We called at several Chinese villages, peopled with exiles from the Celestial Empire, and were received in the most cordial way. One evening especially impressed itself on my memory. We came to a picturesque little village as night was already falling. Some of us landed, and I went alone through the village. A thick crowd of about a hundred Chinese soon surrounded me, and although I knew not a word of their tongue, and they knew as little of mine, we chatted in the most amicable way by mimicry, and we understood one another. To pat one on the shoulders in sign of friendship is decidedly international language. To offer one another tobacco and to be offered a light is again an international expression of friendship. One thing interested them—why had I, though young, a beard? They wear none before they are sixty. And when I told them by signs that in case I should have nothing to eat I might eat it, the joke was transmitted from one to the other through the whole crowd. They roared with laughter, and began to pat me even more caressingly on the shoulders; they took me about, showing me their houses; everyone offered me his pipe, and the whole crowd accompanied me as a friend to the steamer. I must say that there was not one single boshkó (policeman) in that village. In other villages our soldiers and myself always made friends with the Chinese, but as soon as a boshkó appeared, all was spoiled. In return, one should have seen what “faces” they used to make at the boshkó behind his back! They evidently hated this representative of authority. This expedition has since been forgotten. The astronomer Th. Usoltsev and I published reports about it in the Memoirs of the Siberian Geographical Society; but a few years later a terrible conflagration at Irkutsk destroyed all the copies left of the Memoirs, as well as the original map of the Sungarí and it was only last year, when work upon the Trans-Manchurian Railway was beginning, the Russian geographers unearthed our reports, and found that the great river had been explored five-and-thirty years ago by our expedition.
VII
As there was nothing more to be done in the direction of reform, I tried to do what seemed to be possible under the existing circumstances—only to become convinced of the absolute uselessness of such efforts. In my new capacity of attaché to the governor-general for Cossack affairs, I made, for instance, a most thorough investigation of the economical conditions of the Usurí Cossacks, whose crops used to be lost every year, so that the government had every winter to feed them in order to save them from famine. When I returned from Usurí with my report, I received congratulations on all sides, I was promoted, I got special rewards. All the measures I recommended were accepted, and special grants of money were given for aiding the emigration of some and for supplying cattle to others, as I had suggested. But the practical realization of the measures went into the hands of some old drunkard, who would squander the money and pitilessly flog the unfortunate Cossacks for the purpose of converting them into good agriculturalists. And thus it went on in all directions, beginning with the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg, and ending with the Usurí and Kamchátka.
The higher administration of Siberia was influenced by excellent intentions, and I can only repeat that, everything considered, it was far better, far more enlightened, and far more interested in the welfare of the country than the administration of any other province of Russia. But it was an administration—a branch of the tree which had its root at St. Petersburg, and that was quite sufficient to paralyze all its excellent intentions, and to make it interfere with all beginnings of local spontaneous life and progress. Whatever was started for the good of the country by local men was looked at with distrust, and was immediately paralyzed by hosts of difficulties which came, not so much from the bad intentions of men—men, as a rule, are better than institutions—but simply because they belonged to a pyramidal, centralized administration. The very fact of its being a government which had its source in a distant capital caused it to look upon everything from the point of view of a functionary of the government who thinks, first of all, about what his superiors will say, and how this or that will appear in the administrative machinery, and not of the interests of the country.
Gradually I turned my energy more and more toward scientific exploration. In 1865 I explored the western Sayáns, where I got a new glimpse into the structure of the Siberian highlands, and came upon another important volcanic region on the Chinese frontier; and finally, next year, I undertook a long journey to discover a direct communication between the gold mines of the Yakútsk province (on the Vitím and the Olókma) and Transbaikália. For several years (1860–64) the members of the Siberian expedition had tried to find such a passage, and had endeavored to cross the series of very wild stony parallel ridges which separate these mines from Transbaikália; but when they reached that region, coming from the south, and saw before them these dreary mountains spreading for hundreds of miles northward, all of them, save one who was killed by natives, returned southward. It was evident that, in order to be
