Siberia and the Exile System/Volume 1/Chapter IX
CHAPTER IX
BRIDLE PATHS OF THE ALTÁI
ON Saturday, July 18th, after having inspected the city prison, obtained as much information as possible concerning the exile system, and made farewell calls upon our friends, we provided ourselves with a new padarózhnaya and left Semipalátinsk with three post-horses for the mountains of the Altái. The wild alpine region that we hoped to explore lies along the frontier of Mongolia, about 350 miles east of Semipalátinsk and nearly 600 miles due south from Tomsk. The German travelers Finsch and Brehin went to the edge of it in 1876, but the high snowy peaks of the Katúnski and Chúiski Alps, east of the Altái Station, had never been seen by a foreigner, and had been visited by very few Russians.
For nearly two hundred versts, after leaving Semipalátinsk, we rode up the right bank of the Írtish, through a great rolling steppe of dry, yellowish grass. Here and there, where this steppe was irrigated by small streams running into the Írtish, it supported a luxuriant vegetation, the little transverse valleys being filled with wild roses, hollyhocks, goldenrod, wild currant and gooseberry bushes, and splendid spikes, five feet in height, of dark-blue aconite; but in most places the great plain was sun-scorched and bare. The Cossack villages through which we passed did not differ materially from those between Semipalátinsk and Omsk, except that their log houses were newer and in better repair, and their inhabitants seemed to be wealthier and more prosperous. The Russian love of crude color became again apparent in the dresses of the women and girls; and on
Sunday, when all of the Cossacks were in holiday attire, the streets of these villages were bright with the red, blue, and yellow costumes of the young men and women, who sat in rows upon benches in the shade of the houses, talking, flirting, and eating melon seeds, or, after the sun had gone down, danced in the streets to the music of fiddles and triangular guitars.
The farther we went up the Írtish the hotter became the weather and the more barren the steppe, until it was easy to imagine that we were in an Arabian or a north African desert. The thermometer ranged day after day from 90° to 103° in the shade; the atmosphere was suffocating; every leaf and every blade of grass, as far as the eye could reach, had been absolutely burned dead by the fierce sunshine; great whirling columns of sand, 100 to 150 feet in height, swept slowly and majestically across the sun-scorched plain; and we could trace the progress of a single mounted Kírghis five miles away by the cloud of dust that his horse's hoofs raised from the steppe. I suffered intensely from heat and thirst, and had to protect myself from the fierce sunshine by swathing my body in four thicknesses of blanket and putting a big down pillow over my legs. I could not hold my hand in that sunshine five minutes without pain, and wrapping my body in four thicknesses of heavy woolen blanketing gave me at once a sensation of coolness. Mine was the southern or sunny side of the tárantás. and I finally became so exhausted with the fierce heat, and had such a strange feeling of faintness, nausea, and suffocation, that I asked Mr. Frost to change sides with me, and give me a brief respite. He wrapped himself up in a blanket, put a pillow over his legs, and managed to endure it until evening. Familiar as I supposed myself to be with Siberia, I little thought, when I crossed the frontier, that I should find in it a North African desert, with whirling sand-columns, and sunshine from which I should be obliged to protect my limbs with blankets. I laughed at a Russian officer in Omsk who told me that the heat in the valley of the Írtish was often so intense as to cause nausea and fainting, and who advised me not to travel between eleven o'clock in the morning and three in the afternoon when the day was cloudless and hot. The idea of having a sunstroke in Siberia, and the suggestion not to travel there in the middle of the day, seemed to me so preposterous that I could not restrain a smile of amusement. He assured me, however, that he was talking seriously, and said that he had seen soldiers unconscious for hours after a fit of nausea and fainting, brought on by marching in the sunshine. He did not know sunstroke by name, and seemed to think that the symptoms which he described were peculiar effects of the Írtish valley heat, but it was evidently sunstroke that he had seen.
At the station of Voronínskaya, in the middle of this parched desert, we were overtaken by a furious hot
sandstorm from the southwest, with a temperature of 103° in the shade. The sand and fine hot dust were carried to a height of a hundred feet, and drifted past us in dense, suffocating clouds, hiding everything from sight and making it almost impossible to breathe. Although we were riding with the storm, and not against it, I literally gasped for breath for more than two hours; and when we arrived at the station of Cheremshánka, it would have been hard to tell, from an inspection of our faces, whether we were Kírghis or Americans—black men or white. I drank nearly a quart of cold milk, and even that did not fully assuage my fierce thirst. Mr. Frost, after washing the dust out of his eyes and drinking seven tumblers of milk, revived sufficiently to say, "If anybody thinks that it doesn't get hot in Siberia, just refer him to me!"
At the station of Málo Krasnoyárskaya we left the Írtish to the right and saw it no more. Late that afternoon we reached the first foot-hills of the great mountain range of the Altái, and began the long, gradual climb to the Altái Station. Before dark on the following day we were riding through cool, elevated alpine meadows, where the fresh green grass was intermingled with bluebells, fragrant spirea, gentians, and delicate fringed pinks, and where the mountain tops over our heads were white, a thousand feet down, with freshly fallen snow. The change from the torrid African desert of the Irtish to this superb Siberian Switzerland was so sudden and so extraordinary as to be almost bewildering. I could not help asking myself every fifteen minutes, "Did I only dream of that dreary, sun-scorched steppe yesterday, with its sandspouts, its mountains of furnace slag, its fierce heat, and its whitening bones, or is it really possible that I can have come from that to this in twenty-four hours?" To my steppe-wearied eyes, the scenery, as we approached the Altái Station, was indescribably beautiful. On our left was a range of low mountains, the smooth slopes of which were checkered with purple cloud shadows and tinted here and there by vast areas of flowers; on our right, rising almost from the road, was a splendid chain of bold, grandly sculptured peaks from seven thousand to nine thousand feet in height, crowned with one thousand feet of fresh, brilliantly white snow, and belted with a broad zone of evergreen forest; beneath lay a beautiful, park-like valley, through which ran the road, under the shade of scattered larches, across clear, rushing mountain streams which came tumbling down in cascades from the melting snows above, and over grassy meadows sprinkled with wild pansies, gentians, fringed pinks, and ripening strawberries. After three thousand miles of almost unbroken plain, or steppe, this scene
made upon me a profound impression. We reached the Altái Station about six o'clock in the cool of a beautiful, calm, midsummer afternoon. I shall never forget the enthusiastic delight that I felt as I rode up out of a wooded valley fragrant with wild-flowers, past a picturesque cluster of colored KÍrghis tents, across two hundred yards of smooth, elevated meadow, and then, stopping at the entrance to the village, turned back and looked at the mountains. Never, I thought, had I seen an alpine picture that could for a moment bear comparison with it. I have seen the most beautiful scenery in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, of Nicaragua, of Kamchátka, of the Caucasus, and of the Russian Altái, and it is my deliberate opinion that for varied beauty, picturesqueness, and effectiveness that mountain landscape is absolutely unsurpassed. If there exist anywhere a more superbly situated village, I am ready to cross three oceans to see it.
The Altái Station, or, as the Kírghis call it, "Kotón Karaghái," is situated at a height of about thirty-five hundred feet in the upper part of the fertile alpine valley known as the valley of the Búkhtarmá. The village stands upon a small, flat terrace or plateau two or three miles square, which is bounded on the north by rolling, flowery foot-hills and on the south by a shallow wooded ravine through which flows an insignificant tributary of the Búkhtarmá River. The main street of the little hamlet runs parallel with the ravine, and on the opposite side of the latter rise abruptly three or four grandly sculptured peaks, whose steep slopes are clothed to a height of two or three thousand feet with larch forests, and above that are generally white, even in midsummer, with fresh-fallen snow. The village itself is a mere Cossack picket of seventy or eighty log houses, with wide, clean streets, and with a quaint log church at one end; but to a traveler just from the hot, arid plains of the Írtish even this insignificant Cossack station has its peculiar charm. In front of every house in the settlement is a little inclosure, or front yard, filled with young birches, silver-leafed aspens, and flowering shrubs, and through all of these yards, down each side of every street runs a tinkling, gurgling stream of clear, cold water from the melting snows on the mountains. The whole village, therefore, go where you will, is filled with the murmur of falling water; and how pleasant that sound is, you must travel for a month in the parched, dust-smothered, sun-scorched valley of the Írtish fully to understand. The little rushing streams seem to bring with them, as they tumble in rapids through the settlement, the fresh, cool atmosphere of the high peaks where they were born two hours before; and although your thermometer may say that the day is hot and the air sultry, its statements are so persistently, so confidently, so hilariously controverted by the joyous voice of the stream under your window, with its half-expressed suggestions of snow and glaciers and cooling spray, that your reason is
silenced and your imagination accepts the story of the snow-born brook.
The morning after our arrival at the Altái Station dawned clear, cool, and bright, and after a good breakfast served by the wife of the Cossack in whose house we had found shelter, we went out to survey the village. Mr. Frost, who was equipped with sketching-block and pencils, soon discovered a desirable point of view for a picture and, having hired a burly Cossack to stand beside him in such a position as to throw the shadow of his body across the paper, and thus serve as a sun-umbrella, he went to work. Meanwhile I strolled through the village and out past the quaint log church in the direction of the village shops which, with the Government storehouses, were situated on the eastern side of the plateau. Three or four hundred yards from the church, in the middle of the flowery plain, a company of Cossacks, dressed in dark-green uniforms and armed with Berdan rifles, were practising what seemed to be the Russian skirmish drill. They had been divided into three squads, each of which, under the direction of an officer, was manceuvering against an imaginary enemy. Now they would rush forward at "double-quick," firing at will as they advanced, then they would suddenly close up, throw themselves at full length on the ground, and in that position deliver volley after volley until they were hidden in powder smoke, and finally the three squads would unite and charge fiercely in solid column, with the peculiar continuous Russian "oor-rah-ah-ah-ah-ah!" which has been heard with anxiety and dread by the defenders of many a Turkish, redoubt.
The shops of the Altái Station were only three or four in number, and I found in them few things that were either curious or interesting. Perhaps, however, I should qualify this statement by limiting it to things purchasable. The shops were full of Kírghis buyers and Kírghis horses, and in many respects they were interesting enough to satisfy the most exacting foreign traveler. There is a certain amount of adventurous interest in the mere act of forcing one's way into a shop when the shop is full of Kírghis and the door is completely blocked up with the bodies of Kírghis saddle-horses. Hitching-posts at the Altái Station are entirely unknown, and in the absence of such conveniences Kírghis horsemen are accustomed to lead their horses directly into the shops that they have occasion to visit and hold them there by the bridles while they themselves stand at the counter and examine goods. As a result of this interesting custom you will often see four or five Kírghis horses whose heads and fore-legs are across the threshold of a shop door, while their hind-quarters are massed in a sort of reversed equine phalanx outside. If you have not implicit confidence in the tempers of Kírghis mountain ponies, their bodies thus arranged constitute a most formidable barricade. By means of soothing and conciliatory measures I generally succeeded in separating two horses sufficiently so that I could squeeze through between them into the shop, but I rarely found there anything of local origin or manufacture to repay me for my trouble. Most of the goods that were shown to me were from European Russia, and were such as I had seen in scores of Siberian shops already. The mountain Kírghis, however, who were the chief consumers of these goods, were interesting enough to more than make up for the commonplace nature of the goods themselves. They were generally wilder-looking men than the steppe Kírghis whose acquaintance we had made in the territory of Semipalátinsk, and the wildness of their appearance was heightened, perhaps, to some extent, by their dress. This consisted of an under tunic or shirt of cotton cloth striped perpendicularly with red, straight trousers of butternut homespun thrust into top-boots, a beshmét or quilted dressing-gown of black, brown, or gray homespun girt about the waist with a narrow, silver-studded leather belt, and finally an extraordinary pointed hood of quilted cloth covering the whole head and neck, with long chin-laps hanging over the shoulders in front and a bunch of soft feathers dangling from the high, pointed crown. These hoods were almost invariably lined and trimmed with fur, and were made frequently of a peculiar kind of Russian cloth, in which the wavy markings of watered silk are imitated in green, yellow, and purple, so as to produce a sort of chromatic moire antique. It would be hard to imagine anything stranger or wilder in appearance than the rough-hewn, beardless, sun-scorched face of an old Kírghis, framed in one of these high, pointed hoods of green, yellow, and purple, and half concealed by the chin-laps and the shaggy fringe of bear-skin or wolf-skin that hangs like a neglected bang over the dark, fierce eyes.
I spent an hour or more that morning in the little shops of the Altái Station, making a pretense of looking at goods in order that I might have an opportunity to study the Kírghis. I was greatly interested in their forms of salutation, and particularly in their method of shaking or pressing-hands, which I had never before seen. When two Kírghis acquaintances meet, after a period of separation, each of them holds out both his hands with thumbs uppermost, very much as he would hold out his arms to take a baby. One of them puts the palm of his right hand against the back of the other's left, and the back of his left hand against the palm of the other's right, and then both bring their hands together as if they were about to clap them. The result is a sandwiching of the two pairs of hands in such a manner that each person has between his two palms one hand of the other. The hands are pressed closely together in this way without motion while the acquaintances exchange salutations and inquiries with regard to health. This seemed to me to be a much more graceful and appropriate form of hand-greeting than the vise-like grip and the meaningless shake of the civilized world. The mere pumping of interlocked hands has neither grace nor significance, while the gentle pressure of a friend's hand between both one's own is a perfectly natural and suitable expression of affectionate regard. The only objection that I can see to it is that, for indiscriminate use, it partakes too much of the nature of a caress. In civilized society, therefore, it should be reserved for cases in which a hand-shake would be too formal and an embrace too familiar. Thus restricted, I offer it to the world as the first contribution of the Altái Kírghis to the polite ceremonies of social life.
Upon returning from the shops to the place where I had left Mr. Frost, I found him still at work upon his sketch, which had begun to assume the appearance of the illustration on page 194. Just before noon, at the suggestion of the Cossack atamán who came to our house to return our passports, I made a call of ceremony upon Captain Maiefski, the uyéizdni nachálnik or chief administrative officer of the southern Altái district. I found him to be a pleasant, cultivated officer about thirty-five years of age, who had just returned from a trip on horseback through the high Altái, and who could give me the fullest and most accurate information with regard to scenery and routes. He welcomed me very cordially, introduced me to his wife,—a most agreeable and intelligent young woman,—and invited me to come with Mr. Frost that day to dinner. I accepted the invitation, both for myself and for my comrade, and we thus began an acquaintance that proved to be a very delightful and advantageous one for us, and that brought some novelty and variety, I hope, into the rather lonely and eventless lives of Captain and Mrs. Maiéfski.
We remained at the Altái Station three or four clays, making excursions into the neighboring mountains with Captain Maiéfski and his wife, visiting and photographing the Kírghis who were encamped near the village, and collecting information with regard to the region lying farther to the northward and eastward which we hoped to explore. The mountains of the Altái occupy in southern Siberia an area more than three times as great as that of Switzerland. Only a small part of this vast wilderness of mountains has been actually settled by the Russians, and outside of the fertile valleys of such rivers as the Katún and the Búkhtarmá it is very imperfectly known, even to the hardy and daring Cossack pioneers. For this ignorance, however, there are several good reasons. In the first place, the southern part of the Russian Altái, including the valley of the Búkhtarmá and the high peaks of the Katúnski and Chúiski Alps, belonged, until very recently, to the empire of China. The Russians first appeared in the upper part of the Búkhtarmá valley in 1869, and the Altái Station was not founded until two years later. It was then nothing more than a Cossack observing-picket on the new Chinese frontier. In the second place, exploration of these wild mountain fastnesses has always been attended with great difficulty. In the high alpine valleys, and on the elevated plateaus of the main range, snow falls to a great depth in winter; the short summer begins late; the streams that rise among the colossal peaks of the Great Altái are generally torrents and flow through deep, rugged, almost impassable gorges until they descend to the level of the foot-hills; and the mountain walls that separate neighboring valleys are so high, rocky, and precipitous, that crossing them on horseback is difficult and dangerous, even when they are free from snow. There is only one practicable commercial route over the main range of the Altái between the Chúiski Alps and the right bank of the Írtish,—a distance of more than two hundred miles, —and this solitary route is a mere bridle-path, which crosses the desolate plateau of Ukéik and the precipitous water-shed of Úlan-dába at a height of 9260 feet. Of course in such a wilderness as this there was an ample field for enterprising explorers, but as our time was limited we decided, after a number of consultations with Captain Maiéfski, to content ourselves with an excursion to the peaks and glaciers of the Katúnski Alps.
The day of our departure happened to be Captain Maiéfski's namesday; and in order to celebrate it and at the same time to give us a pleasant "send-off," he invited a party of friends to go with us as far as the rapids of the Búkhtarmá river, about fifteen versts from the Station, and there have a picnic. When we started, therefore, we were accompanied by Captain Maiéfski and his wife and daughter, the Cossack atamán and his wife, a political exile named Zavalíshin and his wife, and three or four other officers and ladies. The party was escorted by ten or fifteen mounted Kírghis in bright-colored beshméts girt about the waist with silver-studded belts; and the cavalcade of uniformed officers, gaily dressed ladies, and hooded Kírghis presented a most novel and picturesque appearance, as it cantered away across the grassy plateau.
The day was warm and sunshiny, but clouds were drifting occasionally across the snow-clad peaks south of the village, diversifying their sides with moving areas of purple shadow and increasing the impression of great height that they made upon one. The road, which was dry, hard, and in good condition, crossed the little valley just above the village and then ran along the slopes of the southern mountains through an open, park-like forest of larch, poplar, and silver birch. Flowers were blossoming everywhere in almost incredible luxuriance and profusion. The sunny stretches of grass in the forest openings were embroidered with dark-blue gentians, wild pansies, forget-me-nots, and delicate fringed pinks; in moister, cooler places stood splendid ultramarine spikes, eight feet high, of aconite, and here and there, on the brink of the valley, were white drifts of spirea covering areas of from twenty to fifty square feet with dense masses of snowy bloom.
All along the road, where it ran through the open forest, we noticed ant-hills, four or five feet in height, swarming with large black ants. As we passed one of them Mrs. Maiéfski handed her white cambric handkerchief to a Kírghis horseman, and told him to throw it upon the hill and then give it to me. The handkerchief no sooner touched the hill than it was black with startled ants. After allowing them to run over it for three or four seconds the Kírghis, who had evidently seen this experiment tried before, caught it up dexterously by one corner, gave it a quick, sharp flirt to free it from the insects, and then handed it to me.
"Smell of it," said Mrs. Maiéfski. I obeyed, and was surprised to discover that, although perfectly dry to the touch, it affected the nostrils precisely as if it had been saturated with aromatic vinegar. It had acquired this odor in the few seconds that it had lain upon the ant-hill. I then tried the same experiment with my own handkerchief. After the ants had run over it for three minutes it was so impregnated with the strong, pungent vapor of formic acid that I could not bring it anywhere near my face without strangling. The odor, which is that of aromatic vinegar, is rather
pleasant if not too strong, but in excess it affects the nostrils very much in the same way that ammonia affects them.
About twelve versts from the Altái Station we began to catch glimpses, now and then, of the pale-green glacier water of the Búkhtarmá, flowing through a deep wooded valley on our left and suggesting, in color and topographical environment, the water of the Niagara below the falls. Just beyond the sixteen-verst post we abandoned the road, and turning sharply to the left descended to the bank of the river. Captain Maiéfski had sent forward to the picnic ground early that morning two Kírghis tents, a quantity of rugs and pillows, and his whole house-keeping outfit; and when we arrived a most luxurious camp was in complete readiness. The two tents—one of them white trimmed with scarlet and the other a deep Pompeiian red—had been pitched in a beautiful grassy nook beside the river; soft Bokharan rugs from a Kírghis kibítka had been lavishly used to line and carpet them; a polished sámovár was steaming and singing on the grass in the shade of a drooping birch, and columns of smoke and sparks were rising from two or three cheerful camp-fires. In less than ten minutes after our arrival the whole party was scattered up and down the bank of the river, every one engaged in the occupation that was to him most congenial. Captain Maiéfski and Mr. Frost, armed with long-handled nets, were rushing hither and thither in pursuit of brilliantly colored but erratic butterflies; the Cossack atamán was casting a hook and line into the river and landing every now and then a silvery fish; Mrs. Maiéfski was superintending the preparations for dinner, while Mr. Zavalíshin and I, having neither duty nor speciality, strolled aimlessly about the neighborhood, picking flowers, watching the Kírghis, and enjoying the picturesque effect of the dark-red tent against the background of green trees, the blue curling smoke of the camp-fires and the pale malachite coloring of the glacier-tinted stream.
After an excellently cooked and well-served dinner of soup, freshly caught fish, roast lamb, boiled mutton, cold chicken, pilau of rice with raisins, strawberries and confectionery, we spent a long and delightful afternoon in botanizing, fishing, rifle-shooting, catching butterflies, telling riddles and singing songs. It was, I think, the most pleasant and successful picnic that I ever had the good fortune to enjoy, and when, late in the afternoon, Mr. Frost and I bade the party good-by, I am sure we both secretly wished that
we could stay there in camp for a week instead of going to the Katúnski Alps.
We spent that night at the little Cossack picket of Jingistái, which consisted of two newly built log houses situated in the shallow, flower-carpeted valley of the Búkhtarmá, about thirty versts from the Altái Station. The Cossack family that constituted the "picket" occupied only one of the houses, and we therefore bivouacked in the other. Our sleeping apartment contained no furniture of any kind, its windows were mere rectangular openings in the wall without sashes or glass, and we were forced to make our beds on the rough-hewn planks of the floor; but the room was rilled with the faint, clean fragrance of pine shavings and spruce boards, the air that came in through the sashless windows was fresh from the flowery slopes of the hills, and we slept as soundly and awoke as much refreshed as if we had lain on couches of rose petals in the palace of the Tsar.
Tuesday, July 28th, we continued our ride up the valley of the Búkhtarmá in the general direction of the Katúnski Alps. The snowy range of the Great Altái could no longer be seen from the trail, and we did not catch a single glimpse that day of the group of colossal peaks at the source of the Katún; but the scenery through which we rode was, nevertheless, beautiful and picturesque. The high rolling foothills which formed the sides of the valley, and which concealed the peaks of the main range, were endlessly varied in outline and coloring; the valley itself was full of park-like openings and sunny glades where the soft green carpet of turf was sprinkled with violets, pansies, and forget-me-nots; and every verst or two a clear rushing stream came tumbling down across the trail from a melting snow-field in some deep shaded glen high up among the hills.
Early in the afternoon we reached a small Cossack village called Arúl, about thirty versts from Jingistái, and went to the house of the atamán to present our order for fresh horses. The atamán's son, a good-looking young fellow of twenty-two or three, soon made his appearance in full uniform, and said that his father, for whom we had inquired, was making hay on the mountain-side about twelve versts away, but that he would send for him if it was "shípka núzhni" [awful necessary]. We replied that we must have horses to continue our journey, and that if we could not get them without an order from the atamán, the atamán must be summoned. The young man, thereupon, saddled a horse and galloped away down the valley. While
waiting for his return we refreshed ourselves with bread and tea, and Mr. Frost made the sketch of the village that is reproduced on this page. The atamán arrived in about an hour and a half. He proved to be an officer of intelligence and energy, and procured the necessary horses and a guide for us at once. The distance from Arúl to the Cossack village of Berél, where we expected to leave the valley of the Búkhtarmá, was only about twenty versts, and the road lay, as before, along the river. The foothills that bounded it were higher and steeper than in the part of the valley through which we had passed, and here and there, along their bases, were enormous masses of loose rocks and boulders which looked as if they might have been brought down into the valley by tremendous avalanches or landslides. About half-past four o'clock we crossed, on rude corduroy bridges, two or three turbid, milky arms of the Búkhtarmá River, and rode into the little hamlet of Berél—the most remote Russian settlement in that part of the Altái and the settlement where we expected to make our final arrangements for the long and difficult ride across the mountains to the Katúnski Alps.
The Cossack atamán at the Altái Station had given us a letter of introduction to one of his acquaintances in Berél—a peasant farmer named Bielaüsof—and we therefore went directly to the latter's house. He proved to be an intelligent man, fifty-five or sixty years of age, and an excellent type of the hardy Siberian pioneers who seek to escape from the burdensome restraints of government by migration to remote and unexplored regions. He was a nonconformist in religion, and had come to this wild corner of the Altái partly to enjoy freedom of religious worship and partly to find, if possible, the mythical Bielovódye or uninhabited land of peace and plenty which certain Russian dissenters believe to exist somewhere on the Mongolian frontier in the far East. He had not found the Siberian Eden which was the main object of his quest, but he had found the valley of the Búkhtarmá, and, tempted by its beauty and fertility, he had built a log house for himself at the intersection of the Búkhtarmá River and the Berél and in course of time had become prosperous and contented as a peasant farmer and a breeder of the marál or great Altái deer [Cervus elephas]. The horns of the marál, when at that stage of development known as "in the velvet," are believed by the Chinese to have peculiar medicinal properties, and are very highly prized. Chinese traders go in search of them to the remotest parts of the Altái and sometimes offer for them as much as four dollars a pound, or a hundred dollars for a single pair of large antlers. Bielaüsof had succeeded in capturing fifteen or twenty of these deer, and had shut them up in an extensive park, made by putting a nine-foot fence around a whole mountain so as to inclose a range almost as extensive as the animals would have had in a state of freedom. From the sale of the horns of the stags he derived every year an income of six or eight hundred dollars, which, with the proceeds of his farm, enabled him to live in more than ordinary comfort.
We spent in Berél only one night. Before we went to bed Tuesday evening we had engaged one of Bielaüsof's nephews to accompany us in the capacity of guide, had hired a second man to assist him in making camp, had procured the necessary number of horses, and were virtually ready to start. Wednesday morning at nine o'clock the whole population of Berél—about fifty souls—assembled in front of Bielaüsof's house to see the cavalcade get under way. Mikháiel, the guide, a stout, chubby-faced young fellow, with tangled masses of yellow hair falling over his shoulders, had arrayed himself in a traveling suit of extraordinary chromatic brilliancy, and was the admired of all beholders. His cotton shirt, which he wore outside his breeches like a tunic, was of a gory crimson, whose suggestions of bloodshed were relieved to some extent by a pattern of big yellow harps; his loose buckskin trousers were embroidered with bouquets of scarlet roses and huge orange sunflowers, and the brim of his antiquated chimney-pot hat had been turned up in piratical fashion on one side and fastened to the crown with round buttons of colored glass. His assistant, Nikolái, had on yellow buckskin trousers embroidered with Patagonian cactuses and a cotton shirt of deep indigo blue. Our provisions, consisting of tea, sugar, bread, two legs of mutton, and a little honey,
were packed in capacious, antediluvian saddle-bags; our brushes, soap, towels, sponges, and spare underclothing were wrapped up in our blankets and securely lashed behind our saddles; and we sat on our pillows. The horses that had been provided for our use did not look very promising at first sight, but I knew that the good qualities of a Kírghis horse are not to be discovered by simple inspection, and I accepted Mikháiel's assurance that they were hardy, sure-footed, and accustomed to mountain paths. About half-past nine o'clock everything was said to be ready, and climbing into our high, short-stirruped saddles we rode solemnly in single file out of the settlement. There was a faint cheer from the more youthful half of the assembled crowd as we got under way, but Frost and I did not claim for ourselves, or for our horsemanship, any of the popular enthusiasm thus manifested. We knew very well that it was inspired by the golden harps on the crimson tunic of the yellow-haired Mikháiel, and the Patagonian cactuses that blossomed all over the orange legs of the indigo-shirted Nikolái.
After having forded one of the milky channels of the Berél River we climbed slowly for two hours in short zigzags up a steep Kírghis trail that led to the summit of an immense mound-shaped foothill behind the village. As we ascended, the whole magnificent amphitheater of snow-clad mountains at the head of the Búkhtarmá valley opened on our right, and a long line of sharp white peaks that we had not before seen appeared on the southern side of the Búkhtarmá along the boundary line of Mongolia. Everywhere to the northward and eastward snowy mountains were piled on snowy mountains until there seemed to be no possibility of crossing or piercing the tremendous alpine barrier. On the summit of the mound-shaped foothill, two or three thousand feet above Berél, we found half a dozen Kírghis kibítkas, pitched here and there among immense glacial boulders and surrounded by flocks of Kírghis sheep and goats. As the summer advances and the vegetation begins to dry up in the lower Altái valleys, the Kírghis are accustomed to drive their flocks and herds to the crests of the foothills where the grass is still fresh and green. In the latter part of July, therefore, they may be found encamped
high up in the mountains, and often in the most beautiful, picturesque, and commanding situations. From the aül of the Berél Kírghis we could look out over a perfect ocean of foothills and could trace the snowy range of the Great Altái for a distance of a hundred miles.
After stopping for a few moments at the Kírghis encampment and making some inquiries with regard to the condition of the trail from there to the Rakmánofski hot springs, we tightened our saddle-girths and plunged into the wilderness of steep foothills and wild ravines that lies between the headwaters of the Búkhtarmá and the headwaters of the Katún. The northern slope of the mountain upon which the Kírghis encampment stood was much barer, bleaker, and more rocky than the slope that we had ascended. The yellow flowers that had given a sunny and cheerful glow to the latter suddenly disappeared, and their places were taken by a star-like purple blossom growing in long, slender spikes, and a very striking and showy species of dark-blue campanula. At the same time a new kind of shrub with silvery-gray leaves made its appearance, and grew so abundantly among the rocks as to change the whole tone of the landscape. I cannot remember to have seen in any other part of the world so sharp and sudden a transition from one aspect of nature to another under the very same atmospheric conditions. The northern exposure, the hoary, lichen-stained rocks, the dark-purple flowers, and the cool, silvery-gray foliage of the sage-like shrubs gave me the impression of a landscape seen by moonlight.
Soon after leaving the Kírghis encampment we crossed for the first time in Siberia the terminal moraine of an extinct glacier. It was an immense mass of loose rocks and boulders of all shapes and sizes thrown together in the wildest confusion, and extending far up and down one of the lateral ravines. At the point where we crossed it, it seemed to me to be at least an eighth of a mile wide, and it presented obstacles that brought out all the best qualities of our Kírghis horses. They made their way over the loose slabs and boulders with the judgment and agility of mountain sheep, rarely slipping, and, when they did slip, recovering their foothold without the least nervousness or excitement.
Late in the afternoon, after a very difficult and fatiguing journey of twenty-five or thirty versts, we rode two or three thousand feet down a slippery, break-neck descent into the
deep valley of the Rakmánofski hot springs, where, shut in by high mountains and framed in greenery and flowers, we found a beautiful alpine lake. The medicinal properties of the water that flows from the Rakmánofski springs attract to this beautiful secluded valley every summer many Russians and Kírghis from the neighboring villages and encampments, and there have been erected for their accommodation two comfortable log buildings, and a small spring-house with three bathing-tanks. In the larger of the buildings, which had a well-built Russian oven, we stopped for the night. The ceiling and walls of the room that we occupied bore many names and inscriptions in French, Russian, and Tatár, among which I noticed "N. Yádrintsoff, 16 Aoute, 1880";[1] "Vlad. Banikof, VI 22, 1885"; and "M. T. Zheleiznikof, Semipalátinsk, 5 June, 1885." On the partition wall over the rude plank bench where Mr. Frost made his bed, some sufferer who, apparently, had come with weak faith to the springs in the hope of being cured had inscribed carefully in large, well-formed capital letters the words, "Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief."
The hot springs oozed out from under two or three piles of what seemed to be small glacial boulders, over which devout Russians had placed wooden crosses, and devout Kírghis had hung colored fragments from their shirts and trousers. The water from these springs was collected a short distance below in small vats or tanks in the spring-house, so that sufferers from rheumatism or cutaneous disease might be able to soak themselves in it under shelter. It was remarkably clear and bright in appearance, but had a peculiar soapy, slippery feeling, that suggested the presence of soda or borax. According to the Russian chemist Haller, who has made an analysis of it, it very closely resembles the water of the famous springs at Carlsbad. Its temperature in the tanks was 104° Fahrenheit.
When we awoke Thursday morning rain was falling heavily, and horseback travel in such a country was evidently out of the question. The storm continued, with an occasional brief intermission, for two days; but on the morning of the third the weather finally cleared up and, without waiting for the mountain slopes to become dry, we saddled our horses and went on.
The last sixty versts of our journey were made with great difficulty and much peril, our route lying across tremendous mountain ridges and deep valleys with almost precipitous sides, into which we descended by following the course of foaming mountain torrents, or clambering down the moraines of extinct glaciers, over great heaped-up masses of loose, broken rocks, through swamps, tangled jungles of laurel bushes and fallen trees, and down slopes so steep that it was almost impossible to throw one's body far enough back to keep one's balance in the saddle. Half the time our horses were sliding on all four feet, and dislodging stones which rolled or bounded for half a mile downward, until they were dashed to pieces over tremendous precipices. I was not wholly inexperienced in mountain travel, having ridden on horseback the whole length of the mountainous peninsula of Kamchátka, and crossed three times the great range of the Caucasus, once at a height of twelve thousand feet; but I must confess that during our descents into the valleys of the Rakmánofski, the Black Berél, the White Berél, and the Katún, my heart was in my mouth for hours at a time. On any other horses than those of the Kírghis such descents would have been utterly impossible. My horse fell with me once, but I was not hurt. The region through which we passed is a primeval wilderness, traversed only by the Díko-kámenoi Kírghis, or "Kírghis of the Wild Rocks," and abounding in game. We saw maráls, wolves, wild sheep, and many fresh trails made by bears in the long grass of the valley bottoms; we chased wild goats, and might have shot hundreds of partridges, grouse, ducks, geese, eagles, and cranes. The flora of the lower mountain valleys was extremely rich, varied, and luxuriant, comprising beautiful wild pansies of half a dozen varieties and colors, fringed pinks, spirea, two species of gentian, wild hollyhocks, daisies, forget-me-nots, alpine roses, trollius, wild poppies, and scores of other flowers that I had never before seen, many of them very large, brilliant, and showy. Among plants and fruits that with us are domesticated, but that in the Altái grow wild, I noticed rhubarb, celery, red currants, black currants, gooseberries, raspberries, strawberries, blackberries, wild cherries, crab-apples, and wild apricots. Most of the berries were ripe, or nearly ripe, and the wild currants were as large and abundant as in an American garden. The scenery was extremely wild and
grand, surpassing, at times, anything that I had seen in the Caucasus.
On Saturday, August 1st, we reached the foot of the last great ridge, or water-shed, which separated us from the main chain of the Katúnski Alps, and camped for the night in a high mountain valley beside the White Berél, a milky stream which runs out from under a great glacier a few miles higher up. The air was clear and frosty, but we built a big camp-fire and managed to get through the night without much discomfort. Sunday morning we climbed about two thousand feet to the summit of the last ridge, and looked over into the wild valley of the Katún, out of which rise the "Katúnski Pillars," the highest peaks of the Russian
Altái. I was prepared, to a certain extent, for grandeur of scenery, because I had already caught glimpses of these peaks two or three times, at distances varying from twenty-five to eighty miles; but the near view, from the heights above the Katún, so far surpassed all my anticipations that I was simply overawed. I hardly know how to describe it without using language that will seem exaggerated. The word that oftenest rises to my lips when I think of it is "tremendous." It was not beautiful, it was not picturesque; it was tremendous and overwhelming. The narrow valley, or gorge, of the Katún, which lay almost under our feet, was between 2000 and 3000 feet deep. On the other side of it rose, far above our heads, the wild, mighty chain of the Katúnski Alps, culminating just opposite us in two tremendous snowy peaks whose height I estimated at 15,000 feet.[2] They were white from base to summit, except where the snow was broken by great black precipices, or pierced by sharp, rocky spines, or aiguilles. Down the sides of these peaks, from vast fields of névé above, fell seven immense glaciers, the largest of them descending from the saddle between the twin summits in a series of ice falls for at least 4000 feet. The glacier on the extreme right had an almost perpendicular ice fall of 1200 or 1500 feet, and the glacier on the extreme left gave birth to a torrent which tumbled about 800 feet, with a hoarse roar, into the deep narrow gorge. The latter glacier was longitudinally divided by three moraines, which looked from our point of view like long, narrow, A-shaped dumps of furnace slag or fine coal dust, but which were in reality composed of black rocks, from the size of one's head to the size of a freight car, and extended four or five miles, with a width of 300 feet and a height of from 50 to 75 feet above the general level of the glacier. The extreme summits of the two highest peaks were more than half of the time hidden in clouds; but this rather added to than detracted from the wild grandeur of the scene, by giving mystery to the origin of the enormous glaciers, which at such times seemed to the imagination to be tumbling down from unknown heights in the sky through masses of rolling vapor. All the time there came up to us from the depths of the gorge the hoarse roar of the waterfall, and with it blended, now and then, the deeper thunder of the great glaciers, as masses of ice gave way and settled into new positions in the ice falls. This thundering of the glaciers continued for nearly a minute at a time, varying in intensity, and resembling occasionally the sound of a distant
but heavy and rapid cannonade. No movement of the ice in the falls was perceptible to the eye from the point at which we stood, but the sullen, rumbling thunder was evidence enough of the mighty force of the agencies which were at work before us.
After looking at the mountains for half an hour, we turned our attention to the valley of the Katún beneath us, with the view to ascertain whether it would be possible to get down into it and reach the foot of the main glacier, which gave birth to the Katún River. Mr. Frost declared the descent to be utterly impracticable, and almost lost patience with me because I insisted upon the guides trying it. "Anybody can see," he said, "that this slope ends in a big precipice; and even if we get our horses down there, we never can get them up again. It is foolish to think of such a thing." I had seen enough, however, of Kírghis horses to feel great confidence in their climbing abilities; and although the descent did look very dangerous, I was by no means satisfied that it was utterly impracticable. While we were discussing the question, our guide was making a bold and practical attempt to solve it. We could no longer see him from where we stood, but every now and then a stone or small boulder, dislodged by his horse's feet, would leap suddenly into sight 300 or 400 feet below us, and go crashing down the mountain side, clearing 200 feet at every bound, and finally dashing itself to pieces against the rocks at the bottom, with a noise like the distant rattling discharge of musketry. Our guide was evidently making progress. In a few moments he came into sight on a bold, rocky buttress about six hundred feet below us and shouted cheerfully, "Come on! This is nothing! You could get down herewith a teléga!" Inasmuch as one could hardly look down there without getting dizzy, this was rather a hyperbolical statement of the possibilities of the case; but it had the effect of silencing Mr. Frost, who took bis horse by the bridle and followed me down the mountain in cautious zigzags, while I kept as nearly as I could in the track of our leader. At the buttress the guide tightened my forward and after saddle-girths until my horse groaned and grunted an inarticulate protest, and I climbed again into the saddle. It seemed to me safer, on the whole, to ride down than to try to walk down leading my horse, since in the latter case he was constantly sliding upon me, or dislodging loose stones which threatened to knock my legs from under me and launch me into space like a projectile from a catapult. The first hundred feet of the descent were very bad. It was
almost impossible to keep in the saddle on account of the steepness of the incline, and once I just escaped being pitched over my horse's head at the end of one of his short slides. We finally reached a very steep but grassy slope, like the side of a titanic embankment, down which we zigzagged, with much discomfort but without any danger, to the bottom of the Katún valley. As we rode towards the great peaks, and finally, leaving our horses, climbed up on the principal glacier, I saw how greatly we had underestimated distances, heights, and magnitudes, from the elevated
position which we had previously occupied. The Katún River, which, from above, had looked like a narrow, dirty white ribbon that a child could step across, proved to be a torrent thirty or forty feet wide, with a current almost deep and strong enough to sweep away a horse and rider. The main glacier, which I had taken to be about three hundred feet wide, proved to have a width of more than half a mile; and its central moraine, which had looked to me like a strip of black sand piled up to the height of six or seven feet like a long furnace dump, proved to be an enormous mass of
_-_Katun_waterfall.jpg)
gigantic rocks, three or four miles long, and from 300 to 400 feet wide, piled up on the glacier in places to the height of 75 feet. Mr. Frost estimated the width of this glacier at two-thirds of a mile, and the extreme height of the moraine at 100 feet. I took the photographic apparatus, and in the course of an hour and an half succeeded in climbing up the central moraine about two miles towards the foot of the great ice fall; but by that time I was tired out and dripping with perspiration. I passed many wide crevasses into which were running streams of water from the surface of the glacier; and judging from the duration of the sound made by stones that I dropped into some of them, they must have had a depth of a hundred feet, perhaps much more. This was only one of eleven glaciers that I counted from the summit of the high ridge which divides the water-shed of the Írtish from that of the Ob. Seven glaciers descend from the two main peaks alone.
We spent all the remainder of the day in sketching, taking photographs, and climbing about the glacier and the valley, and late in the afternoon returned to our camp in the valley of the White Berél. That night—the 2d of August—was even colder than the preceding one. Ice formed to the thickness of more than a quarter of an inch in our tea-kettle, and my blankets and pillow, when I got up in the morning, were covered with thick white frost.
Monday we made another excursion to the summit of the ridge that overlooks the valley of the Katún, and succeeded in getting a good photograph of the two big peaks, against a background of cloudless sky. Our little instrument, of course, could not take in a quarter of the mighty landscape, and what it did take in it reduced to so small a scale that all of the grandeur and majesty of the mountains was lost; but it was a satisfaction to feel that we could carry away something that would suggest and recall to us in later years the sublimity of that wonderful alpine picture.
Monday noon we broke camp and started for the Rakmánofski hot springs; and on the 5th of August, after an absence of ten days, we returned to the Altái Station.
- ↑ Mr. Yádrintsoff is the editor of the Eastern Review in Irkútsk and a well-known author, explorer, and anthropologist.
- ↑ Captain Maiéfski's estimate of their height was 18,000 feet above the sea level. They have never been climbed nor measured, and I do not even know the height above the sea of the valley bottom from which they rise.