ON THE SHILKA

Our progress up the Amour was slow but not sure. Time after time the experience described in the last chapter would be repeated. We would touch bottom, scrape on the sand, the engines would make desperate efforts to pull us off into deep water, but would finally give up in despair, slow down, stop altogether, and for one hour, or ten, or twenty, we must possess our souls in patience, until, with infinite pains, our craft was floated once more.

We were told before starting that the journey from Blagavestchensk to Stretinsk would not take more than seven days, or seven days and one-half; but seven times twenty-four hours passed and Stretinsk was still four hundred miles away, and not half the distance had been traversed. The alarming tale was circulated that the water was falling at the rate of two inches a day. The usual story about this being an extraordinary season was current--“not for thirteen years had the water been so low,” etc. I am inclined to think that every year on the Amour is “extraordinary,” and that, especially in the month of June, those who essay this journey must count on spending as much time on the sand-banks as in deep water.

Still, for those who are in no haste to reach their journey’s end, who can put up with very indifferent food, and who can good-naturedly accept the inevitable, there are many and delightful compensations in this new way around an old world. The scenery throughout the whole journey is pleasing, and, much of the way, it is extremely beautiful. A hundred miles beyond Blagavestchensk we passed some remarkable high bluffs, seamed with coal or lignite in narrow, diagonal veins. In many places this coal had caught fire, and for years had been burning with an unquenchable flame. The scene, as we passed, was one of striking beauty. The sun was just setting behind the western hills, lighting up the evening clouds with golden and crimson glory. The broad river swept in a grand and graceful curve around a pine-clad mountain that towered a thousand feet above its placid waters, while, as the light of the dying day waned, glowing jewels appeared in the mountainside, where the burning coal was afire, or little bursts of flame, as from a hundred gas-jets, lit up the gaunt and seamy cliff.

Two days later, and a hundred miles farther on, the same scene was repeated with a still lovelier variation. Again it was just at the hour of setting sun, the most delicious of all the day, for the boiling heat of the day was over, and the cool breezes of evening had begun to blow. On the Chinese shore of the great river high cliffs like the Palisades of the Hudson stretched westward for miles, with tops as even and flat as Table Mountain at Cape Town. Here and there, throughout their whole length, these cliffs, too, were seamed and veined with fire. Oftentimes green shrubs overhung the seams of coal, or pine-trees grew below them, their upper branches athwart the narrow line of fire, so that again the Scripture miracle seemed to be repeated, and the burning bush was not consumed. Imagine the Palisades on a wilder and grander scale, illuminated by their own internal fires, and you have an idea of this night scene on the Amour.

Seven days out from Blagavestchensk, the day we should have completed our river journey, we again stuck fast on a sand-bar for nearly twenty hours. This delay was all the more uncomfortable on account of the extreme heat, unalleviated by the breeze caused by the boat’s motion, and the discomfort was aggravated by innumerable huge green-headed flies, larger than the biggest horse-fly I ever saw in America. These flies showed all the idiosyncrasy of the average house-fly in returning time after time, with the utmost persistence, to the same unguarded spot on ear, or nostril, or back of neck, and, being about ten times as large, their attentions were fully ten times as unpleasant as those of the house-fly.

At length we rubbed our way, inch by inch, over the shallows and into deeper water, and an hour later found ourselves at Albazin, a small and decayed village four hundred miles from Blagavestchensk. Albazin has no glories in the present, but it is famous as the place where, two hundred years ago, a Russian garrison was defeated by the Chinese, and four hundred prisoners carried off to Peking. As a result of this victory a treaty of peace was concluded, and the north bank of the Amour again became Chinese territory. The Great Bear of the North is sometimes defeated and retreats to her den, but it is only to nurse her wounds and to come out again, stronger than ever, to win, either by arms or diplomacy, perhaps two hundred years later, a new victory which will wipe out old scores.

Two hundred years have elapsed since the Russian garrison was carried off to Peking, but Albazin is again in Russian territory, which stretches fifteen hundred miles beyond to the very shores of the Pacific, while Manchuria itself and China, almost to the very gates of Peking, seem likely soon to become Russian provinces.

“That, too, is our country,” said a Russian judge, one of our travelling companions, as he pointed with a sweep of the hand to the Manchurian shore. “That, too, is our country.” And his was no empty boast, even if a little premature.

It is an interesting fact that the descendants of the Russian garrison carried from Albazin to Peking still live in the Chinese capital. They married Chinese wives, but organized a distinct community of their own, in which the Greek Church has flourished ever since.

Ten miles from Albazin we stopped at the larger and more flourishing town of Renova, that owes its prosperity to some large placer gold-mines, which, like all Russian gold-mines, are a government monopoly. All gold discovered and dug must be sold to the government at a price fixed by it below the market price. Of course, much is smuggled out of the country, and such a law is death to genuine private enterprise; but the laws are strict, and no foreigner is allowed to filch the gold from the czar’s private purse, _i.e._, the bowels of the earth.

The next day we reached the final limit of travel on the _Admiral Chicachoff_. She could go no farther, and we were transferred to a great barge, not unlike the prisoners’ cage which we had been towing all this distance. This barge, which for another week was to be our abiding-place, drew only one foot and a half of water, and was towed by a tug which also drew but eighteen inches. On this craft we were to enter the Shilka and stem the current for three hundred miles farther to Stretinsk.

Each change we had made was a descent. We had gone from luxury on the _Baron Korff_ through different grades of discomfort, until we had come to the superlative degree of discomfort on the barge _Diana_.

The men among the first-class passengers were all herded together in one cabin, and the women in another, and the decks and passageways were so littered with third-class passengers and their belongings, that it was with great difficulty that we could pick our way over stout, extended legs, and tender baby toes, and peasant women suckling still smaller babies, who filled every nook and crevice. Clad in great sheepskin garments,

“With the skinny side out and the woolly side in,”

and with huge top-boots, worn often by the women as well as the men, the Moujiks defied the cold night air and the intensely hot mid-day sun, always sprawled out, day and night, at full length, except when they went ashore at landing-places to cook their scanty meals over a brushwood fire.

Of course, exercise under these circumstances was out of the question on shipboard, and, as can be imagined, we all made the most of our stops at the wood-piles for a little run on shore.

Travel on Siberian rivers, like poverty and politics, makes strange bedfellows, and in the men’s cabin were a polyglot company, consisting of a German baron, a Swiss consul, a Dane, two French “bounders,” two Russians, two Scotchmen, a North of Ireland man, and two Americans. All made the best of the situation except the Frenchmen, who sputtered and growled at everything, and made themselves generally disagreeable. Like Mrs. Gummidge, they seemed to say of all the discomforts: “I feels it more than others.” Especially did the food, which indeed was atrocious, come in for their objurgations. At last the climax was reached when one of these irascible Gauls found that sugar had been put in his cabbage. His gastronomic canons were all outraged, and, throwing the cabbage, dish and all, out of the window into the river, he flung a full bottle of beer at the waiter, narrowly missing a lady’s head, and only then felt that his outraged culinary taste had been fully avenged.

But for the most the company on the _Diana_ was a happy family, and though a “Never Again Society” was proposed (never again to cross Siberia by this route), we often consoled ourselves with the reflection that things “might be worse.”

On the second day after boarding the barge the Amour, so far as we were concerned, came to an end, or, rather, we came to its abrupt beginning, for, at a junction point of entrancing scenery, the Argun and the Shilka, two great rivers, come together to form the Amour, after having pursued their separate and devious ways for hundreds of miles. The Argun flows sharply from south to north, the Shilka pursues a northeasterly course. To be sure, the Shilka is really the Amour, and ought to bear the same name to its source, but for boundary purposes the Russians choose to call it another river, and to bound their possessions by the left branch of the Amour, called the Argun. We turned into the Shilka and were soon steaming against its swiftly flowing current.

Now, at length, after coasting along the Manchurian shore for over a thousand miles, we leave China and plunge into the heart of Siberian Russia. On either side the mountains close in on the Shilka, dipping their feet in its rapid, crystal stream, and narrowing it down to less than a quarter of a mile in width. Wild and picturesque is the scenery for almost the whole distance to Stretinsk. The fertile arable land and vast open parks of the Amour give way to rough and rugged hill-sides, clad with a growth of small trees, but affording scant encouragement for the agriculturist. The villages are fewer and farther between, and the scanty houses are of a distinctly poorer type. In fact, the whole country is given up to placer gold-mining and to cutting wood for the frequent steamers, and almost no cultivation is attempted.

It even became difficult, and at last impossible, to secure milk and eggs on shore, and some of the scanty fare provided by the steamer’s steward might have been called “rotten” by the college boy without indulging in slang.

But the natural scenery grew more charming as the evidence of man’s handiwork disappeared. The hill-sides were carpeted with flowers; lilies of the valley, azaleas, and a half-dozen kinds of rare and beautiful orchids abounded everywhere, and the air was fragrant with the new-made leaves of birch and pine. Cuckoos struck all hours of the day from the deeper forest, and a sylvan beauty that I have rarely seen surpassed constantly greeted our eyes.

Frequently during these days on the Shilka we passed great rafts, floating down stream with the current, loaded with emigrant families, men, women, and children, horses, cattle, and dogs, and all the little store of household goods that the poor Moujiks possessed. Sometimes a small bateau would contain a family of seven or eight people and all their belongings. Occasionally great barges towed by a tug-boat would pass us, and these were invariably crowded with such a mass of humanity that one wondered how all could stand by day, much less lie down by night. These crowded rafts and barges headed eastward were most suggestive of Russia’s policy. Hers is a peaceful conquest of the far East. First she must fill up the waste places of Siberia, and then she can stretch out her hand over all Manchuria and northern China, and even in spite of temporary Mongolian uprisings she can hold her own, with no fear of a repetition of the disaster of Albazin, and another exclusion for centuries from Manchuria.

With one barge company alone the government has made a contract to transport thirty thousand peasants within three months to the lower waters of the Amour. Thousands of others will find their way by other methods of conveyance. Liberal land laws and government aid while they are getting established will result in a few years in tens of thousands of log-house homes that in time will make this wilderness to blossom like the rose.

As we approached Stretinsk signs of civilization became more numerous. Cultivated fields appeared. Winter wheat already seemed to be ripening, forced to maturity by a few weeks of the almost continuous sunlight of this northern clime. The interesting village of Oost Kara, about seventy miles from Stretinsk, lies on the right bank of the Shilka, and is supported by extensive gold-mines, which are worked by convicts--criminals, not political prisoners, I am told.

At length, on the 21st day of June, thirteen days after leaving Blagavestchensk, and twenty-one days after embarking on the Amour at Khabaroffsk, we were glad enough to bid good-bye to the _Diana_, its crowded decks, and its wretched fare, and still more glad to feel that our long river voyage, which had stretched itself out from the twelve days which we had expected to twenty-one, was at length at an end, and that the rest of the journey would be behind the iron horse on land, instead of his aquatic cousin, the puffing steamboat.