The local commander of the Cossacks, Captain Buxhövden, knew his people, and consequently we had taken our precautions. At Chitá and at Irkutsk we often had had amateur theatricals, playing by preference dramas of Ostróvsky, in which the scene of action is nearly always amongst the merchant classes. I played several times in such dramas, and found so great pleasure in acting that I even wrote on one occasion to my brother an enthusiastic letter confessing to him my passionate desire to abandon my military career and to go on the stage. I played mostly young merchants, and had acquired sufficiently well their ways of talking and gesticulating and tea-drinking from the saucer—I learned those ways in my Nikólskoye experiences—and now I had a good opportunity to act it all out in reality for useful purposes.
“Take your seat, Petr Alexeievich,” Captain Buxhövden would say to me when the boiling tea urn, throwing out clouds of steam, was placed on the table.
“Thank you; we will stay here,” I would reply, sitting on the edge of a chair at a distance, and beginning to drink my tea in true Moscow merchant fashion, Buxhövden meanwhile nearly exploding with laughter, as I blew upon my saucer with “staring eyes” and bit off in a special way microscopic particles from a small lump of sugar which was to serve for half a dozen cups.
We knew that the Cossacks would soon make out the truth about me, but the important thing was to win a few days, and to cross the frontier while my identity was still undiscovered. I must have played my part pretty well, for the Cossacks treated me like a petty merchant. In one village an old woman beckoned to me as I passed, and asked, “Are there more people coming behind you on the road my dear?”
“None, grandmother, that we heard of.”
“They said a prince, Rapótsky, was going to come. Is he coming?”
“Oh, I see. You are right, grandmother. His highness intended to go, too, from Irkutsk. But how can ‘they’? Such a journey! Not suitable for them. So they remained where they were.”
“Of course, how can he!”
To be brief, we crossed the frontier unmolested. We were eleven Cossacks, one Tungus, and myself, all on horseback. We had with us about forty horses for sale and two carts—one of which, two-wheeled, belonged to me, and contained the cloth, the velveteen, the gold braid, and so on, which I had taken in my capacity of merchant. I attended to my cart and my horses entirely myself, while we chose one of the Cossacks to be the “elder” of our caravan. He had to manage all the diplomatic talk with the Chinese authorities. All the Cossacks spoke Mongolian, and the Tungus understood Manchurian. The Cossacks of the caravan knew of course who I was—one of them knew me at Irkutsk—but they never betrayed that knowledge, understanding that the success of the expedition depended upon it. I wore a long blue cotton dress, like all the others, and the Chinese paid no attention to me, so that, unnoticed by them, I could make the compass survey of the route. On the first day, when all sorts of Chinese soldiers hung about us, in the hope of getting a glass of whiskey, I had often to cast only a furtive glance at my compass, and to jot down the bearings and the distances inside of my pocket, without taking my paper out. We had with us no arms whatever. Only our Tungus, who was going to be married, had taken his matchlock gun and used it to hunt fallow deer, bringing us meat for supper, and securing furs with which to pay for his future wife.
When there was no more whiskey to be obtained from us, the Chinese soldiers left us alone. So we went straight eastward, finding our way as best we could across hill and dale, and after a four or five days’ march we actually fell in with the Chinese track which would take us across the Khingán to Merghén.
To our astonishment, we found that the crossing of the great ridge, which looked so black and terrible on the maps, was very easy. We overtook on the road an old Chinese functionary, miserably wretched, traveling in a two-wheeled cart. For the last two days the road was uphill, and the country bore testimony to its high altitude. The ground became marshy, and the road muddy; the grass was very poor, and the trees grew thin, undeveloped, often crippled, and covered with lichens. Mountains bare of forests rose to right and left, and we were thinking already of the difficulties we should experience in crossing the ridge, when we saw the old Chinese functionary alighting from his cart before an obó—that is, a heap of stones and branches of trees to which bundles of horsehair and small rags had been attached. He drew several hairs out of the mane of his horse, and attached them to the branches. “What is that?” we asked. “The obó; the waters before us flow now to the Amúr.” “Is that all of the Khingán?” “It’s all! No more mountains to cross until we reach the Amúr, only hills!”
Quite a commotion spread in our caravan. “The rivers flow to the Amúr, the Amúr!” shouted the Cossacks to one another. All their lives they had heard the old Cossacks talking about the great river where the vine grows wild, where the prairies extend for hundreds of miles and could give wealth
