V
I did not stay long at St. Petersburg, but returned to Irkutsk the same winter. My brother was going to join me there in a few months: he was accepted as an officer of the Irkutsk Cossacks.
Traveling 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 intense, 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 degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. Traveling 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 Irkutsk nineteen days after leaving St. Petersburg. Two hundred miles a day is the normal speed in such cases, and I remember having covered the last 660 miles of my journey 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 over hill and vale, across rivers frozen as hard as steel, and through forests glistening in their silver attire under the rays of the sun.
I was now appointed attaché to the Governor-General of East Siberia for Cossack affairs, and had to reside at Irkutsk; but there was nothing in 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.
If one casts a glance on a map of Asia, one sees that the Russian frontier which runs in Siberia, broadly speaking, along the fiftieth degree of latitude, suddenly bends in Transbaikália to the north. It follows for three hundred miles the Argúñ River; then, on reaching the Amúr, it turns southeastward, the town of Blagoveshchensk, which was the capital of the Amúr land, being situated again in about the same latitude of fifty degrees. Between the southeastern corner of Transbaikália (New Tsurukháitu) and Blagoveshchensk on the Amúr, the distance west to east is only five hundred miles; but along the Argúñ and the Amúr it is over a thousand miles, and moreover communication along the Argúñ, which is not navigable, is extremely difficult. In its lower parts there is nothing but a mountain track of the wildest description.
Transbaikália is very rich in cattle, and the Cossacks who occupy its southeastern corner and are wealthy cattle-breeders wanted to establish a direct communication with the middle Amúr, which would be a good market for their cattle. They used to trade with the Mongols, and they had heard from them that it would not be difficult to reach the Amúr, traveling eastward across the Great Khingán. Going straight towards the east, they were told, one would fall in with an old Chinese route which crosses the Khingán and leads to the Manchurian town of Merghén (on the Nónni River, a tributary to the Sungarí), whence there is an excellent road to the middle Amúr.
I was offered the leadership of a trading caravan which the Cossacks intended to organize in order to find that route, and I accepted it with enthusiasm. No European had ever visited that region; and a Russian topographer who went that way a few years before was killed. Only two Jesuits, in the times of the Emperor Kan-si, had penetrated from the south as far as Merghén, and had determined its latitude. All the immense region to the north of it, five hundred miles wide, and seven hundred miles deep, was totally, absolutely unknown. I consulted all the available sources about this region. Nobody, not even the Chinese geographers, knew anything about it. Besides, the very fact of connecting the middle Amúr with Transbaikália had its importance, and Tsurukháitu is now going to be the head of the Trans-Manchuria Railway. We were thus the pioneers of that great enterprise.
There was, however, one difficulty. The treaty with China granted to the Russians free trade with the “Empire of China, and Mongolia.” Manchuria was not mentioned in it, and could as well be excluded as included in the treaty. The Chinese frontier authorities interpreted it one way, and the Russians the other way. Moreover, only trade being mentioned, an officer would not be allowed to enter Manchuria. I had thus to go as a trader; so I bought at Irkutsk various goods and went disguised as a merchant. The governor-general delivered me a passport “To the Irkutsk second guild merchant, Petr Alexéiev, and his companions;” and he warned me that if the Chinese authorities arrested me and took me to Peking, and thence across the Gobi to the Russian frontier—in a cage, on a camel’s back, was their way of conveying prisoners across Mongolia—I must not betray him by naming myself. I accepted, of course, all the conditions, the temptation to visit a country which no European had ever seen being too great for an explorer to resist.
It would not have been easy to conceal my identity while I was in Transbaikália. The Cossacks are an extremely inquisitive people—real Mongols—and as soon as a stranger comes to their villages, while treating him with the greatest hospitality, the master of the house where he stays subjects him to a formal interrogatory.
“A tedious journey, I suppose,” he begins; “a
