“Look, here is a strange tree; it must be an oak,” they exclaimed, as we descended the steep slope. The oak does not grow in Siberia at all, and is not found until the eastern slope of the high plateau has been reached. “Look, nut trees!” they exclaimed next. “And what tree is that?” they said, seeing a lime-tree, or some other trees which do not grow in Russia, and which I knew as part of the Manchurian flora. The northerners, who for many years had dreamed of warmer lands, and now saw them, were delighted. Lying upon the ground covered with rich grass, they caressed it with their eyes—they would have kissed it. Now they burned with the desire to reach the Amúr as soon as possible. And when, a fortnight later, we stopped at our last campfire within twenty miles of the river, they grew impatient like children. They began to saddle their horses shortly after midnight, and made me start long before daybreak; and when at last from an eminence we caught a sight of the mighty stream, the eyes of these unimpressionable Siberians, generally devoid of poetical feeling, gleamed with a poet’s ardor as they looked upon the blue waters of the majestic Amúr. It was evident that, sooner or later, with or without the support, or even against the wish, of the Russian government, both banks of this river, a desert now but rich with possibilities, as well as the immense unpopulated stretches of North Manchuria, would be invaded by Russian settlers, just as the shores of the Mississippi were colonized by the Canadian voyageurs.
In the meantime, the old half-blind Chinese functionary with whom we had crossed the Khingán, having donned his blue coat and official hat with a glass button on its top, declared to us next morning that he would not let us go further. Our “elder” had received him and his clerk in our tent, and the old man, repeating what the clerk whispered to him, raised all sorts of objections to our further progress. He wanted us to camp on the spot while he should send our pass to Peking to get orders—which we absolutely refused to do. Then he sought to quarrel with our passport.
“What sort of a passport is that?” he said, looking with disdain at our pass, which was written in a few lines on a plain sheet of foolscap paper, in Russian and Mongolian, and had a simple sealing-wax seal. “You may have written it yourselves and sealed it with a copper,” he remarked. “Look at my pass: this is worth something;” and he unrolled before us a sheet of paper, two feet long, covered with Chinese characters.
I sat quietly aside during this conference packing something in my box, when a sheet of the Moscow Gazette fell under my hand. The Gazette, being the property of the Moscow University, had an eagle printed on its title-heading. “Show him this,” I said to our elder. He unfolded the immense sheet and pointed out the eagle. “That pass was to show to you,” our elder said, “but this is what we have for ourselves.” “Why, is it all written about you?” the old man asked, with terror. “All about us,” our elder replied, without even a twinkle in his eyes.
The old man—a true functionary—looked quite dumbfounded at seeing such a proficiency of writing. He examined every one of us, nodding with his head. But the clerk was still whispering something to his chief, who finally declared that he would not let us continue the journey.
“Enough of talking,” I said to the elder; “give the order to saddle the horses.” The Cossacks were of the same opinion, and in no time our caravan started, bidding goodbye to the old functionary, and promising him to report that short of resorting to violence—which he was not able to do—he had done all in his power to prevent us from entering Manchuria, and that it was our fault if we went nevertheless.
A few days later we were at Merghén, where we traded a little, and soon reached the Chinese town Argúñ on the right bank of the Amúr, and the Russian town of Blagoveshchensk on the left bank. We had discovered the direct route and many interesting things besides: the border-ridge character of the Great Khingán, the ease with which it can be crossed, the tertiary volcanoes of the Uyún Kholdontsí region which had so long been a puzzle in geographical literature, and so on. I cannot say that I was a sharp tradesman, for at Merghén I persisted (in broken Chinese) in asking thirty-five rubles for a watch, when the Chinese buyer had already offered me forty-five; but the Cossacks traded all right. They sold all their horses very well, and when my horses, my goods, and the like were sold by the
