Across Siberia on the Great Post-Road

Excerpts:

THE EASTERN TERMINUS

There is something forbidding in the aspect of the wild mountain ranges which rise sheer up from the sea to the height of 3000 feet or more along the eastern coast of Siberia ; but near the Manchurian frontier, where the Suifoon River finds its way into the sea, there is a break in the range, and the mountains on either side fall away into a group of gently-sloping, round-topped hills. Over the lower slopes of these hills, in the summer-time green with grass and foliage, and over the narrow space between them and the shore, is spread the town of Vladivostock, the eastern terminus of the longest post-road in the world, and of the prospective Trans- Siberian railway.

This town has sprung into existence within the last thirty years, but it is already a well-established settlement, with a population of twenty thousand, half of whom are Europeans. It has not yet attracted much attention in Western Europe, but is regarded by Russia as of great strategic importance, and is likely to become, if it is not already, the most powerful military post in the Far East.

Opposite the town lies an island several miles in length, and the strait included between it and the mainland forms the harbour — an unusually fine one, deep enough to admit the biggest ship afloat, capacious enough to accommodate the largest fleet, and in all weathers affording safe anchorage.

The general appearance of Vladivostock is very different from that of any other settlement in this part of the world. It seems at first more European, for one is struck at once by the prominence of certain red brick buildings — barracks, I was told they were, but in size and obtrusive ugliness they reminded one of some newly-built cotton-mill in Lancashire. A few of the business houses and residences are also built of red brick ; but buildings of this kind are rare, and appear as blots upon the prevailing whiteness of the cosy wooden dwellings, which compose by far the greater part of the town. Most of the houses are detached, and, except in the business quarter, stand in gardens. In these gardens there are plenty of trees — oak, lime, maple, walnut, and such fruit-trees as the apple, pear, and cherry. When these are in full leaf and blossom, Vladivostock, looking down upon the sea from the verdure-covered hillside, is no doubt quite as beautiful as people say ; but it seemed dreary enough when I saw it at the end of winter, for the keen frosts had destroyed the foliage and withered up the grass, and there was nothing to be seen but houses and leafless trees.

For nearly six months every year the harbour itself is frozen, and our steamer was one of the first that season to effect an entrance. The few steamers that had got in before us had the paint scraped from their sides by the pack through which they had forced their way ; and when we ourselves arrived, the sea to the northward of the harbour was one mass of broken ice as far as the eye could see.

Though in some respects a characteristically Russian town, Vladivostock is very cosmopolitan in its inhabitants. The boatmen who took me ashore, and the porters who carried my luggage to the hotel, were, like most of the day-labourers of the town, Coreans. Many of the smaller shops are kept by Chinamen — from Canton, of course, the most distant but most enterprising portion of the Empire ; and very delighted these Cantonese were to meet with a white-faced European who could converse in their own patois. Other shops are kept by Japanese, but these are few.

The principal merchants here are Germans. In the early days of the port two German sailors ran away from their ship here, and opened a little store. That store has developed into the leading mercantile and banking firm in Eastern Siberia ; it employs in its house here upwards of fifty European clerks, and has branches in many of the interior towns. There is not a single British merchant at this port, and never will be if the German settlers can have their way; they are angry at the very thought of British competition, and are determined to keep the field they have exploited to themselves.

Russians are, of course, more numerous than other European residents, but, except the drosky drivers and a few merchants and hotel-keepers, almost all are in Government employ. The military element predominates. The finest plot of land in the neighbourhood is the parade ground ; the biggest buildings are the barracks ; men in uniform are met with at every turn ; and the bray of trumpets and the roll of drums are sounds too familiar to be noticed. The town has also a well-equipped arsenal, a capacious floating dry-dock, and a fleet of torpedo-boats ; men-of-war are lying at anchor in the harbour ; the heights above the town, though looking innocent enough, are all supposed to have their masked batteries ; and it seems to be the ambition of the Czar to make this port a sort of Siberian Sebastopol.

The ice-bound winter, which was just over when I arrived, must have been a lonely time for the European population — cut off from all the world by the frozen sea in front of them, and the 5000 miles of snow behind. But the winter here is far from an unmixed evil, and to the military authorities and the police it is a veritable boon. In the summer they must be always on the war-path. Regarding every stranger as a spy or a rebel, or a villain of some sort, unless he can prove that he is not, their suspicions keep them continually on the alert. If no stranger is in sight, a sharp lookout must be maintained for those who may be coming, and, as if all the world had its eye upon Vladivostock, its brave defenders stand with finger on trigger ready for the fray.

Such vigilance must be very exhausting, and, after the nervous strain of five or six months of it, the relaxation brought by winter must be an unspeakable relief. No hostile fleet can break through those barriers of ice, and no hostile army can reach them through that wilderness of snow. Even the merchant, however reluctantly, must take a holiday, as free from all shipping worries as if he lived in an inland town. But the whole community responds to the reaction, and the winter season is an unbroken succession of festivities.

At the time of my landing there, Vladivostock was just waking up again to a sense of its responsibilities. The ice has broken up, and who knows what may happen ? The merchant is on the lookout for a fresh cargo of provisions from Odessa. The fighting men must again mount guard against the enemy. The police are particularly busy, for steamers are coming in from Japan, and Corea, and China ; and aliens are appearing in the streets, whose passports must be examined, and whose movements must be watched, lest, prowling about the town, they should get to know something of the nature and position of its defences.

A fellow-countryman, who had come up from one of the China treaty ports for a holiday, was walking, on the day of his arrival, along the main street of the town, and, because he had a photographic camera in his possession, the police at once arrested him, marched him back to the steamer which brought him, and told him that if he set foot on shore again he would be provided with accommodation which would limit his movements more effectively.

The example of this unfortunate photographer was a warning to me, and I did my very best to escape his fate. I tried to appear uninterested, to be content with furtive glances at the things about me, to have a vacant, expressionless countenance, and, as far as possible, to look like innocence itself.

But all this circumspectness did not save me from suspicion ; and when the superintendent of police came to see my passport, he said, in a most searching tone, " On your way from Canton to London ? then what brings you here ? "

"You have no commission from the British Government ? "

" And are not sent out by any English newspaper ? "

"Have no other motive than a desire to see the country ? "

Then he ceased questioning, and sank into a profound reverie. I could see plainly that he was trying to determine between the two alternatives : was the individual before him a liar or a fool ?

UP THE AMOOR

Winding half-way round the foot of the Khabarofka bluff, beneath the shadow of its northern wall, the Usuri River meets with the Amoor ; and thence, in united strength, the two confluent rivers roll down towards the coast-range mountains to force a passage through them to the sea. Our way to Europe lies westward, up the stream to the wild table-lands, where the Amoor musters its forces for the sweep it makes through these lowland plains. It is indeed a noble river. Here at Khabarofka, nearly eight hundred miles from its mouth, it is half a mile in width, and is navigable for a farther distance of twice as far again.

The steamers for ascending the Amoor are larger and more comfortable than those on the Usuri ; and fortunately I had not long to wait for one, the steamer on which I took my passage leaving Khabarofka the day after that of my arrival.

There were eight of us in the after-cabin, and my companions were a set of good-natured, careless young men, most of them in Government employ. They spent the whole day playing baccarat, had hardly patience enough to desist while the table was cleared for meals, and played far on into the night. However small their stakes, several of the players in the course of a few days lost all they had. When this happened to one, he slunk from the table and went up on deck ; and there we saw him sitting, hour after hour, with his elbows on his knees and his chin on his hands, heedless of his fellow-passengers, heedless of the scenery on the banks, heedless even of the dinner-bell, and apparently interested only in one little portion of the deck, at which he continued to stare vacantly.

We all live and sleep in the one cabin, as on the two previous steamers ; but on neither of them was the discomfort of the arrangement so intrusive as it is on this. Our gamblers sat up too late at night for the cabin to be made tidy after they were asleep, and, when the steward came in at eight o'clock in the morning to set the breakfast, he found the table littered from one end to the other with pieces of bread, tea-glasses, vodka-bottles, playing-cards, candles, hats, tooth and hair brushes, towels, soap, shaving apparatus, books, matches, cigarette - ashes, and perhaps the clothes of one or two who were not yet dressed.

It was a relief to go up on deck and look at the river, or even at the virgin forest on its banks, for, with all its wild luxuriance, there was in that tangled mass of vegetation no suggestion of confusion. Masses of ice were floating down the river, and their white, gleaming surface was all the more conspicuous, because the water of the Amoor, stained with pine leaves, is of a dark-brown colour, like that of a peat-moss stream. The little gullies between the hills were filled with compressed snow, moving down ' slowly, like miniature glaciers, towards the river. The banks, which rose on either side above the snow - filled gorges, wherever clear of forest, were covered with rhododendrons, now in full bloom ; the bright red patches extending downward to the green willows on the margin of the river, and upward to the dark pine trees, which stood between them and the sky.

Immense shoals of salmon were making their way with us up the stream, and they seemed to think so little of the long voyage from the sea — a thousand miles and more — which they had already made, and of the still longer one which yet lay before them, opposed by a strong adverse current, that in sheer exuberance of energy they kept leaping their whole length from the water as they went along.

Lovers of the gentle craft could hardly wish for better fishing waters than those of the Amoor. On its banks, beneath the cliffs of Khabarofka, anglers were always to be seen in the day-time, and, though provided only with rough home-made rods and lines, everyone who had been fishing for any length of time had a good basket of fish — pike, bream, carp, perch, with several other kinds of fish not found in British waters. Salmon, though usually caught by means of nets, are frequently taken by the angler with sunken bait, but fly-fishing in this part of Siberia appears to be unknown. Sturgeon are very plentiful, and one of 20 lbs. could be bought for about a shilling. To this family belongs the Kaluoga — the largest fish in the Amoor. It often attains a weight of 2800 lbs., the head alone of such a fish weighing 360 lbs.

Fish are so abundant in this river that even dogs have learned to catch them, and in walking on the bank a native of the country is not at all surprised to find one of these canine fishers, dripping wet, and making a meal of a fine salmon which he has seized by the head and dragged out of the water.

At noon, on the fifth day of our voyage, we arrived at I town whose appearance is by no means s0 imposing as its name. It straggles along the left bank of the Amoor for several miles, but its wooden houses are so small, and are built so far apart, that the total population cannot much exceed twelve thousand. There are hills in the distance, but the country in the immediate neighbourhood is flat and uninteresting, and there is nothing to attract the visitor either in the town or its surroundings.

Yet Blagovestchensk is regarded by the people as, next to Vladivostock, the most important town — or rather city — in Far Eastern Siberia ; and there is even a sort of see- Mecca-and-die tone in the conversation of settlers respect- ing it. This extravagance is . excusable enough, for the area of the province is so vast, and its total population is so small, that a city with upwards of a myriad of people in it is of as much relative importance to the country as its largest cities are to England.

But, apart from such considerations, the simplicity of its appearance cannot conceal the fact that Blagovestchensk is a prosperous little settlement. Its numerous, well- stocked stores, the quality of the wares exposed for sale, the comparatively high prices which they command, and the evident contentment of its inhabitants, are plain proof of the sufficiency of its resources. So enlightened and enterprising are its citizens, that they are taking steps to establish here a Bacteriological Institute for the inoculation of horses against a form of anthrax which is very prevalent among the equine population of the country, and is known as the " Siberian Plague."

Commercially, this city owes its importance to its situation near the confluence of the Zeya with the Amoor, for on the banks of that little river have been discovered some of the richest gold-fields in the empire. The mining is mainly in the hands of three large Russian companies ; but there are also many syndicates, and even individual diggers working on their own account. The work is at present confined entirely to alluvial deposits; and the yield of gold which passes through Blagovestchensk averages 200,000 ounces every year.

The city is politically important as the capital of the great Amoor province. It has a large military depot, and in the city and its neighbourhood there is abundant evidence of the energy and sagacity with which Russia is establishing her power in this most easterly part of her dominions. It is only a few tens of years since she gained possession of this province, and though for upwards of a thousand miles there is only the breadth of the Amoor between the territory of Russia and of China, the defence of this extensive frontier is, on the Russian side, complete.

In addition to infantry, whose numbers I could not ascertain, there are in this province 30,000 Cossack regulars, and twice as many more reserves, who, with their families, are posted along the river in little townships twenty miles apart, and who support themselves by the cultivation of plots of land which have been granted to them by the Government, on condition that each man keeps himself and a good horse in readiness for active service at a moment's call.

The Chinese territory on the other side appeared, over extensive areas, to be neither protected nor inhabited. Whatever might be the nature of the country, whether pine-clothed mountains or rolling plains, for hundreds of miles there was no town or village, nor even house, to be seen. It looked like a veritable No-man's Land. During the last few years the Pekin Government has made some attempt to establish colonies along the Manchurian frontier, but with indifferent success. There is one fair-sized town, called Sakalin, nearly opposite to Blagovestchensk, and within a few miles above and below are a few small villages; but, with these exceptions, the only signs of human life on the Chinese bank of the Amoor — and these but rarely — were the wigwams of some wandering Tartars.

The transference of this extensive, valuable, but altogether undeveloped territory from Chinese to Russian rule is only a question of time ; and let us hope, in the interests of humanity, that the time will not be long.

On a fine calm evening, with the sun just setting in the west, and the moon rising shyly in the east to peep at him, we loosed from our moorings and recommenced our run up the Amoor. We had been transferred to another steamer, longer and broader than the previous one, but of lighter draught, and propelled by a single paddle-wheel at the stern. In the second cabin I had with me an entirely new set of fellow-passengers. There were too many of us for the size of our saloon, but my companions were far more interesting than those I had left behind; and as they were not in bondage night and day to baccarat, we had diversity of occupation, with plenty of entertaining and instructive conversation, and so our life was less monotonous.

No other European people that I know, and least of all the English, are equal to the Russians in the freedom with which in a promiscuous company they can make themselves at home with one another; and, now that serfdom is abolished, there is probably less of hereditary exclusiveness in Russia than in any other country in the world. We had no barge in tow after we entered the Amoor, so first and second cabin and steerage passengers had all to be accommodated on the steamer ; and a very miscellaneous company we were. But we got on very well together. Natural barriers were respected, but there was no attempt by those on the other side to buttress them, or to enlarge the area they enclosed by artificial ones.

In the 'first saloon were a dozen military officers of high rank. One of them was a General Gemelman, over sixty years of age, but still hale and active. He seems to enjoy this rough Siberian service, and, after spending six or seven hours in the saddle, says he thinks nothing of responding to some urgent message by another ride of twenty miles on the same day. He did not know English, but was fond of talking French, and we had many an hour's interesting conversation. He first saw active service in the Crimea, where he made the acquaintance of General Gordon, and commenced with him a lifelong friendship. To these two, " Love your enemies " was evidently not an impracticable command. The last letter received from Gordon was written from Khartoum, only a few months before its fall.

Another noteworthy passenger was the colonel of a Cossack regiment — a man in the prime of life, and a splendid specimen of masculine physique. He spoke English fluently, and was full of information about the history and resources of Siberia. There appeared to be no reserve whatever in his conversation, and he seemed ready to talk with the utmost freedom on all sorts of subjects ; but in reality he was ever on his guard, and the slightest and most delicate suggestion or inquiry with regard to the probable extension of Eussian territory on the Chinese side of the river invariably led to an adroit change of subject, or to an abrupt termination of the conversation. One could not but entertain a high respect for the wariness and self-control which enabled this officer to associate such perfect reticence with so much frankness and affability.

A number of younger officers were with me in the second-class saloon, and these I got to know more intimately, but acquaintance only confirmed my first opinion with regard to their courtesy and culture. One of them, indeed, had a lurking suspicion that I was a British spy, and he shook his head knowingly whenever he caught sight of me. This suspicion probably persisted to the end, but with ever-lessening strength and definiteness. The suspicious one was never impolite ; and anything like snobbishness in any of them I never saw. They were open and communicative on all but forbidden topics, and were very well informed, not only on such subjects as the geology, fauna, and flora of Siberia, but even on English literature. In the course of my journey I met with hundreds of men in their position, and was not surprised to find a few boors among them; but, taking one with another, it is only just to say, that in education and refinement ; in frankness, intelligence, and common-sense ; m uniform courtesy of demeanour ; and, above all, in freedom from bondage to the absurd conventionalisms of caste, Russian military officers appear to be at least the equals of any other members of their profession in the world.