BETWEEN TWO GREAT NATIONS

For three days longer we continued to steam on the _Baron Korff_ between China and Russia. On the third day out from Khabaroffsk the scenery grows more charming with every mile. The Amour here passes through a cleft in a spur of the Khingan Mountains, which close in on her on both the Manchurian and Siberian sides. The hills here are not very high, perhaps not more than five hundred feet, but their sides are often precipitous and present a sheer wall of rock to the view, through which it forces its way with many a swirl and eddy and with tremendous force of current, against which our good ship could make but slow headway.

We here remarked again the peculiar open, park-like effect of the forests, especially on the Manchurian side. I could scarcely believe that these trees in these far Eastern wilds had not been planted by man, and that they did not indicate some great baronial estate, whose castle, to be sure, was hidden behind the hills. Some beautiful hill slopes were covered with stately white birches, without a sign of underbrush, but with green grass forming a soft carpet beneath. In other places trees with black boles took the place of the white birch, but they were at such a distance that I could not determine the species, though they looked like oaks. For miles and miles these natural parks continued, and even where the park-like effect was not so pronounced and beautiful, the lovely open character of the forest continued, for nearly the whole of our fifteen hundred miles on the Amour. The cause of this beautiful effect I do not know. Perhaps in the severe Siberian winters only the fittest survive. The small wood, vines, and parasites of all kinds are killed off by the cold, and only the hardier and stronger trees remain. Whatever the cause, the resultant parks make the banks of the Amour singularly attractive during the brief summer.

The approach to a village was a matter of much interest, both to those on ship and those on shore. When within a quarter of a mile the captain would blow a tremendous blast on the whistle to summon every man, woman, and child to the banks. They would all respond with promptness and despatch, and come streaming down the bluff to the shore, each woman hugging two or three bottles of milk or carrying a pail of butter or a basket of eggs or a bowl of sour cream or a great loaf of black bread, with a hole in the middle like a huge doughnut. Sometimes a woman would appear holding a large goose in her arms as tenderly as though it were a baby, the body of the goose being concealed in the blouse that covered her ample bosom, while its long neck craned out, exhibiting as much interest in the passing show as any one on the shore.

The passengers on the ship would all congregate on the upper deck, many of them with empty bottles in their hands, to exchange, with ten kopeks added, for the full bottles on the shore. There are, of course, no docks or piers at these villages along the Amour, and to make fast to the shore in this swift and shallow water is a work of time and patience. First the anchor is thrown out about a hundred yards from the shore, and cable enough is paid out to allow the boat to drift within twenty feet of the bank. Then a bowline is carried ashore in the ship’s boat and made fast to a tree or a post. A stern line is treated in the same way, and by this time the steamer is near enough for the long gangplanks to be pulled ashore. A wooden horse is put underneath to steady them, and then the eager passengers stream ashore, and there is, for a time, a lively barter in milk and eggs and curd cheese and black bread, until the market is exhausted or the passengers’ wants satisfied.

The villages on the Amour all have a striking family resemblance, and usually consist of one or two streets of log-houses, often chinked with moss, one or two stores of general merchandise, and, if the village is of any size, a handsome Greek church, and a triumphal arch to indicate that the czarewitch, in his famous journey to the far East, stopped there. Sometimes the arch is anything but majestic in its proportions, a mere pitiful little affair of unpainted wood, ten feet high, but it indicates the loyalty of the Siberians and their love for their “Little Father” just as well as though it was a magnificent and imposing work of art. The larger towns, like Vladivostock, Khabaroffsk, and Blagavestchensk, all have lofty and imposing arches, blazing with colors or shining with burnished copper, as becomes the larger and wealthier municipalities.

AMOUR]

Just at nightfall on the third day out we passed a Chinese village on the Manchurian shore, called into being by some rich gold-mines in the vicinity. It is only placer-mining that has yet been attempted, and the quartz awaits the enterprise and the machinery of the Western nations.

On the fourth day we passed the Chinese town of Aigun, a city of forty thousand inhabitants, and noted, as I have before said, as the place where the treaty was signed in 1868 which gave all eastern Siberia to Russia.

These places, even from the steamer’s deck, mellowed and sweetened as they were by distance, looked dirty and wretched and squalid, and showed none of the thrift, neatness, and prosperity of the towns on the Russian side. These were the only Chinese towns that border the Amour for a thousand miles from Khabaroffsk. Besides them we scarcely saw a hut or a wood-pile in Manchuria. Here are vast stretches of virgin soil, rich and productive, millions of acres of noble forest, great park-like estates, laid out by nature, without a single inhabitant. Yet there are uncounted millions of Celestials huddled together in hundreds of cities and thousands of reeking villages in China, who need this sweet air and the wide freedom of these Manchurian fields, which for centuries have belonged to the “Middle Kingdom.” That the Chinaman has not occupied his own domain is the more remarkable, for he is in a way an enterprising individual and often leaves home to seek “fresh fields and pastures new.” He finds his home in America and Australia, in the Sandwich Islands and Manila, in the Straits Settlement and Colombo, in Japan and Corea--even across the Amour into Russian territory he has wandered in large numbers, while much of his own country is still a wilderness. I suppose the fact is that the Chinaman knows a good thing in the way of a stable and just government when he sees it, as well as the rest of mankind, and that he does not propose to develop a country where he will be robbed and pillaged under the form of law, and the fruits of his toil taken away from him as soon as they are ripe.

FAMILIES]

Almost every day our steamer had to take on a fresh supply of wood, for she had a vast appetite for birch and pine. Fortunately there was enough to satisfy the most voracious of furnaces. When wooding-up time came at night, it was a most picturesque sight. Two great flares would be built of large logs on either side of the gangplank, a cord of the best wood being piled on at one time to light up the scene. Then the roustabouts from the steamer would tumble ashore, each with a long, stout pole and a strap to go over his shoulders. Two roustabouts, working in partnership, would then lay down their poles and pile the heavy sticks upon them till they had as much as they could carry. Then, hitching the straps over their shoulders, they would hoist their load hip high and rush it on board. The banks down which they had to carry the wood were often steep and slippery, and the gangplank was long and unsteady, and there was many a slip and a spill between the wood-pile and the steamer’s hold. But these minor accidents made the scene all the more interesting from the passengers’ point of view. How the roustabouts looked at the matter I cannot tell. At any rate, they good-naturedly made the best of it, without any profanity that English ears could understand, picked up themselves and their wood, and started on again.

The fourth and fifth days on the Amour were cold and rainy, but we comforted ourselves for the discomfort of the weather by remembering that the rain would raise the river, which was exceptionally low, and perhaps enable the _Baron Korff_ to reach Blagavestchensk.

THROUGH SIBERIA]

On the afternoon of the fourth day we reached a little village, which consisted mostly of wood-pile, and here the wait continued hour after hour. No one knew the cause of the delay, and the Russian of none of the foreign passengers was equal to the strain of finding out. At last it was rumored that the _Baron Korff_ could go no farther, and that we must wait for a boat of lighter draught to take us up to Blagavestchensk. After several hours, two other steamers came sweeping down the river, and brought up with a graceful curve and flourish, like a stage-coach in the olden times, at our anchorage. They were little boats, cramped and dirty as compared with the _Baron Korff_, and many were the groans of the passengers that the change must be made. But low water is no respecter of persons, and we were told that at four o’clock in the morning we must make the transfer. At midnight, however, the captain changed his mind and concluded to scrape through if he could, so, getting up steam, at two o’clock he started. The critical shallows were reached. The _Baron_ scraped and grated on the sandy bottom. A half inch less of water and she would have been stranded, perhaps for a day. But the captain whistled down the speaking-tube for full speed ahead, the engineer opened the throttle-valve, the engine responded, and, with a mighty shove and jerk, our great leviathan pushed herself over the shallows and into the deeper water beyond. It was a “close call,” but on the Amour, as elsewhere, an inch is as good as an ell.

About eight o’clock in the evening, precisely five days after leaving Khabaroffsk, the beautiful spires of the great churches of Blagavestchensk appeared in sight above the tree-tops, and, sweeping around a bend in the river and heading due north, we were soon alongside the bustling wharf of the metropolis of eastern Siberia. In these five days from Khabaroffsk we had journeyed nine hundred and eighteen versts, or about six hundred miles, having made an average of less than five miles an hour, which is about the average rate of speed on the Amour River when there are no extraordinary delays. Here ended the first stage of our river journey, for now we must wait two days and then change to a smaller steamer that can more easily scrape over the shallows that are before us on the upper reaches of the river.