 126 Siberian Types — Peasant, Village Storekeeper . .136 Peasant Types 150 A Chickoya Girl 164 A Troitzkosavsk Student 164 A Wayside Temple 178 A Mongol Belle and her Yurta 186 A Zabaikalskaia Buriat 186 A Mongol "Black Man" 206 Temple of Gigin, Urga 222 Temple in the Urga Lamasery 228 A Prostrating Pilgrimage 234 A Grand Lama 244 Chinese Mandarin 256 Gigin, the Living Buddha 256 Chinese Archway, Urga Maimachen . . . .262 ILLUSTRATIONS ix The Great Wall . 270 The Kremlin, Moscow 282 Russian Types — Dragoon, Constable . . . .292 Street Scenes in Moscow 302 (The Tverskaia Gate, Loubianskaia Place) Russian Types — Peddler, Policeman . . . .316 The Miracle of Attila's Repulse 332 (From the painting by Raphael in the Vatican) On the Road to the Ming Tombs 342 The Glory is departed 360 The Bridge and Tablets in Pei-hai 368 Hsuen-wu Gate, Peking 374 Peking, where the Allies' Main Assault was made . 380 Summer Palace of the Emperor 388 Map of Asia, showing Route from Moscow to Peking . 392 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA THE PATH OF THE COSSACK AN ancient way leads across northern Asia to the Chinese borderland. The steel of the great Siberian Railroad harnesses now the stretch which mounts the Urals, pierces the steppes, winds through the Altai foothills, and by Cyclopean cuts and tun nels girdles Lake Baikal. From Verhneudinsk south ward, it has remained as an ancient post-road leading through the Trans-Baikal highlands to the frontier garrison town of Kiahta. Over the Mon golian border at Maimachen, it has narrowed into a camel-trail threading the barren hills to the encampment of the Tatar hordes at holy Urga. Thence it strikes across the sandy wastes of Gobi, and passes the ramparts of the Great Wall of China, on its way toward Peking and the Pacific. Through five centuries this road has been build ing. Cossacks blazed its way; musketoon-armed Strelitz, adventuring traders, convicts condemned for sins or sincerity, land-seeking peasants, exiled dissenters, voyaging officials — all have trampled it. 2 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA Hiving workmen under far-brought engineers have pushed the rails onward, bridging the chasms and heaping the defiles. Following it eastward, unpeo pled wastes have been sown to homesteads, ham lets have grown into cities. To the very gateway of China it has led the Muscovite. It is the path of Slavic advance. The way scarcely passed Novgorod in the early sixteenth century when the great family of the Stroganovs, a "kindred in Moscovie called the sonnes of Anika living neare the Castle of Saint Michael the Archangel," began the fur-trade with the Samoied tribesmen from Siberia, who paddled down the Wichida River to barter peltries with the Russians. The prudent merchant Anika, looking to a more permanent source for those valued furs than the irregular visits of the aborigines, planned to anticipate his brother traders in their purchases. He sent east with a band of returning Samoieds some of his own henchmen carrying, for traffic with the inhabitants, "divers base merchandise, as small bels, and other like Dutch small wares." The agents returned to report what impressed them most. There were no cities. The Samoieds were "lothsome in feeding," — even a Russian fron tiersman might shrink from the cud of a reindeer's stomach as food, — and knew neither corn nor bread. They were cunning archers, whose arrows were headed with sharpened stones and fishbones. They were clad in skins, wearing in summer the THE PATH OF THE COSSACK 3 furry side outward and in winter inward. They willingly gave sable-skins for Dutch bells. A series of trading expeditions began, which made the Stroganovs so enormously wealthy that "the kindred of Anika knew no ends of their goods." Indeed, they gained so much by this exploitation that they began to fear the application by the Czar's agent of a monetary test of patriotism. So, by a stroke of finance not unknown in modern days, there was arranged the Russian equivalent for carrying five thousand shares of Metropolitan. A block of small wares for the account of the Czar's brother-in-law, Boris, was added to the stock in an especially important expedition among the Samoieds and Ostiaks. The adventurers got far inland. They saw men riding on elks, and sledges drawn by dogs. They returned with wonderful tales of marksman ship, and, more important, brought back enough furs to give Boris a dividend, in gratitude for which he secured to the Stroganovs the grant of an enormous tract of land along the Kama River and a monopoly of the trade with the aborigines. The Stroganovs grew and thrived. They scat tered trading-posts and factories along the river- highways and sent many parties into the interior to barter. In the half-century following old Anika's expedition, they had carried the Slavic way to the Urals. In the summer of 1578, when Maxim Stroganov was ruling over the family estates along the Kama, 4 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA one Yermak, heading a fugitive band of Cossacks, tattered and spent, with dented armor and drooping ponies, straggled into camp and offered service. With great delicacy Maxim forbore pressing too closely his inquiry into their antecedents. It might have wounded Yermak's susceptibilities to avow that his chief lieutenant, Ivan Koltso, was under sentence of death for capturing and sacking a town of the Nogoy, and that the immediate cause of his advent was an army of Imperial Strelitz, which had driven his band from the Volga District for piracy and highway robbery. The situation on the far side of the Urals, where the skin-hunting tribes had been conquered by a roving horde of Tatars under Kutchum Khan, was at this time interfering sadly with the Stroganovs' fur business. Eight hundred Cossacks, furthermore, of shady character and urgent needs were undesir able neighbors. So the prudent Maxim, not par ticularly solicitous as to which of the two might be eliminated, offered Yermak a supply of new muskets if he would go away and fight the Tatars. They were not pleasant people for the Cossacks to meet, these former masters of Moscow. But be hind were the soldiers of Ivan the Terrible. With a possible conquest before, and the Strelitz behind, Yermak gladly chose to invade the Tatar territory, which is now western Siberia. Up the Chusovaya River the little expedition started in 1579, damming the stream with sails to THE PATH OF THE COSSACK 5 get the boats across its shallows. Penetrating far into the mountains, the band reached a point where a portage could be made across the Ural water-shed. Then they headed down the Tura River into Siberia. Here the invaders met the first army of the Tatars under Prince Yepancha, and with small loss drove them back. Yermak made his winter camp on the site of the present city of Tiumen. Next year the advance began once more. The Khan of the Tatars, Kutchum, was alive to the se riousness of the incursion, and prepared to ambush the Cossack flotilla as it descended the Tura. At a chosen spot chains were stretched across the stream, and bowmen were stationed on the banks to await the coming of Yermak and overwhelm with arrows his impeded forces. The Tatar sentries above the ambuscade signaled the coming of the boats; all eyes were turned intently upstream. Then Yer mak's soldiers fell upon them from the rear, to their total surprise and his complete victory. Straw- stuffed figures in Cossack garments had come down in the boats ; the men themselves had made a land- circuit and had struck the enemy unprepared. In defense of his threatened capital, Sibir, the old Khan rallied once more. He assembled a great army, thirty times that of the Cossacks. For the invaders, however, retreat was more perilous than advance. Yermak went on, and in a great fight on the banks of the Irtish, again prevailed. With his forces reduced by battle and disease to some three 6 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA hundred effectives, he entered Sibir on October 25, 1 58 1. A few days later the Ostiak tribes, glad to escape their Koran-coercing masters, proffered their allegiance, and the Cossack saddle was on Siberia. But how precarious was their seat! Southward were the myriads of the unconquered hordes of Ta- tary ; only one of the score of their khans had been vanquished. As thistledown is blown before the wind, so could Yermak's oft-decimated band have been swept away had once the march of the Mon gols' main division turned northward. Girding him round were the self-submitting Ostiaks, loyal for the moment to those who had won them freedom from the old proselyting overlord, but not long to be relied upon once the weight of Cossack tribute — the fur-yassak — began to be felt. But what the Tatar hordes had not, what the Ostiak hunters had not, the three hundred Cossacks had — a man. This man, starting his march as the hunted captain of a band of outlaws, could conquer half a continent. Then over the heads of his em ployers, the mighty family of Stroganov, over the heads of governors of provinces, of boyars, of min isters to the throne, he could send by his outlaw lieutenant, Ivan Koltso, loftily, imperially, as a prince to a king, his offer of the realm of Siberia to Ivan Vasilevich. Ivan the Terrible, Czar of all the Russias, he who had blinded the architect of St. Basil, lest he plan a second masterpiece ; he who had tortured and slain THE PATH OF THE COSSACK 7 a son, hated less for his intrigues than for his unroyal weakness, responded imperially. Over the long versts Ivan's courier carried to Yermak a pardon, confirmation as ruler of the newly-won realm and the Czar's own mantle, an honor accorded only to the greatest, the boyars of Muscovy. Following the messenger eastward there plodded three hundred musket-armed Strelitz to bear aid to the Cossack garrison. Sorely now were these reinforcements needed, for the Ostiak tribes flamed into rebellion against King Stork. With Kutchum's Tatars, they returned to the attack and besieged Sibir. Once again, though hemmed about by the multitude of his enemies, the valor of Yermak saved his cause. In a totally unexpected sally, in June, 1584, the Tatar camp was surprised, a great number mas sacred, and the besiegers scattered. The whole country, however, save only the city of Sibir, was still in arms. Engagements between small parties were constant. Ivan Koltso, striving to open a way for a trader's caravan, fell with his fifty, cut down to the last man. Yermak, marching out to avenge him, was himself surprised near the Irtish. With Ulysses-like adroitness, he and two followers escaped the massacre and reached the river-bank, where a small skiff promised safety. Leaping last for the boat, Yermak fell short, and, weighted with his armor, sank in the river that he had given to Russia. The two Cossack soldiers alone floated down to their comrades. 8 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA One hundred and fifty, all that were left of them, started their long homeward retreat. Far from Sibir, they met a hundred armed men sent by the Czar. Great was the spirit, not unworthy of the dead leader, that turned them back, to march to a site twelve miles from Sibir, where they built their own town, now the city of Tobolsk. In the years that followed, their nomad enemies drifted south, leaving those behind who cared not for their old khan's quarrels. The phlegmatic Ostiaks returned to their hunting and to their feasts of uncooked fox-entrails. The long fight had rolled past, leaving the Slavic way undisputed to the Irtish. Well it was, for no more of the Strelitz marched to the aid of the garrisons. Russia was in the throes of civil war and invasion, — the long-remem bered "Smutnoe Vremya," time of troubles. Boris Godunov, once favorite of Ivan the Terrible, be came the real ruler in the reign of the weak Feodor. On the death of this prince, with the heir-apparent Dimitri suspiciously slain, he had mounted the empty throne, and a pretender, claiming to be Dimitri miraculously escaped, had risen up in Poland, gained the support of the king, and marched against Boris. Though the Polish army was routed, Boris succumbed shortly after to a poison-hastened demise. Dimitri attacked the new czar, captured Mos cow, and was crowned in the Kremlin by the Poles. YERMAK'S EXPEDITION ' (From [0 SIBIR ATTACKED BY THE TATARS j painting by Surikova) THE PATH OF THE COSSACK 9 A revolution followed within a year, in which the pseudo-Dimitri was slain. Meanwhile the Poles were devastating Russia more cruelly than had the old Tatar conquerors. At length Minim the butcher of Novgorod led a popular revolt, which in 1613 carried to the throne Michael, the first of the Romanovs. Through all these years, despite the fact that anarchy and chaos rioted over Muscovy, despite the fact that no troops came to aid in the advance, the Cossacks still pressed their way, contested by the scattered bands of Tatars, and farther on by the Buriats, the Yakuts, the Koriats. After these fighters and conquerors came the traders and colon ists, with their families, following along the road that had been won. The valleys of the great Siber ian rivers, which so short a time before had been the grazing-grounds of the Tatars, became dotted now with the farms of the new-come settlers. The advance guards of the fur-traders, with block houses guarding the portages, and clustering wooden huts and churches, pushed south and east as far as Kuznetz, at the head of navigation on the River Tom, and to the foot of the Altai Mountains. North and east the trade-route was advanced to the Yenesei, twenty-two hundred miles inland. As many as sixty-eight hundred sables went back to Russia in 1640, together with great quantities of fox, ermine, and squirrel-skins. The quaint volumes of "Purchas his Pilgrimes," 10 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA published in 1625, tell of some of the early explora tions. A band of Cossacks dared the upper Yenesei, which "hath high mountains to the east, among which are some that cast out fire and brimstone." They made friends of the cave-dwelling Tunguses in this region, who were themselves stirred to ex plore, and went on far eastward to another river, less than the Yenesei but as rapid. By faster run ning the Tunguses caught some of the inhabitants, who pointed across the river and said "Om ! Om !" The old chronicler diligently records the specula tion as to what "Om! Om!" could mean. Some thought that it signified thunder, others held it a warning that the great beyond teemed with devils. These unfortunate slow-running natives died, ' ' prob ably of fright," when the Tunguses, in a spirit as naively unfeeling as if they were collecting curios, were taking them back to be exhibited to their friends the Cossacks. How far these Tunguses had pierced cannot be told. In one of the dialects of the Yakuts who live beyond Baikal, "ta-oom" or "tanak- hoom" means "greetings." Had the Tunguses and the Cossacks who followed them arrived at the Yakuts' country ? Or was the river on which passed "ships with sails" and beyond which was heard the booming of brazen bells the Amur ? Were those the junks and temple-gongs of the Manchus ? Ni snaia, — who knows ? In 1637 the Cossacks reached and established themselves in Yakutsk. In 1639 by the far northern THE PATH OF THE COSSACK u route they pierced to the Sea of Okhotsk. In 1644 a party reached the delta of the Kalyma, and curiously speculated upon the mammoth tusks which they found. In 1648, on the Cellinga River beyond Lake Baikal they built Fort Verhneudinsk. Had their tide of conquest now rolled southward, up the Cellinga Valley, the Russian Eagles might to day be flying over Peking. Only the Kentai Mount ains were between them and prostrate Mongolia, enfeebled by the internecine warfare of her rival khans. From Mongolia, the road, worn by so many conquerors of old, leads fair and clear to the Chi-li Province and the heart of China. But they passed this gateway by, those old Cos sack heroes, as the railway builders have passed it by, to press with Poyarkov to the Pacific ; to con quer, with Khabarov, the Amur ; to meet in desper ate conflict the whale-skin cuirassed Koriats of the coast ; to battle with the Manchu in conflicts where "by the Grace of God and the Imperial good for tune, and our efforts, many of those dogs were slain"; to fight until but an unvanquished sixty- eight were left of the garrison of eight hundred in beleaguered Albazin. The current of conquest passed by this door to China, but the swelling stream of commerce searched it out. In 1638, the Boyar Pochabov, crossing Baikal on the ice, broke the first way to Urga, the capital of the Mongolian Great Khan, and gained the friendship of the monarch. In the 12 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA interests of trade, the deputies of the Czar Alexei Michailovitch followed up the opening with an embassy in 1654 to the Chinese Emperor himself. Over steppe and mountain and desert the mission wound its weary way to Kalgan, the outpost city beside the Chinese Wall, and then on to Peking, bearing to the Bogdo Khan, the Yellow Czar, the presents of Chagan Khan, the White Czar. From the Forbidden Palace at Peking were starts ed back, four years later, return presents, including ten puds of the first tea that reached Russia. With the presents came a message that drove flame into the bearded cheeks of the Czar and set his Muscovite boyars to grasping their sword-hilts. " In token of our especial good-will we send gifts in re turn for your tribute." Thus, the Chinese Emperor. The answer of the Czar started another legation plodding across a continent, and the retort was thrown at the feet of his Yellow Majesty. It was a summons forthwith to tender his vassalage to Russia. The Czar's gauntlet had been hurled across Asia. But all it brought was beggary to the traders who had begun to press along the newly-opened route to a commercial conquest of the East. Soon Russia regretted the fruitage of her chal lenge. In 1685 Golovin's embassy left Moscow, and, arriving two years later at Verhneudinsk, opened negotiations with Peking. A Chinese commission then made its way north, and at Nerchinsk, August 27, 1689, was signed the famous treaty THE PATH OF THE COSSACK 13 closing to Russia her Amur outlet to the Pacific, purchased with such desperate valor at Albazin, but granting to a limited number of Russian mer chants trading privileges into China. A lively traffic at once sprang up. Long caravans, silk- and tea-laden, crossed the Mongolian deserts, the Siberian steppes and hills, and the forested Urals, taking the road to Europe. A little Russian settlement was founded at Peking, and a traders' caravansary was built. The church constructed by the prisoners of Albazin, who had been so kindly treated by the Manchus that they at first refused the release which the treaty brought, gave place to a larger edifice erected by popes from Russia. Soon, however, the Russians again offended the Celestial Emperor. In their riotous living, the quickly enriched merchants disquieted the sober Chinese. The Siberians over the frontier gave asylum to a band of seven hundred Mongol free booters, whom it was urgently desired to present to a Chinese headsman. So commerce was forbidden anew, and most of the reluctant merchants left their compound. Some stayed and assimilated with the Chinese, retaining, however, their religion ; and for years a mixed race observed in Peking the rites of Greek Orthodox Christianity. It may seem strange that rulers so energetic as Peter the Great and some of his successors took no steps to resent by force of arms the arbitrary acts of the Chinese Emperor. But much was going on in 14 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA Russia; Peter was occupied with his invasion of Persia, and Catherine was without taste for a dis tant and doubtful campaign. The garrisons scat tered over the enormous area of Siberia were numer ically too weak and too poorly equipped to do more than hold their own. So, when commerce was once more interdicted and the merchants banished, re course was had to diplomacy. In 1725 the Bogdo Khan relented enough to receive Count Ragusinsky with a special embassy from Catherine the First, which arranged the second great agreement with China, called the Treaty of Kiahta. By it the frontier cities of Kiahta in Siberia, and Maimachen, facing it just across the line in Mon golia, were established as the gateway to Chinese trade. The treaty provided for the extradition of bandits and for a perpetual peace and friendship between the high contracting parties. Ever since, the citizens of Kiahta have alternately blessed and blamed Ragusinsky, — blamed him because, in the fear lest any stream flowing out of Chinese into Russian territory should be poisoned, he settled the boundary city beside a Siberian brook so inadequate that Kiahtans have suffered ever since for lack of water, with the river Bura only nine versts away in China ; blessed him because of the great prosperity the treaty brought to their doors. The tea carried by this highway became Russia's national drink. Great warehouses arose, built caravansary-wise around courts. Endless files of THE PATH OF THE COSSACK 15 two-wheeled carts rolled northward, bearing each its ten square bales of tea, or its well-packed bolts of silk. The merchants grew wealthy in the rapidly swelling trade. A great Chinese embassy, headed by the third ranking official of the Peking Foreign Office, made its way to Moscow to keep permanent the relations of the two empires. Similarly, a Russian embassy was established in the rebuilt compound in Peking, where a new church arose, whose archimandrite gained a comfortable revenue by selling ikons and crucifixes to the many Chinese converts he had baptized. Catherine the Second's edict opened to all Rus sians the freedom of Chinese trade. Its volume, large before, became now even greater. In 1780 the registered commerce at Kiahta had risen to 2,868,333 roubles, not to mention the large value of the goods taken in unregistered. Tea, a pound of which, if of best quality, cost two roubles in those days, silks, porcelains, cottons, and tobacco, went north, exchanged for Russian peltries, for cloth, hardware, and, curiously enough, hunting-dogs. An English merchant, who had penetrated to Kiahta in that year, gives an amusing account of the mutual distrust with which the barter was conducted. The Russian going over the frontier to Maimachen would examine the goods in the Chinese warehouse, seal up what he desired, and leave two 16 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA men on guard. The Chinese merchant would then come to Kiahta, and do the same with the Russian's wares. When the bargain was struck, both together carried one shipment over the border with guards and brought back the exchange. In growing prosperity, undisturbed, the Kiahta caravans came and went, while elsewhere history was warm in the making. Napoleon marched to Moscow, to Leipsic, to Waterloo. The Kiahta caravans came and went. The St. Petersburg Dekabrists rose for Constantine and the Constitution. The Kiahta caravans came and went. The Crimean War saw the Russian flag flutter down at Sevastopol. Even as the Malakoff was stormed, a Russian army marched into Central Asia to seize the Zailust Altai slope, which points as a spear toward Turkestan and India, and a Rus sian navy sailed under Muraviev to occupy the fobidden Amur. The Kiahta caravans came and went. At length a railroad, pushed year by year, reached the Pacific. One branch cut across the reluctantly-accorded Manchurian domain to Vladi vostok; another struck southward to Dalny and Niu-chwang. The Russian Eagles perched at Port Arthur and nested by the far Pacific. The camel-commerce of the old overland road across Mongolia shrank now as shrinks a Gobi snow-rivulet under the burning desert sun. The meagre Kiahta caravans became but a gaunt THE PATH OF THE COSSACK 17 shadow of the mighty past. Only an intermittent wool-export and a dwindling traffic in tea to the border cities remained of the great tribute of the Urga Road. As trade vanished from their once busy warehouses, the Chinese merchants were troubled. Perhaps to prayer and sacrifice the God of Com merce would relent ? So a scarlet temple rose on the hill by Maimachen. Prosperity came suddenly once again, a new trade rolled north over the historic way. The Mongol cart-drivers returned from far Ulasati. The camel-trains, that had scattered south to the trails beyond Shama, gathered back as an telopes herd to a new spring in the desert. The God of the Red Temple, the God of the Cara van, had sent the Japanese. As the Amban's execu tioner strikes off a victim's hand, so had the Nip ponese lopped away the railroad reaching down to Dalny and Niu-chwang — the road that was break ing the camel-trade a thousand versts beyond, on the old route by Maimachen and Kiahta. Against the Russian control of the Pacific the Japanese had hurled all their gathered might. By battle genius and efficiency the Island soldiers won, and athwart the front of Slavic empire they set their desperate legions. Far more was lost to Russia than men and squandered treasure, far more than prestige and power of place. The enormous stakes, even in the port of Dalny, in the forts of Port Arthur, in the East China Railway, were but incidents. The real tragedy of the war was that the vital terminus 18 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA of her continent railroad was alienated, and that her civilization was barred back indefinitely. The soldiers and statesmen who carried Russia's power across a savage continent had sought out many inventions. But by whatever means each successive territory was won, its maintenance had been by the warrant that the Slavs had gone not lightly, adventuring to conquest, but as an earnest host clearing a way for the homes and the hearths of their race. The colonist had followed the Cos sack; cities and villages, railways and telegraphs, had risen behind the armies. The dawn of the twen tieth century saw a mighty expanse of Siberia redeemed from a desolate waste to a land of farms and villages, of mines and industries ; a native popu lation, once hardly superior to the American Indian, not, like him, displaced and exterminated, but raised side by side with the settlers to a more equit able place than is held by any other subject people in Asia. The Russian advance had brought the establishment of the volunteer fleet plying from far Odessa to Vladivostok, and the completion of the greatest railway enterprise the world has ever seen. It had opened from Europe to the Far East a land- route more important to more people than the water-route discovered by Vasco da Gama. The fruition of a nation's hope was lost when the Eagles went down at Port Arthur. For those who feast at Russia's cost the reckoning is long. Predecessors not unfamed are worthy of THE PATH OF THE COSSACK 19 remembrance : the Tatars who lorded it four hun dred years, the Poles whose kings caroused in the Kremlin, the great Emperor, with his Grande Armee, whose stabled horses scarred the walls of St. Basil, the Turks, the Swedes, — all conquerors of yesterday. But long years must take their toll of life and gold before Russia can carry the en trenched lines along the Yalu, and reenter the redoubts hewn in the sterile hills around Port Arthur. The spoils to the victors for the present are unchallenged. The Russian way to China is not now through Manchuria. But the ancient road of the Kiahta caravans is still unblocked. Here is the shortest route from Europe to the East. Here, through the defiles and the broken foothills of the Gobi Plateau, lies the future redemption of the great unfettered land- route to North China. The Chinese are themselves advancing to anticipate it. They have already built into Kalgan. To this trading-centre across the pale, a Russian railway may yet pass and her colonists make fruitful the unpeopled wilds of Mongolia. In the cycles of progress old paths are reworn. Pharaoh's canal from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea was swallowed up under the sands of three thousand years when the Genoans won a way across the Isthmus. Their track was left unsought when the Portuguese showed the route for ships around the Cape. Yet to-day the Strait of Suez is thronged with reborn commerce. 20 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA The first American highway to the Western Re serve was superseded by the better avenue of the newly built Erie Canal, yet came to its own again beneath the tracks of the Baltimore and Ohio. So, far to the westward of Japan's outpost, the age-old caravan road, with a shadowy fantastic history dim as its dun trail across the desert, may rise to a resurrected glory as a new road to China. Its greatness is of yesterday and of to-morrow. Unto to-day belongs the quaintness of the cavalcade that passes to and fro along its track. Over the frozen snows of winter and the rocky trails of sum mer there plod horse and ox and camel, sleigh and wagon and cart, — a broken line of men and beasts. Russian posts thunder past with galloping horses, three abreast. Bands of Cossacks convoy the guarded camel-trains of heavy mail for China. One meets troops of boyish recruits, singing lustily in chorus on the tramp northward, and Mongol carts and flat-featured Buriats on their little shaggy ponies, sleepy wooden villages, forests, steppes, swamps, frozen river-courses, mountain passes. Through the kaleidoscope of races and peoples one moves in a world-forgotten life, a procession of the ages. On the threshold of Siberia the traveler has turned back in manner, in ways of thought, in government, in everything, to the past. Go into one of these cities, — you are in the Germany of 1849, with the embers still hot of the fire lighted CHURCH OF ST. BASIL, MOSCOW (Ivan the Terrible blinded its architect that he might never duplicate the masterpiece) THE PATH OF THE COSSACK 21 by the republican movement of the young men and the industrials. The seeming chance of victory has passed them by. The iron hand is over all. One hears of Siberian Carl Schurzes, fugitives to Amer ica and to Switzerland, of the month-lived Chita Republic, of the row of gallows at Verhneudinsk, of the bloody assizes at Krasnoyarsk. It is as if one lived when citizens gathered in excited groups in the Forum to discuss the news from Philippi; or as if, from the broken masonry of the Tuileries, there stepped out into breathing actuality the five hundred Marseillaises "who know how to die," fronting the red Swiss before the palace of Louis, the King. Here is the reality of friends in hiding, of files of soldiers at each railway- station, of police-examined passports without which one cannot sleep a night in town, of arms forbid den, meetings forbidden, books forbidden, — all things forbidden. Here as there men thought that the new could come only by revolution. Yet one can see, despite all, the germs of improvement and the upward pressures of evolution. Move further toward the frontier towns, where therelayed horses bring the weekly mail, — you have gone back a hundred and fifty years. You are among our own ancestors of the days of the Stamp Act. Did the General Howe who governs the oblast from his Irkutsk residency overhear the school-boys of Troitzkosavsk as they chant the for bidden Marseillaise, he, too, might say that freedom 22 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA was in the air. These Siberian frontiersmen shoot the deer with their permitted flint-locks as straight as the neighbors of Israel Putnam, and with spear and gun they face the bear that the dusky Buriat hunters have tracked to its lair. Our Puritans are there, rugged, red-bearded dis senters, "Stare' Obriachi," Old Believers, they are called, who came to Siberia rather than use Bishop Nikon's amended books of prayer. Yankee-like, out spoken, keen at a trade, are these big Siberian sons of men who dared greatly in their long frozen march. The grants to Lord Baltimores and Padroon Van Rensselaers are in the vast "cabinetski" estates of the grand-ducal circle, engulfing domains great as European kingdoms. Go into one of the villages of the peasants trans planted in a body by the paternal Government. Here are the patient, enduring recruits for the army, brothers to the toilers over whose fields the Grand Monarch's wars rolled back and forth. Though steeped in ignorance and overwhelmed by the in cubus of communism, they are capable of real and splendid manhood, and will show it when their world has struggled through into the century in which we others live. Go to a mining-camp in the Chickoya Valley. It is California and the days of '49. Histories as romantic as those of the Sierras are being lived out in its unsung gorges, — tales of hardships, of grub stakes, of bonanzas in Last Chance Gulches. THE PATH OF THE COSSACK 23 When the bumping tarantass rolls across the Chinese frontier into Mongolia, it enters a kingdom of the Middle Ages flung down into the twentieth century. Feudal princes, lords of armies weaponed with spear and bow, tax and drive to the corvee their nomad serfs. A hierarchy of priests whose divine head lives in a palace at Holy Urga, sways the multitude of superstition-steeped Mongols, and receives the homage of pilgrims wending their way from Siberia, from the Volga, from Tibet, from all Mongolia, to their Canterbury of Lamaism. In prostrate devotion the penitents girdle the Sacred City before whose hovels beggars dispute with dogs their common nourishment, and in whose com pounds princes of the race of Genghis Khan, with armies of retainers, live bedless, bathless, lightless, in the felt huts of their race. Squalid magnificence and good-humored kindly hospitality are linked to utter brutality. Sable-furs and silks cover sheep skins worn until they drop from the body. Here and there among the natives a Chinese trading caravan sary, alien, walled, peculiar, stands as of old the Hansa-town, with merchant guilds and far-brought caravan goods. A way of adventure and strangeness, where the years turn back, is this old road of the Golden Horde, leading down past the ancestral homes of the Turks to the Great Wall. The Cossack sentries at Kiahta look Chinaward. They have become an anomaly, this hard-riding, 24 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA fierce-fighting soldier class. The plow has meta morphosed into myriad farms the plains along the Don where once their ponies grazed. Mining-cuts score the hills in the Urals where once they hunted. Villages of Slavonic peasants rise along the Amur. The sons of the old warriors grow into peaceful farmer-folk, differing in name alone from their blue- eyed neighbors. Soon they must disappear in all save picturesquely uniformed Hussars of the Guard, and as a memory, chanted by young men and girls in the Siberian summer evenings when Yermak's song is raised. The task of the Cossack, to lead in the conquest of kindred native races and to weld these through themselves into Russia's fabric, is nearly done. Down the ancient road lies a last avenue of ad vance. Eastward is Manchuria, where artillery and science grappling must decide the day with Japan. Southward is India, where England's guarded gate way among the hills can be opened only from behind. But into Mongolia Fate may decree that the yellow- capped Cossacks,, drafted from Russia's Mongol Buriats, shall lead once more the nation-absorbing march of the White Czar. For another memorable ride, the Cossacks, who on their shaggy ponies led the long conquering way across the continent, may yet mount and take the road to China. II THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY How long to Irkutsk? Seven days now, seven years when last I came." The bearded Rus sian standing in the doorway of the adjoining com partment in the corridor-car of the Siberian Express gazes thoughtfully at the fir-covered slope, whose dark green stands in sombre contrast to the winter snows. The train is slowly climbing the Ural Range, toward the granite pyramid near Zlatoust, on op posite sides of which are graven "Europe" and "Asia." Neighbors with easy sociability are con versing along the wide corridors, exchanging stories and cigarettes, asking each other's age and income in naive Siberian style. Regarding the burly occupant of the next state room one may discreetly speculate. From sable- lined paletot and massive gold chains you hazard that he voyaged with the traders' slow caravans in the days before the railway — that he was a merchant. "A merchant? Optovi? No, I did not come with the caravans." From the triangle of red lapel-ribbon, the rank- bestowing decoration, you venture a second guess. "Perhaps the gaspadine made the great circuit 26 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA to oversee the local administrations? He was a government inspector — Revizor?" "Chinovnik niet navierno," he answers. Most decidedly he was not an official. The suggestion causes him to smile broadly. " I was with the con victs," he says. Beside the line of rails curves the old post-road winding like a ribbon through the highlands. " It was by that road we marched. Seven years of my life lie along it." The train swings through a cleft hewn in the living rock, steep-sided as if the mountain had been gashed with a mighty axe. It rumbles around the base of an overhanging crag while you look clear down over the white valley, with the miles of rolling green forest beyond. " Was not seven years a long time for the march ?" you venture. "For a traveler, yes; for convict bands not un usual. We went back and forth, now northward a thousand versts as to Archangel, now west as to Moscow, now south as to Rostov. Again and again our troop would split, and part be sent another way. New prisoners would be added, from Warsaw, Finland, Samara. New guards would take charge. Some groups would go to the West Siberian stations, some east to the Pacific and Sakhalin. I, who was written down for ten years at the Petrovski Works be yond Baikal Lake, with a third commuted for good behavior, had finished my term before I got there." THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY 27 "Why did they wander so aimlessly?" "It seems truly as a butterfly's flight, but you others do not know the way of Russia. Very slowly, very deviously she goes, but surely, none the less, to her goal. We each came at last to our place." A match flares up and he lights another cigarette. "Shall we not go to the 'wagon restoran' for a glass of tea?" you ask. Along the broad aisles you walk, past the state rooms, filled with baggage, littered with bedding, kettles, novels, and fur overcoats. Everything is in direst confusion, and the owners are sandwiched precariously between their belongings. On the lit tle tables which are raised between the seats, they are playing endless games of cards, sipping tea and nonchalantly smoking cigarettes the while. You pass the stove-niches at the car entrances, heaped to the ceiling with cut wood. The fire-tenders as you pass give the military salute. You cross the covered bridges between the cars, where are little mounds of the snow that has sifted in around the crevices; and a belt of cold air tells of the zero temperature outside. At length the double doors of the foremost car appear ahead, and crossing one more arctic zone over the couplings, you can hang your fur cap by the door and salute the ikon that with ever-burning lamp looks down over the parlor-car. Now you can sit on the broad sofa set along the wall, or doze in the corner-rocker under the bookcase, or sit tete-a-tlte in armchairs over 28 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA a miniature table. Ladies here, as well as men, are chatting, reading, and smoking, for this combina tion parlor, fumoir, and dining-room is for all, not a resort to which the masculine element shamefacedly steals for unshared indulgences. "Dva stakan chai, pajolst" (two glasses of tea, please), your friend says to the aproned chelaviek, a Tatar from Kazan. "Stakan vodka," you add ; for you are willing to contribute twenty kopecks to the government re venues if this beverage will help out the memoirs of your friend, the convict. " Say chass," replies the waiter, which means, literally, "this hour," figuratively, "at once," actually, whenever he chances to recall that your party wants a glass of tea and another of vodka. When at length the refreshments have come, your companion gets gradually back to the reminis cences. "Were your comrades many on that march?" "Twenty-six from my school in Odessa," he says. He tells of the tumult in the Polytechnic Academy, when he was a boy of sixteen studying engineering ; of the barricade which the students threw up ; of the soldiers sent against it ; of an officer wounded with a stone, and the sentence to the mines. He tells of the journey, day after day, the miserable company trudging under the burning suns of summer and shivering under the biting cold of winter, ill-fed and in rags. He recalls how this friend and that friend THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY 29 sickened and died ; how a peasant- woman gave him a dried fish ; how one of the criminals tried to escape and was lashed with the plet until he fainted beneath its strokes. " We were a sad procession. First came the Cos sacks on their ponies, with their carbines and sabres. Then the murderers for Sakhalin, and the dangerous criminals in fetters ; a few women next ; then we, the politicals ; last, more soldiers marching behind. Far to the rear came carts and wagons with the wives and families of the prisoners, following their men into exile. Slowly we went, scarcely more than fifteen versts a day, with a rest one day out of three, for the women. In winter we camped in sta tions along the road." From the comfortable leather armchairs they seem infinitely distant and dream-like, these tales from the dark ages of Siberia. The speaker seems to have forgotten his auditor and to be talking to him self, and soon he relapses into silence. He sits hold ing his glass of lemon-garnished tea, like a resting giant with his shaggy beard and mighty chest. The drag of the brakes is felt through the train. " Desiet minute stoit" (ten minutes' stop), somebody calls out. Suddenly, with an effort, the man across the table rouses from his reverie, and looks about the car, when the broad smile comes back and he says earnestly : — "You must not think of that as the true Siberia. It was all long ago — thirty-five years. And you 30 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA see I who became a kayoshnik, a gold-seeker, have prospered, and work many mines. I am glad now that they sent me to Siberia. And many others prosper who came with the convicts. The old dark Siberia dies, but our new Siberia of the railroad lives, and grows great." He rises resolutely and shakes your hand with a vise-like grip. "De svidania! " (Till we meet again.) You rise with the rest, draw on your fur cap and gloves, work into the heavy fur-lined overcoat, and clamber down to the platform. A little wooden station-house painted white is opposite the carriage door. It has projecting eaves and quaint many- paned windows. In front of it is a post with a large brazen bell. On the big signboard you can spell out from the Russian letters "Zlatoust." This is the summit station of the pass that crosses the Urals. Around are standing stolid sheep-skinned figures, bearded peasants just in from their sledges, which are ranked outside the fence. Fur-capped mechan ics, carrying wrenches and hammers, move from car to car to tighten bolts and test wheels for the long eastward pull. Uniformed station attendants are here and there, some with files of bills of lading. As you walk down the platform among the crowd, you come upon a soldier, duffle-coated and muffled in his capote, standing stoically with fixed bayonet. Forty paces further there is another, and beyond still another, all the length of the platform, and far THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY 31 up the line. What a symbol of Russian rule are these silent sentries ! And what a mute tale is told in the necessity for a guard at every railroad halting-place in the Empire ! You stroll along toward the engine. Huge and box-like are the big steel cars, five of which compose the train. Two second-class wagons painted in mus tard yellow are rearmost, then come the first-class, painted black, next the "wagon restoran" and the luggage-van, where the much advertised and little used bath-room aiid gymnasium are located. The engine is a big machine, but of low power, unable to make much speed; and the high grades and the road-bed, poor in many places, additionally limit progress. It is apparent why the train rarely moves at a rate greater than twenty miles an hour. At first you do not notice the cold. But now that you have walked for a few minutes along the plat form, it seems to gather itself for an attack, as if it had a personality. You draw erect with tense muscles, for the system sets itself instinctively on guard. The light breeze that stirs begins to smart and sting like lashes across the face. The hand drawn for a moment from the fleece-lined glove, stiffens into numbed uselessness. As you march rapidly up and down the platform, an involuntary shiver shakes you from head to foot. A fellow passenger, remarking it, observes : — " It is not cold to-day, in fact, quite warm. Ochen jarko." 32 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA You walk together to the big thermometer that hangs by the station-door. It is marked with the Reaumur Scale, and your brain is too torpid for multiplications. But the slightly built official, known as a government engineer by green-bordered uniform and crossed hammers on his cap, is inspect ing the mercury also. " Eight degrees below zero Fahrenheit," he says. "Quite warm for January. It is often thirty-five degrees below zero here in the Uralsk." It gets colder at the suggestion. The three start ing-bells ring, and everybody scrambles into the compartments. The express rolls onward down the Urals. You stroll back to the warm dining-room and idly watch the groups around. Across the way is an elderly mild- looking officer, whose gold epaulettes, zig-zagged with silver furrows, are the insignia of a major- general. He smokes endless cigarettes in company with another officer lesser in degree, a major, decorated with the Russo-Japanese service-medal, smart of carriage and alert of look. By the window beyond is a young German, gazing meditatively at the hills and the snow through the bottom of a glass of Riga beer. A rather bright-mannered dame, with rings on her fingers and long pendants in her ears, chats vivaciously in French with a phlegmatic- looking personage in a tight-fitting blue coat which buttons up to his throat like a fencer's jacket. A quietly-dressed gentleman, evidently in civil life, THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY 33 is reading one of the library copies of de Maupas sant. Outside, cut and tunnel, hill, slope, and valley, green forest, white drifted snow, and bare craggy rocks, the Urals glide past. The little track-ward ens' stations beside the way snap back as if jerked by a sudden hand, and the telegraph-poles catch up in endless monotony the sagging wires. The Tatar waiter goes from place to place, clear ing off the ashes and the glasses, and getting ready for dinner. There is a table-d'hote repast, the Rus sian obeid, a meal which starts with a fiery vodka gulp any time after noon, and tails off in the falling shadows of the winter sunset with tea and cigar ettes. Or, if one wishes, he may press the bell, labeled in the Graco-Slavonic lettering, " Buffet," and dine a la carte. "II vaut mieux essayer le repas Russe," says the quiet reader of de Maupassant, joining you. He is duly thanked for the advice, and we beckon to the aproned waiter. At once the latter passes the countersign kitchenward to set the meal in motion, and puts before us the little liqueur-glasses and the bottle of vodka. While we still gasp and blink over this, he has gotten the cold zakuska of black rye- bread and butter, sardinka, salty beluga, and cold ham, and has started us on the first course. Then comes in, after the omni-inclusive zakuska, a big pot of cabbage-soup which we are to season with a swimming spoonful of thick sour cream. The 34 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA chunky pieces of half-boiled meat floating in it are left high and dry by the consumption of the liquid. The meat becomes the third course, which we garn ish with mustard and taste. "Voyons!" the Frenchman observes. "Of the Russian cuisine and its method of preparing certain food-substances one may not approve. Frankly it calls for the sauce of a prodigious appetite. But contemplating the obeid as an institution so evolved as to fit into the general scheme of life, it finds merit. The Russian meal is a guide to Russian char acter." "What signifies this melange of raw fish, eggs, and great slices of flesh, and mush of cabbage- soup?" " Not that the Russian has no taste. It is that he sacrifices his finer susceptibilities to his love of freedom. A regular hour for meals would seem to him a sacrifice of his leisure and convenience to that of the cook. The guiding principle of the national cuisine is that all dishes must be capable of being served at any time that the eater feels disposed." This is a problem to put to any kitchen, we allow. Napoleon's chef met it by relays of roasting chickens. But one cannot keep half a dozen fowl going for each household of the one hundred and forty million inhabitants of Russia. Thus sturgeon is provided, and sterlet, parboiled so that it tastes like blotting-paper; and the filet that is called "biftek," and the oil-sodden "Hamburger," that is THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY 35 dubbed " filet." These can be started at nine in the morning, and be removed at any time between that hour and nine at night, without any appreciable change in taste or texture. The cook of the res taurant, like his brethren of the Empire, has laid his professional conscience sacrificially upon the national altar of unfettered meals. If the obeid is not a triumph in culinary art, it is at least a signal example of domestic generalship. We have advanced without a hitch to roast par tridge, with sugared cranberries, which our friend washes down with good red wine from the Imperial Crimean estates. We get through a hard German like apple-tart, and reach the last item of cheese. When the mighty meal is over, we order tea, light cigarettes, and lean back in the armchairs to chat and note how our neighbors are getting through the time. At the far end of the room a Russian has joined the French lady and her escort. They are celebrat ing some occasion that requires heaping bumpers of champagne. The babble of their conversation is in the air. It seems to refer to the comparative appreciation of histrionic talent in Rouen and Vladivostok ! Somebody is being treated to a dressing-down in tiie latest Parisian argot. " Ces sont des betteraves la-bas!" one hears scornfully above the murmurs. Across the way some Germans are engaged with beer-schooners. One of them gets excited and brings 36 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA his fist down upon the table. "Arbeit in Sibirien nimmer geendet ist ; they always want more advice about their gas-plants." In the lull that follows the explosion, a gentle English voice floats past from the seat behind us. "And so I told him that the station had nearly enough funds, but we needed workers, more work ers." Itis the English medical missionary on his way to Shanta-fu, discussing China with the American mining-engineer, bound for Nerchinsk. The piano, under the corner ikon with its ever burning lamp, tinkles out suddenly, and a man's voice starts up — You can hear the girls declare, He must be a millionaire. He misses a note every now and then, which does not embarrass him in the least. Caroling gayly to his own accompaniment, he forges ahead. The crowd in the armchairs around the room, consuming weak tea or strong beer, and smoking, all join with an untroubled accord and versatile accents, French, English, and Russian, in the blaring chorus, "The man that broke the bank at Monte Carlo." The train rocks faster on the falling grade ; little by little the mountains drop away ; gradually the mighty forests become dwarfed into scattered clumps of straggly birches, and the great trees dwindle into bushes ; lower and still lower fall the hills, until all is flat. As far as the eye can see are the snow-covered THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY 37 wastes, treeless, houseless, lifeless. The lowest foot hills of the Urals have been passed. It is the be ginning of the great steppes. Slowly the daylight wanes. The gray darkness deepens steadily ; it seems to gather in over the glid ing snow, and the peculiar gloom of a Siberian win ter's night closes down. At each track-guard's post flash with vivid suddenness the little twinkling lan terns of the wardens of the road. Involuntarily conversation becomes less animated and voices are lowered ; the spell of the sombreness is over all. Soon the electric lamps are lighted, and from brazen ikon and sparkling glasses flash reflections of their glitter. Curtains are drawn, which shut out the enshrouding blackness. The piano begins tink ling again; the waiters come and go with tea and liqueurs ; the babble of conversation rises ; and the idle laughter is heard anew. Darkness may be ahead, behind, and beside, but within there is light — enjoy it. The train slows for a halt. Station-lamps shine mistily through the brooding night. Lanterns bob to and fro on the platform as fur-capped train- hands pass, tapping wheels and opening journal- boxes. At each door a fire-tender is catching and stowing away the wood which a peasant in padded sheepskins is tossing up from his hand-sled below. It is Chelliabinsk, whose old importance as the clearing-house of the convicts has been passed on to the new city of the railroad. Here the just com- 38 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA pleted northern branch, linking Perm to Petersburg, meets the old southern line from Samara and Mos cow. A short stop and the train moves on again. The day is done and gradually each saunters into his own warm compartment, which the width of the Russian gauge makes as large as a real room. One can read at the table by the window, under the electric drop-light, or, propped in pillows, one can stretch out luxuriously on the easy couch that is nightly manoeuvred into an upper and lower berth. Practi cally always after crossing the Urals, the number of passengers has so thinned out that each may have a stateroom to himself. Presently you push the bell labeled, " Konduk- tor." A uniformed attendant appears standing at the salute. "Spate" (sleep) is sufficient direction. The sheets and pillows are dug out and the trans formation of the couch into a bed is effected. " Spacoine notche" (good-night) he says, and you fall asleep to the rhythmic throb of the engine. During the following hours the train enters the Tobolsk Government, the oldest province of Siberia, whose 439,859 square miles of area, nearly four times as large as Prussia, extend roughly from the railroad northward to the Arctic Ocean, and from the Urals eastward so as to include the lower basin of the Ob-Irtish river system. This ancient province has seen much of Siberia's history, whose predomin ant features have been two, growth and graft. BRIDGE OVER THE IRTISH ALONG THE TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY 39 Out of evil, somehow, in a marvelous way has been coming good. In the earliest days, with what smug satisfaction did the Stroganovs find that the native inhabitants would trade ermine for glass beads! Yet the fruit of their sharp dealing and purchased protection and special privilege was the expedition that won Sibir, founded Tobolsk, and opened to Russia the way into northern Asia. The imperial commissioner who came to Tobolsk shortly after Kutchum Khan's overthrow, to collect the yassak tribute of ten sable-skins for each married man and five for each bachelor, was detected culling the choice skins for himself, and substituting cheap ones for his master. But his agents had sought out the paths and extended the Russian Empire far into the northern forests. By despotic oppression the inhabitants of Uglitch town, condemned for testifying to the murder of Dimitri, the Czarevitch, came here into exile in I593> carrying with them the tocsin-bell that had tolled alarm when the Czar wished silence. But they, together with the deported laborers settled by the same arbitrary will along the Tobol River, started the permanent settlement of the new realm. A succeeding functionary called on the natives for a special tribute of ermine for the Czarina's mantle. He collected so many bales of it that the taxed began to wonder at the stature of the " Little Mother," and sent a special deputy to Petersburg. The legate discovered that the Empress was as 40 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA other women, and on his disclosures the official was unable to save his own, let alone the ermines' skins. Yet while the governor was plundering the fur- merchants of Tobolsk, the frontiers were extending, until by 1700 they reached eastward to Kamchatka and Lake Baikal, southeast to the Altai foothills at Kuznetz, and north to the Arctic Ocean. At Tobolsk in 17 10 Peter the Great established the capital of his reorganized province of Siberia. Prince Gagarin, whom he appointed its first gov ernor, found here a systemless extortion unworthy of an efficient statesman. With the thoroughness of genius he built up in the unhappy province a regu lar organization of rascality. His pickets patrolled the roads into Russia, to prevent the escape of those who might carry the tale of his oppression. He ar ranged with high officials at Court that any petition ers who evaded this frontier net should be handed over to an appropriate committee. Thus fortified, he began collections of as much as could be wrung from his luckless subjects. Every traveler paid Gagarin's tariff, every farmer sent him presents of stock, every trapper forwarded the best of his catch. The fur-trader's donations and the merchants' loans were assisted into Gagarin's warehouses by thumbscrew and thonged knout. While these things passed in Tobolsk there came periodically to Petersburg delegations of outwardly contented citizens attesting the wisdom of their governor. They brought to the Czar and the Grand THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY 41 Dukes, in addition to the punctiliously rendered tax yassak, gifts of especially fine furs. Such was the completeness of Gagarin's control that not an echo of the true state of affairs reached the ears of the astute Peter. At length, in 17 19, Nesterov, the Minister of Fin ance, was privately approached bysomeTobolskmer- chants and was supplied with evidence sufficient to hang half the officials in Siberia. In a dramatic pre sentation the Minister furnished this to the Imperial Senate, showing so bad a case that Gagarin's own agents in the ducal circle rose up against him. The Czar sent Licharev, a major of the Guard, to Siberia, to proclaim in every town and hamlet that Gagarin was a criminal in the eyes of the Emperor. As this messenger approached Tobolsk, official after official came out to turn state's evidence, trying to assure his personal safety. The highways to Russia were guarded by Peter's own troops, with orders to seize all outgoing travelers who might be transporting Gagarin's accumulated spoil, which with commend able prudence the Czar had allocated to himself. When Peter was in England he had remarked casually to an acquaintance, "In my realm I have only two lawyers, and one of these I intend to hang as soon as I get back." It was particularly unfor tunate for this ex-governor that the remainder of the legal profession did not feel himself called upon to explain to Peter the Gagarin campaign contribu tions. No one ever needed an attorney more. He 42 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA was under trial before an imperial judge who did not know a technicality from a tort, and whose prelim inary procedure was to order a reliable gallows. For some score of years subsequent to Gagarin, the governors of Siberia were, in any event, moder ate. The province grew apace, increased by exiles, by land-seeking colonists, by raskalniks, — noncon formists of the Greek Church, self -called "Old Believers," — who preferred to come to Siberia rather than follow Peter's orders and shave off their beards. Then Chicherin the Magnificent came. His life was a round of celebrations. Wonderful stews he concocted for his sybaritic revels. At obeid an or chestra of thirty pieces supplied the music. Artil lery in front of the residency saluted him with salvos when he drove out. In Butter-Week all Tobolsk drank the spirits which their governor bountifully provided. It is hardly necessary to say that the money for these entertainments did not come from Chicherin's private purse: the city merchants groaned over forced loans and benevolences; and at last their cry reached the throne, and Chicherin too was removed. With his passing, the Tobolsk Province fell to less spectacular rulers, but under good and bad it grew steadily, until in i860 there were a million inhabit ants within its borders, a population which at the present time has risen to a million and a half. Some forty thousand of these are exiles; some eighty THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY 43 thousand raskalniks; and forty thousand Tatars, who feed the flocks where their ancestors once bore sway, living peacefully side by side with the Rus sians. Some fifteen thousand are descendants of the Samoieds and Voguls with whom the first Stro- ganov from the adjoining Russian province of Archangel traded his wares. Some twenty thousand are Ostiaks whose forebears were alternately allies and enemies of Yermak. The capital city, Tobolsk, on the Tobol River hard-by its junction with the Irtish, has grown from a precariously held camp of two hundred and fifty fugitive Cossack soldiers to a city of thirty thou sand. Tiumen, the easterly city on the Tura River, another of Yermak's camps, has grown into a great distributing-centre for produce brought by the river- highways. From the railway line northward as far as the city of Tobolsk extends a farm-belt, a con tinuation of the black-earth region of great Russia. The fertility of the land may be judged by the number of villages met as the train speeds on, and the large proportion of enclosed fields on both sides of the track. Some of the finest agricultural soil in the world lies here, such soil as composes the prairies of Minnesota and Dakota. Three million head of live stock graze in the district, which has a yearly production of ten million hundredweight of wheat alone, four million of rye, and nine million of oats. Five million more settlers may live and thrive, and the harvest will feed the ever-growing 44 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA cities of Europe when Siberia comes to be the new granary of the old world. The stress and turmoil of Tobolsk are passed. Happy the people who have no annals ! Gradually, as the train rolls eastward beyond the Ishim River Valley, the farm country opens out into the unfenced prairie of the Great Steppe. The clus tered wooden villages that flanked the line through Tobolsk appear less and less frequently, till at last we seem to glide over an immense white sea, frozen into perpetual calm and silence. Here and there a gray thicket of stunted trees and bushes, here and there a grove of naked-limbed birches, mutely ex hibit Nature's desolation. As the sullen landscape bares itself, one thinks of the prison caravans tramping these wastes ; of the early neglected garrisons which Elizabeth's favorite General Kinderman proposed to victual on crushed birch-bark and relieve the Crown of their expense ; of all the misery and the wrong that the steppes of Siberia have symbolized. No sign of man's handi work or of Nature's kindliness is seen, — only the cold snow and the bare birches, while regularly as the ticking of a clock the telegraph-poles and the verst-spaced stations snap back into the wastes. The dominant reflection is not, how great is the achievement which has mastered these steppes ! but, how infinitesimal is all that man has done in this ocean of untrodden snow ! Hour after hour we are driving on. Yet never is there passed a landmark THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY 45 to conjure into imagination a picture of progress. One moves as in a nightmare, where he runs for seeming ages, hunted forward, yet can never stir from the spot. The horizon-bounded circle of vision is as the ever-receding rim of a giant dome, the rails ahead and behind bisecting its white immens ity. Above, the vast bowl of the blue sky dips and meets it, imprisoning us. Where are the fields and villages; the bustling activity of human life that tells of man's mastership? Hour after hour passes without a change in the drear monotony of the land scape ; for miles on miles not a trace is seen of hu man dominion. Grim Nature spreading her shroud over plain and pasture is despot here, and Winter is ruler of the Siberian Steppe. One could ride due south a thousand versts, through Golodnia the "hunger steppe" to the bor ders of Turkestan, and find the same monotonous plain, snow-covered save where the dryness of the south has thinned its fall. One could ride from the Caspian Sea due east to China, with each day's march a counterpart of the rest. Five hundred thou sand square miles of area are covered with grass and gaudy flowers in the spring, with low brush and green reeds where the salt swamp-lakes receive the tribute of snow-fed streams. In midsummer the growing grass scorches under a heat of 1040. In winter snow is everywhere, — in feathery flakes that the midday sun does not soften during whole months of a cold which is a ferocity. Thirty to forty degrees below 46 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA zero is not unusual, and the land is swept by bitter winds that pierce like daggers through doubled furs and felts. Yet there dwell on the central plateau of Asia a million people, and one million cattle and three million sheep are scattered over the tremen dous range. As the herds have become hardened through the centuries and survive in measure de spite the severity, so also have the men. From the train-windows now one may chance to see infrequent straggling herds of long-horned cattle, lean and gaunt, scratching away the snow in search of food. Mounted on little shaggy ponies are figures buried in skins, who keep guard over them. One detects a new type among the crowds at the stations, — flat faces, round eyes, square thickset bodies. Here on the borderland, the old race has fused with the Slav and has become metamorphosed. The sons of the Tatars, whose very name was dis torted into that of a dweller in Tartarus by those who feared their fierce valor, have become shop keepers, train-hands, waiters, and butchers, who come to sell meat and milk to the chef of the wagon restoran. Sometimes, at the stops, figures, gnome like in enveloping red capote and grotesquely padded furs, hold their ponies with jealous rein, staring curiously at the locomotive and passengers. Looking long from the windows at this steppe, a drowsy hypnotism steals over the mind — a dull stupor of unbroken monotony. It is better to do as the Russians — pay no attention whatever to the DINING-CAR SALOON, VIEW OF THE LIBRARY THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY 47 landscape outside, but make the most of the life within the moving caravansary, — cards and cigar ettes and liqueurs, tea and endless talk, with yarns that take days for the spinning. The uniformed judge, passing by, joins you. He is traveling to a new appointment with his swarming family of children, shawl-decked females of unknown quality and quantity, the household bedding, and the ancestral samovar, all crowded into one stifling compartment. He discusses volubly the confusions of the Code, and propounds a unique theory of his own as to Russian jurisprudence, to the effect that all the best laws of other nations have been adopted, with none of the old or conflicting enactments repealed. The general drops into the circle. He is interesting when one has pierced the crust, but dogmatic. At every station the soldiers of the gar rison, not on sentry-duty, jump to one side, swing half-around, and stand at the salute until he passes, to the huge inconvenience of the porters. He would undoubtedly vote the Democratic ticket to repay Mr. Roosevelt for putting Russia under the alter native of stopping the war perforce, or forfeiting. sympathy, when Japan was said to be breaking under the strain. " Russia was beaten this time. What of it? Niet- chevo!" says the general. " Nietchevo," we echo, as we sip our tea. " But the Japanese are wily insects," observes his companion, the young service-medaled major. " I 48 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA was in Vladivostok when our prisoners came back. They tried to get money for the checks the Japanese had given them. That was how the big mutiny began. You know, when our men were taken cap tive, the Japanese treated them very well, much good food, vodka, let them write home all about it, and gave them enormous pay, six yen, three dollars a month, charging the expense all up to the Czar for after the war. When at last the prisoners were to be released, the Japanese promised every man double pay, twelve roubles. But they gave them the money? No, the insects gave them each an order payable by the Russian commander in Vladivostok. So the transports came, and these men were sent ashore with these checks in their hands, and they went up to the commandant of the city, and asked for their cash that the Japanese had promised. What money did the commandant have for them? What could he do? He ordered them to go away. So they stood and discussed on the street-corners. And more men still came from the transports. Then they said, ' We will ask the general of the forts.' So they marched to the forts in a big crowd, and the general he also told them to go away. For a long time they talked and they persuaded the sailors to help them. So they went again to the forts, and the sailors shot at the forts, and the general ordered the artillery to shoot. But the artillery would not, so the men broke in and killed the officers and got arms and went back to the city commander. Him, THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY 49 too, they killed, and all Vladivostok was in mutiny for two weeks. Not an officer dared show himself. General Orlov persuaded them to let him into the town. Then many were shot, but at last the city was quiet. The Japanese are very sly insects." His story ends'and the two officers go back to join their families. The train throbs on across the steppe. The German gas-plant drummer, with his new Far Eastern outfit, is gathering from the missionary doctor details of treaty-port life, which are being treasured up as valuable reference data. The French fur-merchant dips back into his library copy of de Maupassant. The rigor of the outside scene seems at length to be changing. A few scattered houses appear, and trees and fenced fields, and villages, with curling smoke rising from the chimneys. Men and children are walking about, and finally we come to the Irtish River, over which the train rumbles on a half-mile bridge. Spires and gilt domes are visible, dark wooden houses, and bright white-painted churches with green roofs. Droshkies and carts are passing in the streets, and presently we draw up to the station of Omsk, the second city of Siberia. The junction of the Trans-Siberian Railway with the Irtish River, which is 2520 miles long and open from April to October, would of itself make Omsk a centre of great strategic importance. But in addi tion to this main river-highway, which is navigated by some hundred and fifty steamers, there are afflu- 50 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA ents by which one can sail from the Urals to the Altai, from the Arctic Ocean to China, and these lines of communication centre here. From Omsk, following the Irtish down past To bolsk, one can steam by the Obi to Obdorsk, within the Arctic Circle. Indeed, a regular grain-export service was planned via the Kara Sea to London by an ambitious Englishman. It failed after some promise of success, because of the ice-packs in the Gulf of Obi. From Omsk, following the Irtish up stream, steamer navigation extends as far as Semi- palatinsk, in the Altai foothills. Smaller craft may go nearly to the Chinese frontier. By the Tobol and Tura rivers, Tiumen, in the Ural foothills, may be reached, four hundred and twenty miles from Semipalatinsk. By ascending the Obi, a boat may go fourteen hundred and eighty miles east from Tiumen to Kuznetz on the Tom; through a canal from an Obi confluent the Yenesei River System may be entered, and from it by a short portage the Lena System. In all twenty- eight thousand miles are navigable by small craft, and seven thousand miles by steamer. Omsk is the pulsing heart of this mighty interior waterway system. The train leaves the station, which is at a dis tance from the town, and once more we are en route. The eye rests gratefully upon the ribbon of cultivated fields which follow the Irtish down. But we reenter the steppe, and again the desolation set- CITIES OF NEW RUSSIA THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY 51 ties over all. In hours of looking, not a habitation is seen, not an animal, not a tree, — only the same white billows. This Barbara district in the Tomsk Government has an area of fifty thousand square miles. Kainsk, some seven hundred versts from Chelliabinsk, is the centre. The section, though cov ered with the fertile black earth of the adjoining regions, is, owing to lack of drainage and adequate rainfall, arid and almost untilled. The round-faced civilian from the compartment further up, whose familiarity with the country has made him a welcome accession, joins us at the win dow. He looks out over the level plain of the Bar bara Steppe with manifest satisfaction. "You admire the landscape?" we ask satirically. He smiles. "We got big money when the line went through here. I made my first fortune then." He sighs at the memory of old times, and tells of the railway-building days when the Czar had given the order for a road across the continent, and the soldiers of fortune, of whom he was one, had gath ered to the task. "Not a kopeck had I when the Dreyfus brothers made their big speculation in Argentine wheat and went down, leaving us young clerks stranded in Kiev. You know Kiev? Great pilgrimages come there to see the bodies of Joseph and his brethren, all preserved just as when they died. We heard by accident of a grading job under a big contractor out here. None of us knew anything about construction, 52 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA but three of us grain-clerks wrote a letter saying we would put the work through, and started. We had just enough money to get to Samara. In Samara was a merchant much esteemed, whom I went to see. He went on our bond, never having seen us be fore, and gave us enough money to come. So it was in the old days. The country was flat as a board. We had but to lay down the ties and spike the rails. Thirty versts we made of this line. It cost us thirty thousand roubles a verst, but we got fifty thousand. Would that we might do that now again." The contractor, his round jolly face glowing with the recital and his eyes shining through gold-rimmed glasses, is entertaining a growing company, for the judge has stopped to gossip, and the railroad official. " I took my money and bought an estate in the country of the Don Cossacks," the contractor is saying. " I paid ten per cent to the Government for taxes when I bought the land. I had to pay no more taxes then all my life, but my heir would pay taxes, or, if I sold, he who bought would pay. So it was done in the Hataman Government." " It is just," says the judge. " Why should they, who get the property, not pay taxes?" The contractor shrugs his shoulder and continues : " For five years I farmed, and though I had a Ger man overseer, I did not prosper. So I went to one of the cities of Russia and thought to put in a tram way. The men of the city said, ' Are all the horses dead? He of the spectacles is mad.' Yetbyimpor- THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY 53 tunity I got them to give me the right to make a tramway. There were in Petersburg then many Belgians, with much money, wishing to give it away. So I went to them and said, 'Here is a great franchise, but who will build the line and gain the riches?' "'We will, we will,' said the Belgians. "From them I got a hundred and eighty thou sand roubles clear, and an interest. I sold the interest quickly to other foreigners, Frenchmen, and went away. Yes, the tramway was built, and the people crowded to ride on it as I had said. But when it was going well, and the profits were yet to come, the people said, ' Shall foreigners oppress our city? ' So the town bought the tramways for what they said was the cost, and the Belgians went away. And they did not come back to Russia. Thus were many railways and tramways built and taken. The foreigners will not come back now, and Russians too do not enter these pursuits, lest the Government come after them later. It is hudoo (bad)." " But is it not worse that these men should make a tramway and draw vast money from the people? " says the railroad official. "For me, I think the Government should do it all." " Ni snaia, I don't know," says the contractor. " But I who bought stocks with the Belgians' money (foolishly thinking that the business which I knew not was safe, while that which I knew was shaky), I will not give again to the stock-people the money 54 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA I shall make from the oil-fields of Sakhalin, where I go now." "But," says the railway chinovnik, "does not the State do these things better? Look you at this very railway. For years any who wished might have built into Siberia. An Amerikanski, and Col lins, an Angleski, came proposing railroads, but all things slumbered. Then in 1891 the Czar ordered the road to be built, and in ten years we had laid the eight thousand versts to Vladivostok. I read that the line of Canada, where too there are steppes and highlands as ours, took ten years for but half the distance. We made two versts a day for all the years, and they but one. Who other than the Gov ernment could spend a billion roubles for a line that will bring money returns only in the far future? " " Ah, you chinovniks, you say, lo, we do all this ! But it was such as I built that road, and because you gave us big money. And is not the money to support it now got from the peasants' taxes while so many clerks and operators waste time in the offices? I have seen a third as many men as at Omsk do the same work. And your trains go as the water-snails, twelve versts an hour for freight, twenty versts an hour for the mail-trains, thirty- five versts for the express. One can go eighty versts in Europe." "Truly, truly, but why go so fast? It costs more for fuel, and the track has to be made straight. What good does it do you to come in sooner? If a THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY 55 man is in a hurry to get somewhere, can he not take an earlier train?" The group mulls over this knotty point of logic, which is complicated by the fact that our own train is twelve hours late. They cite hypothetical men with varying sorts of engagements, and then lightly switch to talk of the nourishing properties of beer, the utility of agricultural machinery, and the old tiger battue of Vladivostok. The birch groves become more frequent now, pines begin to appear, and at last the country has become forested. Several of the passengers bestir themselves for departure, gathering multitudinous bundles, and making the circuit in demonstrative hand-shaking farewells. " We come to Taiga, whence they go to the stingy town of Tomsk," the government engineer observes. " Why do you call it the stingy town of Tomsk? " " I will tell you. Tomsk, before the railroad came, was the biggest, finest, and wealthiest of our cities. She was the capital of the great Tomsk Gobernia, with three hundred and thirty thousand square miles of area, and a million and a half people. The Tom brought the big river steamers to her wharves. In the city she had sixty thousand inhabitants, increasing every year; a university, Stroganov's Library, a cathedral, fine public buildings. The merchants were rich; the miners came down from the Altai; all things were prospering. When the railway was ordered, the engineers came through 56 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA to locate the line. All they asked was a hundred thousand roubles. But how stingy were the people of Tomsk ! They had given two million roubles for their university, where the students made speeches and got sent to the Yakutski Oblast, yet they would not give a hundred thousand roubles to the engin eers. ' Give fifty, give even forty thousand,' said the engineers. But the people of Tomsk said, 'Are we not the seat of government for all western Siberia ? Have we not Yermak's banner in the cathedral ? Are we not Tomsk ? You must bring the railway here anyway.' But if the engineers had done that, who could say where it would have ended? All the other cities would begin to make excuses. So the grades to Tomsk became suddenly so bad that the line had to be run away south here, eighty-two versts. The station where one changes was named, in mockery, Taiga, 'in the woods.' The merchants flocked out begging the engineers to come back to Tomsk. They offered all that had been asked and much more. They hung around the office and wept over the blue-prints. But how can a professional man change his plans and sacrifice his reputation? One cannot do such things. So Tomsk was left, and her trade now falls far behind that of the other cities, Omsk and Irkutsk. We in Siberia smile at her and call her the stingy city of Tomsk." " We have, too, another jest, of the Tomsk Czar," chimes in the judge. "There appeared one day there a stranger calling himself Theodore Kuzmilch, THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY 57 who bought a little house which he never left save to do some act of charity. For years he lived ; then, when he died, the house was turned into a chapel because of his good deeds. Many years after his death, a merchant started the tale that this was the Czar Alexander I, who did not die in the Crimea, but left a false body to be carried to Petersburg and entombed in state. He had, it was told, not really died, and, disappointed at his powerlessness to help his people, had come, self-exiled, to Siberia. But we others laugh at this tale of Tomsk as an imperial residence." The twenty minutes' stop at Taiga ends, and the train renews its journey through the forests. With rolling hill and long-stretching forests, the watershed bounding the eastern limits of the Obi Basin is crossed near Achinsk, and the drainage- basin of the mighty Yenesei River, one million three hundred and eighty thousand square miles in area, is entered. It just fails to equal in length the Mississippi-Missouri System. Including the admin istrative territory " Yeneseik" of the East Siberian Gobernia, the river sweeps from the Chinese border land north beyond the Arctic Circle. In the far south, where it rises among the Minusink Mount ains, the valley country is like the Italian Alps, mild and very fertile. Iron-mines of prehistoric anti quity are found in these valleys, relics of the old Han Dynasty of China. Of the twenty million bushels of grain produced 58 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA throughout the Yeneseik territory, nearly a third comes from the Minusink oasis. The railroad pierces the central plains, farmed in the most favorable spots only, and capable of enormously extended cultivation. Through alternating forest, field, and plain the train moves on, and crossing the three thousand-foot Yenesei bridge, enters the city of Krasnoyarsk. When we pull out, the engineer, who has been chat ting with the erstwhile contractor, observes, "This town was a main hotbed of the great strike. They are well in hand now, but we had our time with them in 1905. Even I knew nothing of what had been prepared." He goes on to tell the most curious tale of the organized strike movement which introduced the disturbances subsequent to the Russo-Japanese War. "On September 15 at noon, no one knows by whom or from what station, a signal of dots and dashes was tapped off. Each telegraph-operator an swered the message and passed the word to the next, standing by until it was repeated back. Then, leav ing all things in order, he stepped from the operat ing-room into the railway-station. With a motion he gave the countersign to the ticket-sellers, and each, as he received it, shut his desk, and walked out. The word went to the engineers, and each, at the signal, drew his fires and left the engine and its train forsaken on its tracks. Every postman put THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY 59 away his mail, closed the safe, and left his office; every diligence-agent locked his doors. From As- trakan to Archangel, from Warsaw to Vladivostok, the electric summons went, and the whole realm of Russia was paralyzed. "With two thousand roubles, offered by the Governor-General of Poland, before them, and ten bayonets on the tender behind, an engineer and a fireman were secured to run one coach, containing a terrified prince, from Warsaw to the frontier. In the south, a few cars were started by soldiers, but beyond such rare instances, for three weeks not a train was moved. More than this, not a telegram was transmitted, not a letter delivered. Everywhere was black silence, as if all the Russias had been swept from the face of the world. "'More wages, and the constitution,' was the slogan of the strikers. The official cohorts met the issue courageously, with bribes and bayonets, and little by little got the upper hand. Force and money were used unstintingly to win the operators needed and break the front of the strike. A few, who, con trary to the expectations of their mates, had re mained loyal to the officials, were finally secured and protected by the soldiery. As in time one train after another was manned and moved, the men who had stayed away lost heart, knowing but too well what would be the fate of those who were left out side the breastworks. First singly, then in crowds, they returned, and the great strike was broken." 60 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA " Here in Krasnoyarsk there was revolutionist rule for a while as well," the manager remarks. "The troops were driven out, and we had to wait for re inforcements. Yet when I came to my office there were sixty thousand roubles in the safe, not a ko peck of which had been touched. Some of the best employees were condemned. I was very sad, and the service was very poor when they marched away." "What became of them?" we ask. In a low voice he answers, "They went to the Yakutsk." Everybody is silent for a moment. "Where did you say?" inquires the missionary. "The Yakutski Oblast," answered the chinovnik. In Europe people talk of the rigors of Russia's winter. In Russia of the cold of Siberia. In Siberia, along the railway, when the thermometer gets down into the forties and the sentries pick up sparrows too numb to fly, they say, "It's as cold as the Yakutsk." "One starts to the Yakutsk by the steamer- towed prison barge, following down the Yenesei from Krasnoyarsk," the engineer continues. "For the first thousand versts northward the way is through a mighty forest region. The interior is al most as unknown as when the Samoieds were its sole inhabitants. Marshes covered with trembling soil, to be crossed only on snowshoes, alternate with thickets, called urmans, of larches, cedars, firs, pines, and beeches." THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY 61 " It is not alluring," we observe. "The cold of the winter seems largely to arrest decay, and the fallen trees, remaining unrotted, form a nature-made cheval de frise, impossible to traverse save along the hunters' trails. Another thousand versts up the Upper Tunguska River, at whose limit of navigation is a crossing into the Lena System, and the Yakutsk Province begins ; eastward to the coastal range overlooking Behring Sea, and northward to the Arctic Ocean, a million and a half square miles of desolation, extends this exiles' oblast. Prison-stations are located in the forsaken tundra country beyond the Arctic Circle, where scattered clumps of creeping birches and dwarf willows struggle to maintain existence in the few unfrozen upper inches of ground, congealed perpet ually beneath to unmeasured depths. Here, where the average winter temperature is eighty below zero, come the exiles deemed most formidable." " How long do men last in the Yakutski cold ?" we ask the engineer. "Oh, sometimes a strong man will outlive his sentence and return. The friends of our strikers ask me sometimes about one or another, but we have heard nothing of them since they marched away in chains. May fate keep us from that road ! " The theme is not enlivening, and soon we go for ward into the observation-car. After crossing the Kan River at Kansk, the rail road turns abruptly southwest, through the hilly 62 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA country of the Irkutsk Gobernia, and climbing into the highlands of the Altai, enters the watershed of the Angara. The drainage-basin of this river equals the combined areas of Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. It is as well adapted to agriculture as parts of the best provinces of Central Russia in the same latitude. The train pulls next into the station of Nishneu- dinsk. A booted peddler is making his way down the platform, with knives, combs, caps, and cheap knick-knacks. He stops to show us something special, a miniature of multicolored minerals, glit tering from a hundred crystal facets. The Russian engineer picks out the flaky quartz, the iron pyrites, — "fools' gold," as they called it in old Nevada times, — green porphyry, iridescent pea cock ore of copper, and some black crystals like antimony, which show here and there. Malachite, serpentine, topaz, and numberless other minerals are in the mass, which glitters in kaleidoscopic changes. A small piece of gold ore tops the pile. "Cabinetski?" asks the engineer. "Da, da," assents the peddler. "Cabinetski." "It comes from one of the domains of his Im perial Majesty's Cabinet," explains the engineer. "Stretches of forest, belts of fertile river valley, fur districts, hundreds of thousands of square versts, the best mines in these Urals which produce some times yearly seven million roubles, the entire Ner chinsk region, producing six million roubles, are THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY 63 * cabinetski,' " he remarks. "Even I, Ivan Vasilovich Poyarkov, am 'cabinetski'!" He explains the origin of the term, going back to the old days when princedoms went to the courtiers of Catherine. Always for a great enterprise it was necessary to have a friend at Court. So the rich merchants and miners would form, with powerful members of the inner circle at St. Petersburg, alli ances such as that made by the Stroganovs with Boris. Gradually, as time went on, the protected were swallowed by the protectors, until one by one the various estates had passed into the hands of the nobles of the Imperial Court. The mines in the Altai, which Demidov had opened up, were taken over in 1747 by the Emperor, those in the Zabaikal- skaia Oblast at about the same time. With the pass ing of the years, what had been graft and expro priation was transmuted into vested interest, until now it is the established right of the Imperial Cabi net, or the Grand Dukes, to receive the revenues of these vast domains. In the mining regions their perquisite is from five to fifteen per cent. Save for the tax, however, miners are free to operate upon the ducal estates, and many are thus engaged. A fur-capped station-agent clangs the big bronze bell, waits a moment, and then clangs twice. The passengers climb back into the box-like steel cars of the express. The third bell sounds, and the train starts. We sit down beside the engineer and the conversation takes up the "cabinetski" again. 64 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA "We have great traditions. One Governor, Ner- yschkin, of the 'cabinetski' mines at Nerchinsk, marched to fight the Czar. In 1775 he was ap pointed chief of the mineral belt in the Zabaikal- skaia Oblast. He sat for eleven months at home with closed shutters. Then, on Easter Sunday, singing a devil's hymn, and with a fat female on either side, he drove to church and ordered the service amended to suit a rather bizarre taste. He organized a series of glittering shows at the Crown's cost, gave free drink to the populace, and throwing out many of his subordinates, appointed convicts in their stead. When he had used up all the tax-money in his keeping, he drew up cannon before the house of the rich merchant Sibirayakov, the operator of the mines, and made him hand out five thousand roubles. Finally he got together an army of Tun guses and the peasants, to march against the Czar. He was caught on the way and sent to Russia for punishment. It is the great honor of our service to be governor over the ' cabinetski ' mines. Perhaps I shall rise there some day. Perhaps not. But I shall not march against the Czar." The forests of birch and pine and fir, and the hills, as the car drives eastward, close in again. The crests of mid-Siberian mountains lift their snowy heads, and the train climbs up and up toward the great central Lake Baikal, and the city of Irkutsk, 3378 miles from Moscow, and further east than Mandalay. THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY 65 When, on this seventh day, the train is winding up the Angara Valley toward Irkutsk, one may mentally look back over the country that has been traversed and estimate somewhat the meaning of the railway. The Urals formed the first landmark. As in the dominion of the blind the one-eyed man is king, so after the monotony of the plains, the Ural Mountains seem great and worthy of the name given by the old Muscovite geographer, the " Girdle of the World." By actual measurements, however, in their seventeen hundred miles of length, no peak rises over six thousand feet. Coming eastward from the Urals the line has cut through the southwestern corner of the old Tobolsk Government, has skirted the northern border of the steppe, has bisected the Tomsk Province, and after crossing the Yenesei River in Yeneseik has entered Irkutsk Province, and traversed the central highland region nearly to Lake Baikal. Many who journey this way will have as their first impression, when the long winter ride draws to its close, a feeling of depression, almost of discour agement, so few are the settlements, so desolate seems all Nature. They see the single line of rails, without a branch or feeder in the mighty expanse from Chelliabinsk to Irkutsk, save for the stub put in for the ungenerous outlanders of unlucky Tomsk. They calculate that for a territory forty times the size of the British Isles, and one and a half times as large as all Europe, the inadequacy of a railroad less 66 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA in total mileage than the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul, is manifest. Statistically-informed bank ers sometimes shrug their shoulders at the mention of the Trans-Siberian. "Every year a deficit," they say. "Gross earnings but twenty-four million roubles, — one sixth of the Canadian Pacific Rail way; one tenth of the Southern Railway. Hudoo (bad) !" One hears expressed not infrequently in Russia the opinion that the railway is a sacrifice justified politically by Russia's need for a link to the Pacific, but ineffectual to secure prosperity and advancement to the isolated land of mid-Siberia. It is deemed, like the Pyramids, a monument to colossal effort and achievement but of little service to man kind. Their statistics are correct. But it is to the greater honor of the road that much which it has accomplished will never appear in credits on the account-sheets. Where the white stations of the Siberian Railway stand now were once the wooden prison-pens with their guarded stockades. Murder ers and priests, forgers, profligates, and university professors, highway robbers and privy councilors, all together have tramped this way. It is its past from which the railroad has raised Siberia, the past of neglect and exile that this steam civilizer has banished to the far Yakutsk. Closer study gives, too, a better appreciation of the railroad's economic significance. The line holds a strategic position as truly as does the Panama THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY 67 Canal. Though in Siberia proper there is the enor mous area of nearly five million square miles, so much of this is in Arctic tundra, impassable swamp, forest, or barren steppe, that the really habitable and arable land narrows down to a tenth of this, which lies in general between the parallels of 550 and 580 30' north, and is contained within a belt some thirty-five hundred miles long and two hun dred to two hundred and fifty miles broad. When it is noted that the tillable area of one hundred and ninety-two thousand square miles in Tobolsk and Tomsk, mostly along the Obi System, the stretch of twenty thousand miles in the steppe, and that of one hundred thousand in the Yeneseik and Irkutsk governments of eastern Siberia, are all in immediate proximity to the railroad, whose course is generally along the 55th parallel, the eco nomic value of Russia's great enterprise takes a different perspective. Its vantage is still more emphasized when the element of the north and south watercourses is con sidered. One after another the great Siberian rivers are crossed, — in the Tobolsk Gobernia, the Tobol, the Ishim, the Irtish ; in the Tomsk Gobernia, the Obi and the Tom ; in Yeneseik, the Yenesei ; in Irkutsk, the Angara. Each of these reaches far up into the agricultural zone that lies north of the rail road, bringing the harvests to its cars by the cheap unfettered water-avenues. Thus, to the part of Siberia that is capable of extensive development, the 68 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA railroad is even now in a position to give great aid. It is from such natural factors as these, not from financiers' figures, that one must weigh the poten tiality of this great line. Its direct value is enor mous, its indirect commercial services greater yet. It may best be compared to a mighty river sys tem such as that of the Mississippi. The latter's traffic has never directly returned a dollar of the millions that have gone to maintaining its levees and training-walls and channels. Yet indirectly the return and the value, as an asset to the American people, are so great as to be incalculable. From its controlling position in relation to the cultivatable land and the interior watercourses of Central Siberia, as well as in relation to the far eastern artery, the Russian railway is an empire-builder as important as has been the Nile. The results already achieved are noteworthy. The city of Omsk, where the railroad and the Irtish River lines meet, has risen from a population of thirty-seven thousand in 1897 to seventy thousand in 1908. Further east, Stretensk has sprung from a town of two thousand people ten years ago to over twelve thousand to-day. Irkutsk has climbed from sixty to over eighty thousand since the railroad opened. The rural population has increased even as that of the cities. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, all Siberia contained but two hundred and ISLAND OF KALTIGEI VILLAGE OF LISTVIANITCHNOE LAKE BAIKAL THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY 69 thirty thousand souls ; at the end of the eighteenth, one million five hundred thousand; at the end of the nineteenth, five million. Now, with the railroad- induced immigration, it approaches the seven mil lion mark. The Steppe Government alone has risen in fifty years from five hundred thousand to one million five hundred thousand, and the Tomsk from seven hundred thousand to two million five hundred thousand. More in importance than its present utility is the fact that the railway holds the key to Siberia's future. The arable territory of the belt is equal to that of Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Ne braska, and the Dakotas combined. This land is generally well-watered, in a climate suitable to grain- raising, and it is, as has been shown, in its whole extent, adjacent to river and rail transportation. While such farming districts of the United States have some fifty inhabitants to the square mile, the most densely populated gobernia, Tomsk, has but six, and the Yeneseik but six tenths of one. An immense further area will yield to clearing and to irrigation, as has been demonstrated in the great results secured from five hundred versts of canals in the Barbara Steppe. Coal and iron are available in many places, and timber in the greatest abundance grows in the northern district. From a summary of these elements one may glean an idea of the Colossus sleeping beneath 70 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA these snows. At a normal rate of increase, fifty million souls should populate Siberia at the close of the twentieth century. The agency of their coming and existing will be primarily the line of rails across the continent. Despite the eight hundred million roubles expended, with only far-off hopes of profit, the faulty road-bed, the light rails, the steep grades, and crawling trains, the glory of Russia is still "The Great Siberian Railway." Ill IN IRKUTSK The train pulls slowly up to the white station- house at Irkutsk. A swarm of porters, nasilchiks, white-aproned, with peaked hats, and big, numbered arm-tags, invade the carriage. They seize each piece of luggage and run with it some where into the crowd outside. You, encumbered with your heavy coat, laboriously follow. Irkutsk station, more than any previous one, is crowded with passengers and Cossack guards. Train officials are shouting instructions, and every few paces a sentry is standing his silent watch. This is the transfer entrepot for all through traffic, as well as the dep6t for the largest and most important city of Siberia. Threading the press on the platform, you struggle with the outgoing human current, and in time reach the big waiting-room of the first class. It likewise is crowded with a mass of people, and its floor is cumbered with heaping mounds of baggage. One of these hillocks is constructed from your impedi menta, which are being guarded now by a porter, apparently the residuary legatee of the half-dozen original competitors within the car. The man takes 72 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA the long document that witnesses your claim to two trunks, and departs. Upon you in turn devolves sentry duty for the interminable time during which those trunks are being culled out from the baggage- car. It is an exasperating wait, but the fundamental rule for Russian traveling is, "never separate from the baggage." The parcel-room here at Irkutsk held for six months a suit-case left by a friend to be sent to this traveler. The officials would not give it up to its owner or to any person save the for warder, though he, oblivious to sequels, had gone on to San Francisco. Like the rest, now, you camp, with the baggage in front of you, on the waiting-room floor. It is a very country fair, this station. At the far end is a big stand crowded with dishes, on which are cold meats, potato salad, heaps of fruit and cakes, sec tions of fish from which one may cut his own slices, boxes of chocolates, and cigarettes. All are piled up in heaping profusion. One can get a glass of vodka and eat of the zakuska dishes free, or while waiting he may buy a meal of surprisingly ample quantity and good quality at the long tables that run down the centre of the room. Most of the Rus sians order a glass of tea, and with it in hand sit down till such indefinite future time as the luggage situation shall unroll itself. We move our baggage and join the tea caravan. Across the table is a slight, brown-faced man, with IN IRKUTSK 73 an enormous black astrakan cape falling to his ankles, and wearing a jauntily perched astrakan cap on his head. "One of the Cossack settlers," a friend from the train remarks. Beyond are half a dozen tired-looking women, with dark-gray shawls over their heads. Near them are men with close- fitting shubas, or snugly-belted sheepskin coats, fur inside, and rough-tanned black leather outside. Beside the lunch-stand are a couple of young men with huge bearskin caps, short coats, and high leather boots tucked into fleece-lined overshoes. A general at one of the little side tables is talk ing volubly to a plump dame with furs, which are attracting envy from many sides. The lady merely nods between puffs of her cigarette, and sips her tea. A large fat merchant waddles past, wrapped in a paletot made of the glistening silvery skin of the Baikal seal. The room is stifling, full of smoke, and crowded with people. Yet no one seems to feel the discomfort, even to the extent of taking off the heavy outer coats, which, with the thermometer at twenty degrees below zero, they have worn on the sleigh-ride in, from across the river. Your friends of the train, save those whose pos sessions were comprised in their multitudinous valises, are all here, fur-coated likewise and sipping tea, waiting, without a thought of impatience, for the baggage to be brought out. At last appears your nasilchik. "They are got," he cries, and balances about himself, one by one, 74 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA your half-dozen pieces of luggage. Through the noisy, gesticulating, thronging passengers and heaped be longings, he shoulders and squirms a way to the door and into the anteroom. A couple of soldiers are good-naturedly hustling out, from the third-class waiting-room opposite, a little leather- jacketed and very dirty mujik. "I did not owe seven kopecks. I cross myself. I am not a Jew," he loudly proclaims. " Nietchevo," says the soldier. "Out with him just the same!" The peasants and crowd loafing alongside grin appreciatingly, as the mujik is es corted, collar-held, through the great doors. The porter and yourself follow. A plunging line of sleighs, backed up against the outer platform of the station, extends far up and down the road. Their isvoschiks, leaning back, are shouting for fares. In sight are your two trunks. " How much to the Metropole?" you call. The legal fare across the river to the hotel is a rouble, but the Governor- General of eastern Siberia could n't tell how much it would be if you didn't bargain beforehand. "Piat rublal" "tree rublal" come hurtling from all sides. It is for you to walk down the line calling in the vernacular, "fifty, seventy kopecks!" One of the drivers will eventually shout a fare which you feel able to allow, and the porter, who has been watching the bargaining process with keen interest, gives him the two trunks. The isvoschik retires then behind the IN IRKUTSK 75 stormy hiring-line, and you renew the process for a second vehicle. The sleighs are just big enough for one person to occupy comfortably. Two can squeeze in if they be thin enough or economically minded. But a second sleigh is needed now for the hand-baggage, and a third for one's self. At length the arrangement is completed. The porter bows low at the donation of fifty kopecks, "for vodka" ; then, " Go ahead ! all ready ! " you call, and with a flourish the procession of sleighs dashes out of the station purlieus. The road to the town mounts first a low hill parallel to the river. As the horses climb toward its crest the panorama of the city and stream, hidden previously by the railroad structures, unrolls. Like a great band of white, the frozen Angara sweeps to the left and right. Beyond it stand out boldly the clustered domes of the cathedral, their surmounting crucifixes glittering in the sunlight. At your feet are the sections of the pontoon bridge, which in summer spans the river but in autumn is discon nected, the parts being moored to the shore, lest the drifting ice from partly frozen Baikal cut and' destroy their woodwork. A dark streak crosses the frozen river, with dots moving, as small apparently as running ants. The deceptive snow has made the distance seem much less than it is in reality. The streak is a road, and the seeming insects are the sleighs that pass and repass on the frozen river-trail. Between scattered 76 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA wooden houses our cavalcade rides down to the- bank, and at length onto the smooth white sheet. It is like skating. The big horses on our sleigh are imported from Russia, and trot splendidly, overtak ing one after another of the citizens with their lit tle shaggy Siberian ponies. The heaped snow is on either side. The cold air is bracing, almost welcome, until it begins to eat its way in. It is a fair drive, this, across the river — a full verst to the northern bank. We mount the incline that leads up the slope, and come to the first log houses of the poorer quarter of Irkutsk town. Gaunt dogs bark feebly, and slink away on either side. The street is almost deserted ; the houses give no sign of life. Suddenly we come into a square crowded with people, gay with life and motion, and motley in colors. It fairly buzzes with talk and cries and chaffering. Low-built booths face every side of the open piazza. We catch a glimpse of one stocked with hardware. Opposite it stands a little shrine within which are dimly visible pictured saints and the Madonna, before which are scores of burning tapers. Our isvoschik takes off his hat as he drives past, and reverently makes the sign of the cross. He crosses himself also as he passes the white church of St. Nicholas with its green roofs and gilded crosses, and he removes his cap to the long-haired and dark-robed pope that he meets, for the Siberian pays much reverence to his Church. THE ANGARA RIVER THE CATHEDRAL IRKUTSK IN IRKUTSK 77 The residences improve from the log cabins of the outskirts, and grow into the two-storied white washed structures of the main thoroughfares. The streets also have an interesting procession of people. The big troika of some high official glides past, with coal-black horses and a coachman padded out into a liveried Santa Claus, after the style of St. Peters burg. Officers of the garrison sweep by in their light- gray overcoats. Shoals of sleighs and sledges are going to and fro. At almost every corner, armed with a sabre and revolver, stands a police officer. As one drives along he reads the Russian letters on the placards and the names on the stores. Many here are Hebrew, for the Siberians of the cities are more tolerant than their European cousins. Ir kutsk has a very large and prosperous Jewish mer chant community, and sent her Dr. Mendelberg to the Duma. Irkutsk has had its representation cut down, they say, post hoc, — perhaps propter hoc. The driver, who has kept his horses at a moderate trot from the station through the town, suddenly cries out to them, and swings and snaps his lash till they break into a gallop. "We always come in handsomely," says the city native who is with you, as the sleigh pulls up triumphantly at the door of the Hotel Metropole. A swarm of attendants greet you at the portal, a tall uniformed concierge, half a dozen aproned porters, a waiter or two, a page, and behind them the Hebraic Hazan, our host. Each porter seizes a 78 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA parcel and the concierge leaves his post by the front door to lead the procession up the broad red- carpeted stairway. With a rattle of keys he swings open the door to a salon big enough to give a ball in, and whose ceiling is six good feet above one's head. The average New York flat would rattle around in it. The concierge advances to its centre and bows. Then he goes on through to another room, almost its duplicate in size, with a forlorn-looking wash- stand and a screen across one corner. " But the bedroom, where do we sleep ?" you ask. "Sdiece, gaspadine," he says, "right here"; and he conducts you to the screen. Raised about eighteen inches above the floor is a little wooden platform-like structure, about the size of a cigar-shop showcase. A dingy mattress is rolled up at one end of it. As you ruefully feel its straw texture and survey the planks which it is to cover, the hotel-keeper pushes in to tell you that sheets will be put on at once if the gaspadine has not his own. "Chass! Chass! If only the rooms suit the gaspadine, everything will be arranged." The porters silently deposit their loads and de part with their twenty kopecks each. The manager goes out, doubtless to gather his sheets. Only the concierge stays expectant after he has received his tribute. You throw your heavy overcoat over one of the armchairs and begin to open some of the bags. The concierge still stays and looks on. You begin to segregate laundry, and locate brushes and IN IRKUTSK 79 tooth-powder. The concierge still stays and looks on. You get out some slippers which are an im provement upon the heavy snow-boots. The con cierge still lingers. "The room is accepted," you say finally. "Yes, yes," he answers. "Haracho, but for the police, I want, please, your passport." To show your passport, true enough, is no more of an incident than to take out your handkerchief. But to be obliged before you have been ten minutes in a place to produce a paper for the police telling. of your age and infirmities, the color of your eyes, the number of your arms and legs and children, seems tiresome. "Must all give in their passports?" you inquire. "All, all," he answers. "I am punished if one person stays here overnight without showing it." He takes the document, visibly impressed with its flying eagle and the big red seal, and bows his way out. Now one can stroll around one's suite and take in some of the details. There are electric lights with clusters of globes in the big pendant electrolier of the parlor, and drop-lamps for the massive writing- desk in the corner! The armchair by the high- silled window is a good place to read in. Too bad one cannot look out on the shuttling sleighs of the street below, but the cold has thickly frosted the double windows. Here is a big sofa, plush-covered, and half a dozen armchairs surround the polished 80 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA table, whose top is scarred with a multitude of rings — from the hot tea-glasses, one deduces. Mentioning tea, why not have some? There ought to be a bell somewhere. Unfortunately there is not a bell. In looking for it one finds that Siberian housekeeping does not include any dusting of the heavy red hangings which flank the doors and windows. An imperious cry resounds in the cor ridor. " Chelaviek I " It is followed by a patter of footsteps. So this then is the custom of the country. You open the door, and in the tone described in books upon elocution as "hortatory," cry out into the dim distances of the corridor, " Samovar, chait " Somewhere down the line a voice answers, "Chass, chass!" and you retire to wait and hope. Curiously battered the furniture looks when you inspect it closely. Here and there a flake is chipped away from the varnish, and cuts or dents show in the paint. Have sabre fights, perhaps, taken place here, or raids on assembling revolutionists? Cer tainly in the generations of occupants, life has been, in some fashion, tumultuous. There is a fumbling at the door-knob, and, with out any preliminary knocking, a waiter comes in with a nickel samovar, an empty teapot, and a glass. He puts them down on the battered table and walks out. The big kettle hums away pleasantly as the red charcoal in its hollow interior glows from the upward draft. The preparations seem all made, save for the tea. Perhaps the chelaviek has gone to get it. IN IRKUTSK 81 You let your eye rove around to the little ikon far up in the corner, and the sleighing and wolf-shooting etchings on the walls. But after a time this becomes tiresome. Has the secret gendarmerie descended on the waiter among his teapots and trays? Has he forgotten the matter entirely, or what? The cor ridor-call seems to be the only recourse. Once again you go out. " Chelaviek ! " and from some region he comes trotting up. "Where is that tea?" "Oh, chai," he says, illumined. "Has the gaspa dine not his own?" " Most decidedly the gaspadine has not his own," you retort. "The gaspadine does not carry pillow- shams or bales with him. He is not a draper's establishment or a grocer's store." " Nietchevo," says the waiter, amiably; and runs off, to return with a saucer of tea-leaves, and an other containing half a dozen lumps of sugar. "Your pardon, generally the gaspadines have their own" ; and he leaves you to the brew and your meditations. Well, it is pleasant, after a long train-ride, to stretch out in a big, if battered, armchair, and sip glasses of anything hot. The little teapot, full of a very strong decoction, is perched on the top of the samovar over its chimney. For a fresh glass you pour out a half-inch of the strong essence, throw in the sugar, and from the samovar's spigot fill the glass with hot water. It is thus just the strength 82 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA you personally prefer, and always hot. The samo var, by a judicious regulation of the draft, can be kept for hours exactly at the boil. It is a fine insti tution, but cannot be transplanted to a country where hot charcoal embers are not constantly available. Comfortably ensconced and sipping one's tea, one can leisurely, Russian fashion, think of the most amusing method of passing the time. It is getting on toward evening; for the day fades early here. To-morrow is soon enough to look at things and distribute letters of introduction. The beverage has also blighted the appetite. Perhaps a light supper and an early couch would be wise. The latter in the far room looks singularly unpromising, but, " Niet- chevo!" It is rather early for dinner or supper, but what of that? As an elusive New York politician used to say to each of the office-seekers who came to ask his influence for nominations, "If you want it, there is no reason why you should not have it." We will try another summons of the waiter. Up he comes with the bill of fare printed in Rus sian and alleged French. Perhaps some eggs would be good. You decide upon them to begin with, and you will have them poached. "Gaspadine," he says, " the eggs to-day cannot be poached. Will you not have an omelette instead?" On second thoughts we will not have eggs at all this time ; we will have a sterlet, a small steak, and IN IRKUTSK 83 a compote. He goes off to the nether regions again. A long time passes, but at length he returns with the sterlet, its chisel-shaped nose piercing its tail in true Siberian style. White creamy butter and Franzoski kleb, white bread, round out the course. The steak is excellent and the canned fruit is satis fying, eaten beside the singing samovar in the great room of the main hotel of Irkutsk. Half a dozen letters pass the next hours until it is time to sleep. They are written on the big desk beneath the drop- light, with a glass of tea at one's elbow in warm cosy comfort. The place is rather warm, and without any appar ent source of heat, for there are no registers or grat ings of obvious instrumentality. A search of elimin ation, like the game in which one is warm, warmer, very hot, leads at length to a rounded corner of porcelain built into the wall, of which only a curved segment shows in an angle of the room. Further inspection reveals that it is a big cylindrical stove fed by somebody in the hallway, and so arranged as to warm two adjoining rooms. In mitigation of the fire-tender's zeal, we decide to open a window. Perhaps with an hydraulic jack this might be possible ; but to manual labor it is not. A single pane of the inner window, however, swings back, and then we can open a similar pane in the outer window, leaving a hole as big as the port of a ship. It is sufficient in this weather. Some further corridor-shouting, produces, in due time, sheets and 84 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA blankets, and presently we lie down on the straw mattress in the little wooden-bottomed box called a bed. "Spacoine notche," the attendant calls, and without trace of irony. It is one thing to go to bed, another to sleep. Tales are told of powder-circled couches which the invaders, surmounting these ramparts by climbing walls, dropped upon from above. There is a legend that there are some people whom they do not bite. ' ' Nietchevo / " Is it not I rkutsk, the Paris of Siberia ? Why then complain of parasites ? Furthermore, a brass band has started up some where in the immediate neighborhood the tune of Viens poupoule! to which there echoes a popular accompaniment of tapped glasses and stamping feet. Perhaps one had better get up and see things after all, — " Needs must when the Devil drives." We dress again. An exploring expedition reveals the big dining-room on the floor below full to the doors with uniformed officers, long-haired students, and assorted civilians. All are drinking and smok ing. On a stage at one end of the room thirty short-skirted damsels are singing and dancing in chorus, to the great approval of the audience. As the curtain rolls down on an act, the ci-devant dancers descend to their friends on the floor. Corks pop, and sweet champagne . flows. The call goes up for " Papirosel" and more cigarettes and more bottles come thick and fast. Soon there is an air of subdued expectancy, and IN IRKUTSK 85 eager looks are directed to the curtain. Somebody near by leans close and whispers for your enlighten ment, " All-black man !" Out comes an old Southern Negro, who sings to the wondering Russians a Slavonic version of the "Suwanee River," between verses delivering himself, with many a flourish, of a clog-dance. Johnson is the man's name. How he drifted so far from Charleston he hardly knows him self. He followed the music-halls to 'Frisco, and somebody, for whom he "has a razor ready," told him he would make his fortune in Vladivostok. He kept getting further and further into the in terior, picking up the language as he went, and turning his songs into the vernacular. Poor chap, the pathos he puts into the " Suwanee River" ! He is thinking, in frozen Irkutsk, of the old Carolina homestead, and is singing and dancing his way back. A girl in peasant dress takes the stage after "Sambo." She is singing some song that is running its course across northern Asia. The lassies at the tables and the men join in. Glasses clink and heels tap. The miners who have made their stake, the prospectors who hope to, the sable-merchants of the Yakutsk, the wool-dealers from Mongolia, all meet here as the first place where the rigors of the hinter land can be compensated. It is very gay — very, very gay. In the years after the ukase of Paul I, ordering that all officers who had made themselves notorious for lack of education or training should be sent to 86 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA the Siberian garrisons, it may be imagined what a Gomorrah grew up under the Russian banners. Modern celebrations are by comparison mild and temperate, as the cold beyond these double win dows is mild and temperate to that outside the Tunguses' huts, in the Yakutsk Province. But it is fairly impressive, nevertheless. Even in a Siberian hotel, the world goes to bed sometime. By four o'clock the music has stopped, and the traveler is tired enough to sleep on even the populous plank-bottomed bed. Thus do all things work together to weave the "web of life." It is nearing noon when one wakes to eat a com bination of breakfast and lunch, and plan for the day. The Post-Office and the Bank are the first material objectives. One must register so that mail may be delivered. We go down and join two com panions of the road. With careful directions from the porter, the party prepares for the half-mile walk to the Post-Office. The preliminaries are for midable in themselves. First the felt goloshes must be pulled over the shoes ; then the big fur overcoat must be swung on and carefully buttoned down its length. Finally a fur cap, like a grenadier's, with ear-flaps is tied, and great fleece-lined gloves are donned. The droshky-drivers assembled before the hotel seem to take it as an insult to their profession that we elect to walk, and two or three follow along outside the curb until the group reaches the corner and turns into the main street, Bolshoiskaia. A CHAPEL EOLSHOISKATA IN IRKUTSK IN IRKUTSK 87 There is an air of placid quiescence at this noon hour. The policeman at the nearest corner is rum- inatingly handling his sabre-hilt, and watching the sleighs go by. Here and there a woman, with the ubiquitous gray shawl over her head, passes, with a preoccupied air. Sheepskin-clad mujiks are driving along, with sledge-loads of firewood or stiffly-frozen carcasses, on their way to the bazaar markets. The shop-windows attract our gaze. Here is one with the word " Apteka" over the door, which is to say, Apothecary. Benches are set in front of it, on which one may sit and watch the people pass, as in the chairs before a New England country tavern. Fur ther along is a solidly built white department store, the Warsawski Magazine, wherein one can get all manner of apparel, — shawls of the latest Irkutsk pattern, towels and soap, and — most important — blankets for the trip into the interior. We stroll in for a moment. An individual looking like a stalwart Chinaman, with long braided queue, shoulders his way past us to buy some cloth. "He is a Buriat of the tribe north of Irkutsk," explains one of the shop-girls, very close herself in type to those seen at Wanamaker's in Manhattan. Near-by the imposing magazine is a low one-story booth occupied by a watchmaker. Beyond that is a walled enclosure with lofty gates, as befits a school. Still further is the yellow and green sign of a gov ernment liquor-tr aktir. The name is said to be derived from the French word traiteur, which was 88 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA current in the days when Napoleon and Bourrienne were planning conquests in their Parisian poverty. As we turn up a side street, the shops for the poorer people appear. Gaudy pictures, of pack ages of tea, vegetables, and sugar-loaves, illuminate the walls, to tell the unlettered that groceries are sold within. Saws and hammers and vises are painted on the walls of the hardware-shops. Loaves of bread, crescent rolls, and rococo wedding-cakes decorate a bakery ; boots and high-heeled slippers, a shoemaker's booth. The street is an open-air gallery of rude frescoes. Presently we come to residences, some of cement- covered brick, with high enclosing whitewashed walls and iron gates, some wooden, with their rough- hewn logs unpainted save for the brilliant white sills and window-frames. At length, far from the town's busy district, the Post-Office is reached. The building is thronged. Two soldiers are loading their saddle-bags with the mail for the regiment. Women are collecting money-orders. A crowd waits at the window of the girl who sells stamps. In rushing industry she makes the calculating beads of her abacus fly across the wires. Everybody is far too occupied to register a voyageur's name, — excepting always the half-dozen soldiers posted in different parts of the room and leaning stolidly upon their bayonets. We venture to ask one of them which is the registry window. IN IRKUTSK 89 "Russisch verstehe ich nicht," is the answer. A Siberian post-guard knowing no Russian and answering in German seems extraordinary. "Where are you from?" we inquire in his native tongue. "Courland," he answers, — - " Courland by the Baltic." This city of Irkutsk gave trouble in 1905. If it gives trouble again, the garrison will be safe. The registering at length is done and we turn to go out. A tattered figure, bearded and haggard, with rags bound on his feet, opens the outer door. "Will the gaspadine help a man get back to Russia?" Your companion looks closely at him. "A convict ! very bad people." He adds : " There is a murder every day here, and one cannot safely go out at night. Very bad men !" With the contradictory charity that is so typical of the Russian, he fumbles in his pocket and gives the unfortunate a fifty-kopeck piece. We go now to the great market-place and the bazaars. Here where we enter is a row of hardware- shops. In the first booth a string of kettles hangs down, and knives, spoons, candlesticks, and ham mers are suspended so as to catch the eye. The proprietor stands outside, chatting with a passer-by and the tenant of the adjoining booth. Further on are stationers, with tables of cheap-covered books. The wall of one is decked with chromos of galloping 90 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA Cossacks, led by a long-haired pope with a crucifix. The soldiers are sabring fleeing Japanese, and red blood is lavishly provided. On the opposite wall are glittering brass and silver ikons, and lithographs of ancient martyrdom. Row upon row of red felt boots hang in the next line of booths, and in still another — the wooden- ware bazaar — are bowls and spoons, and platters of high and low degree. Further on a dozen women are grouped around one of their class, who is bar gaining for a huge forequarter of beef, a full pud weight by the big lever scales that are balancing it. "Dorogo! dorogol" (Too dear, too dear!) she cries. "I will give eight kopecks a pound." The market-woman protests that she will be beggared at less than eleven kopecks. A hali-sotnia of little Buriat Cossacks come rid ing by, clad in their puffy leather shubas. Yellow- topped fur caps are their only uniform garment, and across their backs are hung the carbines. They make merry at the haggling women. Two swing off their shaggy ponies, and begin in turn to bargain in broken Russian for some paper-wrapped sweet meats. They close the deal finally, tuck these away, toss themselves back into position, and ride off. Further along, half a dozen men cluster around a fur-cap seller. He is a merry fellow, and there is much noise and banter and gossiping. Such is the bazaar, the Forum of old Rome set down in a Siber ian city. THE BAZAAR, IRKUTSK IN IRKUTSK 91 A short further stroll, and the party is at your other objective, the Bank. You take leave of the rest and enter. At the door, a grandly uniformed porter helps you off with the outer husk of furs, and motions you into the outer office, with its half- dozen clerks bending over sloping desks. One of these takes your card, and returning leads the way to a capacious sitting-room, with armchairs scat tered here and there, pictures on the wall, maga zines of many nations on the centre table. The American typewriter, which alone betrays that this is an office, is on a little table at one side. A tall military-looking man, gray-mustached and grave in manner, is seated beside the window reading some documents. He rises as you enter, and greets you, and for some minutes the conversation in French is upon general themes. Presently you go down into a side pocket and get out letters of introduction. One is from the Petersburg headquarters. He looks at the signature — Ignatieff. "You are his friend?" The polished worldliness falls away as a cloak that is thrown off. " Splendid ! ' ' he says. ' ' Welcome to our city. We must have tea." He pushes a bell, and a page, red-bloused and wear ing brightly polished jack-boots, appears. "Chai, Alexis," he orders. "And how did you leave Igna tieff?" he begins eagerly. "Does he still drive his black stallions ? It is two years that I have not seen him. When I was in Petersburg last winter, he was in Paris, and when I was in Paris, he was at Nice. 92 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA One is very separated from his friends here. One might as well be a convict." You answer all his questions, and begin to feel as if you were at a little family party. Presently, in the midst of the double conversation, — for the Rus sians seem to talk and listen at the same time, — the boy comes in with a big samovar, and the other accompaniments. The banker makes the brew in the china pot. From this each of us serves himself as the compound conversation moves on. "You have not yet seen the sights of Irkutsk?" he observes at last. " I will get my sleigh and show you around when we have finished." " It is the middle of the day. I cannot break into your work like that," you protest. But he rings a bell for the red-jacketed boy. "Order my sleigh. — We have the finest city in Si beria," he continues ; "eighty thousand people now, and growing always. And trade has come with the railroad as we had not dreamed before. In the days when they used to bring the tea overland from Kiahta, the sledges from Baikal would carry as many as five thousand bales daily. We thought when this began to be shipped through by the rail road that it would hurt the city. But there was so much other traffic that the loss was hardly felt." "The sleigh is ready," the boy announces. "May I have the honor?" he says, with his easy grace. He leads the way to the coat-rack, and is received IN IRKUTSK 93 with the deepest bows by the uniformed worthy, who solicitously helps him on with his coat and overshoes. Then with a stereotyped motion the man holds out his hand for the tip. Though this servant is at the door of the banker's own office and presumably upon his pay-roll, the incessant tribute is his perquisite. It is usual throughout Siberia for wealthy Russians to scatter small silver everywhere along their path — to friends' servants, to house- porters, to beggars on the street. The most profuse miscellaneous generosity prevails. Riding to-day with the Russian banker is like watching the pro gress of a mediaeval prince dispensing his largesse. At the entrance to the bank is the sleigh, skeleton- framed and high-built, unlike most of the sleighs of Siberia. Three big black horses, with the snake-like Arab head that characterizes the best Orloff strains, are hitched to it, troika-fashion, the centre horse under a big bow yoke, the outside animals running free. The coachman has the square pillow-hat, and the enormous wadded corpulence of Jehu elegance. It is an interesting ride in which we move slowly up the Bolshoiskaia, receiving, so far as the banker is concerned, neighborly greetings from most of the sleigh-riders, and respectful salutes from the foot- passers on the sidewalks. A nice social distinction our host draws in returning the formal salute for uniformed officials, the cordial wave of the hand for intimate friends, a nod for the humbler ac quaintances : but none go unrecognized. 94 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA Something like the Roman's idea of showing his city by turns up and down the Corso, is this Siber ian's. We do halt, however, and look at the big Opera House and the Geographical Society's Mu seum and the many-domed Cathedral, — buildings which in no city would be other than sources of sat isfaction. After an hour of driving in the piercing cold, one's conscience begins to prick. The banker, even though absent from his affairs, does not appear to feel either business or atmosphere. At length we are brought at a gallop to the doorstep of the hotel. "To-night we dine at eight. Adieu." With a bow he draws the bearskin robes about him, and the black horses bear him swiftly around the corner. An acquaintance from the train is in the hallway as you climb stiffly up the steps. ' ' Has the drive been a bit cold ? " he asks. ' ' Come in and have a stakan of vodka." "Is that not rather heady for a between-meal tipple?" you suggest. "This is Siberia. When you run with the wolves, you must cry like a wolf, — but tea, too, is good." You mount the stairs together, to the scene of last night's orgy, and order a couple of glasses of tea. It is a strange anticlimax to find the room so deserted. At three this morning it was a good imi tation of the traditional "Maxim's." At four in the afternoon it is simply a crude wooden hall, with the stiff -backed, plush-seated chairs ranged in bour geois regularity at the discreetly covered tables. IN IRKUTSK 95 Only the shuffle of somebody practicing a new step on the stage behind the curtains suggests the double life of this innocent-looking hotel dining-room. A couple of glasses of tea attack the cold in stra tegic fashion, from the inside, and are better than the external reheating method. We sip in silence for a while. " I am going to drive over to the Banno and have a Russian bath," observes your companion. "I do not like the tin tub they bring around here at the hotel. Are you impelled to come along?" " Is there attendance and room for two? I'm not minded to sit around and wait." "Room for five hundred," he says, with a long sweep of the hand. "Everybody goes there. It is one of the institutions of the city." As you are now warm enough to consider a further drive, you go down to assist in bargaining for a sleigh to make the tour to and from the Banno. A big brick building a verst or so away, with a number of private equipages and a stand for public sleighs and droshkys, is our destination. A beggar- woman opens the double doors and gets her service percentage from each passer. "How much is given in this part of the world to beggars !" you remark. The Russian smiles. "It is a part of religion to give. At every big family affair, — a wedding, a christening, a funeral, — we distribute money and gifts to the poor." 96 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA In the entresol of the bath-house, a big tiled anteroom, there are marble-topped tables, around which men and women are smoking and reading papers. One can dine here, even; but this comes after the bath. A ticket at the kontora gives, for a rouble, the privilege of a preliminary boiling and a flaying by one of the naked attendants. A start is made by washing you with infinite thoroughness, section by section, the attendant continuing on each spot until told to stop or advance to the next. An unfortunate foreigner, in Irkutsk, had his head shampooed seven times in succession before he could recall the cabalistic word necessary to direct the man's attention elsewhere. One is scrubbed and rinsed, and is then conducted up onto a wooden platform, running along under the ceiling. Here, while the first inquisitioner dashes water on a steamer-oven below, the second scrapes the victim with new pine branches. One remembers an Irkutsk Russian bath at least as long as the smarting and the cold he gets from it endure. Back at the hotel one can dig out his rather crumpled dress-suit in preparation for the evening's entertainment. Later, he gathers in another sleigh, and sets out for the home of the banker. In Irkutsk nobody relies on house-numbers to find his way. Even Moscow has not yet advanced to this refinement of civilization. If the driver does not know the route, he stops to ask passers-by, "Where is So-and-So's house?" Again and again IN IRKUTSK 97 you are taken to the abode of somebody else with a name more or less similar. Then the driver will say, quite nonchalantly, " Nietchevo!" — ask the next person he encounters for directions, and start anew. You leave abundant margin of time, and usually arrive sooner or later. Our host of to-night is, happily, well known throughout the city. So the driver whips up to a gallop and rushes down the snowy streets. It is not a long ride to the big arched doorway of the white two-storied plaster-covered house, in front of which the driver pulls up with a flourish. You ring a bell at the side of the door and wait. The isvoschik has taken a station beside the curb, has folded his arms, and is nodding on the box, apparently prepared to camp there indefinitely. "Eleven o'clock, return," you say. "Harachol" is his drowsy answer, given without moving. The horses have drooped their heads; they too are settled for repose. The tinkle of a piano comes from within, but minute after minute goes by, the bell unanswered, the isvoschik immovable on his little seat. Other pulls of the bell are at last of avail : the door slowly opens. A final objurgation to the coachman that he is not wanted until eleven o'clock falls on sealed ears. You go in through the massive doorway. In the antechamber a gray-bloused attendant helps you off with wraps and goloshes, then silently disappears through a rear door, leaving you standing there unannounced. The vestibule is cumbered with 98 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA coats and hats on the wall-hooks, overshoes helter- skelter on the floor, and canes and umbrellas in the corner. It is like a clothing establishment. Beyond the curtained doorway on the right are lights, and the sound of the piano is louder. This seems the most promising direction for exploration, so — for ward! Beyond the portieres is a splendidly lofty room, like that of an Italian palace, brilliantly lighted with electricity. Many-paned windows run high up, starting from the level of one's breast, and long heavy hangings half-conceal them. To the right of the door is a mahogany grand piano, at which, obliv ious of the world, the host is diligently thumping away at Partant pour la Syrie! with inadvertent variations, singing carelessly as he plays. Beyond him, in an imposing armchair of German oak, like King Edward's throne in the Abbey, is a lady, propped with many cushions. She is slender and darkly clad, and is conversing with a young man in uniform, who sits very straight on a dainty gilt chair of the Louis XVI epoch. A low lacquered table before them is gayly painted with geisha girls and eaved pagodas. It holds a massive brass samovar en circled by a row of beautifully colored tea- tumblers of the sort that one sees on exhibition in the glass- factories which front the Grand Canal at Venice. The chorus comes from the banker at the piano : — Amour a la plus belle ; Honneur au plus vaillant. THE ICE-BREAKER, YERMAK — LAKE BAIKAL IN IRKUTSK 99 There is no use of paltering and waiting to be announced, so we enter the room. The performer hears the steps on the polished floor and swings round on the stool. "Ah, voila !" he says, and rises to introduce you to his wife. "A moi le plaisir," she says, smiling. "Mon frere, Ivan Semyonevieh," presenting you next to the young officer, who rises abruptly and clicks his heels as he takes your hand. You are motioned to a replica of the little chair, and your host returns to his piano, this time to play with immense satisfaction in your honor a hazy memory of some bygone variety show : " There'll be a hot time in the old town to-night." "A friend is very welcome," says Madame Karet- nikov, when he finishes. "We do not see many from the world here in Siberia." "The life, however, is interesting, is it not?" "O monsieur, I, too, was interested at first, but there are so few people of the world here, and we see them all the time. C'est affreux ! I give you a month to change that opinion." "You give a month, Irina ; I give a week," growls her brother. "If it were not that we get away during the spring one would perish of ennui," the hostess adds. "But Japan is not far. We go there or to Europe every year. Perhaps soon we shall get a transfer to another branch." "You bankers have hopes," observes the brother, ioo THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA "but what of us poor officials of the Justice Depart ment ! We are chained to the bench like old galley- slaves, and all we get is three hundred roubles a month and a red button when we are seventy." As the macerated song floats anew from the piano, the hall-door opens and there is dimly visible in the anteroom a curious much-encumbered figure, with a gigantic sheepskin hat and short blue reefer coat. He divests himself of these, and of a long woolen inside muffler, and, brushing back his long hair, comes into the room. His blue tunic is resplendent with brass buttons and he wears jack-boots. A light down is growing upon his upper lip. He is nineteen or twenty. "Good-day!" says our host, hailing him in Eng lish. "Good-day, uncle!" he replies. He presents himself before Madame Karetnikov, who holds out her hand, which he formally kisses. " Zdravstvouitie, Valerian!" says the official, shaking the young man's hand. Then you are introduced with explanations. "Valerian here is in his last year at the Irkutsk Realistic School, studying preparatory to engineer ing." The status of science in Siberia becomes the theme, and the newcomer infuses considerable local color into his pictures. "Does the professor in drawing suit you now, Valerian?" the banker inquires presently. Then he IN IRKUTSK 101 adds to you : "They all went on strike because the old professor of drawing had a method they did not like. The authorities had to replace him before any of the students would go back." "The new professor respects our rights," says Valerian soberly, not liking the levity of his elder. Soon, from an adjoining room, come in the child ren of the host, — a very pretty girl of the age at which misses wear short dresses and braids; and a little boy of about eight. The boy very respectfully kisses his mother's hand and is introduced to the stranger, but finds a superior attraction in his father at the piano. The girl, Marie Pavlovna, sits down beside her cousin Valerian. Lacking the stock football amen ities of a happier land, and half-embarrassed, half- superior in the status of a budding young man, Val erian is not much of a conversation-maker. Marie Pavlovna, too, is seen but not heard. She is evid ently the typical product of the French system of sex-segregation and cloistered study, which keeps girls abnormally uninteresting until marriage, per haps to make amends subsequently. "I think we had better go in and eat. It is half- past eight," says the host. "Si tu veux," replies his wife; and we stroll out into a big dining-room, at one end of which is a heavily-freighted oak sideboard. As we approach this, the host opens a far door, and shouts down into the darkness : — 102 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA "Obeid, Dimitri." We turn to the zakuska sideboard. The official reaches for the vodka-bottle, and the little silver egg-like glasses. "Vodka will it be, or do you prefer cognac?" The various guests choose their tipple. With the gulp of a mountaineer taking his moonshine, the banker swallows the twenty-year-old French brandy, of the sort that gourmets protractinglysip with their coffee. The little boy slips out to his particular re gion of the house. The hostess takes her seat at the foot of the table, and the gentlemen pass and repass, bringing her assorted zakuska dishes as at a ball. Caviar from the Volga, Thon marine from Calais, sprats from Hamburg, Columbia River salmon, are spread out and attacked by the rest of us, standing, free-lunch fashion. One by one the men finish and straggle to their places at the table. Three menservants, with gray blouses and baggy silk trousers falling over their topboots, appear now, one with a huge tureen of bouillon, another with the little silver bowls, and a third with a plate of the piroushkies that accompany the soup. Madame Karetnikov deals out the consomme for the whole table, and also for little Paul and his governess in some outside quarters. Every one begins to eat, without waiting for the hostess or for anybody else. " It is hard work managing a big family like ours," she allows, in reply to your question about the domestic problem. "We always have seven or eight, IN IRKUTSK 103 and one can never tell how many friends will come in to dine with us." She casts a solicitous eye over the table, to see that no one has been neglected, and then serves herself. "One must keep the men well fed," she observes. "Remember that, Marie, when you get married." Marie at the far end of the table nods assent. "But you must not think of marrying until you are told," adds the banker. She nods assent to this, too. "Don't mind him, Marie," says the official. "He thinks he is living in the time of the Seven Boyars. Take my advice. Pick out the man you want and go for him. You can't fail." "Such ideas to put in a girl's head!" says his sister, smiling. The soup-course is nearly over, when suddenly the banker ejaculates, and jumps up to welcome some new arrivals. "Ah, father!" He runs to a sturdy benignant-looking old man, and kisses him on both his white-bearded cheeks, then does the same to the little old mother. "Come in, come in; we are just beginning." At once the table is in a state of unstable equi librium. The old lady is steered to a chair at the head, and the rest are pushed along to make room. The father makes his way, under similar escort, in the direction of the vodka-bottle. 104 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA "No French brandy for me!" he says, and puts the fiery Russian liquid where it will do the most good. He, too, goes to the far end of the table. The student tells in a low voice that the new comer is a veteran of Sevastopol, was once the personal friend of Czar Alexander, the Liberator, and was decorated by him for gallantry at Plevna. "What a splendid old Russian he is !" one thinks, noting all the kindliness and courtesy of his honored age, and the grip of a bear-trap in his hand. Yet there is an indescribable air of melancholy about him, as if a great sadness were being bravely and uncomplainingly faced. A remark from the hostess turns you to her. "Father is one of the Colonization Commission. We are all very much interested in hearing about his discussions with the settlers !" "Colonization for the settlers or for the exiles here?" you ask. " 1 1 is the government assistance for the voluntary emigrants, not for the unfortunate ones." "But the latter must be a problem in them selves?" Madame seems embarrassed. The student leans over and in a low tone whis pers : "His youngest son, the brother of Vladimir, is in hiding, is under sentence of death. They don't speak of him here." "He has just come from the Governor," adds Madame Karetnikov, "who is a great friend of his. IN IRKUTSK 105 The Governor has heard from Petersburg that they may bestow the cross of St. Stanislaus." "That is the autocracy here, which you do not know in your country," adds the student, in a low voice. "He is an intimate friend of the Governor and two of his sons are officials, yet his last son is beyond pardon. The old man himself knows not where he is. Yet they decorate the father. He still believes in the Emperor." " Do not let my nephew talk politics to you," says the hostess, rather anxiously. Valerian is silent. A supplementary tureen of soup makes its ap pearance, and the two newcomers are served with it. The rest of the party have advanced to boiled sturgeon, with a thin sauce, compensated by Rus sian Chateau Yquem from the Imperial domain in the Crimea. Roast beef follows the fish, with the old general and his wife at length even with the rest. Then come duck and claret, and finally dessert and champagne. The toast of the evening is drunk to the old general, who brightens as the meal ad vances. In the big reception-room, Turkish coffee is brought, which is poured from the brazen ladle and served in exquisite little cups without handles. "We got them in Damascus on one of our trips," says the host. Conversation goes round the table. The official is in eager talk with Madame Karetnikov about a com- 106 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA mon friend in a smart Petersburg regiment, who has got badly in debt. "He ought to apply for a transfer to the Siberian service. The officers get more pay, and it costs less to live," she is urging. "But for Serge we must consider how much greater is the cost of champagne here," retorts the official. "We can marry him to Katinka, and make her father get him a promotion," the sister suggests. "I think he ought to have left the army and gone into the contracting, — every contractor I know is as rich as sin and goes to Monte Carlo." So the conversation rambles on. Cigarettes are passed. The hostess will not have one. "I used to smoke, but it is so common now," she explains. "Every peasant's wife hangs over her oven with a cigarette in her mouth. Even a vice cannot survive after it has become unfashion able." The host comes up to show you his curios. "This Alpine scene is one of Segantini's. We got it in Dresden before he had earned his repute. I am very proud of my wife's discrimination. The statuettes are from a little sculptor in the Via Sis- tina in Rome. Rien d'extraordinaire. The vase came from the Imperial Palace in Peking. I bought it from a Cossack for fifty kopecks. I have been told it belongs to the Tsin Dynasty, and is better than those they have in Petersburg Hermitage." IN IRKUTSK 107 So you are shown the spoil of two continents in connoisseur purchases. "Hardly to be suspected in Irkutsk," he allows, complacently. Every year host and hostess visit the Riviera, taking a turn at Monte Carlo and Nice and Cannes. The banker speaks English, French, German, and Italian fluently, and half a dozen other languages passably. His wife acknowledges only French and Italian. The conversation turns to the idealism of Pierre Loti's description of the road to Ispahan. The banker has followed this road himself, and he has a much less poetic memory of it. The veteran — his father — is not up in French or English, but he has a good knowledge of German left from academy times. In this language he tells of the old days of the serfs and of the Crimea. He talks with the kind frankness of age that does not need self-suppression to prompt respect. When the guests rise to leave, and the buoyancy of the entertainment is passed, his cloud comes back. His voice has just a touch of bitterness as he says good-bye. " I am glad we can welcome to our country a man traveling for pleasure. So many who come are here under less pleasant auspices." "De svidania," you say at last to everybody, and out you go into the midnight frost. The droshky- driver is still there waiting. He has slept since you entered, unmoving through the hours. "Gas- 108 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA tinitza," you direct; and he drives to the hotel through the bleak starlit night. Valerian comes a few days later to visit us, and volunteers to be our guide for Irkutsk. "If I miss a few days at the Academy, what matter? I shall improve my English," he explains. Valerian is typical of the student class, all ideal and aspiration. He has gathered the heat of the epoch, and has concentrated it upon his philosophy. He is saturated with the French Revolution. Does he mention Danton, for example, it is with intent- ness of loyalty for the great Mountain speaker, which makes one almost think that the year is I792t and that the place is sans-culottic France ; " debout contre les tyrans !" He sings fiercely with his com rades, to the tune of the Marseillaise, the Russian revolutionary anthem, ending it with a swirl. "For the palace is foe to our homes!" America he con siders one of the free nations, but he has reserves. Though he is not at one with our political system, yet he thinks that all learned about it is a great gain. "Your land is free politically," he specifies, "but it is not yet emancipated from capital, — it is not free socially. You have an industrial feudalism and a proletariat. So will it not be when we have won our revolution." Many are his anecdotes of the uprising of 1905, whose tragic drama will never be fully pictured and whose history is to be gleaned only from the mouths of cautious witnesses. THE ORGANIZERS OF THE CHITA REPUBLIC IN IRKUTSK 109 "We rose at Irkutsk, many of us, students and workmen, but General Miiller had a strong garrison of troops here. We tried them, but they would not come over. They shot down our men and dispersed all the meetings, and now he is Governor in the Baltic Provinces. They say that when he was drunk, he would shoot accused men in his own rail way carriage; "the butcher!" we of the Cause call him. At Tomsk and Krasnoyarsk the city was held for weeks by our party. The railway men would not run troop-trains and the Government was paralyzed. Chita was held by a Revolutionary Committee of Safety. We manned the entrances with artillery. We took turns watching, and ran the whole city, not touching the money in the Treasury. But we were few, and word came that the insurrection was every where broken. Miiller was marching from Irkutsk, and Rennenkamp came back with the troops from Manchuria. He promised moderate terms to all but the leaders. The townspeople were afraid, and rose against our men. Many were taken. Many fled away and got to Japan and America. Some were shot and some were sent to the Yakutsk. So it was crushed, and our great chance was gone." "Will it come again?" " Ni snaial The workmen are ready. The intel lectuals are ready. The peasants back in Russia cry for land. Perhaps they too will be ripe next time, and the soldiers will be with us. In any case Siberia has seen the red flag float over the Chita Republic." no THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA Many-faceted is the life in a Siberian city. In numerous ways it seems feverish and abnormal, for it represents the young blood of a capable race struggling upward, and knowing that in much its battle is desperate. The towns have hardly yet got settled methods ; they are outgrown villages where men of all stamps, who have become enriched in the new land, come for the pleasures or the benefit of a less monotonous existence. The traditions of peasant origins survive in the conditions and gen eral civic neglect. Irkutsk, once its novelties have become familiar, has lost its charm. That it is provincial is no dis credit, but its amusements are of the grosser order, unredeemed by wit. Every evening the tawdry dining-room at the hotel echoes the songs and noise of the revelers. The same circle attends the the atres. The students discuss hotly the rights of man and the Valhalla prepared for all martyrs, and calm simple wholesome life seems to be reserved for the workaday world which moves on its slow toilsome upward way in silence. There is, however, to-night an unwonted stir at the Hotel Me'tropole. The corridors are thronged. A Russian friend points out the notables. The blue- uniformed official yonder with the gray mustache and the row of glittering orders on his breast is the Governor-General. Half a dozen members of the local bar, in frock-coats, pass through. In the dining- room a young lieutenant, dashingly clad in long IN IRKUTSK in maroon coat with the row of silver-topped cartouches and the clattering sabre of the Emperor's Cossack Guard, is being deferentially entertained by officers of the garrison. Three officials are taking champagne with two beautifully gowned women, Parisiennes even to their long pendant earrings. The hotel-pages in fresh red blouses and high boots pass here and there with messages. The waiters, with intensified deference, glide among the crowd in its many-colored uniforms and glittering war-medals. "Who has arrived?" we ask, surveying the scene. "A member of the Imperial Cabinet." The announcement of his name has a personal interest and memories of earlier stays in Russia. The Minister's life has been a romance indeed. Disagreeing with his family through liberal ideas, he went in 1862 to Birkenhead as a locomotive engineer, to the United States, to Argentine, and returning to Russia worked up from a very small government position to be chief of all the Russian roads, railways, and telegraphs, and Minister of Ways and Communications in the Czar's Cabinet. His brain threw the line of rails over half a continent. On the outbreak of the Japanese War he was called from his retirement to the colossal task of bringing to the front across the width of Asia half a million men, their artillery and arms, their food, their trans port, all on the one line of rails. He has served under three Emperors and is life-member of the Senate. You send a card in through one of the attaches. 112 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA In a few minutes there is delivered to you the Prince's card, across which is written: "At noon." At the hour appointed you mount to the apart ment overlooking the Bolshoiskaia. Guards at sa lute, staff in brilliant uniforms, secretaries and callers in full dress, — the antechambers are full. You pass through to the furthermost room. In a nest of books and maps, with blue-prints out spread on floor and chairs and sofas, is an elderly man in a plain frock-coat, without a ribbon or a button to hint his honors. He is vigorous, hearty, simple, almost unchanged from your earlier ac quaintance, his keen flashing eyes hinting ever a reverse side to the great repose of his manner. Personal questions occupy the first minutes, but presently we are into larger themes, and you begin to feel subtly the man's power. He has come on a special tour, to inspect, with his own practiced eyes, the projected double-tracking of the Siberian Rail road. Every brakeman and locomotive engineer, every traffic superintendent and division manager along the route knows he could step down from his private car and handle the levers and give them directions. His mind is a very vortex of ideas, and his range of conversation reflects world-wide inter ests. The talk gets to the American political situa tion and the race-problem. Later it shifts to the Japanese War, and he tells of some of his experiences getting the troops into Manchuria. A mention of the overland road to China awakens reminiscences. IN IRKUTSK 113 "It was long before the railroad that I went over that route first," he says. He tells of his months- long horseback ride beyond Baikal before the rail road went through, inspecting the trade-route and the prospects of the country. By and by the con versation has got to the special problems of the Slav. With the straightforward frankness of a great nature which wishes the best for his country, he tells of the Russian aspirations from the stand point of those who are facing the problems of the nation in their fact and practice. "I too," he says, "was once for changing much in a little time, and worked to free the serfs and to start the elective Semstvos throughout the Empire. Alas ! so much that they want is possible to no gov ernment! One cannot by enactment abolish want or bring all men to a niveau. We are trying to give every man the chance to rise, unchecked by any administrative barrier. But one sees as he lives longer that all which one wishes cannot come at a coup. Great changes, great improvements, I have witnessed, but they have not come by violence. We must keep order, and hand on to our sons an un divided Empire of the Russias." You leave this patient builder of the new order alone amid his maps and studies in the idle Sunday city. As you descend the steps, a black-capped student passes the door. He is humming the for bidden Marseillaise. IV SLEDGING THROUGH TRANSBAIKALIA The sledge-route that leads to the Chinese frontier goes southward from Verhneudinsk across the territory of Transbaikalia. In old days one reached its starting-point by traversing the frozen Lake Baikal in sleighs, muffled in furs against the sweep of the terrible winds, with plunging ponies at full gallop. Now, after mighty effort and at monumental cost, the line of the great railroad has been driven through the last obstacles that blocked an open way, and trains carry the traveler through the deep cuts and tunnels that pierce the barrier crags around the Holy Sea. It is not the express that one takes at the Irkutsk station to reach the ancient fort, but the daily post- train, the servant of local traffic. Luggage-cumbered passengers crowd into the cars wherever there is a place. A few, and these mostly officials, establish themselves in the blue-painted first class. Many press into the yellow second class — merchants, lesser chinovniks, tradesmen, popes, and children on their way to the city schools. Swarms pour into the green wooden-benched third, where the throng ing tousle-headed emigrants patiently huddle closer SLEDGING IN TRANSBAIKALIA 115 to give room to newcomers. Next to the engine, with its big smokestack, is the mail-wagon, on whose sides are painted crossed post-horns and the picture of a sealed letter. Behind this, with a sentry on guard, is the baggage-car. The sinister compartment of drawn shutters and barred windows is for the prisoners. In this princes or artel-workers, their identity unsuspected, can be run across a con tinent to their unknown places of exile. The post-train starts from Irkutsk occasionally on time. In general, along the local line the time-table is about as reliable a guide as the calendars sold to the mujiks, with weather prophecies for each day of the year. Fifteen miles an hour is mean speed. Stops may be for minutes or for hours. One settles down therefore in the attitude sacred to a yachting cruise, — foie gras and bridge, if it is calm ; double reefs and pilot-bread if it blows up. The high heavens alone know when we are to get in, and nobody cares. It is not unpleasant withal to sprawl over a great broad couch, and as the train crawls forward watch the white highlands slowly unroll, the towering cliffs and peaks with spear-like pines driving up through the snow, and the icy lake below. For meals, one dashes out during the station- stops, and before the third bell gives warning of the start, devours meat-filled piroushkies and swallows lemon-tinctured tea at the long buffet-tables decked with hollow squares of wine-bottles, and beer from 116 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA the seven breweries of Irkutsk. If one has a teapot he can get boiling water from the government- furnished samovar, and milk from the peasant- women who stand in booths hard-by. He can add salt fish and hot fowl, together with rye-bread and butter, and then consume his rations at leisure in the compartment. At night the seats are let down, and one sleeps in fitful naps among the hills of bag gage. When morning comes, an hour-long proces sion forms to take turns at the wash-bowl with its trickle valve, in a towelless, soapless, and cindered lavatory. We leave Irkutsk at ten in the morning, and reach Verhneudinsk at seven next day, covering in twenty-one hours the 446 versts. Here is the last of the railroad. With troika, sledge, and tarantass, by highway and byway, over frozen rivers and camel-tracked trails, we must now follow the old road into the heart of Asia. The post-station that serves as point of departure for the sledge journey lies some distance away, at the edge of the town. An isvoschik, after due bar gaining, proceeds to transfer thither us and our dunnage-bags. As we ride through the town, just waking for the day, the streets, the lamps, the telegraph-wires, the comfortable houses, — each and every symbol of civilization takes on a new significance now that it is to be left behind. On the parade-grounds the recruits are at the morning drill, shouting lustily in unison, BAIKAL STATION THE HIGHLANDS OF TRANSBAIKALIA SLEDGING IN TRANSBAIKALIA 117 "Ras,dva, trel" to keep the step. We pass the bar racks, the shops with their brightly illustrated signs, and ride under the wooden yellow-painted Alex ander Arch. Soon we reach a street of low log houses, and a lofty boarded enclosure is ahead. At its gateway is swinging a black signboard, painted with post-horn and the Czar's double-headed eagle. "Postava Stancie," is inscribed over the lintel. Between the black and white-striped gate-posts we swing into the courtyard. To the left stretches a low log house. To the right, along the wall, are ranked sledges. In front are the stalls. Grooms, whip in hand, stand around in the courtyard, muffled against the cold. "Is the gaspadine going on?" one of them asks. On the reply, "Yes, at once," he scurries off to start harnessing, and you shoulder open the low felted door of the post-house and enter the big waiting-room. "Three horses ? " asks the young black-mustached agent within. " Yes, a troika sledge." He turns to the book of registry attached to the rough table by a long cord fastened with a big red seal, and begins to write. "The name? " he asks. It goes down. "The destination?" "The Chinese frontier at Kiahta." "Your first relay-station is Nijniouboukounskaia, twenty-seven versts." 118 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA The fare is set out in a printed placard posted up on the wall ; as is the price of a samovar, fifteen ko pecks, and all the other items that the traveler may require. The agent hands you the slip: "One rouble, eighty-two kopecks, for two persons, the gaspadine and his courier"; something under three cents a passenger-mile. As you wait for the harnessing of the post-sledge, the courier overlooks anew the bags and counts out again the parcels. As light as possible must be the impedimenta. Now is the last chance for change. The big station-clock ticks on. The agent moves about in the warm dusky silence of the house. The courier straps tighter the dunnage-bag. "Look that your furs are snugly fastened," he says. There is trample of footsteps by the door. A fur- clad, ruddy-faced driver stumbles in, makes the sign of the cross before the ikon on the further wall, and beckons to you. "Ready!" he says. Three shaggy ponies stand hitched to a wooden sledge, not high like those of city isvoschiks, but low and shaped like a wide bath-tub. The bottom is cushioned with hay and you are to sit some six inches above the runners. The bells hanging from the big arched duga over the centre horse jingle as he frets. The side horses, that will run loose be- SLEDGING IN TRANSBAIKALIA 119 tween rope-traces, look around at the yamshik who stands by. He holds in his mittened hands four reins of leather, twisted into ropes — two for the centre trotter, one each, on the outside, for the gal lopers. You climb into the nest of rugs and furs super imposed upon your baggage! The yamshik leaps to the precarious perch that serves as his seat. The whip falls, and with a bound the horses are off. Always one starts at top speed, however bad the way. Always one finishes at a gallop, however jaded the horses. It is the rule of the Russian road. With bells jingling, the driver shouting to clear the way, and a white cloud rising behind, the sledge skims out between the log houses which flank the straggling street. Dogs bark and the idle passers-by stare. Fur-covered pigs scramble up with a squeal, and scurry from their resting-places in the road. Girls, with shako-capped heads, peer through the windows. Little chubby boys, in big brown felt boots, cheer. Soon the uttermost houses of the town are left, . and emerging we plunge into the country road through open fields, dazzlingly, blindingly white. The trotter's legs seem to move too fast, as if seen in a cinematograph. The gallopers, free of all weight and held only by the two traces which fasten them, outrigger fashion, swing on like wild ponies of the steppe. Crude and massive as the sleigh may look, its burden is almost nothing on the hard compacted 120 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA snow. The horses in the rush through the bracing air seem to be the incarnation of the wind. A rut in the glistening road does not produce a disjointing shock, for, as a huntsman's bullet glances from the skull of a wild boar, so the sleigh glides into the air and swiftly down again at a long low angle. It is a fact of "flying." The cold is intense. After an hour of riding you have learned a certain lesson which adds to your experience. Whether the traveler shall make this winter journey equipped with full camp-kit, port able stove, folding -forks, thermos bottles, and shell- reloading tools, or Tatar fashion, with a rifle and a haunch of mutton, is important but not vital. Let him make sure, however, that the huge all-envelop ing sheepskin overcoat is at hand to supplement the coats beneath, and that a shaggy sleeping-rug is provided in addition to the blankets. One obstinate newcomer started with the insistence that a mink- lined Amerikanski overcoat, with two heavy rugs as lap-robes, would be ample. After an hour on the road, he turned into a peasant's hut to thaw out upon boiling tea, while the driver went back to the town to buy the hairiest robe and coat obtainable. These were thenceforth worn on top of the initial outfit. Siberia for a midwinter sledging journey exacts this tribute of respect. For versts the winter road follows down along the river between towering pinnacled rocks, where in summer eagles nest. The cliffs are vividly spotted SLEDGING IN TRANSBAIKALIA 121 with orange and green lichens ; below they are fretted with the scourings of ice brought down in the spring freshets. All along beside the road are the familiar pine-saplings planted in mounds by the villagers to guide the way. In the vast monotony and drifting snows travelers would be lost but for these land marks. Along the fertile river valleys hamlets are thick. A cluster of houses is met every six to ten versts. Presently the road leaves the river and bends to the left, cutting across fields. When it quits the bank, it climbs sharply a five-foot ascent. The driver does not even slacken speed. At the turn he swings the sure-footed ponies suddenly, and takes the slope, letting the outrigger bring up against a stiff clump of bushes. There is a crash, the sleigh has caromed off at right angles, nothing has befallen, and we are on again. Verst after verst of plateau goes by, with rounded rolling hills of dimpled snow, treeless, houseless, a barren waste. Then comes a crest so steep that the horses can only toil up it at a walk, and the passen gers must climb beside them. The forest closes in as the height is mounted, — white leafless birches and dark green pines. The light snow is seamed with rabbit-runs, and here and there are the far-spaced tracks of deer or wild goats. A mound of stones and a small pole with a Buddh ist prayer-flag — for here is the ancient home of the Buriats — mark the top of the ascent. There is a moment's halt while you climb in and the driver 122 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA tightens the saddle of the centre horse ; then down the giddy descent we sweep, in full gallop once more. The pines flash past, and you hold your breath in fear of the smash that must come should a horse fall, should a trace break, should a side rut swing the sledge over. One is, however, so close to the ground that an overturn is usually harmless, save to the clothes and the nervous system, both of which are at a discount in Siberian sledging. Then too the outrigger arrangement is such that the craft turns a quarter of the way over and slides on the supplementary runner until it rights. The cold is intense. One wipes away the snow from his fur collar, and the dampness on the hand kerchief has caused it to become frozen stiff. It is a crackling parchment that goes back into the pocket. Eyeglasses are unwearable, for the rising vapor from one's breath is caught and frozen on them in an opaque film. Fingers exposed but a moment become numb and useless, and uncovering the hand is an agony. Gradually as you ride, through the great felt boots, the triple flannels, the camel 's-hair stock ings, the fur-lined gloves, the coats and rugs, the cold begins to bite. You have become fatigued and depressed of a sudden. The driver points to your cheek, where the marble whiteness is eating into the flesh, and bids you rub it with snow. An involun tary shudder grips and shakes you relentlessly from head to foot. It is time to stop. If you try to go on beyond the SLEDGING IN TRANSBAIKALIA 123 next station you will, if the gods are lenient and you do not freeze, get out nerveless and trembling, not for hours to rally strength and energy. The chill will cling, however hot the post-house oven. Even now you are weak, beaten down, querulous, in a sudden feeble old age. The shudder means that the human animal is near his endurance limit. On an urgent call, with special preparations, you may travel for a hundred hours, night and day, without halt save for change of relays. Physically, it is possible to fight cold for a time. You can run along in all your furs beside the horses, you can beat your arms together, and rub nose and cheeks to keep the blood in motion. You can drink copious glasses of scalding tea in the post-houses, and live by stimulants on the road. Through ceaseless vigil ance and resolution you can keep from freezing, even while intense fatigue creeps on and vitality is going. But the persistent awful shudder is Nature's red lan tern. Run past it if you must, — it is at your peril. Dark against the snows, now a low-lying village comes into sight, — Nijniouboukounskaia, — and among its first log houses is one bearing the post- horn signboard. A cry rouses the jaded horses to a gallop, and covered with snow, the sledge sweeps into the yard. Steaming and frosted white, the animals stand with lowered heads. Stablemen run to unharness them. Stiff with cold and muffled like a mummy, you clamber out, and on unsteady legs mount the steps to the felted door of the posting-inn. 124 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA In the big bare room, beside the warm oven, robes and overcoats can be thrown off. A red-capped girl loads the samovar with glowing brands from the fire, and sets it humming for tea. Brown bread is produced and eggs, and a great bowl of warm milk. With these, and the contents of your bag of pro visions, can be eked out a welcome obeid. For the night's rest one need not seek a bed. There is never a spring to ease the bones from Verhneudinsk to Kiahta. There was discovered just once on the journey — at Arbouzarskie — an iron skeleton, bearing to a spring bed about the rela tion that the three-toed Pleistocene prairie trotter holds to a modern horse. The post-keeper had care fully hewn with his axe five pine planks to cover the gaunt limbs of it. The voyageur slept on the soft side of these timbers. Bed and board are synonyms in Siberia. For a couch there is to-night the narrow wooden law-provided bench, or — a less precarious perch, and equally resilient — the sanded floor. For bed ding, one has one's own blankets and coats. What if the shoulder slept on numbs with one's weight, or the corner of the soap-box in the traveling-bag, serving as a pillow, dents the tired head! One draws off felt boots and some of the outer layers of clothes, rolls the sheepskin about one, covers the head with a blanket, and sleeps like the forest bears in their winter dens. Just before daybreak is the best time to start, so SLEDGING IN TRANSBAIKALIA 125 that one can cover the most road possible while the sun is up. At ten or eleven, an hour's stop for lunch is advisable, and then on again until sundown. It is better not to travel after nightfall, as the cold is so much more intense. We dedicate the evening to hot tea, and then turn to the blankets and the bench. The stretch between Verhneudinsk and Troitz- kosavsk, officially rated at two hundred and eighteen versts, is really somewhat longer. A run of average record took from 4:20 p. M. Tuesday to 1 1 : 30 a.m. Thursday — forty-three hours and ten minutes. This included all relaying, seven hours a night for sleeping, dinner and breakfast halts, two accidents (an overturning and a broken runner), and one calamity — a Siberian who snored. The actual driving-time, over a road for the most part hilly, was twenty-two hours, five minutes, or just about ten versts per hour. Horses stand always ready, with special men at hand to harness. Drivers swing on their shaggy greatcoats, and with almost no loss of time one is out of the shadowed courtyard and on the road again in the dazzling whiteness of the winter day. In traveling "post," however, with relayed sleighs and big empty guest-rooms, one does not become acquainted with the life along the way. One has only hurried glimpses of slant-eyed Buriat tribesmen, of galloping Cossacks, trudging peasants, post-agents, girls who carry in samovars and 126 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA silently steal out, rosy-cheeked boys on the streets, and women at the house-windows. To know the people and see their daily life one must get away from the beaten highroad, strike out from the gov ernment-regulated inns, and blaze one's own path into the interior. First, you get a low passenger-sledge, long enough to admit of stretching out, and without too many projecting nails on the inside; then, three good ponies of the hardy Cossack breed, that are never curried or taken into a stable through the bitterest winter. The best animals procurable are none too good for climbing the passes away from the river- courses. The whole outfit can be bought for three hundred roubles in any of the interior towns. For drivers, there is a class of yamshik teamsters, who spend their lives guiding the sledge-caravans which carry the local traffic. One of these men, Ivan Kurbski, can guide you through a whole province, and lodge you every evening with some hospitable friend or recommended host. Whether he has him self been over all the changing by-paths in the wilderness of the Zabaikalskaia Oblast, or whether he mentally photographs the directions of his friends regarding each village, is an unsolved mystery. When the day's journey is done, Ivan will drive slowly down the crooked street of the village he has settled upon for the night's repose, looking keenly for landmarks visible only to him in this country, where every village and every house is mate to all SLEDGING SOUTHWARDS SLEDGING IN TRANSBAIKALIA 127 the rest. Sometimes he will ask a question of one of the innumerable urchins. But generally he seems of himself to hit upon the desired domicile. Day after day he will take you the sixty versts, lead you to the village stores to replenish the supply of candles or sugar, bring you surely to food and shelter at night, and take off all the burden of care for the outcome of each day's journey. If for the third member of your personal suite you can get an old-time servant to keep the guns clean, build the camp-fires when midday tea is to be taken out of doors, bring in the baggage and rally the best resources of each halting-place, you are doubly lucky. You will be sedulously tended, and be treated partly as a prince, partly as a helpless baby. Of this order is Jacov Titoff. Not the smallest personal service that he can render will you be per mitted to do for yourself. The telling of unpleasant truths will be carefully avoided, however certain the ultimate revelation. Though honest beyond ques tion, he pays you the naive compliment of relying upon your generosity in all the little matters that concern provisions and petty luxuries. He will open the package which he is carrying back from the torgovlia to extract matches and cigarettes for his own delectation, and will rifle unstintingly the re serve of canned sardinki. He cheerfully freezes himself waiting for deer, and stumbles up miles of snowy mountain in the beats. He is always in good humor, and without complaint for whatever comes. 128 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA He is ready anywhere, at any time, to sleep or drink vodka. Thus outfitted and manned, take your place, muf fled in furs, and seated on the felt sleeping-blankets. Guns are at your side, the bag of provisions is in front, your own little ponies paw the snow. They start off now, trotting and galloping beneath the duga. The air is frosty, clear, and thrilling as wine ; the snow is feathery and uncrusted, as when it fell months back; bells are jingling, and the driver is crying his alternate endearments and curses upon the shaggy ponies. Down the long rock-flanked river valleys, amid birch and pine forests, you will skim, by unwonted paths, through out-of-the-world villages, to see in their own homes the red-bloused peasants, the women spinning at the wheel, the peddlers and priests, the traveling Mohammedan doctors, the rough Buriats, miners and merchants, along the white way. The smooth main road is left now for newly broken sledge-trails across fields and over snow- covered marshland. Every available river is util ized as a highway, for along its winding length the path, smooth and level, is marked like a boulevard by the evergreen saplings planted by villagers to guide the winter traveler. One can pierce the dis tricts flanking the Chickoya's gorges, reachable at other seasons only by breakneck climbs. And one can see the real Siberia. On this first night of his incumbency, Ivan Kurb- SLEDGING IN TRANSBAIKALIA 129 ski lodges us with friends. He leaves us for a mo ment while he enters the yard by the wicket-gate to make due announcement, and the ponies hang their tired frost-covered heads. Your own bows under an equal fatigue. But the wait is very brief. Soon the big double gates of the log-stockaded courtyard open. The horses of their own accord turn in, and swing up to the steps of the house. You are handed out like an invalid grand duke, and are welcomed at the threshold, with a hard hand-shake, by a red- bloused peasant who ushers you up the steps, across the low-eaved portico, and through the square felt- padded door into the big living-room. As we all enter, Ivan and Jacov, caps in hand, bow and make the sign of the cross toward the grouped ikons high up in the corner opposite the door. The saints have guarded you on the way — are not thanks the devoir? Then you, as head of the party, must salute, with a " Zdravstvouitie," your host, the old Hazan father of the peasant who, wearing a gray blouse sprayed with vivid flowers at breast and wrists, sits on a bench beside the window. Now you may sit down beside the massive table on the other bench, which is built along the whole length of the log walls, and survey the curious world into which you have fallen. A woman of middle age, clad in bright red, is busy with a long hoe-like instrument pushing pots into a great square oven six feet high, ten feet to a side, and spotlessly whitewashed. To her right, in the 130 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA room beside the oven, is a girl of fifteen or sixteen, rolling brown rye-dough on a little table, in perilous proximity to a trap-door leading into some dark nether region. An old bent woman gravitates be tween the two. Glancing up, one meets the wonder ing eyes of three sleepy blinking urchins, who peer down in solemn interest from a big cushion-covered shelf, two feet beneath the ceiling. Looking about to locate the muffled sound of crows and clucks, one discovers, beneath the oven, a corral of chickens, pecking with perky bills at the whitewash for lime. On the floor is sitting a little girl crooning some endless refrain to a baby in a sapling-swung cradle. "The gaspadine will take chai?" asks the patri arch. From the woman's room beside the oven the girl brings a samovar. She sets it on the floor, be side an earthenware jar standing near the door, and dips out the water to fill it. Then with tongs she takes a long red ember from a niche cut in the side of the oven, and drops it down the samovar funnel. Round loaves of frozen rye-bread are brought out and set to thaw. A plate of eggs is produced from the cellar. One rolls off as the girl passes, and falls to the floor. Instinctively you start. Not so the oth ers. The egg has dropped like a stone and rolled away. But it is quietly picked up and put to boil with the rest. It is frozen so solidly that there is not even a crack on the shell. Jacov meanwhile is making earnest inquiry of the "old one." SLEDGING IN TRANSBAIKALIA 131 "How are your cows, Dimitri Ivan'ich? Your horses, are they well? And your sheep? All well? And have you had good crops? Is there still plenty of pasture-land in this village? Good 1 Good! — and how is your wife?" Poor withered wife ; she is bustling around looking after the children, and trying to help her daughter- in-law. Not so the "old one," the ancient man of the family to whom these courteous questions are addressed. The patriarch stopped his labors at fifty, and sits slumbering away his second prospective half -century in honored idleness. "Everybody works but father !" The samovar is humming now, and the table is decked with a homespun-linen cloth ready for the obeid. The first formality, as dinner is about to begin, must be observed. The various members of the family turn, one after another, toward the ikons, reverently crossing themselves. Then the host produces a bottle of a colorless liquid, shakes it up and down, and brings the bottom sharply against his palm. The cork shoots out, and he pours into a little glass a drink of the national beverage, vodka, which one is supposed to swallow at a gulp. Every time a guest enters, a bottle of vodka is brought out, costing 49! kopecks, half the average day-laborer's pay in this district. On feast-days the visitors go from house to house drinking, — and these prasdniks number some fifty-two days in the Russian year. Every business deal is baptized with 132 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA vodka. Every family festival, the return of a son from the army, the marriage of a daughter, — all are vodka-soaked. As one passes through villages on a saint's day, he may meet a dozen reeling figures and hear the maudlin songs from the courtyards where the men have gathered. The part played by vodka in the people's life is appalling. In the house now, all, beginning with the "old one," partake of this stimulant, solemnly gulping down their fiery potions. Then the family sits down in due rank and order, the " old one" in the cosiest corner, with the samovar convenient to his hand. You, as the guest, are beside him on the bench that lines the wall, then comes Jacov, next the son, then Ivan Kurbski the yamshik, and on stools along the inner side of the table, the grandmother and assorted infants. The mother alternates between the table and the oven. The samovar is tapped for tea as the first course of the evening. For all who come, tea is the obliga tory offering, in a cup if the visitor be familiar, but for special honor in a glass with a ragged lump of sugar hammered from a big cone-shaped loaf. This one nibbles as he drinks, for sugar is a luxury, not to be used extravagantly. The brown rye-bread, which has been thawed at the gaping oven-door, is next brought out, and raw blubber-like fat pork, in little squares, eaten as butter, and boiled potatoes, and the boiled eggs, curdled from the freezing. At Little Christmas, the prasdnik day which SLEDGING IN TRANSBAIKALIA 133 comes in early January, pelmenis, or dumplings, egg- patties (grease-cooked), and meat will be served, with cranberries and white bread. In Butter- Week everybody gorges on buttered Minnies, or pancakes, garnished with sour cream. Even a substance show ing rudimentary traces of a common ancestry with cake may be produced. As the shadows of the northern evening close down, a piece of candle is lighted to-night in our honor. Generally the burning brands for the samovar, propped in a niche cut at the height of a man's shoulder in the outer edge of the oven, throw the only light. Presently the candle is used up and the brands give a fitful flame, leaving the corners black as Erebus. From the baby's cradle comes now a plaintive cry, and one of the little girls goes over to dandle it. Up and down, to and fro, for hours together she works, singing her monotonous lullaby. The children, who have been lifted down from their eyrie above the oven, play on the sanded floor. The men remain oblivious and smoke their pipes, letting fall an oc casional word, which comes forth muffled from their great beards. Ox-like, all sit for a while, sipping occasional cups of tea. Then the woman and the girl go out and get wood, remove the pots from inside the oven, and build up a roaring fire. The children are rolled up for sleep in their little blankets on the floor. The men reach for their furs and felts. They go to the 134 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA left of the oven, the women to the right, and the children are between, making a long row in front of the fire. Soon all are sunk in heavy sleep. The little girl alone sits up to rock the baby. As you doze off in the genial warmth of the newly-stoked oven she is still crooning her lullaby in the dim fitful light of the firebrands. Through the long night all lie like logs. Toward morning, as the oven's heat dies down and the bitter cold creeps in, sleep becomes uneasy. One stirs and then another. Finally the woman rises and wakes the girl, and they go out into the cold for wood and water. Presently the men bestir themselves, get up, and wait for their tea. The rising sun of another day casts its rays through the windows. As the sleepers one by one arise and stretch, their blankets are folded by the watchful woman of the house, and thrust up on the children's shelf. Some of the men go across the room and let the water from the little brass can in the corner trickle over their hands. Some do not do even this. For the outlander of washing proclivities, peculiar problems are offered by a country of no wash-bowls, no soap, only occasional towels, and the tea samo var as the only source of hot water, a copious draft on which not only postpones breakfast but compels some of the women of the family to go out and chop ice for a new supply. Necessity evolves the tea- tumbler toilet method as our solution. You borrow one of the precious tea-glasses from the old woman, SLEDGING IN TRANSBAIKALIA 135 fill it to overflowing with warm water from the sam ovar, and prop it up on the window-sill. The top inch of water is absorbed into a sponge which is put aside for future use. Into the remaining two and a half inches a soaped handkerchief is dipped, with which one washes one's face, touching tenderly the spots recently frozen. The reserved sponge will do to rinse off the detritus of this first operation. Two and a quarter inches of water are left, of which half an inch may be poured over the tooth-brush. With an inch and three quarters left, one has ample to lather for a shave, as well as to wet the nail-brush which is to scrub one's hands that will be rinsed with the sponge. Half an inch remains finally to clean the brushes and razors. "There you are!" With two glasses one may have a bath. When the breakfast of rye-bread and tea is ended, the men go out to their various winter tasks, of which the most serious is felling trees in the forests, cutting them up, and getting home the wood. The women keep stolidly at their cooking, cleaning, child-tending, and turn to the spinning-wheel and hand-loom when other work does not press. In the weeks that follow, each night brings us to a different home, but never to a changed environ ment or atmosphere. This type of life is found, not only among the Trans-Baikal peasantry, but throughout all Siberia. The log houses down the long straggly village streets look out upon the same wooden-walled courtyards, — the women peer- 136 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA ing from their little windows as the sleighs jingle past. The same ikons with burning lamps look down as you enter; the same whitewashed oven and shelf and cradle are there as you push open the felted door. The women of each district wear the same traditional costume. The bearded host produces the same vodka. One of the most im pressive sights, when one drives out before dawn into the frosty air, is to see at almost the same moment from every chimney the black smoke roll upwards, then dwindle to a thin gray streak. Each woman has risen and heaped green wood into the cooking-oven. It is as if one will actuated simul taneously all the people. At places the master of the house has a trade, shoemaking or saddlery, and the big living-room is littered with pieces of leather and waxed cord as he stitches. Sometimes there are hunters in the family, and ancient flintlock muskets rest on the antlered trophies. The men gather together oc casionally to drive deer. But in general, as the win ter is the men's idle time, a little wood is cut, the cattle are seen to, and for the rest, talk, tea, and tobacco, until it is time to eat and sleep once more. The women on the other hand seem to be always occupied, but they are not discontented. The customs and institutions which bind together the household group are unique. In all families the Hazan is supreme. To him first of all, strangers pay their respects. To him every member of the house- VILLAGE STOREKEEPER SIBERIAN TYPES SLEDGING IN TRANSBAIKALIA 137 hold comes for advice as to whom he or she shall marry, and which calf shall be sold. Howsoever hard of hearing he may be, there is related to him all the events of the neighborhood with infinite minuteness. He is the repository of all moneys earned by logging for a neighboring mine-owner, or for bringing out to the railroad the sledge-loads of rye. As head of the family he can summon a forty- year-old son from the merchant's counter in Kras noyarsk, or his nephew from the fur- traffic in Irkutsk, and bid him return to his peasant hut. If a grand son wishes to go to Nerchinsk to seek his fortune, the " old one's " consent must be obtained before the youth receives his passport. It is all at the patri arch's sovereign pleasure. We come one day upon a vexatious example of this ancestral authority. A report reaches us, by chance, of a hibernating bear's hole some fifty versts away, which one of the peasants has located. The host, noting our interest, asks : — "Would the gaspadine like to hunt him?" There is no question on this score, so the peasant is quickly brought to the hut. Numerous friends crowd in with him, for one person's business is everybody's business in these primitive commun ities. For a liberal equivalent in roubles the man agrees to act as guide, and the start is to be made early next morning. All is arranged and he goes out with his body-guard to make the necessary pre parations. By and by there is a stir. Our sledge- 138 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA driver comes in with a long face. Then half a dozen peasants add themselves to the family quota in the hut. Soon more come, until the stifling room is as populous as a Mir Assembly. They are all talking at once, and there is a great hubbub. At length one voice louder than the rest seems to call a decision for them all. They turn backward again, and with many gesticulations bustle through the felted doors into the snowy streets, and through the village to a house which they enter in a body as if with intent of sacking it. Instead they bring out and over to our hut a slight bearded old man, bent with the weight of many winters — the father of the peasant guide. Humble but resolute, he faces the assembly. "No, I cannot consent that he lead the gaspadine to the Medvetch Dom." " But assure the 'old one ' that his son will only point out the den and then go away." The "old one" answers: — "The bear does not come to steal my pigs. Why should I get him shot? Besides, a bear chewed up three Buriats last year. It would be sad to be de voured even for the gaspadine' 's fifty roubles." The reward is doubled, and forty kopecks' worth of vodka produced. Many advisers give aid, and one suggests that "the son may mount a tree one hun dred sagenes from the mansion of the bear!" But still the father refuses. "No, I will not allow him to take out his horse and hunting-sledge." The son, whose half-dozen full-grown children are SLEDGING IN TRANSBAIKALIA 139 looking on, shakes his head dolefully. A big eagle- nosed peasant, of hunting proclivities, comes in. "I will give my hunting-sleigh if he will go," he calls. But the shrill voice of the "old one" rings out again, " I do not consent. I do not consent. My son shall not go to the mansion of the bear." The guide shrugs his shoulders. We have hit the ledge of Russian authority. No one will budge. The old man has his way. As is the management of the household, so is that of the village. While the Hazan rules over the com mon property of the family {izba), the village elder (Selski Starosta) is guardian over the grouped households which make up the Mir. As the house hold goods belong to no one individual, but are com mon property, so the land farmed by the villagers is a joint possession whose title rests with the com mune. The family is held for the debts and behavior of all of its individuals ; and similarly, with certain limitations, the village community is answerable for the taxes and discipline of each of its members. On a humble scale it is the spirit of socialism incarnate. Within the commune no capitalistic employers, no wage-taking worker-class, no castes exist, and no individuals are born with special priv ileges. No distinctions of rank or fortune lift some above their fellows. The manner of living is the same for all. Each head of a family has a right of vote, and elects by the freest, simplest means his own 140 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA judges and village rulers. The land, the source of livelihood, is divided among the producers by their own unfettered suffrage. The chief man of the community — he who drums out the voters to the Mir, lists those who do not work sufficiently on the pope's field, and reports the toll of taxes to the Government — is simply an elderly peasant clothed with a little brief authority. There is no household in the average village which is looked up to as more genteel than the rest. No such distinctions as prevail in America will reveal that such a farmer's family is musical and well-read, such another has traveled to Niagara Falls, such a third has blue-ribbon sheep. In Russian peasant circles all is equality, almost identity. Here is presented the best example in the world to-day of an applied system based upon the commun istic as opposed to the individualistic theory. It is therefore of more than local interest. Most appar ent of all results is the economic stagnation which has accompanied the elimination of special rewards for special efforts. The man, more daring or more far-sighted than his fellows, who would take for him self the risk of a new enterprise, who would mort gage his house to buy a reaper, or would seek a farther market, is fettered by his plodding neighbors. His financial obligations, if he fail, fall on the others of a common family, whose members have a veto on his freedom of action. His own and his neighbor's fields by the allotment are proportioned in extent to SLEDGING IN TRANSBAIKALIA 141 the old hand-labor standard. A machine has few to serve until the fields are readjusted to a new stand ard. While technically a man may buy or rent lands outside the commune and may introduce a new rotation of crops or agricultural tools, actually the inertia of the peasants bound to him by the brotherhood of the Mir weighs the adventurous one hopelessly to the earth. Who can persuade an as sembly of bearded conservatism-steeped " old ones " to buy for the Mir the costly new machines? Per haps, with the visible demonstration of profits which private enterprise could make under an individual regime, the doubting elders might consent. But who is there to show them when every village checks back the swift to the lock-step of the clod ? Nor is it simply in material things that communism manifests its lotus-fruit in these country hamlets. Ignorance, unashamed, broods over them one and all. What a dead level is revealed by the fact that one peasant in a populous village on the Chickoya, our guide upon a shooting-trip, could not tell time by a watch, and had never seen such an invention. Some instances are related where the more ambi tious men of a Mir have clubbed together to bring in a teacher at their own expense. The Semieski, or "Old Believers," big, red-bearded, obstinate men, settled in Urluck in the Zabaikal, who dissent from the sixteenth-century revisions of Bishop Nikon, will not send children to Slavonic schools and may have schools of their own. But these cases are rare. 142 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA There is among the peasantry almost no education and comparatively little desire for it, yet how far this sentiment is from being a racial or national failing the crowds that come to the city universities bear ample witness. In one of the villages a teacher from Chita is established in the side room of a peas ant's house, wherein one night we sojourn. He has been appointed by the Commissioner of Schools of the Cossack Government. He is of a good Nerchinsk family and is brother to an elector of delegates to the second Duma. He is one of the " Intellectuals " — the student class which forms almost a caste by itself. A free-thinker, keenly interested in the rights of man, a Social Democrat by politics, he goes shoot ing on Sunday with some peasant cronies. He plays Russian airs on his balilika and gets the peasant's daughter to dance for the guest. He produces speci mens of antimony and chalcopyrite, and discusses the geological probability of finding silver or plat inum ores in these districts. Photographs of the amateur-kodak variety are along the walls, and on a table in the corner are a mandolin and a pile of books. We pick up a volume, — "L' Evolution de la Moralite," by Charles Letourneau. The young owner, who consumes a prodigious number of Mos cow cigarettes, tells of the indifference to education among the people. "Here we have a school in a big village, with two other communities near by. There are easily five hundred households, — with how many children in SLEDGING IN TRANSBAIKALIA 143 each, you can see. Yet we have but thirty boys at school. What can we do?" He is discouraged, this single "Intellectual" of Gotoi. Profoundly solicitous for the future, an idealist, boundless in hopes for the good of his race, he sees the younger generation submerged at the threshold of opportunity by the inertia of the old. '"What good will it do for him to read?' ask the peasants, when I urge, 'Send your boy to the school.' What can I say? The boy comes from my class after two years, and goes out with the men. He has no money to buy books if he wants them. No newspapers come to the village, no printed mat ter whatever, save that on the pictures which they buy in the fairs. In a few years all I have taught is forgotten. The darkness is over these villages. One must lift them despite themselves." Beyond the range of the village communes, no people show a more eager zeal for knowledge and study. In the cities almost all of the younger gener ation can read and write. The school-boys, with their big black ear-covering caps, smart blue coats, brightened with rows of brass buttons, and knap sacks of books, are one's regular morning sight. "Realistic" and "Materialistic" schools are estab lished in many towns. The apathy of the rural element is to be laid at the door of the system which hinders those within the confines of the communes from reaping the fruits of special sacrifice and effort. No one 144 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA attempts to raise himself in the Mir, where the dead weight of those bound to him is so hopeless. If any boy, brighter than the rest, follow some lodestar, it must be to a city. The aspirant must bury ambition, or leave the drudging Mir with its toll of taxes and recruits. He will not study law before the wood-fire as did Lincoln in his log cabin. The cloud of deadening communism over their lives utters itself in the words continuously on the peasants' tongues. It is the northern equival ent for that buttress of despotism — "manana." The possibility of the Russian condition is "niet- chevol" If the red cock (krasnai petuk) has crowed and has left the forty householders with charred embers where stood their homes, "nietchevo!" They build it up of wood and straw, with the oven chimney passing through as before. Does a raging toothache torture, "It is the will of God, — niet chevo!" If the weary day's climb sees a gameless evening, "nietchevo!" If the son is frozen in the troop-train, "nietchevo!" If the Little Father send to Yakutsk the other one who has gone to the city, "nietchevo!" Is the unrevised tax for a family of ten men pressing down upon three, " It has got to be borne, — nietchevo!" It is this bowing to fate as a thing begotten of the gods, when it is a force to be fought here on earth ; the long-taught submission to evil, when evil is to be conquered, to limitation when opportunity is to be won, — it is this spirit which is holding rural Russia still in her Dark Ages. SLEDGING IN TRANSBAIKALIA 145 The origin of the present village-system goes back to the time of serfage, when the overlord held his dependents herded together for easy ruling. That it extended to unfettered Siberia, where the rewards of individual effort were so obvious, cannot be laid entirely to old custom or government compulsion. Nor is it to be explained by the early necessity for protection against wild beasts or hostile natives. The same dangers threatened the pioneers of our own country. Perhaps the Russian spirit of gregari- ousness lies at the root of the fact that in the Czar's domains the peasant lives away from his fields to be near his neighbors, while our people live away from their neighbors to be near their fields. What ever the cause, the outcome is that practically the whole rural population, even in the most thinly settled districts, is gathered into villages, and owns the lands in common. The system makes enormously for homogeneity, welding, solidarity. The people are a " mass." Units are lost in unity. Nothing save Nature's im print and law of individuality, that decree under which every created thing is some way different from every other, keeps the Russian peasant from quite losing his birthright. The commune, vodka, and resignation are the incubi of Siberia. In the towns and cities gather the energetic natures that have climbed out and above them. What these have done, their allied people — the peasants — can do. Beyond the horizon of the latter's narrow 146 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA lives lies still the borderland of possibilities. One cannot doubt the vigor of the stock, nor the cer tainty of its rise. This quality of rugged worth is the basis of all the great advance that the pioneers and the city populations have made. It is only in the Mirs, frozen fast in their lethargy of com munism, that resurrection seems such a far-off dream. The way is long for the peasants of Siberia — long and toilsome. But their vast patience is allied to as vast a courage, and both will lift them into the larger day. The measure passed by the last Duma, decreeing the division of the Mir lands in severalty, and private ownership of property, will be one of the most momentous and far-reaching enactments ever legislated for a people. It should end for rural Russia the stagnation, and open an era of mighty endeavor and achievement. There are many races here among the serenely tolerant Siberians, undiscriminated against and un coerced. While one of the Orthodox may not abjure the state religion without severe punishment, those born to an alien faith are unmolested by official or proselyting pope. " God has given them their faith as he has given us ours," is the Russian rule. This medley of races beneath the Russian banners gives to one's earliest contact the conception of a heterogeneous disorganized jumble of nations and peoples. But closer acquaintance impresses upon one the dominating and surviving qualities innate SLEDGING IN TRANSBAIKALIA 147 in the Slav, whose unalterable solidarity is beneath and behind the kaleidoscopic types of aboriginal tribes and exiled sectarians. By race-absorption, like that which has evolved Celts, Danes, Saxon, and Norsemen into English ; British, Dutch, Swedes, Germans and Italians into Americans, the Slav is dissolving, transmuting to his own type and mould ing to his own institutions the varied peoples. Though the heterogeneous blood adds to the total of Siberian country life, it is the Slavic race that determines the permanent order of this great land. Primarily too it is the peasantry who shape its destiny. Their possibilities are the limit of Russia's ascent. Their condition is therefore of far deeper than sightseeing interest to the student. Unlike the picturesque peasantry of Holland, here they are the foundations of the state, forming not an insignifi cant minority but ninety per cent of the population. Somewhat of a new spirit flickers here and there in Siberian hamlets. The peasant is superior to his Russian brother. The traditions of serfdom were broken by his severance from the old environment, and wider lands give him an abundance unknown save in a few favored parts of Europe. The political exiles have through the centuries added an upsurge of independence and personal self-consciousness, which is markedly higher than the Oriental humility of Occidental Russia. The influence of the criminal, as distinct from the political convict, is felt primarily in the cities, such as 148 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA Irkutsk and Vladivostok, to which the time-expired men drift. The convict element is always met with. It has been customary to billet a condemned, who was not wanted at home, upon some out-of-the-way village, giving him a passport for its confines alone. The victim might have been a Moscow professor or a locomotive engineer, but in the Mir he must farm the land given him. Naturally such seed as this planted in Siberian hamlets does not produce the traditional peasant faith in God and the Czar so faithfully preached by the popes. Another influence making for upheaval is the returning recruit. We are in a peasant house when a soldat comes back to the family from his service. If he has not brought any great burden of salary, he has accumulated tales enough of the outer world to hold in breathless excitement the circle of friends and relatives which gathers at once when the tink ling sleigh-bells and the barking have announced to the village his return. Far down the street is heard the jingle of his sledge. It brings every girl to her peep-hole window, and every boy from his sawing to the courtyard door. At the gateway where the newcomer turns in, he is heralded by the commotion of the household guardians, wolf-like in appearance and nature. Everybody within the important house runs to the door. The village knows now which family is mak ing local history. The arrival is accompanied al ready by two or three men who have recognized him SLEDGING IN TRANSBAIKALIA 149 as he descends. He tramps in with military firmness of tread, head erect. Before he greets the grand father even, he makes the sign of the cross to the holy ikons, and, bowing down, touches his lips to the floor. Then comes the respectful kiss to the old man, next to the mother, while the younger brother, soon to go to service himself, stands awkwardly by, and the little children look half-dubiously at a form scarcely known after his four years of absence. Then there is a scurrying of the grown and half- grown daughters to prepare chai and to produce the pelmenis and brown bread. The villagers drift in one by one, cross themselves, and speak their greet ings, until the little house is packed, and. as hot as the steam-room of a banno. The vodka-bottle is out and everybody has settled down for an indefinite stay. The soldier's tales of war and garrison duty and government and revolution hold the family and the audience breathless through the long evening. As you drop asleep, the hero is still reciting and gesticulating. The guests in departing will be care ful not to stumble over you, so nietchevo. In one of the houses where we put up, a shop adjoins the big living-room. It has dingy recesses from which hatchets and the commoner farm uten sils can be produced, shelves of homespun cloth, and gaudy cottons for the men's blouses, and beads for the women's bonnets. Here, as in the country- stores of our own land, during the long idle winter days there is always a crowd and endless discus- 150 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA sion of the village events, — the health of each other's cows, births, marriages, deaths, drafts into the army, taxes. Even in this remoteness something of the echo of great Russia's struggle is heard over the shopkeeper's tea-cups. We hum, unthinking, a bar of Die Beide Grenadier, in which a refrain of the Marseillaise occurs. A peasant looks quickly up. "It is not allowed, that song," he says. "Why not?" "That is the song of the strikers." "But the gaspadine is a foreigner. He may sing it." "Yes," says the peasant, "he may sing it, but I may not. . Would that I might !" One meets quaint characters in this inland jour neying — veteran soldiers of the Turkestan ad vance; "sabbato sectarians," who keep Saturday holy rather than Sunday; austere "Old Believers," traveling peddlers, teamsters who have tramped beside their ponies over three provinces. One comes upon peripatetic Mussulman doctors, in snug- fitting black coats and small black skull-caps, who show their Arabic-worded road-maps and much- thumbed medical works bound in worn leather. Be side their plates at table the kindly hostess puts piles of leathery bread, unleavened, and made without lard in deference to their caste rules. A shop in one village is kept by a Chinaman, who, lettered like most of his race, seems a far PEASANT TYPES SLEDGING IN TRANSBAIKALIA 151 shrewder and more intellectual person than the uneducated Russian peasants. He invites the stranger to drink tea that his special caravan brings, and presents Chinese candy with the courtesy of a grandee. When, in reciprocity, the traveler buys sugar for his chai, he receives it wrapped in paper covered with hieroglyphics and exhaling the faint unmistakable Chinese odor. Going always southward, one begins to meet more and more frequently the villages of the Mon gol-descended Buriats. "Bratskie" (brotherly peo ple), the Russians call them, for despite the forbid ding aspect that flat Mongolian features, high thin noses, yellow-brown skins, and big squat bodies give them, no more peaceful, harmless, and hos pitable people exist. They are great and fearless hunters, unexcelled riders, and though still only on the threshold of civilization, are rapidly moving to better things. All phases of the advance from the nomad to the agricultural stage may be studied among them. The pastoral Buriats, decorated like the Chinese with queues, ride around after their flocks. Their villages lie far away from the lines of convoys, un marked on the Ministry map, which one is supposed to be following. Each family occupies a little windowless wooden hut, some fifteen feet in diame ter. In front of it is planted a pole, carrying at the top a weather-faded pennant, the colors of which in Buriat heraldry indicate the tribe and name of 152 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA the occupant. Behind the hut are stacks of hay and a wooden corral with sheep and horses. Beside it stands the summer tent, of felt, looking like a great inverted bowl. It is empty in winter, save for a shrine with grotesque pictured gods, fronted by offerings. In the homes of these least advanced Buriats we loiter no longer than we must. The wooden house which shelters them is hermetically sealed, and is crowded with people and animals. Fenced off in a corner of the first that receives us is a corral of thir teen lambs, which at uncertain moments begin to bleat suddenly in unison, producing, with startling effect, a prodigious volume of sound. When one has been roused from sleep half a dozen times a night by this chorus, he is strongly inspired to move on. The men are out during the day looking to their flocks. The women spend a good part of their time sewing furs or making felt. They are very unclean, and it is a decided relief to get out of their homes, to which the cold compels one to have recourse on a long journey. In spring, with great and understandable relief, these semi-nomads take to their felt tents and move where fancy and pasturage dictate. One grade higher are those Buriats who have learned some rudimentary farming from the Ortho dox. You will see the men threshing on a level floor beside the corral. They are dressed in long blue or magenta fur-lined cloaks and colored cone-shaped hats. Other Buriats are permanently resident in SLEDGING IN TRANSBAIKALIA 153 the Slavonic settlements, and send their rosy-faced children to school. They mix with the Russians, subject to almost no disabilities, and their better classes contract inter-racial marriages, which seem, to an outsider, at least, completely happy and successful. It is no small thing, this which Russian rule has done for the Buriats. A people whom any other na tion would spurn in racial ostracism, perhaps would eliminate, live side by side with the good-natured Slav in perfect accord, progressing in civilization and material well-being as high as the individual can aspire to and attain. They are ruled by their own chiefs, whose sway is tempered by the benevolent supervision of the general government. They are represented in the Duma by men of their own selection. They freely worship the Buddhist Burhan in their lamasery near Cellinginsk, without pope to preach or mis sionary to proselyte. Their easy citizenship is un- harassed by money taxes, and their only obligation is Cossack service in the army. But Cossack service to a Buriat is what a picnic is to a boy. Riding around on horseback, rationed by the Government, visiting a city with real tobacco and vodka some times attainable, sleeping on a straw-stuffed mat tress with no tethered lambs to murder sleep, when they are used to a sheepskin on the dirt floor, — all this is luxury of blissful memory, during the years of the reserve. The net result is that the Buriats 154 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA are entirely content. They are progressing all along the line, and are being made useful to the nation, not by unpayable taxation, but by the service which they are so especially fitted to render. As one nears Chinese territory, by the lower waters of the Chickoya River, the villages of Slavic colonists who hold their land on tax-paying peasant tenure, have given place to the Buriat tribesmen and to the stanitzas of the Cossack guard that occupy the pale of land flanking the frontier. Within this border-belt, every village stanitza holds its quota of Cossacks. These soldiers are for the most part de scendants of the levies from the Don region, trans planted to the Trans-Baikal by the Government's despotic hand in the eighteenth century, and since then forming an hereditary military caste. Many of them are bearded Slavs, indistinguishable, save for their accoutrements, from their more peaceful neighbors. Others are of a peculiar cast of counten ance, due to the mixture with the Asiatic tribes in ancient times, when the hunted people fled to their ancestors' asylum, the territories beyond the Volga and on the Don. There is great variation in type among the imported Cossacks. Most are Orthodox, but a very large number are "Old Believers," or Semieski. In all the houses now hang the yellow cap and the uniform coat, which must be ever ready against the call of duty. Arms are in the corners of the rooms, and everything has a military look, in marked contrast to the peasant homes. Crude, SLEDGING IN TRANSBAIKALIA 155 highly-colored prints of Japanese defeats, which circulated broadcast in Russia during the war, share the attention usually devoted excusively to holy ikons. Portraits of Generals Linevitch and Kuro- patkin, and Admiral Alexiev, are tacked to the walls. In one house we saw hanging a prized silver watch, one of those distributed by General Rennen- kamp among the soldiers of his command. One of our Cossack hosts is an old man, Orthodox, and of Russian origin, but with some ancient Asiatic blood, for only a stringy beard grows on his kindly, wrinkled face. With reluctant pride he tells of his three sons away on service, leaving but himself and two daughters at home. With frank happiness he shows you his medals. Every soldier at the front received a round brass service-medal ; his, however, a silver cross with St. George and the Dragon on it, is given for valor. He will not drink the vodka he offers you, — rheumatism. But in order that you may smoke some alleged tobacco that greatly inter ests him because he gathered it himself by the road side, in Manchuria, he starts up his pipe despite the dust-induced coughs that it begets. He is a kindly, loquacious old man. Another Cossack, privileged to the broad yellow top on his cap and the yellow stripe on his trousers, is, for the time, our guide and gun-carrier. His flat strongly-mustached face is open and ingenuous. He tells of his sotnia in Manchuria. " I was with Mitschenko at the front during the 156 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA war, in his great raid," he says. "Ten of our sotnia of a hundred were killed, forty wounded. We got behind the Japanese and burned four hundred of their wagons. We had two hundred rounds of car tridges, and more when we wanted them. But food often not, and meat sometimes not for two months. We had thirty Buriats in our hundred, but the Verh neudinsk Polk were almost all Buriats." In one house where ikons, oven, bench, and stockade reveal the Slav peasant's home, the mir rors are shrouded for their forty days' veiling. It is a place of death. The owner was a full-blooded Buriat married to a Russian woman. In silent grief she plods through her mechanically-executed duties. Their son, in red blouse, is in prayer beside his father's body. They have pressed us to remain. The advent of strangers seems to distract their thoughts a little. From outside comes a hail, and heavily there dismounts from his pony an old griz zled Buriat Cossack. He has ridden two hundred versts to pay this last respect to his friend. His military training makes the Cossack a little less gentle than the average peasant. When off duty, hen-roosts near a garrison are in some danger. For the rest, he is naturally brave, generous, and will share the chicken he has just ridden forty versts to lift. He will give his pipe to be smoked, and will behave with a thoughtfulness and courtesy that is not found in finer circles. His children have the free unrepressed air which speaks of genial home kindli- SLEDGING IN TRANSBAIKALIA 157 ness and sympathy. His wife is far from being a mute drudge. Assuredly this is not the Cossack of legendary fame, the "implacable knout" of the czars. It re quires almost courage, in the face of the savage of literary tradition, to assert that the Cossack is other than a dehumanized monster of oppression. Why then did he cut down with utter ruthlessness the helplessly frozen grenadiers of the Grande Armee? Why will he massacre indiscriminately men, women, and children on his path from Tien-tsin to Peking? Why will he beat with his knotted whip the striking girl students of Kiev? Who shall tell? To a certain extent he is callous to suffering because of a defect ive imagination. He will ride his best horse to death if need be. Loving it, he will yet leave it out in weather forty below. He is cruel, often, because he has not the substituting gift needed to translate another's suffering into terms of his own. He is valorous because, even so far as regards himself, he cannot think beyond the immediate privation into the future of imaged dread, so he goes fearlessly into unpondered peril. He offends the traditional ideas of humanity and civilization in killing people, because of his failure to recognize a wider radius of sym pathy than circles his own tribe. But if the tribe circumscribes his idea, the nation circumscribes the sympathies of others who make tariffs to crush an extra-national industry and raise armies to destroy a foreign liberty. But if outside the Cossack's re- 158 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA cognized circle, you are to him beyond the pale, in his home, you are, ipso facto, a member of the tribe, a brother in whose defense he will gayly risk his life, and spend his substance. The deeds that are recalled to the • Cossack's discredit often fall for judgment really to those who plan and issue the orders which loyalty makes him obey. Where his allegiance has been once given, there it remains. His hataman is more than a superior officer; he is the chief of the clan, the head of all the tribe, and the subordinate is united to him by the traditions of centuries of mutual depend ence. Where other than blood-kin officers are put over the Cossack he mutinies, as when, in Man churia, Petersburg-schooled lieutenants were drafted and raised to command. But give him his own right ful chief, then if the Cossack is told to do something it is done. He will cross himself and jump from the tower, as in Holland did Peter the Great's guards man at the word of the chief to whom he had given his loyalty. The savage valor of the warriors in Verestchagin's picture, The Cossack's Answer, is typical of the spirit of these soldiers. Surrounded by battalions of the foe, fated to annihilation when the summons to surrender is rejected, the leaders, laughing uproar iously in approval, hear their hataman dictate the insulting reply that dooms them all. If one would ride to China he can have no better guards and com rades than the Cossacks. SLEDGING IN TRANSBAIKALIA 159 We are close to the border now, climbing the last crest which separates the Chickoya from the Cel linga Valley, our toiling tired ponies white with frost. All day the long sweep of the hills has been taken through heavy snow. The landscape is barren, de solate, and lifeless save for the occasional sight of a distant Buriat horseman. The sun is slowly sinking. The crest at last ! The driver points with his whip to the dark masses of houses below, wreathed in the curling smoke of the evening fires. Here and there is a brilliantly painted building or tower, and sleighs and horsemen are passing in the streets. "Troitz- kosavsk!" he says. He points further ahead to another more distant town, whose most dominant features are the great square tea-caravansaries and a mighty church, green-domed, with a gilded far- glimmering cross. The huddled houses end sharply toward the south, as if a ruler had marked off their limit in a straight stretch of white. Along this pale are little square sentry-boxes, striped black and white. In the evening sun a distant glint of steel flashes from the bayonet of a pacing sentry. "Ki ahta!" the driver says. Then, across the white strip where a wooden stockade girds a settlement of gray-walled compounds, fluttering with tiny flags, gay with lofty towers and temples flaunting their red eaves, he points a third time : " Kitai !" (China). He picks up the reins, and lifts the whip; "Scurry!" he cries to the horses. The ponies leap 1 60 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA forward, throwing their weight against duga and collar, and we sweep down the hill toward the near est Russian town, Troitzkosavsk, four versts from the border. As we come down to the main road hard-by the town, officers of the garrison drive past with their spick-and-span fast trotters, city-wise, as one sees them in Irkutsk. Behind rolls a Mongol cart driven by a burly Chinaman. A Buriat, come to town to replenish his supply of powder and ball, follows on his shaggy pony. Down a long street, flanked first by log cabins with courtyards and fences like those in the peasant villages, then by stucco-plastered houses, cement- walled government buildings, and great white washed churches, we pass and reach the centre of the town. Then we turn up a side street to the house of a mine-owner, to whom we are accredited. Nicolai Vladimirovitch Tobagov meets us at the door of his log house, clad in gray flannel shirt and knee-boots. A not unnoteworthy product of Siberia is this man, — squarely built and yet wiry, with nervous strength expressed on his bearded face. He is self-made, risen from the masses. A peasant-boy, he started life as assistant to a surveyor, learning to read and write by his own efforts. During this apprenticeship he studied his chief's books on geo logy, by the light of the brands for the samovar in the peasants' houses where they were billeted nightly. SLEDGING IN TRANSBAIKALIA 161 He located placer gold in a number of spots, at a time when the oblast was a lawless "no man's domain," without any legal means in existence for acquiring title to property. Guarding in silence his secret, he waited years, until at last a mining-law was enacted for the oblast where his prospects lay. When this law ultimately made private ownership possible, he started in to realize. A friend lent him the money for a mill, which he constructed, accord ing to book-descriptions, on the model of those in California. At first it failed to work, and broke again and again. His riffles were set too steeply. They had let the gold scour away, and his neigh bors reported that there was no gold to collect. But he fought it through to victory, returned every borrowed kopeck with interest, bought new ma chines, and prospered ; till now, besides controlling several mines, he possesses a great domain in the river valley, some hundred versts away, with fields of wheat and rye and hay-meadows. When the visitor has stamped the snow from his felt boots and emerged from his shaggy bearskin coat and hooded fur cap, he enters the main room, with its walls of great logs bare of ornament and showing the scorings of the axe, but clean as new- planed wood can be. Between the chinks straw and moss are packed to keep out the cold. Two great benches flank the sides of the room. Not a picture, not an ornament, not a curtain, not a drapery, not a shelf, breaks the plainness of the log wall, but here 162 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA and there are hung guns and rifles. In essentials this large house does not greatly differ from the typical peasant's dwelling. But a copy of the "Sibir" newspaper lies on the table, and photo graphs of the female members of the family are added to the many reproductions of relations in military dress, which the photographer has touched up with brilliant dashes of red, to pay tribute to the coat-lining, and white to indicate the gloves. Lamps replace the lowly tapers, and they burn before more gorgeously gilt ikons. The windows are double, with cotton-wool and strips of colored paper be tween. This is a great improvement on the single ice-crusted window, with its perpetual drippings down along the sill. There are the little sheet-iron stoves, whitewashed after the tradition of the oven ; chairs with backs, as well as the square stools ; and small rooms curtained off from each other. A clock hangs on the wall, and there are carpets on the floor. A large table stands at one end, on which is the ever-boiling samovar, which is nickel instead of brass. We are made acquainted with the wife of the host, a stout matron of fine domestic proclivities. Though of humble origin, she has discarded her peasant shako and bandana-handkerchief headdress for a bonnet, and dispenses, as to the manner born, many luxuries. On the other hand, she has lost the robustness which keeps her peasant sisters fresh and hearty. Sewing-machines, and beds, and servants, SLEDGING IN TRANSBAIKALIA 163 must exact toll even in Siberia. Her boys are clean- cut and intelligent. They go to school and are the future " Intellectuals " that are seeding Siberia. Six teen children — eleven Nicolai Tobagov's own, five adopted in open-hearted generosity — sit down to four very solid meals a day in the big hall. Ivan Simeonski, optovie and argove merchant, and Nicita Baeschoef the lieutenant, traveling west on fur lough, are stopping in this friendly house, and many other guests are here. The hospitality of the house hold is conducted on a scale of patriarchal magni ficence. Before our furs are fairly off, the host has called aloud for obeid. One's first formality is, as usual, to salute the ikons and the guests. One's second is to escape the scalding vodka, seventy proof, and then begin with the zakuska of ten cold dishes on the side table. There is black caviar from the Volga, though the rapid diminution of the supply has raised the price to ten roubles a pound. There is red caviar from the Chickoya, cold mutton, cold sturgeon, sardines, ham, and sliced sausages made at home. The latter must be abundantly and appre ciatively sampled, because they have been specially prepared under the direction of the souprouga her self. One stands before the zakuska and dips from dish to dish. Next, the guests take the square wooden stools and draw up to the great table, where the plates are set for the real dinner. Each one helps himself to the smoking soup, which is 164 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA passed in the tureen. As this is being ladled, a plate of round balls comes by, the delicious piroushki, dough-shells filled with hashed meat, always served with soup. We have entered upon a typical Siber ian meal, with the boiled soup-meat eaten as the second course, and madeira, champagne, claret, and rum, indiscriminately offered. A perfect babel of conversation goes on, and one is pressed to try this, try that, try each and everything of the long menu, under the watchful eyes of the kindly host and hostess. At all times of the day the samovar is left simmer ing, ready for any one of the multitudinous house hold to brew tea, and constantly replenished zakus ka dishes deck the sideboard. Guests, attendants, children, and friends come and go in the utmost freedom. Such is the Hazan' s life. In another part of the building there stuffs to re pletion an army of dependents. Servants, artisans, drivers from the caravans which pass up from China by the road below the house, a whole other below- stairs world is here. Twenty caravan teamsters, karetniki or isvoschniki of the sledges and carts that fill the ample courtyard, huddle in the back rooms for tea. An old bespectacled maker of string-net doilies, who reads Alexander Pushkin's poems, is working out a week's board in the room where the chickens are kept. The housewife does not disdain, either, to find a place for the traveling sapojnik, who will put leather reinforcements on the felt A CHICKOYA GIRL TROITZKOSAVSK STUDENT SLEDGING IN TRANSBAIKALIA 165 boots which have been worn through at the heel. It is a large easy way of living, this of the man who holds a leading place in the border city. A mixture of crudeness and culture, of luxury and hardship, of Orient and Occident, runs through the quaint fabric of frontier society, with its medley of races and types. Fine avenues flanked by stuccoed houses pierce the main city. Back of them lie the log houses of the plainer citizens, while the out skirts are occupied by the felt huts of the Buriats and Mongols. Students in uniform elbow Cossacks of the Guard, and maidens from the seminary brush the Mongol wood-choppers. "Teatre?" suggests one evening the twenty-year- old son of your host. Of course the invitation is ac cepted. At eight o'clock you put on your felt boots, and tramp down past dark-shuttered log houses and the silent white church into the field, where stands a barn-like building placarded with the programme. The young guide secures seats at the ticket-counter of rough lumber. Seventy-five kopecks they are, each. With them are handed out eight numbered slips of red paper. Then together you break a way to the front rows, through the crowd of burly Cos sacks of the garrison, bearskin-capped students, citizens with shiny black boots, and here and there a husky stolid-faced Buriat. Keeping hat and coat on, as does every one else, we find seats on the rough benches wheresoever we like or can ; for nothing is reserved save the elevated perch of the musicians, 1 66 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA where a four-piece orchestra drones out a mono tonous Russian march. What a fire-trap ! is the first thought. To each of the posts that sustain the rafters is fastened a lamp shedding an uncertain light on the hangings of bright-red cotton cloth, in dangerous proximity to which, utterly disregarding the "no smoking" signs, stand the crowd of forty- kopeck admissions, rolling and smoking perpetual papirosi. As the impatient audience begins to pound and stamp, a bell rings, and the curtain rises on two comic characters busily engaged in packing for a hurried departure from their lodging. The stage has become a room, with red-cotton-covered walls and bright green curtains. A merchant comes with a bill for comestibles six months due. He is quieted with extravagant tales of forthcoming change for a hundred-thousand-rouble note. The landlady enters, and the shoemaker's apprentice with a pair of mended boots. Both are likewise cajoled and bullied away. The Jewish money-lender is more difficult, but at length, to the manifest delight of the audience, he, too, is staved off, and the pair draw the vivid green curtains and go out through a window for parts unknown, amid much glee and applause. We now go out to the "buffet" and contribute to the dangers of conflagration by smoking an offered cigarette. We also add to the theatre's income by buying a glass of hot chai for ten kopecks. Some thing special is in the air for the next act. The audi- SLEDGING IN TRANSBAIKALIA 167 ence is buzzing and moving in eager expectancy. We return to our seats. The curtain rises upon a double row of two-pud (sixty-four-pound) weights, such as are used at the bazaar to sell frozen beef. Amid a thunder of stampings on the plank floor one of the escaping debtors of the last act, dressed in tights, comes out from behind the green curtains, and lifts one of these above his head. Then he poises one with each hand. Finally a wooden harness is adjusted to his body, and sixteen weights (or about half a ton), are heaped upon him by the jack-booted Buriat stage-attendant on one side, and the de frauded merchant of the first play on the other. It is the most unspectacular performance possible, this athletic test, but it takes the place of a football match in Siberia. The applause is ferociously ap preciative. More chai and cigarettes, and we come back to hear a very pretty girl, dressed in the peasant's costume of Little Russia, head a chorus, and to see a boy in red blouse and boots dance the wild dervish whirl which the peasants of tradition are supposed to execute. The boy is in the midst of his perform ance when there is a tumult among the forty- kopeckers under the musicians' eyrie. The latter, being human, try to watch what is going on below and play jig-music at the same time, and sharps and flats fly wide of the mark till the sounds become frightful. Everybody jumps up on his bench to see a peasant having a turn with a Buriat, and further 168 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA trouble brewing with a Cossack who has got upset in the m£lee. There is a chaos of tossing hats and brandished fists, and the two armed soldiers who are on guard as policemen press in, with gruff shouts to make them way. The tumult finally goes out the door and into the street, and we turn back to the poor dancer still trying to beat out his stunt. The curtain rises next on the manager, who has been up to date weight-lifter, escaping boarder, and part of the peasants' chorus. He is seated at a table, looking very ordinary in his street clothes. Behind him is another table covered with an assortment of crockery, mirrors, spoons, vases, pieces of cotton cloth, and a big striking clock. He calls for a volun teer from the audience for some unknown purpose, and a little rosy-cheeked uniformed Buriat school boy, who has been peeking behind flapping curtain between the acts, responds. The boy reaches into a box and pulls out a slip of paper. The manager reads a number from it, " Sto piatdeciet sem." An eager voice from the rear answers "Jes!" The ;stage-attendant takes a glass tumbler from the table and carries it solemnly to the man who has an swered. Your host nudges until you comprehend that you are to excavate the eight theatre-slips, which you do, to find that two only are seat- tickets. The rest are numbered billets, and you are liable at any moment to receive a perfumery-bottle or a can dlestick from the lottery which is in progress. The scene now takes on an imminent personal interest SLEDGING IN TRANSBAIKALIA 169 shared with the banked forty-kopeckers behind. A breathless strain accompanies the drawing of the numbers. It mounts to a climax as the big musical clock is approached. The fateful billet is at last drawn in intense silence. Every eye is fixed on the reader. Not a Cossack speaks, not a Mongol moves. "Dvesti tri!" and a sharp "Moil" tells that the clock goes to ornament the table of a burly peasant, who grinningly receives it. The tense breaths are let out, the forms relax, and the crowd straggles to the door, lighting cigarettes and pulling down caps. The drama is over. Next morning at eight a soldier visits your host with a message from his chief. "Bring to the police-station the passport of the stranger seen with you at the theatre last night." A town droshky will take one the few versts to Kiahta, wherein the Geographical Society's museum is the celebrated sketch of the Dalai Lama made at Urga by a Russian artist, when the young Tibetan monk had fled before the English expedition to Lhassa. Here, too, are ore samples and recon structed Mongolian tents. But it is hard to look at fossil rhinoceros-heads and at stuffed sabre-toothed tigers and musk-deer when the camel-trains are passing and China is a verst away. A courier is necessary now, for resourceful Jacov and driver Ivan are strangers beyond the border. Perhaps our host knows of a man acquainted in Mongolia? He will inquire. Next day there presents himself a slight, bearded, intellectual man, Alexander Simeonovich 170 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA Koratkov, usually called, for short, " Alexsimevich." Bachelor of forty, educated in the Troitzkosavsk "Realistic" school. He speaks, as well as Russian, Mongolian, English, French, German, and some Chinese. He has translated for the English engin eers who were brought in to work the Nerchinsk mines. He is deeply read in Buddhist mythology and sociology. Will he go down into Mongolia with you ? Yes ; and so it is arranged. Provisions are cheap and abundant in the Siber ian towns. Sixty kopecks buy a pound of caravan tea, seventeen kopecks a pound of sugar, the sort that comes in a cone like a Kalmuck hat. It is a luxury by warrant of public opinion, so much that it has, of note, been served on baked potatoes. Before the Buddha pictures of the Buriats, a few lumps may be the choicest offering. Flour costs six kopecks a pound. Beef, if a great pud-weight fore- quarter is bought at the market, twenty kopecks. Frozen butter will cost twenty-five kopecks per pound. Eggs, of the Siberian cold-storage variety, forty-eight kopecks a dozen. For thirty kopecks one gets a piece of milk as big as one's head. But do not try to go beyond the native produce, for canned goods, coffee, or sardines. It is bankruptcy speedier than buying bear-holes. A big magazine will sell pate de foie gras, imported from France, at two roubles the tin ; while beneath the Chinese caravansaries' arcade, bales of tea will be sold at a few kopecks a pound. One gets cigars in a glass- SLEDGING IN TRANSBAIKALIA 171 covered box, with the government stamp, for a rouble and a half, and they will be worth about as much as the strings of twisted tobacco-rope which the Mongols carry off as their single cherished luxury. And now for transportation. The sledge can serve no more, for the snow goes bare in places along the caravan trail. We must have a tarantass, and in time one is produced for inspection. A cask sawed in half, lengthwise, is the image of it6 body, a lumber-cart the model of its clumsy wheels and framework. To the tarantass is hitched the trotter, with his big bow yoke to bring the weight of collar and shafts on his back rather than against his neck. At each side of him, with much such a rig as is used to tow canal-boats, are made fast the two galloping horses. When one goes beyond the post-route with his own equipage he has, fastened under the driver's seat and behind his own, bags of oats and hay, which must serve as emergency-rations for the horses against the days in which none can be se cured along the often deserted trail. Personal pro vender must be likewise stored away, bags of bread, frozen dumplings to make soup with, tea, sugar, milk-chocolate, milk, candles, cheese, matches, kettles, and whatever else one can think of, or that the ingenuity of Alexsimevich can devise. Hay is piled into the tarantass bottom to supply the want of springs. A driver who knows the trails has been found, 172 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA Andre Banchelski, a tall Siberian, of timbering and hunting antecedents, who has a small stock of Mongol idioms regarding the price of hay and the location of water. He has reached a very good understanding with Katrinka, one of the household dependents, and Nicolai is taking an interest in him. To-night we go to sleep on Nicolai's plank couch, ready for the march of the next day. All is ready. To-morrow we cross the Chinese frontier. IN TATAR TENTS The shaggy ponies, white with the frost of the morning, stand harnessed to the tarantass; Andre in his belted sheepskin shuba, whip in hand, is perched on the bag of oats; Alexsimevich sits in a greatcoat of deerskin, with only a nose and a tri angle of black beard visible. The host, in his gray surtout, and the red-bloused drivers of the sledges scattered in the courtyard, all have left their sam ovars to see the start. The children of the family peep from behind the mother with her gray shawl- covered head. They group at one side, under the eaves of the doorway, while Josef, one of the house hold servants, swings back the ponderous gates. The reins are drawn in, the whip is lifted, the horses are leaning forward into their collars, when the cry of "Andre!" comes through the opening door way. From behind the gathered onlookers, who turn at the sound, runs out Katrinka, dressed in her best red frock. "Andre!" she cries. He pulls back the starting horses, and Katrinka lifts up to him a little bag embroidered with his initials in blue and red. "For your tobacco." He looks down into her eyes and smiles. " Spasiba 174 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA loubesnaia," he says, and pushes it into the breast of his shuba. "De svidania, Andre!" she whispers, then runs back, confused. The teamsters laugh, pleased and amused as big children at her blushes, and her brother shouts a commentary from the gateway. " V period! vpe- riod /" says the interpreter. He has reached forty now without falling before the charms of any Siber ian girl, and he does not sympathize. "On! on!" The horses swing out of the great gateway into the snowy streets, with "Good-bye! Good road!" called in chorus after us. At a slow trot the lumbering carriage rolls through the quiet town, misty in the cold of the morning. The row of shuttered shops, with their crude pictures of the wares within, are opening for the day. The little park with the benches, which are trysting-places of summer evenings, cushioned now with six inches of snow, and the low log houses beyond, loom up and retire rearward, as we pass. The white church and the fenced cemetery of Troitzkosavsk are left behind, and we are on the broad paved road by which a sharp trot of half an hour brings us to Kiahta. Its scattered houses now in turn begin. The big tea-compound, of four square white walls, flanks us and is gone. The officials' residences and the bar racks of the garrison appear and vanish behind. The street opens out into a big square, where, shim- IN TATAR TENTS 175 mering against the white ground, stands the great church of Voskresenie, the Resurrection. On its green dome, lifted high in appeal and in promise, gleams the gilded cross. In white and green and gold Russia raises inspiringly the symbols of Slav onic faith before the doors of the heathen empire. As we pass the white Russian church, the litany of the popes and the answering chant of the choir come faintly wafted from within. But even as the Christians sing, the clash of distant cymbals and the roll of a far-off prayer-drum meet and mingle with the echoes. On the hill across the border, in vivid scarlet against the snow, with painted walls, sacred dragon-eaves, and flapping bannerets, flames a Chinese temple. Here now is the borderland of empires. The neu tral strip is in front, a hundred sagenes broad. The Cossack sentries stand at ease before their striped boxes, which face toward Mongolia. Far to the east and far to the west are seen stretching the long lines of posts marking the boundary. The outmost sentry, as the tarantass rolls across the strip, hails you with a last "De svidania!" (God speed !) Past the Chinese boundary-post, covered with hieroglyphic placards and shaped like the lotus- bud, we drive, and in under the painted gateway of the gray-plastered wall. No Marmlicher-armed Chinese regulars, like those that in Manchuria throng to hold what is lost, guard this half-forgot- 176 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA ten road. No sentry watches; no custom-officer bids the strangers stop. Through the open gate we ride into the narrow street of the trading city of the frontier — Maimachen, the unguarded back door to China. In life one is granted some few great impressions. None is more striking than that experienced in passing beneath the shadow of this gabled gateway. Behind are kindred men, the manners of one's own kind, police, churches, droshkys, museums, theatres, the whole fabric of European civilization. From all these one is cut away in the moment of time taken in passing the neutral strip. Two hundred yards have thrust one into the antithesis of all western experience, into an utterly strange environ ment, where the most remarkable of the world's Asian races lives and trades, works and rules. Everything which is made sensually manifest by sight, by sound, by scent, by action, is weirdly alien. You three in the tarantass are as men from Mars, isolated, and moving among people foreign to your every interest and experience. The solitary strangeness of your little party in the tarantass, started into a forbidding land, the first confronting vision of the eternal Orient — these are the things for which men travel. As you go slowly down the narrow lane-like street, you catch glimpses of banner-decked court yards seen through great barred doors in the gray mud walls. Here and there a sallow blue-coated IN TATAR TENTS 177 Chinaman, with skull-cap and queue, passes by, his folded hands tucked into his long sleeves, fur- lined against the cold. Chinese booths and shops are open. Waiting traders, seeing yet invisible, behind the many-paned paper windows, look out ward through the peep-hole. In the city square a halt is made before a Chinese store, for a last provisioning. At the entrance half a dozen Russian sledges are drawn up. Here can be had the supply of small silver coins indispensable for the road, canned goods of European origin, and a bottle whose contents may be less like medicine than is vodka. Though the goods come all the way from Peking on camel-back, they are much cheaper than the tax-burdened provisions over the border in Russia. Indeed many of the main Chinese stores, with their surprising stocks of wines and pates de f oie gras, candies, and Philippine tobacco, are sup ported by Russian inhabitants of Kiahta and Troitz kosavsk. It is amusing to watch the enveloping of champagne-bottles in sleigh-robes, and the secreting of cigars beneath fur caps for the return journey. We stroll a little way down the street, among the Chinese booths for native wares, where sturdy shuba-robed Mongol tribesmen are bartering sheep skins for blue cotton cloth, metal trinkets, quaint long-stemmed metal pipes, and wool-shears with big handles. They are probably getting deeper in debt, as usual, to the wily traders. We pass the haymarket in the shade of a ruined temple, where 178 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA the Mongols have heaped their little bundles of provender. All the while one has an eerie undefined senti ment that something is lacking. It is not that the houses which face the narrow main street are low and poor, that the gray mud-walled compounds are grimly unwelcoming with their closed iron- studded gates. It is not that the small stocks of goods in the shops tell of a vanished prosperity, now that the bulk of the tea-trade has left. It is not anything material, but an oppressive indefinable feeling that something is lacking. Only when Alex simevich makes a chance remark, do you realize consciously what it was you instinctively felt, "It is queer to be in a city where there is not a woman or child." Some have explained the exclusion law which controls the situation by the self-sufficiency of the Chinese, who wished no real settlement of their people here, — the fruit of a pride deep-rooted as that underlying the custom which brings every corpse back to China for burial. Others, by the desire to avoid transmitting to the Empire the dis eases that are rife in Mongolia. Whatever the basis, the regulation is in full force to-day. At one time merchants in Maimachen kept their wives across the border in Russia, which under a subterfuge was not technically forbidden. But the ability to hide behind a technicality is a blessing enjoyed especially in democracies. It did not go with the chief of A WAYSIDE TEMPLE IN TATAR TENTS 179 police, who came down for a squeeze which made it more profitable to pay the women's fare home than to continue to offend. Associating with the native Mongol women is here precluded by the fact that there are no settle ments near by from which the Chinese might get indigenous consolation. A deserted tract lies behind the town. Only camel-drivers, wood-cutters, and sellers of cattle come into Maimachen, and they leave at night. For though the Mongols, in their pointed hats, pass along the streets, none may law fully live within the stockaded walls, and none keep shop beneath the carved eaves of the houses which flank its narrow streets. This is the prerog ative of Chinese traders from beyond the far-off Wall. The spectacled merchant Tu-Shiti, who has be come prosperous from the sale of Mongol wool, retakes for a visit, every two years, the long camel- trail to Kalgan and China. The tea-trader, Chan- tu-fou, drinks his wares alone. The slant-eyed clerks and booth-keepers trotting down the streets in their skull-caps, hands tucked up the sleeves of their blue jackets, plan no theatre-parties or amity balls, or sleigh-rides in the biting air, as over the way in Kiahta. The seller of sweetmeats will never be told to be sure and inclose the red and black New Year's card. There is no red-cheeked Chinese boy to smile as he munches your sugar; to puzzle over your ticking watch as at Kotoi, or to tease 1 80 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA the tame crane in the courtyard. Not a girl appears on the narrow streets. It is the sentence passed upon the generations of Chinese who have gone to Mongolia, that no woman of their race shall pass the Wall. And so it must remain, for never a home will be founded till China, the unchanging, shall change. Back and forth through the thoroughfares go the little men with the queues flapping against their backs and their sallow uncommunicative faces. Are they thinking of the time when they will have made their little fortunes and can get back to China to enjoy them? As they wait for customers in the little booths, do they plan the homes which none of their blood may ever possess in Mongolia ? When they sleep on their wooden platforms, do they dream of faces in the Kingdom of the Sun? Never will one know. Around the thoughts of the Chinaman arise the ramparts of his isolation. What he believes, what he hopes, what he dreams are not for you. The soul of China is behind the Wall. The tarantass rolls out of the quaint weather worn gateway of the woman-less city of Maimachen. "How much they miss!" says Andre, filling his pipe from the new pouch. "How much they es cape!" retorts Alexsimevich. When in hot haste Pharaoh ordered out his great war-chariot to pursue the rebellious Children of Israel, and thundered through his pyloned gate way with plunging horses urged by the shouts of IN TATAR TENTS 181 his Nubian charioteers, he must have experienced, despite contrasts, much the same physical sensa tions as those which we feel when the tarantass starts in full gallop across the level plain to the distant range of mountains ; but where Pharaoh's robe was white with dust, ours is white with snow, and the sun, which baked his road, makes ours endurable. The horses leap free under the knotted lash of the Siberian driver. With the rumble of low thunder the ponderous wooden wheels bound over the rutty road, hurling the springless tarantass into the air and from side to side. You brace yourself with baggage and hold to the sides, but toss despite all, like corn in a popper. The hay on which you sit shifts away to one side, leaving the bare boards to rub through clothes and packs. A sudden splinter makes you jump like a startled deer beside the way. In this noisy tarantass, down the narrow road grooved with the ruts of the Mongol carts and sledges that have gone northward, you tumble and groan and bump and roll out across the open country. There is a wide plain from Maimachen. It climbs into the first barrier-range and the forest belt of Mongolia, whose plateau is the third terrace in the rise of land from the low frozen flats of the Northern Lena to the Roof of the World, — the Himalayas of the south. The northern city of Yakutsk is at a very low elevation, only a few feet above the sea. 182 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA Irkutsk on the fifty-second parallel is 1521 feet in altitude, Troitzkosavsk on the fifty-first is 2600, Urga on the forty-eighth 3770, Lhassa 11,000 feet. Far to the northwest, Mongolia is a forested fur region ; far to the south is Shama — the desert. Here at the north and east the forested belt of the Siberian highlands south of Baikal breaks off al most at the boundary. Snow is over everything, but thinly. It has been worn away on the road, leaving brown patches over which the tarantass, mounting the long slope with horses at a slow trot, lugubriously thuds. A long stretch of straggly trees and stumps tells of Kiahta peasants going over the border to cut wood where no timber-laws limit. Up and up we go, the way steeper every sagene, — afoot now and the horses leaning and pulling at the traces. Finally silhouetted against the sky appears a rough pile of stones. At its top bannerets are waving from drooping poles. It is the Borisan on the summit of the pass to which every pious Mongol adds an offering, until the pile is many feet high, with stones, sticks, pieces of bread and bones. Some throw money which no one save a Chinaman will com mit the sacrilege of touching ; some give a Moscow paper-wrapped sweetmeat, some a child's worn hat or yellow-printed prayer-cloths waving on their sticks and fading in the wind ; — everything is holy that is given to the gods. A piercing wind, searching and paralyzing, IN TATAR TENTS 183 meets the tarantass beyond the crest at the south ern border of the forest: it is Gobi's compliments to Baikal, the salute of the great desert to the great lake. The horses stumble through the drifted snow, scarcely able to walk. The driver, blinded, half- frozen, keeps to the general direction of the oblit erated trail. Barely one verst an hour is made, until, under the shelter of the bald white range of hills, the road reappears and the wind is warded off. A rolling plain between the heights is the next stretch of the way. The afternoon sun, dimly bright, creeps haloed through the lightly falling snow. Deep in the mist appears a dark moving mass. It grows, focuses, and takes shape into a shaggy beast of burden, and camel after camel emerges from the haze, loaded with square bales of tea. ' 'Ask if there is shelter near," you shout to the muffled head of the interpreter. "I will ask," he replies. Then to the caravan leader : "Sein oh!" he cries in greeting. The foremost camel stares stonily as its Mongol driver twitches the piece of wood which pierces its upper lip, and the whole train stops. "Gir orhum beine?" " Ti, ti, orhum beine!" comes the answer. "It is close at hand." Forward the caravan slowly paces, each camel turning his head to stare as he passes out into the mist again. One of them has left a fleck of blood in each print of his broad spongy foot which the driver 184 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA will cobble with leather at the next halt. Along their trail you drive southward. The mist is clearing as you rise, and the sun shines down on the snow which has crystalized in little shafts an inch high. These spear-shaped slivers have a brightness and a sheen of extraordinary brilliance, and like prisms show all the colors of the rainbow. They cast a gleam, as might a mirror, a hundred yards away. It is as if upon the great white mantle had been thrown haphazard treasuries in rubies and emeralds and diamonds and opals, — myriad evergrowing rivals of Dresden regalias. The sun goes down with its necromancy. Beyond, the soft blanket enfolds the rolling hills. It drapes the rocks and weaves its drooping festoons about the barren mountain-sides. "Mongol yurtai" calls Andre, turning to point out with his whip the low dome-shaped hut, black against the darkening sky. On its unknown oc cupants we are to billet ourselves, sheltered by the rule of nomad hospitality. As the tarantass nears the wattled corral, the watchful ravens stir from their perches. The picketed camels turn to stare. A gaunt black hound stalks out, with mane erect and ominous growls. "Nohoi," cries out Alexsimevich, to the inhabit ants of the hut; then adds to you, "Very bad dogs ! It is a Mongol proverb : 'If you are near a dog, you are near a bite.' " Beneath an osier-built lean-to a woman is milk ing a sheep, with a lamb to encourage the flow. IN TATAR TENTS 185 She calls a guttural order to the dog, which slinks back. Then she comes to the wattled fence, while the sheep which has been getting milked escapes to a far corner of the yard. The woman's head is curiously framed by a triangular red hat, and silver hair-plates, which hold out like wings her black tresses. The shoulders of her magenta dress are padded up into epaulettes two inches high. She is girded with a sash. "Sein oh!" says Alexsimevich. "Sein!" she answers, and opens the gateway to the enclosure around the hut. Andre drives in among the sheep and cows, and you climb lumberingly down with cold stiffened limbs. Andre puts his whip upon the felt roof, for it is a deadly breach of etiquette to bring it into the house. "You go in," said Alexsimevich. It is like entering a kennel, this struggle through the narrow aperture, muffled to the eyes in double furs and awkward felt boots. As you straighten up after the crawl through the entrance, a red glare from the fire just in front meets the gaze. Stinging smoke grips the throat ; you choke in pain. It blinds the smarting eyes. You gasp and stagger. Then some one takes your hand and pulls you violently down on a low couch to the left, where in course of time breath and sight return. There is no chimney, nor stack for the fire of the brazier, which stands in the centre of the hut. One can see the open sky 1 86 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA through the three-foot hole above. The smoke, finding its way toward this aperture, works along the sloping wooden poles which form the framework of the felt-covered tent, filling the whole upper section with its blinding fumes. To stand is to smother. Sitting, the head comes below the smoke- line. With recovered vision, one can look around within the hut. The couch of refuge, raised some six inches above the floor, is the bed by night, the sitting-place by day. Against the wall at the left hand, and directly opposite the door, is a box-like cupboard, along whose top are ranged pictures of grotesque Buddhist gods, before whom are little brass cups full of offerings, millet or oil, in which is standing a burning wick. Beside the door is a shelf loaded with fire-blackened pots and kettles. Branches of birch for fuel are thrown beneath. On the far side of the room, three black lambs, fenced off by a wicker barricade, are huddled together, quietly sleeping. Seated beside the fire close by is the girl of nine teen who has just saved you from asphyxiation. The long fur-lined working-dress, common to all ages and sexes of Mongols, is buttoned on her left side with bright brass buttons, and is belted in with a sash. She has not the padded shoulder-humps, nor the spreading hair arrangement, which gave to her mother, who welcomed us, so weird an appear ance. A MONGOL BELLE AND HER YURTA A ZABAIKALSKAIA BURIAT IN TATAR TENTS 187 Her complexion is swarthy like an Indian's, not the Chinese chalky yellow, and she has red cheeks and full red lips. Her eyes are large and black. The rest of the party have stayed a moment out side to ask about hay and water. You have made this solitary and awkward entrance. The girl has no more notion than a bird who the strange man of another nation may be, who has stumbled into her home. But it does not trouble her in the least. For a moment she looks you over calmly, with a smile of amused curiosity, rolling and wringing with her fingers a lambskin which she is softening. Then composedly she bids you the Mongol welcome, " Sein oh!" and holds out her hand. Her grip is as firm and frank as a Siberian's. Now Alexsimevich comes tumbling through the door, and next Andre. Both are used to these huts, and artistically stoop below the smoke-line. All our impedimenta — blankets, furs, pots, kettles, bread- bag, rifles — are heaped in a mound within the space between the couch and the tethered lambs. The girl has not stirred from her work. "They are friends of yours then, Alexsimevich?" you ask. "No, no, I never saw them," he answers. "Any one may take shelter in any yurta in Mongolia." A small head suddenly makes its appearance from the pile of rugs on the sofa opposite on the women's side of the tent. There emerges, naked save for a bronze square-holed Chinese cash fastened 188 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA around her neck, a little slant-eyed three-year-old. The water in the small cups offered to the dokchits has long been ice, and one has full need of one's inner fur coat and cap in the hut, where the en trance, opening with every visitor, sends a draft of air, forty degrees below zero, through from the door to the open hole which serves as chimney. And still this tot can step out naked and not even seem to feel it. "The child's name?" asks Alexsimevich. "Turunga," replies the girl. "And your own?" "Sibilina," she says, and smiles. Turunga carefully inspects you, and solemnly accepts a lump of sugar which she knows what to do with, even if it is a rare luxury offered to gods. She sits down, in an evidently accustomed spot on the warm felt before the brazier, to play with the scissors-like fire-tongs, carefully putting back the red coals that have fallen out on the earthen plat form. The tarantass-driver, having piled up your imped imenta, excavates from its midst the bag of rye- bread, which he sets to thaw. He gets next the little bag of pelmenes, the meat-balls covered with dough-paste which you carry frozen hard. The mother comes in from under the yurta's flap, and, placing a blackened basin over the brazier, puts into it a little water and scours diligently with a bundle of birch-twigs. She brushes out this water IN TATAR TENTS 189 on the earthen floor near the entrance. This is the picketed lamb's especial territory, to which the felt rugs before the couches and the altar do not extend. A big bag of snow which she has brought from outside is opened and the chunks are piled into the basin, where, while one watches, it melts down into water. "Boutzela! boutzela!" she cries soon, holding a lighted sliver over the basin to see by: "it boils." Into the Mongol's pot go our pelmenes, to brew for a few moments. An accidentally trenchant descrip tion of Siberian pelmenes was given on the quaintly- worded French bill of fare in the hotel at Irkutsk : "Meat hashed in bullets of dough." They come out, however, a combination of hot soup and dumplings, very welcome after the long cold day's drive across the plains, the frozen marsh, and the rolling hills. The wooden Chinese bowls from the bazaar at Troitzkosavsk are filled now with our hostess's big ladle, and the application of warmth inwardly gradually thaws the outlying regions of the body. But there is trouble in camp. Turunga is moved by the peculiar passions of her sex and her age, curiosity and hunger. It does not matter in the least that she has home-made pelmenes every two or three days — she wants these particular meat balls. The little mouth begins to pucker and the eyes to screw up. No amount of knee-riding by the mother takes the place of the pelmenes. We fill 190 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA a heaping ladleful and Andre furnishes his own bowl. The mother receives it, holding out both her hands cup-fashion as is the etiquette, and Turunga is satisfied. The mother looks kindly to the stranger and smiles at Andre, then throws more sticks of the pre cious firewood on the embers. Andre has caught, likewise, the not unadmiring glance of the young maid. The girl who waits in Troitzkosavsk is not the only one who appreciates our six-foot Siberian hunter. The dog barks in the yard, but without the menace which hailed us, and the crunch of a horse's hoofs sounds on the frozen ground outside. The flap opens, with its inrush of freezing air. Stooping, there enters a typical Mongol, squat of figure, round of head, with broad sunbrowned face and a short queue of black hair. He wears a funnel-shaped hat, magenta-colored, and is enveloped in a long shuba, with brass buttons down one side like a fencer's jacket. About his waist is a sash with jingling knives and pouches. He is the head of the family, come in from herding his horses. He turns back the long fur-lined cuffs which have protected his gloveless hands, and stretches out both his arms for you to place your hands over his. It is the man's ceremony of welcome. Then he produces a little porcelain snuff -bottle. This must be received in the palm of the right hand with a bow. It is to be utilized, and passed back. If the herder is out of snuff, the bottle is IN TATAR TENTS 191 offered just the same and you must appreciatively pretend to take a pinch. Such is etiquette. The soup is gone now; the pot, cleaned out for the tea, is again on the boil and the leaves are thrown in. Andre has borrowed a hatchet from his host, and has chopped off a piece of milk, which goes in as well. It is in order to ask the new arrival, Subadar Jay, to pass his wooden cup for some of the bever age. He takes it and the lumps of sugar without a word of thanks. The Mongol language has no expression to signify gratitude. Silence does not, however, mean that he does not appreciate. The dozen pieces of Mongol sandal-sole bread which he gives you later are worth two bricks of tea in open market, and this current medium of exchange — caravan-brought tea — is worth sixty kopecks the brick. No small gift, this bread, to an inter loping stranger who is brewing tea by his fire, and camping unasked on his bed. A Tibet-schooled lama knows the Buddhist maxim, " Only accomplish good deed, ask no reward." But the unlettered Mongol layman knows its practice. Little Turunga has played naked before the fire long enough now ; she is caught up ; her reluctant feet are put into the boots with pointed upturned toes, and her body into a miniature sheepskin "daily," such as her mother and father wear. The little girl is as smiling and shy and coquettish as any child of white skin and complex clothes. 192 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA " Will you sell Turunga for a brick of tea? " "No, no," says the mother, gathering the little one quickly up into her arms, while the rest of the family smile at the offer and her solicitude. "No, no, not even for ten bricks!" Everybody laughs, Turunga with the rest, in a child's instinctive knowledge that she is the centre of admiring attraction. Far more petting than the Russian babies get is lavished on the little Mongols. Perhaps the much smaller families (only two or three children to a hut) allow more attention per capita. The mother hands Turunga over to her father, — unheard-of in Siberia, — and he plays with the child, giving her pieces of sheep's tail to eat from his mouth, answering her prattle or baby- talk and endless questions. At night, about eight o'clock, the mother takes the child to the couch and they both go to sleep, Turunga cuddled warmly under her mother's shuba. Meanwhile we men sit cross-legged by the fire and talk of many things, — of the pasturage for the sheep, of the snow on the road, of the beauty of the housewife's silver headplates, of water and roads, of whether or not the Mongol dokchits on the altar are like the Gobi wolves that hate Chinese. It is interesting to note how some of the words used (few, however) have a familiar sound — al though there is said to be no common ancestry with the Indo-Germanic tongues ; perhaps it is only the instinctive sound-imitation which makes the IN TATAR TENTS 193 Mongol baby cry " Mama" to its mother, as does the child in Chita and in Chicago. "Mine," for instance, is mina; " thine" is tenei. A horse or mare is mari. The word for "it is," "they are," is beine, a fairly respectable form of the verb "to be" in Chaucer's English. The grammar is delightfully simple. In the ver nacular there is no bothering about singular or plural. "One hut" is niger gir; "two huts," hayur gir. " Milk" is su, and apparently the word for " water" was formed from it — ou su. If one wants to know whether it is time to throw in the meat-balls he says, "Ou su boutzela?" with a rising inflection ("Water boils ?") and the answer is, "Boutzela." The " moon" and a " month" are sara, and the years go in cycles of twelve. If one wants to compliment the host on the excellence of the sandal-shaped bread which he hands out, loaded with gray chalky cheese (hourut), one says, " Bread good be " (Boba sein beine) ; this gives him great pleasure. Some of the written numbers are somewhat like ours : 2 and 3 are nearly the same, but they have fallen forward on their faces; 6 has an extra tail. When the teapot overturns, they say "Harlab!" to relieve their feelings. There is no word for "so good," "farewell," or "much obliged." These are just squeezed into the heartiness of the final " good" (sein) . So when one leaves, he holds out both arms, palms up, for the host to put his own upon, and says loudly, "Sein oh!" 194 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA A not unbarren amusement is to study but one's own derivations for some much-explained words. Tamerlane is often given as meaning " the lame." Why does it not rather come from temur (iron) and mean " man of iron," as the ruler of the Khalka tribe was called Altan Khan, the golden king ? The Amur River has khara-muren (black water) usually given as its derivative root. Why not the Mongol word amur, which means simply "quiet"? In the hut to-night, while we are comparing mother tongues, the brazier-fire has burned to red brands. The girl reaches into a basket beside the door for pieces of dried camel-dung, and puts them on, that the embers may be fed and live through the night. These argols do not smoke ; she may close the chimney-hole with the flap of felt, and the hut will be kept somewhat warm through the night. The Mongols prepare for sleep : they take off their boots, and slip their arms from the sleeves of their fur shubas, in which they roll themselves up as we in our blankets. But how hardened they are to the cold ! A naked arm will project and the robes be come loose, but they do not wake. We keep on all our inner clothing and roll our selves about with skins until we are great cocoons. Andr6 gives a good-night look to his horses; then he, too, lies down. With our heads beside the altar of the gods, we sleep, in the Mongol's gir. How cold it is in the morning when we wake! The embers have burned to a gray ash ; the iciness IN TATAR TENTS 195 of the waste outside has gripped like an octopus the little hut, and sucked its precarious warmth through the night-long radiation. The chimney- hole is open again, and the mother is starting a blaze with her few pieces of birch firewood. Andre has gone out to harness the horses. He has left the door flap a little wrinkled, and the wind whirls through it and up the chimney, keen as a scimitar. Alexsimevich is getting out the tea-bowls and the bread. You put a reluctant hand from under the blankets and seize your fur cap. Then you disen gage the inner fur coat from its function of cover let, and struggle, sleepy-eyed, into it. If you have the moral courage to take off these friends in need, and the inner coat and sweater, to get a bowlful of snow-water, and hunt among the baggage for soap and a towel, all at five o'clock in the morning of this freezing weather, then you have full license to call the Mongols dirty degraded heathen. If, however, you sit and shiver, and promise yourself that you will bathe at Urga, it is elementary fair play to be discreetly silent about the little failing of your hosts. You will rejoice, too, in open admiration of courage, when you find, as you sometimes will, a clean-shaven well-groomed lama, or a washed and combed village belle, on the road to the sacred city. "Ready," says Andre. You finish a goodly portion of rye-bread and several bowls of Alex- simevich's tea, while he is carrying out the luggage and making a pyramid of it in the tarantass. You 196 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA put both hands out to shake those of Subadar Jay, of his wife, and Sibilina. You give a last chunk of sugar to little Turunga, and crawl out under the tent-flap. The family calls "good-bye" from the gateway as you climb in. Then up the hill you start, for the next day's ride. It is slow to travel by this schedule. One can ad vance by day and rest by night, but daylight travel and night sleep, while most comfortable for a man, are the least efficient for a horse. If progress be the aim, one must adopt the teamster's system. This involves a start at midnight, and eight hours of travel at a slow trot, — six to seven versts per hour. Then, at eight in the morning, a halt for the ponies. One hour they stand in harness, be fore getting their quarter pud of hay; after which comes water, and finally, seven and one half pfunde of oats. Four hours of halt are involved, in which one can roll up in his blanket and sleep. Then off again for eight hours of trot, and another four hours of halt at eight in the evening. So the watches go, with some hundred versts made daily. Noon to-day finds us climbing the hills on foot, to stretch our cramped limbs and ease the horses, as in old times the English tourists climbed the St. Gothard on the way to Italy. We are chilled, and racked by the jar of the road, and glad of even strenuous freedom. Presently we get on again, and ride down the far slope. It is the camel-boat of the steppe, this tarantass. IN TATAR TENTS 197 A solitary gnarled tree shows in the waste of snow — the one seed that lived, on the barren waste, of all that the Siberian winds had brought. An eagle is watching from its upper branches. Further on are higher hills, with trees growing on their northern declivities alone. No foliage can stand the sun, which steals the moisture and bakes the rocks on the southern slopes. As we pass one of these iso lated groves, the bald trees are seen to be packed with old nests ; for the birds from miles around come hither, as the only refuge for their eggs. Deer watch us, standing ten yards off; for these Mongols are poor hunters and their religion sanctifies life. A lama may not kill even a fly : it might be his own father, transmigrated into this form for insufficient piety. A big white hare starts through the trees, stops, and runs again. Thousands of little marmots scurry to their holes in the plain at the alarm of the tink ling bells. A kite soars with a marmot writhing in his claws. Big gray jack-rabbits bound along the road ahead. A troop of partridges let us pass their wallowed holes six feet away. They peer up, their heads protruding from the snow, their yellow aprons glistening like shields, tame as guinea-fowl. At length we drive into Zoulzacha village. One becomes after a time somewhat of an adept regarding quarters. To-night the village gives a chance. The most promising exterior is selected, and driving up, we prepare to enter. Cold and cumbersomely muffled, you worm under the felt 198 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA hut-flap, and see through the pungent smoke of the brazier a dim figure seated to the left of a veiled altar. Bowed over a red-beaded rosary, he is chanting in a low voice, a weird oft-repeated phrase. He ceases as you struggle in, becomes silent, and looks up. "Amur sein!" he salutes in quiet greeting, and motions you to a place on the low sheepskin- covered couch, to the right of the altar, opposite him. The open smile of his welcome shows white teeth hardened by the tough biscuit of his daily diet. You note next, with the pleasure born of seeing anything good of its kind, the light color and un- wrinkled features of this young man of twenty- five. The gaze of his brown eyes is direct and frank. He is clean-shaven, his hair is close-cropped, and he has the appearance of a well-groomed horse. In contrast with the smoke-blackened, hardship- wrinkled faces of the older Mongols, his is as a drink from a clear mountain spring after stale drafts from a long-carried canteen. His color is that of an athlete trained under the suns of the running- track. His features are defined, the nose not so flat, the eyes larger than the usual Mongol type. His expression is earnest and sincere as he now stands up in his robe of rich orange, trimmed and girdled with red. He welcomes the guests without question, — it is the rule of Mongol hospitality, but you feel for the first time what an intrusion it is for your great IN TATAR TENTS 199 Russian tarantass-driver to shoulder his ponderous way into the home of a stranger, loaded with your bearskin rugs and rifles and bags of bread, and to pile them loutishly on the native's couch. At the other huts wherein you have lodged, this sentiment has not come so strongly. Poor places they were: the hardship-lined faces ; the soiled and ragged robes of the women, the threadbareness of the heaped-up sheepskins on the couch, all these revealed that your two-headed eagle of silver was needed, and your coming a windfall. But here are no sheep fenced in, making one feel that standards are superfluous. The fuel is put away in a basket, the bright fire- irons are ranged in a row. The couch of polished wood is orderly, and the skin-rugs on it are folded in their places. The little chests of drawers are brightly polished, and the yellow cap, with its lining of fox-fur, on one of them is new and clean. But most of all, in the proprietor himself is there an air of freshness and cleanliness, of youth and vigor, and of self-confidence. When you burst into a place like this, covered with snow and muffled up in furs, disturbing the master of the house at his prayers; when your driver lays the uninvited mattress down in the warmest place, a man can not but feel like a thrice-dyed barbarian bounder, even if the home be a fifteen-foot felt hut open at the top, and situated on the borders of the Gobi Desert. So feeling, the first impulse is to let the host know that you are not quite, of intent, what you 200 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA are by accident, — a big hulking foreign savage. So you hastily think over what you can give to put yourself less at a disadvantage. The prized reserve of milk-chocolate comes to mind. "Will the host have some?" you ask. "Da blagodariou!" he answers in Russian, to your surprise. With mixed gladness at having made good thus far in any event, and regret at the diminished store of this commodity, you take a little spoonful of the snuff which the host is now offering in a beautiful porcelain bottle, patterned in flowers. Then you come back with a cigarette. Most of these people know what cigarettes are, though some smoke them with their noses. " No, thanks !" and hepoints to his closely-cropped head. Alexsimevich, who has followed into the hut, ex plains : " You speak to a priest, he does not smoke." A screen hangs before the altar opposite the door. You look hesitatingly at it. Without demur, the lama, at the visible interest, draws back the veil. There, in painted grotesqueness, is Janesron, the red god of Thunder, and bearer of the lightning sword. He glares down with his three eyes upon the sunken orbits of a sheep's head, laid out as an offering. Black Gumbo, the six-armed good spirit, is also there, and both are surrounded by attend ant demons. All are pictured artistically, the minute detail of Tibetan workmanship showing in IN TATAR TENTS 201 their squat bodies. The polished wood of the frames is as finely wrought as a Japanese sword-hilt. On the box-top, beneath the gods, are set out in neat array the best of Mongol dainties. These are disposed in little polished brazen cups shaped like wine-glasses. There are raisins and dried plums, caravan-carried from the far-off Middle Kingdom, and lumps of sugar brought down from Russia in some trader's pack. Millet fills one cup, water an other; each symbolizing some ancient seizin. A wick, sunk in oil, flares in the centre, and casts a flickering, uncanny light upon the deities. Spread on a low seat, six inches above the felt rug on the floor, are rows after rows of boba, the gray Mongol biscuits, in shape like the thick soles of a sandal. As a centre-piece between the stacked loaves rests the brown roasted sheep's head. It is the feast of the New Year that this unusual volume of offerings betokens. The old year of the Horse passes with the rise of to-night's new moon. The leap-year — that of the Ram — will then begin. All the fami lies in the eimucks of Mongolia will feast on the grosser part of the offering which now lies in its ranked regularity undisturbed. For the present the priest takes light refreshments while waiting for his midnight rite. "Will you have some of the tea that has been brewed for you by the old mother while you were looking at the altar ? " asks Alexsimevich. It has been made, not from the loosely-packed 202 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA leaves, but from the hard tea-bricks. A chunk of this has been cast into the great iron bowl over the brazier when the fagot-fed fire has melted the ice and has brought the water to a boil. Solemnly you are presented a wooden bowl of tea, which you receive in both hands, and as solemnly sip. The evening meal is cooked and eaten, your sugar reciprocating the lama's tea. As the evening wears on, amid the smoke of cigarettes and brass-bowled pipes, the lama brings out quaint paper slips of Buddhist prayers. "You are interested?" He will write for you a charm. "O mani padmihom," he tells you. "The Buddhist prayer." "Oh, thou jewel in the lotus-flower, hail!" says the interpreter. It is mighty, this ancient Buddhist prayer, which is murmured by so many millions from Japan to Persia, from Malay to Siberia. It is symbolic, esoterically, of much. The jewel is the soul, the lotus is Buddha, the prayer, a wish that the spirit be in them which was in Saka-muni, their Lord. On endless rosaries this prayer is told. It is on the lips of priests and women, it is carved around the stones which travelers throw upon the obos, the "high-places" of Old-Testament record. It is murmured by the pilgrims as they prostrate them selves. The disciplined body, the praying tongue, and the mind intent on sacred things, all incline the soul to the acquirement of merit. IN TATAR TENTS 203 The lama draws now with his quick hand, trained to the Tibetan script of the Urga monastery-school, sketches of his temple, Zoulzacha Soume, of his people's summer tent of cloth, and winter hut of felt. He writes out the Mongol numerals, and ex plains the cycles of years, in answer to questions regarding the New- Year festival. He describes the puzzling element-and-animal system, by which the chere mari, or earth horse, is 1907, the chere khoni, or earth ram, is 1908, and so on through a sixty- year epoch. He quotes Mongol proverbs come down from old priests and rulers: "One may buy slaves, but not brothers," and, in the spirit of Macchiavelli, " You can govern a State by truth as well as you can catch a hare with an ox-cart." Now it is nearing moonrise. From his rolled purse the priest draws a small slip of paper ruled into a half -inch checker pattern, in every square of which there is a symbolic group of letters. The lama con sults this. Then he brings from the chest beneath the altar a long narrow box in which are strips of faded paper thick as parchment. On these in red and black are traced quaint characters, written, as is our script, from left to right. The priest selects a dozen of his long sheets and puts them carefully on his couch. He touches the box to his forehead and restores it to its place. Then he turns and speaks to the interpreter. "The lama must make ready for the night of the 204 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA New Year," you are told ; and as you look, off comes the red sash and yellow robe. The young priest stands up in his vivid blue jacket and walks to the entrance of the gir. From a cupboard he takes a towel, and from the fireplace, ashes. Pouring warm tea into a wooden bowl, he scrubs hands and face with the vigor of an athlete after a run. Then back to the cupboard he goes, and off comes the blue jacket for a clean new silken one. A rich yellow robe is donned. A bright silver knife is slung upon a new red sash which girdles his waist ; and smart and erect as an officer of the Guards, the lama steps over, pro strates himself before his deities, then goes out into the night to his temple service. "Creeds are many, but God is one," murmurs Alexsimevich. It is regrettable that the rule of lama celibacy prevents the arrangement of the usual kidnapping marriage-ceremony between this young priest of Zoulzacha, and Amagallan (blissf ulness) , the belle of the Odjick encampment. It is early in the first moon, Sara, of the year of the Ram, and holiday still reigns in Mongolia. Doubtless she, too, is a sooty Cinderella at other times ; but to-day she is a reigning princess, dressed in the best that a father, owner of a hundred sheep, can furnish. A bright new blue coat, lined with fine white lamb's-wool, is belted around her rather ample waist with a red sash. Her boots are of evident newness. But the triumph, the chef d'ceuvre, is her pointed red hat IN TATAR TENTS 205 made of the brightest Chinese silk. It is topped with a gold and black knot and is garnished with gold braid. The flaps, turned up at the sides and the back, are of a long silky dark-gray fur. A broad red ribbon fastened behind is brought forward and rests on her breast. She has a feminine eye to its brilliant contrast against the blue dress. Two long tassels of pearls, set in coral-studded silver earrings, frame a rosy, laughing face; for Amagallan is ex hilarated with the consciousness of being very well- dressed. The presence of two young herdsmen in dark red and blue, and one lama of the first degree, — and consequently not estopped from the race, like a full- fledged priest, — bears testimony to the effective ness of the costume and the girl. The wiles with which she distributes a smile to one, a dried Chinese plum to another, and a mild frown to a third, reveal even more the universal woman. Amagallan is not at all averse to adding to her string three mascu line Russians. There are only two foreign nations in Mongolia, Chinese and Russians. Into the latter class come all stray visitants — Americans, Buriats, and Troitzkosavsk teamsters. The girl stands up now and greets this American with a frank hand shake. She invites him to sit down with the rest. Since there is scriptural permission to eat meat of fered to idols, the fact that the evening's feast has stood at the feet of Buddha need not deter one from partaking of the little dumplings, gray cheese, and 206 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA dried fruits. Amagallan hands them out on one of those sole-shaped biscuits, which serve as plates until one has eaten what is on them, after which they go down themselves. A fat sheep's- tail is sliced for your benefit, while a coarse lump of dusky- looking sugar is an ultimate delicacy, eaten as candy. Muddy brick tea follows, of course. The Mongol bread is good, but it takes resolution to do one's duty by the gray cheese, the resin-like desiccated milk, and the sheep-fat just seethed. A chatter of conversation goes on, the neighbors drift in and out, and those of our gir, as the even ing wears on, make excursions to the other huts and exhibit and drink more muddy tea for politeness' sake. The hostess in each tent shakes your hand before feeding you. The formality makes you tem porarily one of the tribe and family, to be treated with courtesy and hospitality. Thus you are taken into the social life of a simple affectionate people. We meet in one hut a traveling friar who has tramped sturdily from Tibet, pack on back and prayer-beads on arm, begging, praying, selling relics claiming to cure rheumatism, and the eye-diseases which the smoky huts induce. He carries on a pole an image of Gumbo and others of the dokchits, to gether with a hodge-podge collection of rosaries, strips of silk, bells, beads, pipe-picks, etc. These are jingled during parts of his prayer, where it is necessary to keep the god attentive. In one hut they are playing the age-old game of A MONGOL "BLACK MAN' IN TATAR TENTS 207 tawarya. A bag is produced containing hundreds of sheep's-knuckles, colored blue. Everybody gets a handful. Then a girl holds out her fistful of them, and each man guesses the number. There is a rapid fire of shouted numerals, — "niger, hayur, urbu, durbu!" The one who guesses correctly gets the handful of knuckles. This person next holds out his fistful, and so it goes. It is an uproarious sport, interspersed with quite unnecessary grabbings of disputed handfuls, — part of the game that Ama gallan is playing, even if not germane to tawarya. Finally through the darkness you make your way back to the gir in which you are billeted. The wreathing smoke from its dome is illuminated to night by the beams from the fire below. It rises in dimly bright convolutions, beautiful in its small way as the great Northern Lights. You spread your felt on the floor of the tent and roll up in your rugs. The teamster needs a timepiece to regulate his hour of harnessing, for you must start at daybreak. Leave your watch for him on the altar of the dok chits. It will be safe in this hut by the desert of Gobi, among the remnant of the Golden Horde. The days' marches have taken us well up among the ridges of the Kentei Mountains. To the east ward is the peak which, despite the claims of Urga's Holy Mountain and of a site near Tibet, has the best authority for being the burying-place of Genghis Khan. 208 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA In 1227 the great conqueror died. The confused records tell of his body's being taken northward to a mountain which was the heart of his empire, from whose slopes sprang the sources of the three great Mongol rivers, — the Tola, the Onon, and the Kerulon. Beside its sacred lake the Manchu Amban of Urga sacrifices annually to the Nature-spirits. It is both a survival and a memorial to the bloody sacrifice of every living being on the road to the grave, — a tribute which tradition says the guards of Genghis Khan's funeral cortege offered to their departed chief. Huts are far apart in these highlands now, and the whistling winds pierce the very marrow. The tired horses can hardly crawl forward on the doubtful trail. Far up in the heights, beside an old caravan- route, superseded by a newly-cut artery of travel, we come very late upon an ancient wooden shrine. The worshipers have gone. They lived their time in a village near by, but with the exhaustion of pasturage for the flocks, under nomad necessity they moved. A new camel-road was tramped out by drivers, who must find shelter amid habitations. So in the shrine, long unpainted, the smiling Buddha presides now over his famished altar. Very, very old, very, very poor, is Archir the warden, who welcomes you. For forty years he has watched in his gir by the dragon-gargoyled gate. The spear with which he stood to his post of old is blackened, and its red tassel is dulled and faded. IN TATAR TENTS 209 A tattered fringe is along the edge of the felt door to his yurta, and holes are under its walls close to the ground. His pile of wood is pitifully small, and few are his sandal-sole biscuits. His shuba, sheep skin-lined, is blackened with the soot of years. Archir refuses courteously what he knows is a rare foreign delicacy, a Russian cigarette. " A lama," he says, " may not smoke." But his own hospitality is of the thoughtful kind which comes from the heart. He hands you a sheepskin softened by long massaging between his trembling old hands, that his own covering, not your coat, be burned by the sparks from the brazier. He notices that your tea-bowl is awkwardly held, and he brings a little table to put before you. He sees your driver fumbling for a match to light his pipe, and reaches him a coal with the fire-tongs. He clears his couch that you may sit in comfort. He offers you the first use of his fire for cooking. In the old days many came to pray to the smiling Buddha. The drivers of the tea-caravans from far- off China left their offerings of fruit and silk scarves. The herdsmen whose lambs had lived well through a bitter winter gave sheep fat of tail to the two yellow-robed priests who chanted and clashed the cymbals through the long days and into the nights. The little boys dedicated to the gods, shaven- headed, rosy-faced, crooned their lessons in the Tibetan tongue, sitting on the floor of the big blue schoo\-gir beside the shrine. Every day pilgrims 210 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA on their way to Urga stopped to pray in the soume, and filled the tent of the young guardian with eat ings of noodle-soup and drinkings of tea, with gos sip and with song. But all is changed now in his little hut. The rule of non-marriage he keeps in the spirit, where so many lamas observe it only in the morganatic let ter. This has left him alone in his old age, and pitifully solitary now that even the dwindling camel-trains, of whose tea-traffic the Manchurian Railway has robbed them, pass by no more. The priest is unfed even by pilgrims. These have gone with the rest to the routes of a better prosperity. Archir has seethed his evening meal of sheep-meat and flat pieces of dough. He has let the fire die down to embers, and has pulled the covering over the round hole. The freezing winds very soon make his hut so cold that one feels like a thin shaking uncovered creature even beneath the heaped furs. One's ungloved hands grow numb as he lies by the brazier. In the morning we too depart, and like the Ro man legionary beside the Vesuvian gate of Pom peii, the old priest waits, alone, unquestioning, uncomplaining, till a greater God than he of the soume shall send the summons of relief. The mountain-ranges, one after another, stretch their towering barriers across the path. They trend northeast and southwest, as in Siberia. First comes IN TATAR TENTS 211 the Sharan Daba, the white range, whose pass leads down to the Iro River, rich in alluvial gold. The streams flow westward into the Cellinga, whose waters empty into Lake Baikal, and thence by the Angara River, into the far-off Arctic Ocean. Ridge follows ridge now, and valley follows valley, — narrow cuts, with shallow streams, and huts clustered upon their sides. Out from the almost deserted borderland, the Mongol encampments are not unfrequently pitched where there is water for the flocks. If any wood be near by, it is well, since then the dried dung can be reserved for the smoke less evening fire when the top hole is closed. When the steep mountain climb has been passed, it is as if a gateway had been opened through the constricting ridges. The broad valley of the Hara- gol stretches out. Down, down, we go, onto a plain, in the centre of which we come to an enclosure with a high mud wall and a peaked gateway, gaudily decked with red banners and vivid placards. Out side the mud walls of the compound, far and wide, are checker-board squares with irrigation ditches between. Huge stacks of hay and straw are piled up near the gate, the wonder and envy of the nomads, who never have more than the scantiest store. Within are booths facing the courtyard. A little temple occupies one corner. Two-wheeled carts are drawn up along the wall. Troughs and picket-poles are ranged in line, ready for the cara vans. 212 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA Now, around the tarantass, there gather from their threshing the dwellers of the compound, — coolies from the far-off Pink Kingdom, with puffy blue trousers and tight-buttoned jackets, flail in hand and metal pipe in mouth. They stare stolidly without comment at the frost-covered horses, the robes, and the bearded strangers. Expressionless they stand watching every movement. Alexsime vich asks a question; no one answers. We sit for a moment mutually expectant. Not one of the Chinese stirs or speaks. Then Andre swings down and leads the team through the gateway into the compound. Alex simevich leads the search for shelter. We cross the courtyard to the building which serves for the lodging of travelers. Its walls are of mud, and a big adobe chimney projects up one side. Beneath low eaves a small window with white paper panes blinks like the sightless eyes of a blind man. We stoop, pushing open the crudely pivoted door, enter the smoky chamber, and the door swings back behind. We are standing in what seems an unreal world — a stage-scene or a cavern from the Arabian Nights. In front and on each side close in dark windowless walls. Behind comes a feeble light from the little paper-paned window. In the dimness, a flickering fire throws fitful gleams on dusky figures, idols, and wearing-gear hung on pegs driven into the wall. IN TATAR TENTS 213 As your eyes become accustomed to the gloom, the details take shape. A clay stove is to the left. Fagots are heaped beside it, copper kettles rest upon its top, pigtailed figures are crouching around. In front, a platform, raised four feet above the clay floor, occupies the whole width of the room and ex tends back into the darkness. A group of men are seated, cross-legged, around a little brazier, smoking. Others are lying rolled in blankets. With our luggage Andre staggers in. No one stirs. Some of the group around the stove turn their heads to look, but that is all. Andre heaps the food- bag and blankets in a vacant spot on the kang. We make room on the stove for our pots to boil the water for tea. On this self -elbowed place amid the rest we sit cross-legged, propped against the clay wall. The smoke from the oven, led under the kang, warms it so that the outer coat can come off. A little tabouret some six inches high stands in a cor ner, and serves as a table for the repast. The shelter is far better, as comforts go, than any of the Mongol tents. The icy wind that sweeps the latter is barred off. There is a stove to replace the nomad's brazier; a warm kang instead of the floor to rest upon. But how different is the spirit of the hosts ! There are no frank hand-clasps here, no in terested gossip and inquiries of the adventures by the way. No generous bringing out of fat sheep's- tails and snuff-bottles for the guests' delectation. You cannot but have the feeling that these people 214 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA are as indifferent to your existence as they are to the pariah dog that howls outside the walls. They are exclusive, non-welcoming, — these Chinese. They are strangers to the land, self-sufficing in their toilsomely cultivated rye- and wheat-fields, an iso lated, womanless, working settlement. Despite the better quarters and comfort which these inns afford, one prefers to go to a Mongol tent and be among men more human, if less civilized. When the bread is thawed and the tea is boiled, we eat, pay the Chinaman who gave the wood, and with a sense of relief go out again to the tarantass and the road. For versts now the way is along the alluvial plain, seamed with irrigation-ditches and dominated by several of these walled Chinese factories. As the sun goes down, however, there appears a solitary build ing, and Andre gives a glad shout, seeing that it is built of wood and has windows and big centre chimney. " Russky dom 1 " he cries. A low mud wall surrounds the enclosure. Inside some quilts are hung in the air, that the cold may kill the vermin. A big black dog comes up, but unlike the scavenger beasts of the Mongol encampments, it signals welcome with friendly tail-waggings and good-natured barks, approaching at once as if ac customed to kindly treatment. The quilted door of the house opens. A booted figure appears with the familiar red blouse, and the Russian greeting hails you, "Zdravstvouitie! " IN TATAR TENTS 215 "An Orthodox Buriat," says Alexsimevich. We mount his wooden steps, shake his hand, and enter the big warm room. It is as if one were back in Siberia. The Buriat's Siberian wife, in shawl and kerchief, is busy at the whitewashed oven. Brilliantly-colored cornic prints detail the misadventures of the young recruit, with doggerel ballad rhymes beneath. Chickens peck beneath the stove, the samovar hums on the table, and figures sipping tea are grouped around it on the benches, or are lying on the floor enjoying the genial warmth. "Hail, Alexsimevich!" comes a voice; and a tall bearded Siberian, dressed in a Mongol robe, rises. "Aha, Vladimir Vassilivich ! " answers our inter preter. "Good-day!" A volley of questions at once overwhelms him. The party has been long away from Kiahta, and we have the latest news. "A Kiahta merchant, my friend, and his son," Alexsimevich explains. Overcoats are being doffed, mufflers unwound, and boots kicked off. The babble of talk continues. A place is made for us at the table, and glasses of tea, with immense slices of cheese and ham, are placed before us. When more tea and cigarettes have completed the repast, Alexsimevich paces up and down, relating with dramatic gestures the latest gossip from Troitzkosavsk. In the midst of his narrative, which all are follow- 216 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA ing with great interest, there comes an incident of heightened vividness. " Sh — sh ! " a warning signal sounds. One of the auditors points to a shape rolled in blankets, and lying on the bench. "Gaspaja" (a lady), they say. Alexsimevich completes his tale in a lower tone and with more artistic circumlocution. But it is the other side's turn to tell a tale, for why, in the ferocious cold of midwinter, with — save for this one Buriat's house — the Mongol huts only for nightly shelter, why does a lady come down here? The merchant explains: "She has twisted her knee-joint, and in Irkutsk, in Tomsk even, the Christian doctors cannot heal her. A lama tells us that warm sulphur-water will soften the sinews, and the bone can be brought back into place. We go to the warm springs of the Holy River. I have been there in old times, and I know the way." With pathetic eagerness the party has gone to do the lama's bidding, and bathe in the Mongol Jordan. Evening comes. The lady's bench is pulled over close to the oven. The merchant and his son lie down beside it on the floor. Servants and drivers roll up at their feet, and all sleep, in amity. It takes resolution to awake at daybreak and leave the luxury of this shelter. But when horses are harnessed, riders must ride. The rising sun comes up over the white plain. The Buriat waves IN TATAR TENTS 217 "good-bye" from his doorstep; the dog barks in farewell, and we lumber on southward. A sugar-loaf hill marks the end of the valley. We turn up now into the mountains, the driver some what in doubt as to the way. A boy of about fif teen years, a yellow-robed lama novice, rides by. Alexsimevich hails him to ask the road to Urga. A complicated explanation follows, hardly under stood. " I show you," says the boy. For a dozen versts he rides along on his pony beside us, chattering and laughing. When, after a devious trail, the pass is in sight, he starts off, and will not, at first, accept any present for his trouble. Valley follows valley now, the trail fairly well defined. Mongol huts give a chance for rest and for cooking. A welcome is bidden us in each, the nearest water is shown, and invitations to come back are freely extended. There is now one last range to cross, the Tolo- goytou, highest and steepest of all. Even the mounted Mongols, who have caught up with our toiling tarantass, swing off and climb afoot. Trees are on either hand, and the white wall-like face of the barrier passed in the morning seems a bare verst away. There comes a whole slope of boulders and rocks, jagged and broken, like the moraine of a glacier. And then, at long last, we reach the high- heaped Borisan at the summit, with its fluttering prayer-flags. The foremost Mongol throws on a 218 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA rock, leaps upon his pony, and rides twice around the mound. "Argila I argila ! " (bridles free ! bridles free !) he cries, and trots down behind the crest. We, too, throw on a stone, and take the steep descent. Beyond the low rolling ridges below is the white of the Holy Mountain, topped with green foliage. Here one may not kill the thronging hare and deer and pheasants. As we gallop down, the obos, the white memorial monuments, take shape from the snow. In the dark-gray dimness of the city beyond, green and gold roofs become distinct, lighted by the last glow of the sinking sun. Huts cluster close now along the road, and the shadows of innumerable dogs pass and mingle and pass again, where the gray mud walls and houses begin to be continuous. In the dim twilight the tarantass thunders into the great wide way which ends in the main street of Urga. Two hundred feet broad is this street. Mud walls twenty feet high flank it. The gates to the en closures are closed. The fast-fading light discloses hardly any passers-by. Save for a distant tom-tom there is deep silence brooding over the city. A great empty square is entered, where a few figures are passing in the distance. We approach one of these, who upon our question lurches up to the tarantass. He is a Russian clad in Mongol shuba, rather the worse for liquor. " I will show you," he says amiably. IN TATAR TENTS 219 Affectionately leading the horses, he reels down one dark alley, then down the next, until we come to a second broad street and to an enclosure with a lantern-lighted gate. A cry brings at length a stir within. The gate swings open. " The Varlakoff house!" says the guide thickly. The tarantass is led in, and we stumble through the darkness into a Russian home of some preten sions. In the main room is a lamp and a table covered with a red cloth. A glass of tea is available and is quickly swallowed. Then, tired out, we roll up in our blankets, on the floor, and drop off to our first night's sleep in Urga, the Holy City of Mon golia. VI THE CITY OF THE REBORN GOD THE murmur of many voices pierces the blanket over your head. Sleepy-eyed in the warmth, you peer out from the chrysalis of coverings to watch the people moving about. Alexsimevich has extri cated himself from the mound which he constructs nightly on the floor, out of luggage-bags, felt mats, rugs, and overcoats. Under all the heaped wrap pings that he uses in the icy Mongol tents, he has camped and slept close up against the white wall of the oven. Truly the Siberian is brother to the salamander. He pulls on now his big felt boots and runs a pocket-comb through his beard. The wife of our host, come to the door for a sur vey, notes progress and returns to the female region. The Hazan Varlakoff, gray-bloused and wearing deerskin boots, enters next. He lights his first cigar ette ; his wife with the bowl of sugar and the plate of bread follows. She has gotten up earlier than her husband, so she is several cigarettes ahead, but he is cutting down the lead. Perhaps one had better get up one's self. It is an easy operation here. "Getting up " consists in emerging from the rolled blankets and stretching. " Dressing " means pulling on boots. One can wash THE CITY OF THE REBORN GOD 221 over in the corner, where the brass can lets out a trickling stream of cold water when the needle- valve underneath is pushed up. The samovar hums on the red cotton cloth of the table. Varlakoff moves along to make room. From the little pot of infused tea your glass is partly filled ; then you place it under the spigot for hot water, and the beverage is ready for sipping. No lemons are here, as in Russia. In a few Chinese shops one can buy spherical citrons, but they are like unripe oranges, and are a luxury as great as pineapples in old New York, A wool-buyer from Kiahta reaches for the bowl of broken loaf-sugar, and holds it for you to choose the piece whose size pleases best. The housewife comes from the kitchen over by her oven-door, bringing some crestfallen cake which she has made in your honor. " Kuchete I kuchetel" she commands, arms akimbo, puffing contentedly on her cigarette. We revel in the luxuries of Varlakoff 's room; warmth such that we may take off the cumbersome outer coats ; chairs to sit upon, instead of crouch ing cross-legged; hot samovar-made drinks, and a chance to wash in water. The latter is a privilege which can be appreciated only after a period of ablutions in lukewarm tea. We stretch out and bask and sip, and whiff papirosi in epicurean idle ness. As we luxuriate, one by one the neighbors of the 222 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA Russian colony come in, to hear the news of Kiahta from Alexsimevich. The expedition has become part of the gossip-transportation system. Half the population of Kiahta must have sent messages here, — half the Russian traders in Urga have come to receive them. First, there is the general news dis pensed into the expectant ears of the group at Var- lakoff's. Alexsimevich is for an hour the cynosure. Questions and answers flash back and forth, going off sometimes explosively like fireworks. Then fol low the special events and the individual messages. At last these are all detailed. Now come invitations from various men to visit their houses "Will the gaspadine come?" — "The gaspadine must see the city." — " Da ! da!" echoes the group. Varlakoff goes out for his stick and overcoat. The wool-merchant gets into his fleece-lined shuba. He achieves the feat by the usual Siberian method. Putting the garment over his head, he pushes his arms through the sleeves, and gradually struggles and writhes up into it as one gets into a wet bathing- suit. Alexsimevich finishes his fourth glass of tea, lights one of the Hazan' s cigarettes, and worms his way also into his deerskin greatcoat. Then out we go into the bright sunlight and the snow-covered streets. The houses of the Russian quarter of Urga were only glimpsed in the dusk of last night. We have daylight upon them now. Squat whitewashed build ings they are, with neatly paned windows and big TEMPLE OF GIGIN, URGA THE CITY OF THE REBORN GOD 223 square chimneys. Across the mounds and hillocks of a broad street is the one-storied Russian Club, where one may drink vodka, play billiards or cards, and while away the winter evenings. Further on is a row of shops. The bearded owners stand behind their counters, dressed in belted Mongol shubas and Russian fur caps. The doors to all the shops are open, that the Mongols, perplexed with knobs, may not take their trade elsewhere. Enameled kettles are hanging in festoons down the walls. The shelves are crowded with bolts of vivid-colored cotton cloths to be sewed into shubas by the Mongols who ride in to buy. There are big cases of sweetmeats, Mos- cowski caramels, acceptable offerings to the gro tesque dokchits on the family shrines. Russian monopoly tobacco is there, in stamped paper packets for the delectation of Muscovites and Bu riats who have the taste and the means, and vil lainous South-China tobacco and snuff for native purchasers. One can get vodka almost as bad as that of Siberia, and far cheaper, for it is com pounded by a local distiller who rejoices in an excise- less market. Foreign brandies and wines fill big walls of shelves. " Zdravstvouitie!" one of the merchants calls, hailing our party. " It is Vassili Michaeloff, old friend of mine," says Alexsimevich. "Let us go in." We enter and are led back into the private part of the house. 224 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA " Chai ! " shouts the host to somebody behind the oven. "Haracho," comes the answer. We all sit down. If any purchasers drift into the shop, they can wait until we get through our visit, or they can go down the line. For wherever the Eagles are planted, the Russian joyfully drops his business to entertain a friend. At the call of "tea" the shovel goes into the ditch, the ledger onto the shelf, the pen into the potato. If " chai " interferes with business, cut out business. Nor does it matter in the least that we have just had breakfast ; by the rule of etiquette we must be entertained. "Tea" consists first in a ceremoniously clinked toast drowned in vodka. Then appears the samovar in charge of the woman of the house, the glasses, and the sugar. Next follow the cigarettes. The talk is animated, for its local history absorbs each little world. The fact comes out that the cousin of Michaeloff has bought a new pair of horses for a hundred roubles. The price, the quality of the animals and of the man, all go into the crucible. Kiahta beer arrives as the conversation turns to the death of one Ivan Vladimiraef, which it is agreed was not unnatural, since he had reached the age of ninety-odd years. Still the provisions come. The good wife brings in a heaping plate of lard- impregnated Hamburger steaks, called "cotlet," which Alexsimevich attacks as if his last meal were half a day instead of half an hour distant. Other THE CITY OF THE REBORN GOD 225 bottles accumulate to help out the dwindling flagon of vodka. We enter upon Chateau Yquem, Pomeranian, and Caucasian claret. Then cakes are set out, and more tea, and finally a quart bottle of champagne. Alexsimevich stands to his guns like the 38th Siberians at Tien-tsin. But it is hard for any one of less rigorous training in this sort of thing to hold even the straggler's pace at nine o'clock in the morn ing. Mentally we hoist the flag upside down, and wink at Alexsimevich as the outward and visible sign of the inward and spirituous distress. He takes the rest of the champagne in a last gulp, and with a series of thanks we gain the entrance to the shop, where two Mongols and a Buriat are wait ing patiently, looking vacantly around at the crockery. We are shown ceremoniously to the door, shake hands, remark about the weather, give our compli ments to the wife, and depart. When at the corner, we glance back. Vassili Michaeloff is still standing on the threshold ; his three customers too are look ing out leisurely at the people passing. "We have thrown his business out of gear," we remark to Alexsimevich. He seems surprised. "There is plenty of time. Why should they mind waiting? Nietchevo." Another host is overjoyed to see us, for an engin eering problem of great perplexity is, he tells us in 226 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA due course, harassing his mind. No one in Urga can help him out, but perhaps we will. "The Chinese governor, the Zinzin, wants to make an automobile line from Kalgan," the host announces. " I saw an iron bridge once, so I agreed to build him one over the Lara River. Have you ever seen an iron bridge? How shall I do it?" You allow that you have seen an iron bridge, — that you have even gone across one. You suggest that much depends on the river. " How wide is it, for instance?" " I have not picked out the place for the bridge yet," answers the host; "but the river is some where between sixty and three hundred feet wide. Have some vodka? " "And how deep is the water?" you ask. "Well," — after much thought, — "it is deep in the middle and shallow at the edges. Have a cigarette ! Have some tea ! If we build this bridge, the Zinzin will give us a decoration. How much will the bridge cost? " "That depends upon what sort of bridge you build, and how long it is, and how much material you use! " Alexsimevich comes in. "You see, the more iron you use, the more the bridge costs," he observes. " Naviernol navierno! you speak sagely, Alex simevich. That is what I told the Zinzin." THE CITY OF THE REBORN GOD 227 "It must have piers and abutments," you ven ture. " But the Zinzin does not like piers, because the water was not made to put such things into. Yet I said with you, one must always have piers. Here is brandy. Take a few sardines ! " The problem certainly needs something special for its elucidation. You ponder, and Alexsimevich and the host breathlessly watch the hatching of your official pronunciamento. At last you deliver yourself. " Find out how wide and deep the river is. Then write to a steel-manufacturing company, to quote prices. They will send a blue-print of an auto mobile bridge of the specified length, together with the weight of the steel. You can buy pieces to build it at so many kopecks a pound, just like butter." "Ah, my friend, you do not know how great a service you have rendered ! What a providence is your coming ! Pray, have some cognac ! Will they send me a picture with piers, — a picture that I can show the Zinzin?" " Yes, — yes, indeed." " I go to-morrow to tell him of this." We are once more in the street and the banded escort is turning into still another Russian's house. Their idea of sightseeing is apparently to take tea with every Russian in the place. A mild desire is registered to come in contact with some of the other 228 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA people. The idea strikes them in the light of a strange new doctrine. "You wish to see Mongols?" one asks. Though surprised, they acquiesce amiably. "To-day they have holiday ; you are favored. Go see the doings and make me visit later," says the disappointed third host. Then the wool-merchant speaks. " Near by is the great temple of Urga, which few have seen, for it is one of the most holy places of the Lama faith. It is the temple of Maidari, the Future God. If the gaspadine wishes to see it, I, who have bought wool from the uncle of the keeper of the gate, can gain admittance." For this we start. The Russian section, made up of shops with posters and signs in Slavonic letters, and homes with centre chimneys and little square panes of glass, is left behind. Through a long dark lane we come out into the main thorough fare of Mongol Urga. The town is in festival for the New Moon. The streets are ablaze with color. Red posters are on every door and wall. The bril liant picture is framed by the snowy girding hills and the green trees of the Holy Mountain to the south. The tomb-like altars on the plain are daz- zlingly white against the gray-plastered fronts of the houses behind. The gilded gargoyles of the temples flash in the sun. Down the main street, a hundred feet broad, go bevies of girls, their hair bedecked with the gaudiest ornaments of silver and TEMPLE IN THE URGA LAMASERY THE CITY OF THE REBORN GOD 229 pearl, their silken robes striped and banded in green alternating with yellow and blue and gold. Lamas stride here and there dressed in bright orange robes and hats, their silver knives hanging at their sides. Great shaggy-haired dromedaries swing past. Horsemen, robed in vivid scarlet and blue and magenta, dash at full gallop across the wide open piazza in the centre of the town. A donkey-cart is driven slowly along, crowded with brightly-dressed girls. A squad of Chinese cavalry trot by in white jackets, red-lettered. Two of the Cossack garrison swagger past. A bearded Siberian trader strolls across, clothed in the dark Mongolian cloak which most have adopted, going toward the Russian quarter we have just left. A string of oxen plods by, drawing cartloads of wood. Walking on, we come to a long line of kiosks which a continuous procession of pilgrims in holiday attire is entering. In each booth is a cask-shaped prayer-wheel, a magnified model of those which women carry, twirling them in their hands as they walk. Along this main square of Urga, and girding her city stockade, are hundreds of these cylinders. All the day long, men and women are going in and out from one kiosk to another, turning. Some say that formerly one could enter a great Tibetan temple only after saying a prayer so long that even a Grand Lama's memory could not carry it. So, for con venience, a cylinder with the written text was set 230 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA up at the temple gate. By degrees it became the custom, without reading it, to rotate the petition for a blessing. Others say that the wheels are whirled in literal obedience to Buddha's precept to "turn over and over his words." Alternating with the wheels are stone shrines graven with Tibetan characters, before which, on wooden couches, silken-dressed women are abasing themselves in abject worship. A long line of pil grims is doing the circle of the city. They stand, then drop prostrate in the snow. Rising, they move conscientiously forward to where their heads touched, and again lie prone, making thus a peni tential circuit of the stockade. Most are in deadly earnest. Some, hired for a proxy service, steal for ward a few inches on each prostration. Suddenly three distant guns boom out. "Scurry, scurry toda!" says the wool-merchant. "Quick, this way. He is coming." You hurry forward to where a trail leads across the square. Afar off, in the direction of the Holy Mountain, is seen a band of galloping cavalry. The Mongols on horseback around you are drawing rein. The pilgrims are looking toward the approach ing cavalcade. Brilliant red and yellow are the robes that flutter as the body-guard ride. Now a rumble of wheels is heard among the clattering hoofs. Preceded by twenty horsemen, followed by twenty more, rolls down a Russian droshky, with a yellow- robed lama driving. Propped among the multi- THE CITY OF THE REBORN GOD 231 colored cushions sits a clean-shaven, silk-robed man, with puffy cheeks and tired eyes. The Eu ropean watch which he carries hangs in anomalous awkwardness at the breast of his robe; his leg is propped on the front seat, as if he were lame. Most turn their backs to him in Oriental honor ing ; many prostrate themselves in the snow ; every horseman in the square has dismounted. "He drives from his palace beside the Holy Mountain to the temple on the hill beyond the city," says the wool-merchant. " But who is it ?" we ask, as the last galloper rides by. The Russian looks at us as an old Roman might, if in the Forum we had not recognized Caesar. "That! That's Gigin, the Living God! That's Buddha come back to earth, — Gigin ! " You stand a moment to take it all in. Then, despite your purpose of respect, a smile works to the front. At once the wool-merchant laughs gleefully. "Ask Varlakoff about the Buddha," he chuckles. "Varlakoff sold him his ponies for ten thousand roubles. My friend showed him a picture of the ponies, little horses, you know, and Gigin told him to get them. They had to send to an island of Europe, Scotland. But Gigin was very pleased. He said Varlakoff was the only man who had never lied to him." The expression of the wool-merchant was that 232 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA worn according to tradition by the Roman augurs. "When there is not a holiday, the people have the market here in this square," the merchant con tinues. " I was here in the bazaar with a friend last week, and we heard a commotion over by that prayer-wheel. We went up, to find that two of the Buddha's lamas were borrowing a fine horse, worth three hundred roubles, which belonged to a Mongol woman. It was all she had, she told us, and it was being taken to the Living God's stables. The woman was in great distress. "'It is mine. I will appeal to the Consul,' said my friend. "The Gigin's men could not take a Russian's horse, so they had to give it up. The Mongol woman came and wept on him, she was so glad. She brought a gift to my friend. Generally the Gigin returns such borrowed booty when he has used it a while, but often not. Anything that is new, the God will buy. These pilgrims, you see, bring him offerings. Kalmuks come all the way from the Volga, Manchus make pilgrimages, Buriats come down from north of Baikal, and tribesmen from Tibet. He has half a million roubles a year from his priests, and he does not care for anybody." Becoming more and more steeped in celestial gossip, we go past the gray-plastered compounds piled high with wood and timber, a main export of Urga. Tall masts with logs suspended from THE CITY OF THE REBORN GOD 233 them are the signs. We reach at last a big stock aded courtyard, the beginning of the monastery quarters. " Come, look in here ! " says the guide. You peer through the gateway at six of the big gest bronze burgoo-kettles that ever existed outside an ogre's kitchen. Each kettle can hold a couple of cows. " It is to feed the monks," says your companion. The Mongols are going up to the vessels, with buckets suspended to the end of a milkmaid's yoke. They dip up a load. The soup looks like gray tapioca pudding. What it is made of remains one of the secrets of the monastery, whose chef is stir ring the mixture with an oar. A big stockade, enclosing tents and peaked soume, from which the sound of chattering is heard, ap pears ahead. As we approach, a whole hive of boys swarm out and scatter in all directions. Some are in red, some in yellow, some wear ordinary Mon gol caps, some wear high, yellow sugar-loaf fools'- caps, which fall over on one side. These are the novices in training for the lama hierarchy. The first-born of each family must by imme morial custom become a lama. In babyhood and boyhood one of these dedicated children is clad in yellow robes and is especially tended. " Ubashi," he is called. When about ten years old the boy goes to school, at Urga. He becomes a bandi, or student of the prayers and of the Tibetan language. He runs 234 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA about as those we have just seen, and at about twenty he becomes a gitzul, or first-degree lama. Now he shaves head and beard, and wears a brilliant yellow and red robe. Next he takes the more ad vanced examination and catechism, and becomes a full priest, or gilun, forbidden to marry, to kill, or to work. He may continue his curriculum in one of the departments of the lamasery, studying divin ity, medicine, or astrology. In the divinity course a lama will memorize Tibetan prayers, and pore for years over the big holy books which lie within the chests of the lama sery chapels. He will repeat the creed over his beads, in rapt self-hypnotism, meditating in celestial holi ness. He will pray down rain for the grass, and will exorcise glanders from the ponies. A priest taking the medical course will gain a knowledge of the innumerable herbs that grow on the Tibetan mountains, many of which are of great value as drugs, and are known only to these mon astic seekers. Massage, warm sulphur baths, and waters, are part of his pharmacopoeia. Mixed with genuine instruction in anatomy and medicine, he will be taught the incantations that cast out tchut- gours, or evil spirits, the words of power to be written on rice-paper and rolled into a pill for the patient to swallow. He will learn what devil is responsible for the disease which has brought low the lusty herdsman, and the right order of image to make for allaying the infernal anger. He will be taught A PROSTRATING PILGRIMAGE THE CITY OF THE REBORN GOD 235 when the fever crisis is at hand, so that the cymbal- clashers, the drum-beaters, and the prayer-wailers may assemble, and by these holy noises and a transcendental counter-excitement, lift the patient over the fever-point. If he elects astrology, he will be instructed in casting horoscopes of unfailing value, in reading the stars, predicting their future stations and the com ing of eclipses. He will be prepared to declare the reasons for visitations of murrain and to track the trail of straying camels. Divers are the paths of knowledge, but all may lead to the honor of Grand Lama, head of a mon astery, or member of the college of shabniars, who form the Council of the Living God. And when the great reaper has called the high priest from his earthly glory, a whitened tomb will be raised to his memory just outside some town along the camel- trail, while his ashes will be moulded into briquettes and godly images, to rest before the gods in the shrine of some soume. We have arrived at the gateway to the great temple. The wool-merchant disappears inside to work his pull. A young lama comes out to the door, smiles at the foreigner, and then goes in again, and you tremble lest your advent is being announced to some other than the one man who can supposedly be "fixed." This is the most important temple of Urga, forbidden to foreigners, and seen through good fortune by a few only of the old residents. 236 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA But every gate they bar to hate will open wide to love — and a ten-rouble note. The merchant comes back. "We can go in while the lamas pray," he whis pers. The uncle appears, with an expectant look on his face, and motions us in through the darkness to the anteroom of the temple sanctuary. From the chamber curtained off at one side comes a low swelling chant. "Service begins, you may see it from here," the lama says, just above his breath. Your station is in darkness, but just the other side of the curtain are the lamas, and their apartment is lighted by windows. Two rows of benches extend the length of their chamber, leaving an aisle between them, reaching from the door to the altar. A score of priests in yellow robes, with red sashes slung tartan-fashion over a shoulder, are sitting on these seats facing each other. They are ranged evidently in the order of their ages. Two old giluns, fluent in the Tibetan litany, sit next the altar. Then come younger lamas, the gitzul, not yet full priests. Finally next to the door are bandi, ten or twelve years old, intense in youthful delight that their part in the ceremony is to pound as lustily as they can the big prayer-drums. The service begins with the chanting of a ritual in form not unlike the Slavonic litanies of Siberia. At appointed times it is neces sary to call the god's attention to the fact that THE CITY OF THE REBORN GOD 237 something is going on in his honor. At once a most deafening clamor begins. The small boy with a drum is drowned out by his big brother, further up the line, who officiates upon a huge wooden cornet, and by his uncle with the conch-shell or the cymbals. The droning of prayers is like the buzz of hiving bees. There seem to be no responses, but all of them read together. Presently comes a sud den clamor, almost like a fire-alarm; then the crash and the droning suddenly cease. " It is over ! " says the guide. The lamas file out by a further door, and we tiptoe in to inspect the holy of holies at the heart of the great lama sanctuary. In the dimness one sees first before him the table for offerings, on which are the two main sacerdotal instruments, — a silver bell and a silver handle like a carving-knife-rest, — and row after row of targets made of dough-paste, of brass cups filled with oil to serve the tapers, of mil let, rice, currants. Behind this altar, towering far up into the hollow of the dome, is the bronze colossus of the smiling Buddha, Maidari, the Future God. Fifty feet in height, the figure is, cross-legged, with open, painted eyes. From Buddha's hands hang long silken streamers. One of very fine quality is embroidered with the ten thousand gods. "This," the priest whispers, "is a present from the Dalai Lama." A great festival takes place in summer in honor of this god, who will rule a myriad years hence, when 238 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA the race of giants descends to kill mankind and to people the earth with their own kindred. The Gigin's elephant is brought out, and he himself takes the lesser dignity of a carriage in deference to Maidari. Even the gods of the present must honor the gods of the future. The Gigin's throne is to the left of the statue. It has triple silk cushions. Around are twelve colossi of Buddha, some ten feet in height, and en tirely gilt save for the red lips and the eyes. The hands are held in differing positions, folded, out stretched, pointing. Here and there a silk scroll is hung. The walls of the sanctuary are lined with shelves like a book-store, and these are loaded with statu ettes of the ten thousand gods. We tiptoe back the way we came, and are soon in the street of the monastery. The uncle has seen us safely away. We betake our route from the Mongol toward the Russian section. "You saw the throne cushion of Dalai Lama?" the wool-merchant asks. "They have put it back now. Gigin kicked it out of the temple when Dalai Lama left. The Angleski drove Dalai Lama from Lhasa, and he came to Urga to visit Gigin, because here is the second great Buddhist holy place. Now Dalai Lama is very monkish, very austere, and al ways prays and fasts. But our Gigin " — here fol lows another expansive smile — "Gigin rode out with his Council, the shabniars, and took some THE CITY OF THE REBORN GOD 239 of Pokrin's best champagne in the cart, for they would not have it in Lhasa. Dalai Lama was very stiff. Gigin asked him, ' Have a drink ! ' Dalai did not understand, for drink is forbidden. Then he asked him again, and Dalai Lama refused rebuk- ingly. They came to Gigin's palace at the foot of the Holy Mountain, which is built like the Russian consulate. After the prostrations, Gigin said to Dalai that he had come far and few women were on the road and those mostly old and ugly. Dalai Lama refused that too. Cigarettes and snuff, and canned tomatoes he offered, but Dalai Lama refused them all. Then, in the Assembly of the Lamas, Dalai re buked Gigin, and made him sit below his servants in penalty, for Dalai Lama is more of a god than Gigin. All the pilgrims came to offer gifts to Dalai Lama, and Gigin did not get his. For months Dalai Lama stayed here. Afterwards he went away to China. Gigin came to this temple then and kicked Dalai Lama's throne, throwing it down. He celebrated in the summer palace when Dalai Lama left, for he was very happy." Mongol Urga is left behind, and we reenter the Russian town. A hail from one of the passers-by is not long delayed. "Will you have chai? " he ques tions/ He is an alert-looking Russian, smartly clad in a shuba of green leather trimmed with sable. "Must we eat any more dinners to-day?" we inquire. 240 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA ' ' Only tea, " is the reply. It is not quite reassuring. "That is Pokrin, the one that sells to the Gigin," the wool-merchant whispers. " Go with him : he can tell you some tales." Obviously one must not miss the acquaintance ship of this modern Ganymede, cup-bearer of the many-bubbled French nectar and jugged ambrosia ; so on we march to his compound. Pokrin was on his way to a business appoint ment ; but no rendezvous will interfere with pro spective chai. He hangs his coat back on its peg, bids his wife start up the samovar, and produces the vodka-bottle. Yes, his family is very well, and he is very busy buying hides. We talk up and down and roundabout numberless themes, and at last venture : "The Gigin ! " "Ah, the Gigin was here to see me only a week ago. We bow our recognition of the host's great im portance, and he is started ; soon he buckles down into the story. "The Buddha came up in his carriage with his lamas riding beside him, and they tied their horses all around here in front. Then Gigin came in, walk ing softly because of his gout, and he said, ' Let us drink together like friends, without quarreling.' " I brought out the drinks, and we sat down, — Gigin and I with the lamas around us. Gigin likes best the strong drinks, — not vodka, but cognac and sweet champagne. Very many bottles we drank, THE CITY OF THE REBORN GOD 241 Gigin and I. And at last I fell asleep. But Gigin drank still. Then he too fell asleep. In the morning the lamas carried him to his carriage, and back he drove to the palace, with the people lying down in the street as he passed. All the next day I had a very bad pain in my forehead, and it felt large." By non-Siberian standards Alexsimevich should be on the way to similar symptoms in the near future. For the purveyor to the Divinity has pro duced an assorted collection of his wares which are being sampled with due diligence. Cold meats and wheat-bread appear on the table with the sam ovar. "We must eat, or he feels badly," whispers Alexsimevich, as he makes a sandwich, an inch and a half through, which is about the depth of brandy in the Siberian highball. Other neighbors drift in as the afternoon wears on. The talk turns to that greatest of local events, the Metropolitan Handicap of Mongolia, under the high patronage of the Living God. Things become decidedly stimulating, and the recitals lively. Every body is living over the excitement, ejaculating and gesticulating. The child-quality in their minds keeps so vivid their impressions, that the scenes are pro jected almost as by a cinematograph. From hundreds of miles around, the herdsmen have assembled. The plain before the city is a riot of color, as the horsemen ride here and there. In the centre of the field is the gay pavilion for the 242 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA yellow-robed bishops and cardinals from distant lamaseries, guests of the great Gigin. All through the morning, hundreds of riders and horses have been making for the starting-point, twenty li (about seven miles) distant. The jockeys are the smallest boys available : young red-cheeked lamas, perched bareback on the shaggy racing- ponies. The monks, who are stewards of the course, have with much shouting finally, at the hour, lined them up in a long row, facing Urga. One thousand ponies have been reported as entering. It is a regi ment of boys. A signal starts the whole cavalcade together. The thousand small jockeys shout at once. A thousand whips come down on flanks. Two thousand heels dig into the ponies' withers. Over the irregular plain tear the racers, dodging around gullies, stumbling in marmot-holes, galloping helter- skelter amid furious yells. At length they come within sight of Urga. Crowds, mounted, have gone out to follow them in. The shouts redouble, the people become frantic; the riders yell at one an other, and the horses are as wild as their masters. Shabniars and cardinals get to their feet as the cavalcade appears. The Living God's heavy eyes brighten up with interest. His chief soul-mate waves a jewelled hand and chatters excitedly with a lama of the guard. The foremost rider is close at hand now, the jockey, wriggling like an eel and al most on the neck of his pony, yelling and slashing. The field thunders behind. The leader nears the THE CITY OF THE REBORN GOD 243 pavilion, his pony is on the fierce final spurt, — a last cut of the whip, and in triumph, amid the deafening roar of the populace, the winner passes the line. Many other riders come in at his heels, but most straggle off to either side of the course when they see that the finish is lost. The victor is caught up by the priests and is brought before Gigin, where he lies on his stomach in adoration. He receives a gift, and is pensioned for life. The horse's owner receives a good price for the animal, which is added to the Gigin's stable. The mule-cart of the Buddha is then brought up and he is loaded in. The yellow bishops mount their steeds, and back to his palace goes the Living God. Thus ends the great Urga race. There are other athletic tournaments during the season; most important of these is the champion ship wrestling - bout, which every year decides whether laymen or clergy are the better sportsmen. The Gigin's pavilion fronts a ring, with dressing- tents on either side. From one emerges a layman. He advances by huge jumps and prostrates himself before the deity. Next, palms on the ground, like a great frog, he leaps into the ring. The chosen lama executes the same pass from the other side. They meet, jumping like game-cocks, with quick breaks. At length the clergyman gets a leg. In an instant he heaves up on it, and over goes the black man, — out! The whole assembled populace raises a stu pendous howl. Bout succeeds bout, with differing champions and varying issues. Partisanship is in- 244 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA tense. The clergy usually win in these matches, and have long held the championship. One guest tells to-night of the photographer who bribed a lama, and got the first photograph of Gigin. The tale runs that this man, a Russian, se cured admission among a crowd of pilgrims, and snapped the god, unawares, among his entourage of priests. This photograph, enlarged and colored, is the one now hawked to the Mongols, and which they set up for worship among their other gods. The lama was beheaded, they say. That was several years ago, however: since then Gigin has been photographed at the races and elsewhere. At last we break away from the group and return to our lodgings at Varlakoff' s. We are informed next day that among the in vitations so lightly and uncomprehendingly ac cepted was one to take dinner with the mayor of the Russian settlement. We are expected there fore toward evening. So, late in the day, we gird on our greatcoat and move out heavily. Down the street we fare forth to the house of the host. A fine well-fed man is this mayor, with the cordial grip and the slow smile of good-fellowship. He wears a very long beard. He has taken a fancy to the em broidered green and pink Chinese ear-tabs as a sub stitute for the big fur cap of his own people. The ear-tabs are about as appropriate to his burgo master build as baby-blue ribbon on the tail of a fighting bull-pup. Otherwise, deerskin boots and < aZ <: ao THE CITY OF THE REBORN GOD 245 hunting-coat, he is the real Siberian. In the mayor's large sitting-room, along the wall against which the table stands, is a rank of bottles of divers heights and fatness, like recruits out for their drill. The samovar of shining brass leads the array. Four different-sized glasses stand at each plate, and the intervening area is covered with platters of sausages, cheese, bread, sprats of every conceivable variety, and a medley of cold zakuska dishes. The mayor reaches for the vodka. " Please, none ! " we blurt out. The mayor looks hurt. Then an idea takes form in his head, and he shouts something to his Chinese boy, who promptly shuffles through the door into the street. Out of the window we catch a glimpse of him turn ing into the establishment across the way, where Pokrin's clerk sells the wherewithal to make a Russian holiday. The Chinese boy emerges with a bottle, and trots back across the street with the curious gait made requisite by the unattached thick- soled slippers. He shuffles into the dining-room and makes space for one more bottle. Whiskey ! The mayor has bethought himself of the English label, and has sent for it, on the theory that not to drink, like not to sleep, is unbelievable. Evidently one must again sidestep, so chai is besought and got down. Our virtue is rewarded, for the host smiles and is content. "Poor Pokrin!" he says presently, reminded of 246 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA the man by the beverage. "He made over a hun dred thousand roubles from selling things to the Gigin. But now he can't think of any more things to sell. You saw the Gigin's new droshky? But that is n't like selling an elephant or an electric-light plant. Pokrin is down to pelicans and fountain- pens." He shakes his head sympathetically, and reaches anew for the vodka -bottle. He goes on reminiscing, half-cynically, half-regretfully, of the past, while dinner to serve the appetite of a Cyclops keeps coming on. In the midst of the repast cries arise outside. A Mongol with a flow of language is heard calling aloud for "Bulun Dargat" (fat policeman.) "They are after me," says the mayor resignedly. The Mongol comes hurtling in, pushing past the Chinese boy. "Fat policeman," he cries; "Red Mustache and Long Nose and Blue Coat are drunk, and are disturbing my gir. Come quickly, O Lord, fat police man." The mayor sighs. " I go " ; then he turns to us. "Will you accompany me?" "Gladly, if we don't have to eat any more." The mayor considers this a back-handed com pliment to the amplitude of his hospitality and smiles. " V period, it is not far." He puts on his huge greatcoat, draws on his pon- THE CITY OF THE REBORN GOD 247 derous boots, takes a. heavy stick, and in vividly embroidered Chinese ear-tabs stands ready to fol low the Mongol. We shoulder open the felted door. From the low-ceilinged recess between this and the outer door he produces two other big sticks, like pilgrim's staves. These he hands to his visitors. " For the dogs ! " he explains. The Mongol's hut is soon reached. It is in fright ful disorder, and vodka-bottles are strewn around. The mayor looks up in a little book to see if Krasni, young Agueff, and Pugachev are not, as he sus pects, the men who in native nomenclature are called Red Mustache, Blue Coat, and Long Nose. He finds that he has rightly surmised. "I know them," says the mayor. "They will come around to me in the morning. I will tell them to make the Mongol satisfaction. When they come back and say he is satisfied, I tell them to be good and to do this no more. Nietchevo ! " The irate man is jollied along, and is told that it will be fixed up soon. Consoled and soothed by the protection of authority, he admits it was not so bad after all, and he bids us, as we leave, a grinning "Sein oh!" "Now," says the mayor, "will you not come and see Urga at night?" He leads along an icy back street, black as a can yon, with the bulging mud-plastered walls, twenty feet in height, so close that a cart can barely pass between them. Not a light is seen save as a ray 248 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA pierces the shuttered planking of some compound door. Distant clanging of cymbals and far-off echoes alone break the stillness. Out from the gloom of the street we come into the open piazza, half a verstwide. It is unshadowed, and less dark. Thread ing the heaped-up refuse we stumble on. The black crows, with lancet-like blood-red beaks, which search the heaps by day, are gone. The black cannibal dogs wake and growl as we approach. "They are afraid of a stick and don't generally attack people. But, if several do come at you, crouch down and stay perfectly quiet," the mayor counsels. He then tells of the Cossack who last year, pass ing by a dog that did not move aside, drew his sabre and struck the beast. As soon as the other dogs smelled the fresh blood, they became mad, and half a dozen came at him. He put his back against the wall and slashed among them. Many he cut and wounded, but more came and more, in an instant. Soon he was pulled down, for hundreds were upon him. A big black-furred brute looks insolently at us as we pass. "They do not bury the dead here, you know," the mayor says. "The corpses are taken to the mountain northward outside the town, and are left. It is cold to-night. There will be death in the market-place where the poor lie shelterless. And the dogs wait beside them." A little way off, where the prayer-wheel stands, THE CITY OF THE REBORN GOD 249 is the twinkling light of a shrine. The new moon and the few brilliant stars are frigidly distant. They cast a pale white glow now on the dimly out lined walls and huts. A beggar, lying unseen, calls suddenly as we pass his heap of sodden hides. The six-foot Siberian hunter by our side cries out as he stumbles over and beholds a something, partly eaten, guarded by a great cannibal dog. If the thought of the rights of man has drowned sympathy with all that concerns the government of Russia, visit Urga at night, and the Cossack of the Russian Guard, swaggering' along among the Chinamen, — this Cossack whom you have heard execrated as the "knout of the Czar," — will look to you like a Highlander at Lucknow. The chance to absorb an unwholesome amount of tannin by way of a samovar, and to sleep on the floor be side the oven in the whitewashed house of Michael Varlakoff, will become a privilege more prized than any possessed by His Holiness, the Living God. The section of the Russian colony in which we have been lodging consists of five hundred-odd traders. They have drifted down from Siberia, and on the free ground of taxless Urga have established their shops of gaudy European cloths, enameled cooking-utensils, candles, and cutlery. These Rus sians, whose whitewashed many-paned houses fill a quarter of the town, have not the large interests watched by the English merchants, who dot the globe with their agencies. They are small Trans- 250 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA Baikal shopkeepers, transplanted bodily. They build their houses in the Siberian way, and their wives toil personally at the oven. They wear blouses and felt boots as the house-dress, and keep the ikons in the corner. Prosperity is evidenced in the striking-clocks, the lamps, nickeled samovars, and curtained double windows. But they are still not many removes from the peasant. There is, however, another section of Urga's Rus sian colony, grouped around the consulate, a large compound situated a verst east of the Mongol town, which was built in 1863, and was fortified in 1900, against the Boxers. Within this compound are the Orthodox Church, the Russian doctor, the rooms of the twenty Cossacks of the Guard, and the great empty barracks of the two sotnias that were sent here in Boxer times, and were, to the regret of their compatriots, later removed. The barracks are still ready for any future visits, and the breastwork, with its stake and fosse lined with barbed-wire, is equal to any force which from a five-hundred-verst radius can assemble against it. In this quarter, the Russian consul is autocrat. He is the official notary, without whose stamp no contract is legal, the chief of police, the guardian of orphans. Around him revolves the society of the few dozen mondaines of Urga, whose personnel consists of the officials, the garrison officers, and some half- dozen commercial agents, single generally, or with distant families. They conduct their bachelor quar- THE CITY OF THE REBORN GOD 251 ters through Chinese servants, and their cuisines are helped out by all the canned and bottled delicacies that can be ordered from the frontier. The gold mines, and the extensive wool-trade which produces a commerce of twenty to thirty millions, demand that first-grade men watch the interests of the great companies which handle the business. So men of the best cosmopolitan Russian type come, at salaries proportioned to their sacrifice. They gather in the consulate evenings, or sit in the fenced-off boxes at the theatrical performances, which periodically come down from Kiahta. A few families who have made their sixteen-day camel-trip from Kalgan and Peking have fore gathered here with their household goods and gods. Buttressed by the companionship of books, this other class lives in splendidly-furnished rooms, with pictures purchased in Paris, statuettes from Rome, and grand pianos drawn for days over the passes by laboring oxen. One converses at the consulate in French, the mother tongue of none, but the common tongue of all. The few favored guests, who are in vited of necessity over and over, play chess end lessly in the evenings. The ladies read the latest French novels, or sing the songs that distant friends have sent from the Riviera or St. Petersburg. They drive in imported carriages and sleighs for the afternoon airing, and bemoan Nice and Monte Carlo in winter over the pages of Zola's "Rome." The men' subscribe extensively to English, French, 252 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA German, and Russian periodicals. They invite such relatives as can be persuaded for lengthy stays, and shower a guest with the hospitality of old claret, caviar, and the varied courtesies which the rarity of visitors from the world inspires. They take long adventurous horseback trips in the dull season, — explore forgotten monasteries, study the Tibetan inscriptions, print monographs on the folk-tales, and dream of promotion and Petersburg. The consulate has one uniquely circumstanced personality, whose career is a romance of Eastern adventure. Born in the Baltic provinces, he studied in the Oriental training-schools, and entered the Russian diplomatic service at Peking. Here he ap plied himself indefatigably, until he knew the Chinese language as did hardly another European. He could write the ten thousand ideographs, and could speak flawlessly the Mandarin and the popu lar dialects. He went to Mongolia and mastered its languages also, — its spoken idioms and its written grapevine letters. Then, with his diplomatic entree, his knowledge of men and tongues, and the initiative of an adventurer, he launched his grand coup in the palace of Peking. He carried away the sole right to the gold of two eimucks, a territory as large as France. Not a China man may pan the metal, not a Slav may open a mine, save through this concessionnaire. A third of all gold washed, — these are his terms to those who would lease from him ; just double what he pays the THE CITY OF THE REBORN GOD 253 Peking Yamen for his privilege. Fortune upon for tune he is reported to have made, and the Chinese gold-washers and the Russian miners who lease from him have gathered their own stakes, too, despite the Caesar's tribute which he exacts of all that they produce. He has spent large sums in bringing down ma chinery, to do on a great scale what the shallow veins of ore demanded should be done on a limited scale. An abandoned gold-dredge lies far up the Iro River, transported piecemeal at exorbitant expense over the hills. Traction-engines are here, which could not cope with the Mongol roads. They con sumed forty days going one hundred and twenty miles to the largest mine. Now they lie rusting in their sheds. Thousands of ox-carts were engaged for hauling in the various purchases. River steamers and great oil-drills scattered over northern Mon golia are relics of his ambition. His brick house, finely furnished, and his brick smelter stand hard-by the consulate. The Russians tell of masons imported from Sweden to build them. The life-history is a bizarre record of great things attempted by a man whose overleaping ambition stopped nowhere, and whose expenditures more than once brought him down. But his interesting meteoric career continues, and twenty pud of gold are said still to come down yearly from the mines to the most picturesque character in Russian Urga. We drive down with one of the officials, to be 254 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA present at another of the events in Urga's meagre happenings — the arrival of the mail. The Russian post, one delivery a week, crosses Mongolia. The horses bring in three mails from the Russian frontier. From Urga to Kalgan, the camel- post guarded by Cossacks, traverses the great desert of Gobi. Save the Imperial Chinese telegraph, it is the only regular method of intercourse with the out side world. The two thousand-odd roubles a year paid by Russia as a subsidy are a small expenditure for the opportunity of accustoming the people to her service, and for controlling the avenues of news and communication. The post-office is at the consulate, and a new post master has just been installed. Thereby hangs a tale which is poured into your ear before your stay in Urga has been much protracted. A telegram came from Irkutsk to seize and bring to Verhneudinsk as propagandists the postmaster's son and daughter — twenty-one and eighteen. Twenty Cossacks surrounded the house at three in the morning. The two were arrested, taken to the mayor's house, and lodged there. The next day they were started on the trail to Kiahta. Once over the border, there would be no more hope. Quickly the leading men of the colony assembled and tele graphed the Russian ambassador at Peking, knowing that if the ambassador had official cognizance, he could not safely authorize an arrest on Chinese soil by the Cossacks of the Guard. The response was THE CITY OF THE REBORN GOD 255 delayed, but there was pressure enough upon the consul to get the prisoners held at the mining-camp beyond Iro until the answer was received. At length the ambassador replied that Chinese suzer ainty must be respected. The two were free. But the father had been advised to resign his post and accept a station which was offered him at Kalgan, where there were only three Russians, all warranted proof against propaganda. Beyond the Russian consulate, six versts, is the Chinese town called, as are many of these trading- posts, Maimachen, or place of trade. One can get there by the solitary Cossack-driven droshky that the Russian colony supports. But more appropri ately we go on pony-back, borrowing an army-saddle and a purple fleece-lined shuba, whose skirts reach around the knees, and whose long sleeves fold over the hands, keeping a rider reasonably warm in cold weather. The houses of Mongol Urga are soon left behind, the stockaded lamasery is passed on the left, and we are on a big open plain. A few minutes' gallop takes us past the consulate. Beyond it stands a compound girded by a stockade of saplings, within which are the low mud walls of straggling houses, amid which the gilded eaves of a more pretentious residence lift themselves above the rest. A troop of pig- tailed horsemen trots past: the white tunics of the riders are covered, back and breast, with red ideograph letters, which stigmatize 256 THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA the bearers as of the lowest caste — soldiers of the Celestial service. The man in front holds aloft a gilded pear-shaped standard, and between the ranks lumbers a covered cart with closed shutters. The cavalcade Wheels to. the right and turns in, dipping the standard as they pass under the gargoyle-tipped beams of the gateway. Servants come running out of the great house. From the cart is helped down a Manchu of pallid face and short gray mustache. That wooden house, girded by mud huts, is the seat of government for this greatest eimuck in Mongolia. The figure robed. in cheap blue cotton is lord of life and death, the Zinzin, Viceroy for the Emperor of China. This Manchu Viceroy, and his Tu-T'ung, or lieu tenant-governor, who represents Chinese authority in the city of Kalgan, are responsible for the collec tion of tribute, the administration of justice in the cities, and the maintenance of order. Over the Chi nese inhabitants in the Maimachen the rule through the agency of the prefect of police appointed by the Viceroy is direct and absolute. Over the Mongols, Chinese rule is exercised in an irregular nebulous fashion, with some force in the centres and almost none in the outlying districts, where the old nomad organization of society, with princes, barons, or tai-tsi, clergy, and ordinary black men, still persists. A code of Chinese laws exists, but in general justice is dealt out by the local princes, or guns, who receive also the cattle-tax in j^y^ . . *'*^^I^^"^S^— gii lb laiEp^liPl A 1 llfefMl Bl^s ^K*»!p*<^Kii|B(H Br B»V?B mkw^m ?.!' I ^^44 t Sa? r'^iSfe15'' ffll^';@^f#« 6071 YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY ASIA READING ROOM