all the afternoon we went back on our tracks along the main line, the sea on one side and the green country, riotous, lush, luxuriant, on the other, till at last we reached the head of the gulf and took our last look at the northern sea; grey like a silver shield it spread before us, and right down to the very water's edge came the vivid green. and then we turned inland, and presently we left the main line and went north. above was the grey sky, and the air was soft and cool and delicious. i had had too much stimulation and i welcomed, as i had done the rains after the summer in my youth, the soft freshness of the siberian summer.
there were soldiers everywhere, tall, strapping, virile russians; there were peasants in belted, blouses, with collars all of needlework; and there were chinese, japanese, koreans, and the natives of the country, men with a strong mongolian cast of countenance. the country itself was strangely empty after teeming china, but these all travelled by train or were to be found on the railway stations and at the fishing stations that we passed, but apparently i was the only bloated aristocrat who travelled first class. in normal times this made travelling fairly easy in russia, for it was very cheap and you could generally get a carriage to yourself.
oh! but it was lovely; the greenness of the country was a rest to eyes wearied with the dust and dirt of china. and there were trees—not trees denuded of all but enough timber to make a bare livelihood possible, but trees growing luxuriantly in abundant leaf after their own free will, oaks and firs and white-stemmed, graceful birches bending daintily before the soft breeze. at the stations the natives, exactly like chinamen, dirty and in rags, brought strawberries for sale; and there were always flowers—purple vetches and gorgeous red poppies, tall foxgloves and blue spikes of larkspur. the very antithesis of china it was, for this was waste land and undeveloped. the very engines were run with wood, and there were stacks of wood by the wayside waiting to be burnt. i was sorry—i could not but be sorry. i have seen my own people cut down the great forests of western victoria, and here were people doing the same, with exactly the same wanton extravagance, and in this country, with its seven months of bitter winter, in all probability the trees take three times as long to come to maturity. but it is virgin land, this glorious fertile country, and was practically uninhabited till the russian government planted here and there bands of cossacks who, they say, made no endeavour to develop the land. the koreans and the japanese and the chinese came creeping in, but the russians made an effort to keep them out. but still the population is scanty. always, though it was before the war, there were soldiers—soldiers singly, soldiers in pairs, soldiers in little bands; a horseman appeared on a lonely road, he was a soldier; a man came along driving a cart, he was a soldier; but the people we saw were few, for the rigours of this lovely land in the winter are terrible, and this was the dreaded land where russia sent her exiles a long, long way from home.
farther we went into the hills; a cuckoo called in the cool and dewy morning; there were lonely little cottages with wooden roofs and log walls; there were flowering creepers round the windows, and once i saw a woman's wistful face peeping out at the passing train, the new train that at last was bringing her nearer the old home and that yet seemed to emphasise the distance. we went along by a river, the ussuri, that wound its way among the wooded green hills and by still pools of water that reflected in their depths the blue sky, soft with snow-white clouds. a glorious land this land of exile! at the next station we stopped at the people were seated at a table having a meal under the shade of the trees. then there was a lonely cross of new wood; someone had been laid in his long last home in the wilderness and would never go back to holy russia again; and again i thought of the woman's wistful face that peered out of the flower-bordered window.
this is a new line. formerly the way to kharbarosvk was down the amur river from the west, and that, i suppose, is why all this country of the amur province south and east of the river is so lonely.
as we neared kharbarosvk came signs of settlement, the signs of settlement i had been accustomed to in australia. there were tree stumps, more and more, and anything more desolate than a forest of newly cut tree stumps i don't know. it always spells to me ruthless destruction. i am sure it did here, for they cut down recklessly, sweeping all before them. it seemed to cry out, as all newly settled land that ever i have seen, and i have seen a good deal, the distaste of the people who here mean to make their homes. these are not our trees, they say; they are not beautiful like the trees of our own old home; let us cut them down, there are plenty; by and by when we have time, when we are settled, we will plant trees that really are worth growing. we shall not see them, of course, our children will benefit little; but they will be nice for our grandchildren, if we hold on so long. but no one believes they will stay so long; they hope to make money and go back. meanwhile they want the timber, but they neglect to plant fresh trees.
they wanted the timber to build kharbarosvk. this is a town of the outposts, a frontier town; there are no towns like it in the british isles, where they value their land and build towns compactly, but i have seen its counterpart many a time in australia, and i know there must be its like in america and canada. it straggled all along the river bank, and its wide streets, streets paved, or rather floored, here and there with planks of wood, were sparsely planted with houses. in one respect australian towns of the frontier are much wiser. when there is a train they do build their stations with some regard for the comfort and convenience of the inhabitants. in russia wherever i have been the railway station is a long distance, sometimes half-an-hour's drive, from the town it serves. i suppose it is one of the evils of the last bad regime and that in the future, the future which is for the people, it will be remedied, but it is difficult to see what purpose it serves. i had to get a droshky to the hotel. we drove first along a country road, then through the wide grass-grown streets of the town, and i arrived at the principal hotel, kept by a german on russian lines, for the restaurant was perfectly distinct from the living-rooms. i put it on record it was an excellent restaurant; i remember that cold soup—the day was hot—and that most fragrant coffee still.
from the windows of my bedroom i saw another of the world's great rivers. i looked away over a wide expanse of water sparkling in the sunshine: it was the junction of the ussuri and the amur, and it was like a great lake or the sea. it was very, very still, clear as glass, and the blue sky and white clouds were reflected in it, and there were green islands and low green banks. all was colour, but soft colour without outlines, like a turner picture.
the amur is hard frozen for about five months of the year and for about two more is neither good solid ice nor navigable water. it is made by the joining of the shilka and the aigun in about lat. 53° n. 121° e., and, counting in the shilka, must be nearly three thousand miles in length, and close on two thousand miles have i now travelled. i don't know the amur, of course, but at least i may claim to have been introduced to it, and that, i think, is more than the majority of englishmen may do. and oh, it is a mighty river! at kharbarosvk, over a thousand versts—about six hundred and forty miles—from the sea, it is at least a mile and a third wide, and towards the mouth, what with backwaters and swamps, it takes up sometimes about forty miles of country, while the main channel is often nearly three miles wide. it rises in the hills of trans-baikal—the yablonoi mountains we used to call them when i was at school. really i think it is the watershed that runs up east central siberia and turns the waters to the shallow sea of okhotsk; and it cuts its way through wooded hills among rich land hardly as yet touched by agriculture, beautiful, lovely hills they are, steep and wooded. it climbs down into the flat country and then again, just before it reaches the sea, it is in the hills, colder hills this time, though the amur falls into the sea on much the same parallel of latitude as that which sees it rise, only it seems to me that the farther you get east the colder and more extreme is the climate. for nikolayeusk at the mouth is in the same latitude as london, but as a port it is closed for seven months of the year. true, the winter in siberia is lovely, bright, clear cold, a hard, bright clearness, but the thermometer is often down below -40°
fahrenheit, and when that happens life is difficult for both man and beast. no wonder it is an empty river. the wonder to me is that there should be so much life as there is. for in those five months that it is open fine large steamers run from nikolayeusk by ivharbarosvk to blagovesehensk, and smaller ones, but still rather fine, to stretensk, where river navigation, for steamers of any size at any rate, ceases. there are the two months, april-may, september-october, when the river cannot be used at all, and there are the winter months when it may be, and is to a certain extent, used as a road, but with the thermometer down far below zero no one is particularly keen on travelling. it has its disadvantages. so most of the travelling is done in the summer months and in 1914 the steamers were crowded. now, i suppose, they are fighting there. it is a country well worth fighting for.
it was a curious contrast, the lonely empty river and the packed steamer. it was an event when we passed another; two made a crowd; and very, very seldom did we pass more than two in a day. but it was delightful moving along, the great crowded steamer but a puny thing on the wide river, the waters still and clear, reflecting the blue sky and the soft white clouds and the low banks far, far away. when there were hills they were generally closer, as if the river had had more trouble in cutting a passage and therefore had not had time to spread itself as it did in the plain country. the hills were densely wooded, mostly with dark firs, with an occasional deciduous tree showing up brightly among the dark foliage, and about blagovesehensk there is a beautiful oak known as the velvet oak, the wood of which is much sought for making furniture. however dense the forest, every here and there would be a wide swath of green bare of trees—a fire brake; for these forests in the summer burn fiercely, and coming back i saw the valleys thick with the curling blue wood smoke, smelt the aromatic smell of the burning fir woods, and at night saw the hills outlined in flames. it was a gorgeous sight, but it is desperately destructive for the country, especially a country where the wood grows so slowly. but at first there were no fires, and what struck me was the vastness and the loneliness of the mighty river. i had the same feeling on the congo in the tropics, a great and lonely river with empty banks, but that was for a distance under two hundred miles. here in the north the great lonely river went wandering on for ten times as far, and still the feeling when one stood apart from the steamer was of loneliness and grandeur. man was such a small thing here. at night a little wind sighed over the waters or swept down between the hills; round the bows the water rose white; there was a waste of tossing water all round, under a lowering sky, and the far-away banks were lost in the gloom. a light would appear, perhaps two lights shining out of the darkness, but they only emphasised the loneliness. a wonderful river!
the navigation of the river is a profession in itself. there is a school for the navigators at blagoveschensk where they are properly trained. all along we came across the red beacons that mark the way, while beside them in the daytime we could see the cabins of the lonely men who tended them.
truly a voyage down the amur in summer is not to be easily forgotten, and yet, sitting here writing about it in my garden in kent, i sometimes wonder did i dream it all, the vastness and the loneliness and the grandeur that is so very different from the orchard land wherein is set my home. you do not see orchards on the amur, the climate is too rigorous, and i doubt if they grow much beyond berries, a blue berry in large quantities, raspberries, and coming back we bought cucumbers.
oh, but it was lovely on that river. dearly should i like to share its delights with a companion who could discuss it with me, but somehow it seems to be my lot to travel alone.
not, of course, that i was really alone. though the steamers were few, perhaps because they were few, they were crowded. there were two companies on the river, the sormovo or quick-sailing company, and the amur company; and i hereby put it on record that the amur company is much the best. the john cockerill, named after some long-dead english engineer who was once on the amur, is one of the best and most comfortable.
at kharbarosvk, finding the steamer did not leave till the evening of the next day, i had naturally gone to a hotel. it seemed the obvious thing to do. but i was wrong. the great russian steamship companies, with a laudable desire to keep passengers and make them comfortable, always allow a would-be traveller to spend at least two days on board in the ports, paying, of course, for his food. and i, who had only come about thirty-six hours too soon, had actually put up at a hotel, with the john cockerill lying at the wharf. the russo-asiatic bank, as represented by a woman clerk, the only one there who could speak english, was shocked at my extravagance and said so. these women clerks were a little surprise for me, for in 1914 i was not accustomed to seeing women in banks, but here in eastern siberia—in vladivostok, kharbarosvk, and all the towns of the amur—they were as usual as the men.
the john cockerill surprised me as much as i surprised the bank clerk. to begin with, i didn't realise it was the john cockerill, for i could not read the russian letters, and at first i did not recognise the name as pronounced by the russians. she was a very gorgeous, comfortable ship, with a dining saloon and a lounge gorgeous in green velvet. and yet she was not a post steamer, but spent most of her time drawing barges laden with cargo, and stopped to discharge and take in at all manner of lonely little ports on the great river. she was a big steamer, divided into four classes, and was packed with passengers: russians in the first, second and third class, with an occasional german or japanese, and in the fourth an extraordinary medley of poorer russians, chinese and gilyaks and golds, the aboriginals of the country, men with a mongolian east of countenance, long coarse blaek hair, very often beards, and dirty—the ordinary poor chinaman is clean and tidy beside them.
but the first class was luxurious. we had electric light and hot and cold water. the cabins were not to hold more than two, and you brought your own bedding. i dare say it could have been hired on the steamer, but the difficulty of language always stood in my way, and once away from the seaboard in north-eastern asia the only other european language beside russian that is likely to be understood is german, and i have no german. i was lucky enough on the john cockerill to find the wife of a russian colonel who spoke a little english. she, with her husband, was taking a summer holiday by journeying up to nikolayeusk, and she very kindly took buchanan and me under her wing and interpreted for us. it was very nice for me, and the only thing i had to complain of on that steamer was the way in which the night watch promenading the deek shut my window and slammed to the shutters. they did it every night, with a care for my welfare i could have done without. in a river steamer the cabins are all in the centre with the deck round, and the watch evidently could not understand how any woman could really desire to sleep under an open window. i used to get up early in the morning and walk round the decks, and i found that first and second class invariably shut their windows tight, though the nights were always just pleasantly cool, and consequently those passages between the cabins smelt like a menagerie, and an ill-kept menagerie at that. they say russians age early and invariably they are of a pallid complexion. i do not wonder, now that i have seen their dread of fresh air. again and again i was told: “draughts are not good!” draughts! i'd rather sleep in a hurricane than in the hermetically sealed boxes in which those passengers stowed themselves on board the river steamers. on the john cockerill the windows of the dining saloon and the lounge did open, but on the steamer on which i went up the river, the kanovina, one of the “sormovo” company, and the mail steamer, there was only one saloon in the first class. we had our meals and we lived there. it was a fine large room placed for'ard in the ship's bows, with beautiful large windows of glass through which we could see excellently the scenery; but those windows were fast; they would not open; they were not made to open. the atmosphere was always thick when i went in for breakfast in the morning, and i used to make desperate efforts to get the little windows that ran round the top opened. i could not do it myself, as you had to get on the roof of the saloon, the deck where the look-out stood, and anyhow they were only little things, a foot high by two feet broad. but such an innovation was evidently regarded as dangerous. besides the fact that draughts were bad, i have been assured that perhaps it was going to rain—the rain couldn't come in both sides—and at night i was assured they couldn't be opened because the lights would be confusing to other steamers!
nobody seemed to mind an atmosphere you could have cut with a knife. i am sure if the walls had been taken away it would have stood there in a solid block—a dark-coloured, high-smelling block, i should think. i gave up trying to do good to a community against its will and used to carry my meals outside and have them on the little tables that were dotted about the deck.
after all, bar that little difficulty about the air—and certainly if right goes with the majority i have no cause of complaint, i was in a minority of one—those steamers made the most comfortable and cheapest form of travelling i have ever undertaken. from kharbarosvk to nikolayeusk for over three days' voyage my fare with a first-class cabin to myself was twelve roubles—about one pound four shillings. i came back by the mail steamer and it was fifteen roubles—about one pound ten shillings. this, of course, does not include food. food on a russian steamer you buy as you would on a railway train. you may make arrangements with the restaurant and have breakfast, luncheon, afternoon tea and dinner for so much a day; or you may have each meal separate and pay for it as you have it; or you may buy your food at the various stopping-places, get your kettles filled with hot water for a trifling tip, and feed yourself in the privacy of your own cabin. i found the simplest way, having no servant, was to pay so much a day—five shillings on the big steamers, four shillings on the smaller one—and live as i would do at a hotel. the food was excellent on the amur company's ships. we had chicken and salmon—not much salmon, it was too cheap—and sturgeon. sturgeon, that prince of fish, was a treat, and caviare was as common as marmalade used to be on a british breakfast-table. it was generally of the red variety that we do not see here and looked not unlike clusters of red currants, only i don't know that i have ever seen currants in such quantities. i enjoyed it very much till one day, looking over the railing into the stern of the boat, where much of the food was roughly prepared—an unwise thing to do—i saw an extremely dirty woman of the country, a gilyak, in an extremely dirty garment, with her dirty bare arms plunged to the elbow in the red caviare she was preparing for the table. then i discovered for a little while that i didn't much fancy caviare. but i wish i had some of that nice red caviare now.
the second class differed but little from the first. there was not so much decoration about the saloons, and on the john cockerill, where the first class had two rooms, they had only one; and the food was much the same, only not so many courses. there was plenty, and they only paid three shillings a day for the four meals. the people were much the same as we in the first class, and i met a girl from samara, in central russia, who spoke a little french. she was a teacher and was going to nikolayeusk for a holiday exactly as i have seen teachers here in england go to switzerland.
but between the first and second and the third and fourth class was a great gulf fixed. they were both on the lower deck, the third under the first and the fourth under the second, while amidships between them were the kitchens and the engines and the store of wood for fuel. the third had no cabins, but the people went to bed and apparently spent their days in places like old-fashioned dinner-wagons; and they bought their own food, either from the steamer or at the various stopping-places, and ate it on their beds, for they had no saloon. the fourth class was still more primitive. the passengers, men, women and children, were packed away upon shelves rising in three tiers, one above the other, and the place of each man and woman was marked out by posts. there was no effort made to provide separate accommodation for men and women. as far as i could see, they all herded together like cattle.
the ship was crowded. the russian colonel's wife and i used to walk up and down the long decks for exercise, with buchanan in attendance, she improving her english and i learning no russian. it is evidently quite the custom for the people of the great towns of the amur to make every summer an excursion up the river, and the poorer people, the third and fourth class, go up to nikolayeusk for the fishing. hence those shelves crowded with dirty folk. there were troughs for washing outside the fourth class, i discovered, minor editions of our luxurious bathrooms in the first class, but i am bound to say they did not have much use. washing even in this hot weather, and it certainly was pleasantly warm, was more honoured in the breach than in the observance. the only drawback to the bathrooms in the first class, from my point of view, was their want of air. they were built so that apparently there was no means of getting fresh air into them, and i always regarded myself as a very plucky woman when in the interests of cleanliness i had a bath. the hot water and the airlessness always brought me to such a condition of faintness that i generally had to rush out and lie on the couch in my cabin to recover, and then if somebody outside took it upon them to bang to the window i was reduced to the last gasp.
the john cockerill was run like a man-of-war. the bells struck the hours and half-hours, the captain and officers were clad in white and brass-bound, and the men were in orthodox sailor's rig. one man came and explained to me—he spoke no tongue that i could understand, but his meaning was obvious—that buchanan was not allowed on the first-class deck, the rules and regulations, so said the colonel's wife, said he was not; but no one seemed to object, so i thought to smooth matters by paying half-a-rouble; then i found that every sailor i came across apparently made the same statement, and having listened to one or two, at last i decided to part with no more cash, and it was, i suppose, agreed that buchanan had paid his footing, for they troubled me no more about him.
three or four times a day we pulled up at some little wayside place, generally only two or three log-houses with painted doors or windows, an occasional potato patch and huge stacks of wood to replenish the fuel of the steamer, and with much yelling they put out a long gangway, and while the wood was brought on board we all went ashore to see the country. the country was always exactly alike, vast and green and lonely, the sparse human habitations emphasising that vastness and loneliness. the people were few. the men wore belted blouses and high boots and very often, though it was summer, fur caps, and the women very voluminous and very dirty skirts with unbelted blouses, a shawl across their shoulders and a kerchief on their unkempt hair. they were dirty; they were untidy; they were uneducated; they belonged to the very poorest classes; and i think i can safely say that all the way from kharbarosvk to nikolayeusk the only attempt at farming i saw was in a few scattered places where the grass had been cut and tossed up into haycocks. and yet those people impressed upon me a sense of their virility and strength, a feeling that i had never had when moving among the chinese, where every inch of land—bar the graves—is turned to good account. was it the condition of the women? i wonder. i know i never saw one of those stalwart women pounding along on her big flat feet without a feeling of gladness and thankfulness. here at least was good material. it was crude and rough, of course, but it was there waiting for the wheel of the potter. shall we find the potter in the turmoil of the revolution and the war?
we went on, north, north with a little of east, and it grew cooler and the twilight grew longer. i do not know how other people do, but i count my miles and realise distances from some distance i knew well in my youth. so i know that from kharbarosvk to nikolaycusk is a little farther away than is melbourne from sydney; and always we went by way of the great empty land, by way of the great empty river. sometimes far in the distance we could see the blue hills; sometimes the hills were close; but always it was empty, because the few inhabitants, the house or two at the little stopping-places where were the piles of wood for the steamer, but emphasised the loneliness and emptiness. you could have put all the people we saw in a street of a suburb of london and lost them, and i suppose the distance traversed was as far as from london to aberdeen. it was a beautiful land, a land with a wondrous charm, but it is waiting for the colonist who will dare the rigours of the winter and populate it.
at last we steamed up to the port of nikolayeusk, set at the entrance of the shallow sea of okhotsk, right away in the east of the world. when i set foot upon the wharf among all the barrels with which it was packed i could hardly believe i had come so far east, so far away from my regular beat. one of my brothers always declares i sent him to sea because my sex prevented me from going, and yet here i was, in spite of that grave disadvantage, in as remote a corner of the earth as even he might have hoped to attain.
it was a july day, sunny and warm. they had slain an austrian archduke in serbia and the world was on the verge of the war of the ages, but i knew nothing of all that. i stepped off the steamer and proceeded to investigate nikolayeusk, well satisfied with the point at which i had arrived.
