Part 25

Only those who have seen the Amúr, or know the Mississippi or the Yang-tse-kiang, can imagine what an immense river the Amúr becomes after it has joined the Sungarí and can realize what tremendous waves roll up its bed if the weather is stormy. When the rainy season, due to the monsoons, comes in July, the Sungarí, the Usurí, and the Amúr are swollen by unimaginable quantities of water; thousands of low islands, usually covered with willow thickets, are inundated or torn away, and the width of the river attains in places two, three, and even five miles; water rushes into hundreds of branches and lakes which spread in the lowlands along the main channel; and when a fresh wind blows from an eastern quarter, against the current, tremendous waves, higher than those which one sees in the estuary of the St. Lawrence, roll up the main channel as well as up its branches. Still worse is it when a typhoon blows from the Chinese Sea and spreads over the Amúr region.

We experienced such a typhoon. I was then on board a large decked boat, with Major Maróvsky, whom I had joined at Blagovéschensk. He had well provided his boat with sails, which permitted us to sail close to the wind, and when the storm began we managed, nevertheless, to bring our boat on the sheltered side of the river and to find refuge in some small tributary. There we stayed for two days while the storm raged with such fury that when I ventured for a few hundred yards into the surrounding forest, I had to retreat on account of the number of immense trees which the wind was blowing down round me. We began to feel very uneasy for our barges. It was evident that if they had been afloat this morning, they never would have been able to reach the sheltered side of the river, but must have been driven by the storm to the bank exposed to the full rage of the wind, and there they must have been destroyed. A disaster was almost certain.

We sailed out as soon as the main fury of the storm had abated. We knew that we must soon overtake two detachments of barges; but we sailed one day, two days, and there was no trace of them. My friend Maróvsky lost both sleep and appetite, and looked as if he had just had a serious illness. He sat whole days on the deck, motionless, murmuring: ‘All is lost, all is lost!’ The villages are few and rare in this part of the Amúr, and nobody could give us any information. A new storm came on, and when we reached at last a village, we learned that no barges had passed by it, and that quantities of wreck had been seen floating down the river during the previous day. It was evident that at least forty barges, which carried a cargo of about 2,000 tons, must have perished. It meant a certain famine next spring on the lower Amúr if no supplies were brought in time. We were late in the season, navigation would soon be closed, and there was no telegraph yet along the river.

We held a council and decided that Maróvsky should sail as quickly as possible to the mouth of the Amúr. Some purchases of grain might perhaps be made in Japan before the close of the navigation. Meanwhile I was to go with all possible speed up the river, to determine the losses, and do my best to cover the two thousand miles of the Amúr and the Shílka--in boats, on horseback, or on board steamer if I met one. The sooner I could warn the Chitá authorities, and despatch any amount of provisions available, the better it would be. Perhaps part of them would reach this same autumn the upper Amúr, whence it would be easier to ship them in the early spring to the lowlands. Even if a few weeks or only days could be won, it might make an immense difference in case of a famine.

I began my two thousand miles’ journey in a rowing boat, changing rowers each twenty miles or so, at each village. It was very slow progress, but there might be no steamer coming up the river for a fortnight, and in the meantime I could reach the spots where the barges were wrecked, and see if any of the provisions had been saved. Then, at the mouth of the Usurí (Khabaróvsk) I might find a steamer. The boats which I took in the villages were miserable, and the weather very stormy. We kept evidently along the shore, but we had to cross some branches of the Amúr of great width, and the waves, driven by the high wind, threatened continually to swamp our little craft. One day we had to cross a branch of the Amúr nearly half a mile wide. Chopped waves rose like mountains as they rolled up that branch. My rowers, two peasants, were seized with terror; their faces were white as paper; their blue lips trembled, they murmured prayers. Only a boy of fifteen, who held the rudder, calmly kept a watchful eye upon the waves. He glided between them as they seemed to sink around us for a moment; but when he saw them rising to a menacing height in front of us he gave a slight turn to the boat and steadied it across the waves. The boat shipped water from each wave, and I threw it out with an old ladle, noting at times that it accumulated more rapidly than I could get rid of it. There was a moment when the boat shipped two such big waves that, on a sign given to me by one of the trembling rowers, I unfastened the heavy sackful of copper and silver that I carried across my shoulder.... For several days in succession we had such crossings. I never forced the men to cross, but they themselves, knowing why I had to hurry, would decide at a given moment that an attempt must be made. ‘There are not seven deaths in one’s life, and one cannot be avoided,’ they would say, and, signing themselves with the cross, would seize the oars and pull over.

I soon reached the places where the main destruction of our barges took place. Forty-four barges had been destroyed by the storm. Unloading had been impossible, and very little of the cargo had been saved. Two thousand tons of flour had perished in the waves. With this message I continued my journey.

A few days later a steamer slowly creeping up the river overtook me, and when I boarded her the passengers told me that the captain had drunk so much that he was seized with delirium and jumped overboard. He was saved, though, and was now lying ill in his cabin. They asked me to take the command of the steamer, and I had to accept it; but soon I realized, to my great astonishment, that everything went on by itself in such an excellent routine way that, though I paraded all day on the bridge, I had almost nothing to do. Apart from a few minutes of real responsibility when the steamer had to be brought to the landing-places, where we took wood for fuel, and saying a few words now and then for encouraging the stokers to start as soon as dawn permitted us faintly to distinguish the outlines of the shores, everything went on by itself, requiring but little interference of mine. A pilot who would have been able to interpret the map would have managed as well.

Travelling by steamer and a great deal on horseback I reached at last Transbaikália. The idea of a famine that might break out next spring on the lower Amúr oppressed me all the time. I found that the small steamer on board of which I was did not progress up the swift Shílka rapidly enough, and in order to gain some twenty hours, or even less, I abandoned it and rode with a Cossack a couple of hundred miles up the Argúñ, along one of the wildest mountain tracks in Siberia, stopping to light our camp fire only after midnight would have overtaken us in the woods. Even the ten or twenty hours that I might gain by this exertion had not to be despised, because every day brought us nearer to the close of navigation: at nights, ice was already forming on the river. At last I met the Governor of Transbaikdália, and my friend, Colonel Pedashénko, on the Shílka, at the convict settlement of Kará, and the latter took in hand the care of shipping immediately all available provisions. As to me, I left immediately to report all about the matter at Irkútsk.

People at Irkútsk wondered that I had managed to make this long journey so rapidly, but I was quite worn out. However, youth quickly recovers its strength, and I recovered mine by sleeping for some time such a number of hours every day that I should be ashamed to say how many.

‘Have you taken some rest?’ the Governor-General asked me a week or so after my arrival. ‘Could you start to-morrow for St. Petersburg, as a courier, to report there yourself upon the loss of the barges?’

It meant to cover in twenty days--not one day more--another distance of 3,200 miles between Irkútsk and Níjni-Nóvgorod, where I could take the railway to St. Petersburg; to gallop day and night in post-carts which had to be changed at every station, because no carriage would stand such a journey full speed over the ruts of the roads frozen at the end of the autumn. But to see my brother Alexander was too great an attraction for me not to accept the offer, and I started the next night. When I reached the lowlands of West Siberia and the Urals the journey really became a torture. There were days when the wheels of the carts would be broken over the frozen ruts at every successive station. The rivers were freezing, and I had to cross the Ob in a boat amidst the floating ice, which menaced at every moment to crush our small craft. When I reached the Tom river, on which the ice had only stopped floating during the preceding night, the peasants refused for some time to take me over, asking me to give them ‘a receipt.’

‘What sort of receipt do you want?’

‘Well, you write on a paper: “I, undersigned, hereby testify that I was drowned by the will of God and by no fault of the peasants,” and you give us that paper.’

‘With pleasure, on the other shore.’

At last they took me over. A boy--a brave, bright boy whom I had selected in the crowd--opened the procession, testing the strength of the ice with a pole; I followed him, carrying my despatch-box on my shoulders, and we two were attached to long reins which five peasants held, following us at a distance--one of them carrying a bundle of straw, to be thrown on the ice if it should not seem strong enough.

At last I reached Moscow, where my brother met me at the station, and we proceeded at once to St. Petersburg.

Youth is a grand thing. After such a journey, which lasted twenty-four days and nights, when I came, early in the morning, to St. Petersburg, I went the same day to deliver my despatches, and did not fail also to call upon an aunt--or, rather, upon a cousin--who resided at St. Petersburg. She was radiant. ‘We have a dancing party to-night. Will you come?’ she said. Of course I would! And not only come, but dance until an early hour of the morning.

* * * * *

When I came to St. Petersburg and saw the authorities, I understood why I had been sent to make the report. Nobody would believe the possibility of such a destruction of the barges. ‘Have you been on the spot? Did you see the destruction with your own eyes? Are you perfectly sure that “they” have not simply stolen the provisions and shown you the wreck of some barges?’ Such were the questions I had to answer.

The high functionaries who stood at the head of Siberian affairs at St. Petersburg were simply charming in their innocent ignorance of Siberia. ‘Mais, mon cher,’ one of them said to me--he always spoke French---‘how is it possible that forty barges should be destroyed on the Nevá without anyone rushing to help save them?’ ‘The Nevá,’ I exclaimed; ‘put three, four Nevás side by side, and you will have the lower Amúr!’

‘Is it really as big as that?’ And two minutes later he was chatting, in excellent French, about all sorts of things. ‘When did you last see Schwartz, the painter? Is not his “John the Terrible” a wonderful picture? Do you know for what reason Kúkel was going to be arrested? Do you know that Chernyshévsky is arrested? He is now in the fortress.’

‘What for? What has he done?’ I asked.

‘Nothing particular; nothing! But, mon cher, you know, State considerations! Such a clever man, awfully clever! And such an influence he has upon the youth. You understand that a Government cannot tolerate that: that’s impossible! intolérable, mon cher, dans un État bien ordonné!’

Count Ignátieff made no such questions; he knew the Amúr very well, and he knew St. Petersburg too. Amidst all sorts of jokes, and witty remarks about Siberia which he made with an astounding vivacity, he dropped to me: ‘It is a very lucky thing that you were there on the spot, and saw the wrecks. And “they” were clever to send you with the report! Well done! At first, nobody wanted to believe about the barges. Some new swindling, it was thought. But now people say that you were well known as a page, and you have only been a few months in Siberia; so you would not shelter the people there if it were swindling. They trust in you.’

The Minister of War, Dmítri Milútin, was the only man in the high administration of St. Petersburg who took the matter seriously. He asked me many questions: all to the point. He mastered the subject at once, and all our conversation was in short sentences, without hurry, but without any waste of words. ‘The coast settlements to be supplied from the sea, you mean? The remainder only from Chitá? Quite right. But if a storm happens next year, will there be the same destruction once more?’ ‘No, if there are two small tugs to convoy the barges.’ ‘Will it do?’ ‘Yes, with one tug the loss would not have been half so heavy.’ ‘Very probably. Write to me, please; state all you have said, quite plainly; no formalities.’

I did not stay long at St. Petersburg, and returned to Irkútsk the same winter. My brother was going to join me there in a few months; he was accepted as an officer of the Irkútsk Cossacks.

Travelling across Siberia in the winter is supposed to be a terrible experience; but, all things considered, it is on the whole more comfortable than at any other season of the year. The snow-covered roads are excellent, and, although the cold is fearful, one can stand it well enough. Lying full length in the sledge--as everyone does in Siberia--wrapped in fur blankets, fur inside and fur outside, one does not suffer much from the cold, even when the temperature is forty or sixty Fahrenheit degrees below zero. Travelling in courier fashion--that is, rapidly changing horses at each station and stopping only once a day for one hour to take a meal--I reached Irkútsk nineteen days after I had left St. Petersburg. Two hundred miles a day is the normal speed in such cases, and I remember having covered the last 660 miles before Irkútsk in seventy hours. The frost was not severe then, the roads were in an excellent condition, the drivers were kept in good spirits by a free allowance of silver coins, and the team of three small and light horses seemed to enjoy running swiftly across hill and vale, and across rivers frozen as hard as steel, amidst forests glistening in their silver attire in the rays of the sun.

I was now nominated attaché to the Governor-General of East Siberia for Cossack affairs, and had to reside at Irkútsk; but there was nothing particular to do. To let everything go on, according to the established routine, with no more reference to changes, such was the watchword that came now from St. Petersburg. I therefore gladly accepted the proposal to undertake geographical exploration in Manchuria.