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Title: The Russian road to China
Author: Lindon Bates
Release date: October 19, 2025 [eBook #77082]
Language: English
Original publication: Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910
Credits: Alan, deaurider and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA ***
THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA
[Illustration: A MAID OF OLD MUSCOVY (From a painting by Venuga)]
THE RUSSIAN ROAD
TO CHINA
BY
LINDON BATES, JR.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1910
COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY LINDON BATES, JR.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published May 1910_
CONTENTS
I. THE PATH OF THE COSSACK 1
II. THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY 25
III. IN IRKUTSK 71
IV. SLEDGING THROUGH TRANSBAIKALIA 114
V. IN TATAR TENTS 173
VI. THE CITY OF THE REBORN GOD 220
VII. RUSSIA IN EVOLUTION 273
VIII. THE STORY OF THE HORDES 322
IX. CHINA 364
ILLUSTRATIONS
A MAID OF OLD MUSCOVY _Frontispiece_
From a painting by Venuga
YERMAK’S EXPEDITION TO SIBIR, ATTACKED BY THE TATARS 8
From a painting by Surikova
CHURCH OF ST. BASIL, MOSCOW 20
Ivan the Terrible blinded its architect that he might never
duplicate the masterpiece
BRIDGE OVER THE IRTISH 38
ALONG THE TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY 38
DINING-CAR SALOON--VIEW OF THE LIBRARY 46
CITIES OF NEW RUSSIA--TIUMEN, TOMSK, PERM 50
ISLAND OF KALTIGEI, LAKE BAIKAL 68
VILLAGE OF LISTVIANITCHNOE, LAKE BAIKAL 68
THE ANGARA RIVER, IRKUTSK 76
THE CATHEDRAL, IRKUTSK 76
A CHAPEL IN IRKUTSK 86
BOLSHOISKAIA, IRKUTSK 86
THE BAZAAR, IRKUTSK 90
THE ICE-BREAKER, YERMAK--LAKE BAIKAL 98
THE ORGANIZERS OF THE CHITA REPUBLIC 108
BAIKAL STATION 116
THE HIGHLANDS OF TRANSBAIKALIA 116
SLEDGING SOUTHWARDS 126
SIBERIAN TYPES--PEASANT, VILLAGE STOREKEEPER 136
PEASANT TYPES 150
A CHICKOYA GIRL 164
A TROITZKOSAVSK STUDENT 164
A WAYSIDE TEMPLE 178
A MONGOL BELLE AND HER YURTA 186
A ZABAIKALSKAIA BURIAT 186
A MONGOL “BLACK MAN” 206
TEMPLE OF GIGIN, URGA 222
TEMPLE IN THE URGA LAMASERY 228
A PROSTRATING PILGRIMAGE 234
A GRAND LAMA 244
CHINESE MANDARIN 256
GIGIN, THE LIVING BUDDHA 256
CHINESE ARCHWAY, URGA MAIMACHEN 262
THE GREAT WALL 270
THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW 282
RUSSIAN TYPES--DRAGOON, CONSTABLE 292
STREET SCENES IN MOSCOW 302
(The Tverskaia Gate, Loubianskaia Place)
RUSSIAN TYPES--PEDDLER, POLICEMAN 316
THE MIRACLE OF ATTILA’S REPULSE 332
(From the painting by Raphael in the Vatican)
ON THE ROAD TO THE MING TOMBS 342
THE GLORY IS DEPARTED 360
THE BRIDGE AND TABLETS IN PEI-HAI 368
HSUEN-WU GATE, PEKING 374
PEKING, WHERE THE ALLIES’ MAIN ASSAULT WAS MADE 380
SUMMER PALACE OF THE EMPEROR 388
MAP OF ASIA, SHOWING ROUTE FROM MOSCOW TO PEKING 392
THE RUSSIAN ROAD TO CHINA
I
THE PATH OF THE COSSACK
An ancient way leads across northern Asia to the Chinese borderland.
The steel of the great Siberian Railroad harnesses now the stretch
which mounts the Urals, pierces the steppes, winds through the Altai
foothills, and by cyclopean cuts and tunnels girdles Lake Baikal. From
Verhneudinsk southward, it has remained as an ancient post-road leading
through the Trans-Baikal highlands to the frontier garrison town of
Kiahta. Over the Mongolian border at Maimachen, it has narrowed into a
camel-trail threading the barren hills to the encampment of the Tatar
hordes at holy Urga. Thence it strikes across the sandy wastes of Gobi,
and passes the ramparts of the Great Wall of China, on its way toward
Peking and the Pacific.
Through five centuries this road has been building. Cossacks blazed its
way; musketoon-armed Strelitz, adventuring traders, convicts condemned
for sins or sincerity, land-seeking peasants, exiled dissenters,
voyaging officials--all have trampled it. Hiving workmen under
far-brought engineers have pushed the rails onward, bridging the chasms
and heaping the defiles. Following it eastward, unpeopled wastes have
been sown to homesteads, hamlets have grown into cities. To the very
gateway of China it has led the Muscovite. It is the path of Slavic
advance.
The way scarcely passed Novgorod in the early sixteenth century when
the great family of the Stroganovs, a “kindred in Moscovie called
the sonnes of Anika living neare the Castle of Saint Michael the
Archangel,” began the fur-trade with the Samoied tribesmen from
Siberia, who paddled down the Wichida River to barter peltries
with the Russians. The prudent merchant Anika, looking to a more
permanent source for those valued furs than the irregular visits of
the aborigines, planned to anticipate his brother traders in their
purchases. He sent east with a band of returning Samoieds some of
his own henchmen carrying, for traffic with the inhabitants, “divers
base merchandise, as small bels, and other like Dutch small wares.”
The agents returned to report what impressed them most. There were
no cities. The Samoieds were “lothsome in feeding,”--even a Russian
frontiersman might shrink from the cud of a reindeer’s stomach as
food,--and knew neither corn nor bread. They were cunning archers,
whose arrows were headed with sharpened stones and fishbones. They were
clad in skins, wearing in summer the furry side outward and in winter
inward. They willingly gave sable-skins for Dutch bells.
A series of trading expeditions began, which made the Stroganovs so
enormously wealthy that “the kindred of Anika knew no ends of their
goods.” Indeed, they gained so much by this exploitation that they
began to fear the application by the Czar’s agent of a monetary test
of patriotism. So, by a stroke of finance not unknown in modern days,
there was arranged the Russian equivalent for carrying five thousand
shares of Metropolitan. A block of small wares for the account of the
Czar’s brother-in-law, Boris, was added to the stock in an especially
important expedition among the Samoieds and Ostiaks. The adventurers
got far inland. They saw men riding on elks, and sledges drawn by
dogs. They returned with wonderful tales of marksmanship, and, more
important, brought back enough furs to give Boris a dividend, in
gratitude for which he secured to the Stroganovs the grant of an
enormous tract of land along the Kama River and a monopoly of the trade
with the aborigines.
The Stroganovs grew and thrived. They scattered trading-posts and
factories along the river-highways and sent many parties into the
interior to barter. In the half-century following old Anika’s
expedition, they had carried the Slavic way to the Urals.
In the summer of 1578, when Maxim Stroganov was ruling over the family
estates along the Kama, one Yermak, heading a fugitive band of
Cossacks, tattered and spent, with dented armor and drooping ponies,
straggled into camp and offered service. With great delicacy Maxim
forbore pressing too closely his inquiry into their antecedents. It
might have wounded Yermak’s susceptibilities to avow that his chief
lieutenant, Ivan Koltso, was under sentence of death for capturing and
sacking a town of the Nogoy, and that the immediate cause of his advent
was an army of Imperial Strelitz, which had driven his band from the
Volga District for piracy and highway robbery.
The situation on the far side of the Urals, where the skin-hunting
tribes had been conquered by a roving horde of Tatars under Kutchum
Khan, was at this time interfering sadly with the Stroganovs’ fur
business. Eight hundred Cossacks, furthermore, of shady character and
urgent needs were undesirable neighbors. So the prudent Maxim, not
particularly solicitous as to which of the two might be eliminated,
offered Yermak a supply of new muskets if he would go away and fight
the Tatars. They were not pleasant people for the Cossacks to meet,
these former masters of Moscow. But behind were the soldiers of Ivan
the Terrible. With a possible conquest before, and the Strelitz behind,
Yermak gladly chose to invade the Tatar territory, which is now western
Siberia.
Up the Chusovaya River the little expedition started in 1579,
damming the stream with sails to get the boats across its shallows.
Penetrating far into the mountains, the band reached a point where a
portage could be made across the Ural water-shed. Then they headed down
the Tura River into Siberia. Here the invaders met the first army of
the Tatars under Prince Yepancha, and with small loss drove them back.
Yermak made his winter camp on the site of the present city of Tiumen.
Next year the advance began once more. The Khan of the Tatars, Kutchum,
was alive to the seriousness of the incursion, and prepared to ambush
the Cossack flotilla as it descended the Tura. At a chosen spot chains
were stretched across the stream, and bowmen were stationed on the
banks to await the coming of Yermak and overwhelm with arrows his
impeded forces. The Tatar sentries above the ambuscade signaled the
coming of the boats; all eyes were turned intently upstream. Then
Yermak’s soldiers fell upon them from the rear, to their total surprise
and his complete victory. Straw-stuffed figures in Cossack garments had
come down in the boats; the men themselves had made a land-circuit and
had struck the enemy unprepared.
In defense of his threatened capital, Sibir, the old Khan rallied once
more. He assembled a great army, thirty times that of the Cossacks.
For the invaders, however, retreat was more perilous than advance.
Yermak went on, and in a great fight on the banks of the Irtish, again
prevailed. With his forces reduced by battle and disease to some three
hundred effectives, he entered Sibir on October 25, 1581. A few days
later the Ostiak tribes, glad to escape their Koran-coercing masters,
proffered their allegiance, and the Cossack saddle was on Siberia.
But how precarious was their seat! Southward were the myriads of the
unconquered hordes of Tatary; only one of the score of their khans had
been vanquished. As thistledown is blown before the wind, so could
Yermak’s oft-decimated band have been swept away had once the march of
the Mongols’ main division turned northward. Girding him round were the
self-submitting Ostiaks, loyal for the moment to those who had won them
freedom from the old proselyting overlord, but not long to be relied
upon once the weight of Cossack tribute--the fur-yassak--began to be
felt.
But what the Tatar hordes had not, what the Ostiak hunters had not, the
three hundred Cossacks had--a man. This man, starting his march as the
hunted captain of a band of outlaws, could conquer half a continent.
Then over the heads of his employers, the mighty family of Stroganov,
over the heads of governors of provinces, of boyars, of ministers
to the throne, he could send by his outlaw lieutenant, Ivan Koltso,
loftily, imperially, as a prince to a king, his offer of the realm of
Siberia to Ivan Vasilevich.
Ivan the Terrible, Czar of all the Russias, he who had blinded the
architect of St. Basil, lest he plan a second masterpiece; he who had
tortured and slain a son, hated less for his intrigues than for his
unroyal weakness, responded imperially. Over the long versts Ivan’s
courier carried to Yermak a pardon, confirmation as ruler of the
newly-won realm and the Czar’s own mantle, an honor accorded only to
the greatest, the boyars of Muscovy. Following the messenger eastward
there plodded three hundred musket-armed Strelitz to bear aid to the
Cossack garrison. Sorely now were these reinforcements needed, for
the Ostiak tribes flamed into rebellion against King Stork. With
Kutchum’s Tatars, they returned to the attack and besieged Sibir. Once
again, though hemmed about by the multitude of his enemies, the valor
of Yermak saved his cause. In a totally unexpected sally, in June,
1584, the Tatar camp was surprised, a great number massacred, and the
besiegers scattered.
The whole country, however, save only the city of Sibir, was still in
arms. Engagements between small parties were constant. Ivan Koltso,
striving to open a way for a trader’s caravan, fell with his fifty, cut
down to the last man. Yermak, marching out to avenge him, was himself
surprised near the Irtish. With Ulysses-like adroitness, he and two
followers escaped the massacre and reached the river-bank, where a
small skiff promised safety. Leaping last for the boat, Yermak fell
short, and, weighted with his armor, sank in the river that he had
given to Russia. The two Cossack soldiers alone floated down to their
comrades.
One hundred and fifty, all that were left of them, started their long
homeward retreat. Far from Sibir, they met a hundred armed men sent by
the Czar. Great was the spirit, not unworthy of the dead leader, that
turned them back, to march to a site twelve miles from Sibir, where
they built their own town, now the city of Tobolsk.
In the years that followed, their nomad enemies drifted south,
leaving those behind who cared not for their old khan’s quarrels. The
phlegmatic Ostiaks returned to their hunting and to their feasts of
uncooked fox-entrails. The long fight had rolled past, leaving the
Slavic way undisputed to the Irtish.
Well it was, for no more of the Strelitz marched to the aid of the
garrisons. Russia was in the throes of civil war and invasion,--the
long-remembered “Smutnoe Vremya,” time of troubles. Boris Godunov, once
favorite of Ivan the Terrible, became the real ruler in the reign of
the weak Feodor. On the death of this prince, with the heir-apparent
Dimitri suspiciously slain, he had mounted the empty throne, and a
pretender, claiming to be Dimitri miraculously escaped, had risen up
in Poland, gained the support of the king, and marched against Boris.
Though the Polish army was routed, Boris succumbed shortly after to a
poison-hastened demise.
[Illustration: YERMAK’S EXPEDITION TO SIBIR ATTACKED BY THE TATARS
(From a painting by Surikova)]
Dimitri attacked the new czar, captured Moscow, and was crowned in the
Kremlin by the Poles. A revolution followed within a year, in which
the pseudo-Dimitri was slain. Meanwhile the Poles were devastating
Russia more cruelly than had the old Tatar conquerors. At length Minim
the butcher of Novgorod led a popular revolt, which in 1613 carried to
the throne Michael, the first of the Romanovs.
Through all these years, despite the fact that anarchy and chaos
rioted over Muscovy, despite the fact that no troops came to aid in
the advance, the Cossacks still pressed their way, contested by the
scattered bands of Tatars, and farther on by the Buriats, the Yakuts,
the Koriats. After these fighters and conquerors came the traders and
colonists, with their families, following along the road that had been
won. The valleys of the great Siberian rivers, which so short a time
before had been the grazing-grounds of the Tatars, became dotted now
with the farms of the new-come settlers. The advance guards of the
fur-traders, with blockhouses guarding the portages, and clustering
wooden huts and churches, pushed south and east as far as Kuznetz, at
the head of navigation on the River Tom, and to the foot of the Altai
Mountains. North and east the trade-route was advanced to the Yenesei,
twenty-two hundred miles inland. As many as sixty-eight hundred sables
went back to Russia in 1640, together with great quantities of fox,
ermine, and squirrel-skins.
The quaint volumes of “Purchas his Pilgrimes,” published in 1625,
tell of some of the early explorations. A band of Cossacks dared the
upper Yenesei, which “hath high mountains to the east, among which
are some that cast out fire and brimstone.” They made friends of the
cave-dwelling Tunguses in this region, who were themselves stirred
to explore, and went on far eastward to another river, less than the
Yenesei but as rapid. By faster running the Tunguses caught some of
the inhabitants, who pointed across the river and said “Om! Om!” The
old chronicler diligently records the speculation as to what “Om! Om!”
could mean. Some thought that it signified thunder, others held it a
warning that the great beyond teemed with devils. These unfortunate
slow-running natives died, “probably of fright,” when the Tunguses, in
a spirit as naïvely unfeeling as if they were collecting curios, were
taking them back to be exhibited to their friends the Cossacks. How
far these Tunguses had pierced cannot be told. In one of the dialects
of the Yakuts who live beyond Baikal, “ta-oom” or “tanak-hoom” means
“greetings.” Had the Tunguses and the Cossacks who followed them
arrived at the Yakuts’ country? Or was the river on which passed “ships
with sails” and beyond which was heard the booming of brazen bells
the Amur? Were those the junks and temple-gongs of the Manchus? _Ni
snaia_,--who knows?
In 1637 the Cossacks reached and established themselves in Yakutsk. In
1639 by the far northern route they pierced to the Sea of Okhotsk. In
1644 a party reached the delta of the Kalyma, and curiously speculated
upon the mammoth tusks which they found. In 1648, on the Cellinga
River beyond Lake Baikal they built Fort Verhneudinsk. Had their tide
of conquest now rolled southward, up the Cellinga Valley, the Russian
Eagles might to-day be flying over Peking. Only the Kentai Mountains
were between them and prostrate Mongolia, enfeebled by the internecine
warfare of her rival khans. From Mongolia, the road, worn by so many
conquerors of old, leads fair and clear to the Chi-li Province and the
heart of China.
But they passed this gateway by, those old Cossack heroes, as the
railway builders have passed it by, to press with Poyarkov to the
Pacific; to conquer, with Khabarov, the Amur; to meet in desperate
conflict the whale-skin cuirassed Koriats of the coast; to battle with
the Manchu in conflicts where “by the Grace of God and the Imperial
good fortune, and our efforts, many of those dogs were slain”; to fight
until but an unvanquished sixty-eight were left of the garrison of
eight hundred in beleaguered Albazin.
The current of conquest passed by this door to China, but the swelling
stream of commerce searched it out. In 1638, the Boyar Pochabov,
crossing Baikal on the ice, broke the first way to Urga, the capital of
the Mongolian Great Khan, and gained the friendship of the monarch. In
the interests of trade, the deputies of the Czar Alexei Michailovitch
followed up the opening with an embassy in 1654 to the Chinese Emperor
himself. Over steppe and mountain and desert the mission wound its
weary way to Kalgan, the outpost city beside the Chinese Wall, and then
on to Peking, bearing to the Bogdo Khan, the Yellow Czar, the presents
of Chagan Khan, the White Czar.
From the Forbidden Palace at Peking were started back, four years
later, return presents, including ten _puds_ of the first tea that
reached Russia. With the presents came a message that drove flame into
the bearded cheeks of the Czar and set his Muscovite boyars to grasping
their sword-hilts. “In token of our especial good-will we send gifts in
return for your tribute.” Thus, the Chinese Emperor.
The answer of the Czar started another legation plodding across a
continent, and the retort was thrown at the feet of his Yellow Majesty.
It was a summons forthwith to tender his vassalage to Russia. The
Czar’s gauntlet had been hurled across Asia. But all it brought was
beggary to the traders who had begun to press along the newly-opened
route to a commercial conquest of the East.
Soon Russia regretted the fruitage of her challenge. In 1685 Golovin’s
embassy left Moscow, and, arriving two years later at Verhneudinsk,
opened negotiations with Peking. A Chinese commission then made its way
north, and at Nerchinsk, August 27, 1689, was signed the famous treaty
closing to Russia her Amur outlet to the Pacific, purchased with such
desperate valor at Albazin, but granting to a limited number of Russian
merchants trading privileges into China.
A lively traffic at once sprang up. Long caravans, silk- and tea-laden,
crossed the Mongolian deserts, the Siberian steppes and hills, and the
forested Urals, taking the road to Europe. A little Russian settlement
was founded at Peking, and a traders’ caravansary was built. The church
constructed by the prisoners of Albazin, who had been so kindly treated
by the Manchus that they at first refused the release which the treaty
brought, gave place to a larger edifice erected by popes from Russia.
Soon, however, the Russians again offended the Celestial Emperor. In
their riotous living, the quickly enriched merchants disquieted the
sober Chinese. The Siberians over the frontier gave asylum to a band
of seven hundred Mongol free-booters, whom it was urgently desired to
present to a Chinese headsman. So commerce was forbidden anew, and
most of the reluctant merchants left their compound. Some stayed and
assimilated with the Chinese, retaining, however, their religion; and
for years a mixed race observed in Peking the rites of Greek Orthodox
Christianity.
It may seem strange that rulers so energetic as Peter the Great and
some of his successors took no steps to resent by force of arms the
arbitrary acts of the Chinese Emperor. But much was going on in
Russia; Peter was occupied with his invasion of Persia, and Catherine
was without taste for a distant and doubtful campaign. The garrisons
scattered over the enormous area of Siberia were numerically too weak
and too poorly equipped to do more than hold their own. So, when
commerce was once more interdicted and the merchants banished, recourse
was had to diplomacy. In 1725 the Bogdo Khan relented enough to receive
Count Ragusinsky with a special embassy from Catherine the First, which
arranged the second great agreement with China, called the Treaty of
Kiahta.
By it the frontier cities of Kiahta in Siberia, and Maimachen, facing
it just across the line in Mongolia, were established as the gateway
to Chinese trade. The treaty provided for the extradition of bandits
and for a perpetual peace and friendship between the high contracting
parties. Ever since, the citizens of Kiahta have alternately blessed
and blamed Ragusinsky,--blamed him because, in the fear lest any stream
flowing out of Chinese into Russian territory should be poisoned, he
settled the boundary city beside a Siberian brook so inadequate that
Kiahtans have suffered ever since for lack of water, with the river
Bura only nine versts away in China; blessed him because of the great
prosperity the treaty brought to their doors.
The tea carried by this highway became Russia’s national drink. Great
warehouses arose, built caravansary-wise around courts. Endless files
of two-wheeled carts rolled northward, bearing each its ten square
bales of tea, or its well-packed bolts of silk. The merchants grew
wealthy in the rapidly swelling trade.
A great Chinese embassy, headed by the third ranking official of
the Peking Foreign Office, made its way to Moscow to keep permanent
the relations of the two empires. Similarly, a Russian embassy was
established in the rebuilt compound in Peking, where a new church
arose, whose archimandrite gained a comfortable revenue by selling
ikons and crucifixes to the many Chinese converts he had baptized.
Catherine the Second’s edict opened to all Russians the freedom of
Chinese trade. Its volume, large before, became now even greater. In
1780 the registered commerce at Kiahta had risen to 2,868,333 roubles,
not to mention the large value of the goods taken in unregistered.
Tea, a pound of which, if of best quality, cost two roubles in those
days, silks, porcelains, cottons, and tobacco, went north, exchanged
for Russian peltries, for cloth, hardware, and, curiously enough,
hunting-dogs.
An English merchant, who had penetrated to Kiahta in that year, gives
an amusing account of the mutual distrust with which the barter was
conducted. The Russian going over the frontier to Maimachen would
examine the goods in the Chinese warehouse, seal up what he desired,
and leave two men on guard. The Chinese merchant would then come to
Kiahta, and do the same with the Russian’s wares. When the bargain was
struck, both together carried one shipment over the border with guards
and brought back the exchange.
In growing prosperity, undisturbed, the Kiahta caravans came and went,
while elsewhere history was warm in the making.
Napoleon marched to Moscow, to Leipsic, to Waterloo. The Kiahta
caravans came and went. The St. Petersburg Dekabrists rose for
Constantine and the Constitution. The Kiahta caravans came and went.
The Crimean War saw the Russian flag flutter down at Sevastopol. Even
as the Malakoff was stormed, a Russian army marched into Central Asia
to seize the Zailust Altai slope, which points as a spear toward
Turkestan and India, and a Russian navy sailed under Muraviev to occupy
the forbidden Amur. The Kiahta caravans came and went.
At length a railroad, pushed year by year, reached the Pacific. One
branch cut across the reluctantly-accorded Manchurian domain to
Vladivostok; another struck southward to Dalny and Niu-chwang. The
Russian Eagles perched at Port Arthur and nested by the far Pacific.
The camel-commerce of the old overland road across Mongolia shrank
now as shrinks a Gobi snow-rivulet under the burning desert sun. The
meagre Kiahta caravans became but a gaunt shadow of the mighty past.
Only an intermittent wool-export and a dwindling traffic in tea to
the border cities remained of the great tribute of the Urga Road. As
trade vanished from their once busy warehouses, the Chinese merchants
were troubled. Perhaps to prayer and sacrifice the God of Commerce
would relent? So a scarlet temple rose on the hill by Maimachen.
Prosperity came suddenly once again, a new trade rolled north over the
historic way. The Mongol cart-drivers returned from far Ulasati. The
camel-trains, that had scattered south to the trails beyond Shama,
gathered back as antelopes herd to a new spring in the desert.
The God of the Red Temple, the God of the Caravan, had sent the
Japanese. As the Amban’s executioner strikes off a victim’s hand, so
had the Nipponese lopped away the railroad reaching down to Dalny and
Niu-chwang--the road that was breaking the camel-trade a thousand
versts beyond, on the old route by Maimachen and Kiahta. Against the
Russian control of the Pacific the Japanese had hurled all their
gathered might. By battle genius and efficiency the Island soldiers
won, and athwart the front of Slavic empire they set their desperate
legions. Far more was lost to Russia than men and squandered treasure,
far more than prestige and power of place. The enormous stakes, even
in the port of Dalny, in the forts of Port Arthur, in the East China
Railway, were but incidents. The real tragedy of the war was that the
vital terminus of her continent railroad was alienated, and that her
civilization was barred back indefinitely.
The soldiers and statesmen who carried Russia’s power across a savage
continent had sought out many inventions. But by whatever means
each successive territory was won, its maintenance had been by the
warrant that the Slavs had gone not lightly, adventuring to conquest,
but as an earnest host clearing a way for the homes and the hearths
of their race. The colonist had followed the Cossack; cities and
villages, railways and telegraphs, had risen behind the armies. The
dawn of the twentieth century saw a mighty expanse of Siberia redeemed
from a desolate waste to a land of farms and villages, of mines and
industries; a native population, once hardly superior to the American
Indian, not, like him, displaced and exterminated, but raised side
by side with the settlers to a more equitable place than is held by
any other subject people in Asia. The Russian advance had brought
the establishment of the volunteer fleet plying from far Odessa to
Vladivostok, and the completion of the greatest railway enterprise
the world has ever seen. It had opened from Europe to the Far East
a land-route more important to more people than the water-route
discovered by Vasco da Gama. The fruition of a nation’s hope was lost
when the Eagles went down at Port Arthur.
For those who feast at Russia’s cost the reckoning is long.
Predecessors not unfamed are worthy of remembrance: the Tatars who
lorded it four hundred years, the Poles whose kings caroused in the
Kremlin, the great Emperor, with his Grande Armée, whose stabled horses
scarred the walls of St. Basil, the Turks, the Swedes,--all conquerors
of yesterday. But long years must take their toll of life and gold
before Russia can carry the entrenched lines along the Yalu, and
reënter the redoubts hewn in the sterile hills around Port Arthur. The
spoils to the victors for the present are unchallenged. The Russian way
to China is not now through Manchuria.
But the ancient road of the Kiahta caravans is still unblocked. Here
is the shortest route from Europe to the East. Here, through the
defiles and the broken foothills of the Gobi Plateau, lies the future
redemption of the great unfettered land-route to North China. The
Chinese are themselves advancing to anticipate it. They have already
built into Kalgan. To this trading-centre across the pale, a Russian
railway may yet pass and her colonists make fruitful the unpeopled
wilds of Mongolia.
In the cycles of progress old paths are reworn. Pharaoh’s canal from
the Mediterranean to the Red Sea was swallowed up under the sands of
three thousand years when the Genoans won a way across the Isthmus.
Their track was left unsought when the Portuguese showed the route for
ships around the Cape. Yet to-day the Strait of Suez is thronged with
reborn commerce.
The first American highway to the Western Reserve was superseded by
the better avenue of the newly built Erie Canal, yet came to its own
again beneath the tracks of the Baltimore and Ohio. So, far to the
westward of Japan’s outpost, the age-old caravan road, with a shadowy
fantastic history dim as its dun trail across the desert, may rise to a
resurrected glory as a new road to China.
Its greatness is of yesterday and of to-morrow. Unto to-day belongs the
quaintness of the cavalcade that passes to and fro along its track.
Over the frozen snows of winter and the rocky trails of summer there
plod horse and ox and camel, sleigh and wagon and cart,--a broken line
of men and beasts. Russian posts thunder past with galloping horses,
three abreast. Bands of Cossacks convoy the guarded camel-trains of
heavy mail for China. One meets troops of boyish recruits, singing
lustily in chorus on the tramp northward, and Mongol carts and
flat-featured Buriats on their little shaggy ponies, sleepy wooden
villages, forests, steppes, swamps, frozen river-courses, mountain
passes.
Through the kaleidoscope of races and peoples one moves in a
world-forgotten life, a procession of the ages.
[Illustration: CHURCH OF ST. BASIL, MOSCOW (Ivan the Terrible blinded
its architect that he might never duplicate the masterpiece)]
On the threshold of Siberia the traveler has turned back in manner, in
ways of thought, in government, in everything, to the past. Go into one
of these cities,--you are in the Germany of 1849, with the embers still
hot of the fire lighted by the republican movement of the young men
and the industrials. The seeming chance of victory has passed them
by. The iron hand is over all. One hears of Siberian Carl Schurzes,
fugitives to America and to Switzerland, of the month-lived Chita
Republic, of the row of gallows at Verhneudinsk, of the bloody assizes
at Krasnoyarsk.
It is as if one lived when citizens gathered in excited groups in the
Forum to discuss the news from Philippi; or as if, from the broken
masonry of the Tuileries, there stepped out into breathing actuality
the five hundred Marseillaises “who know how to die,” fronting the
red Swiss before the palace of Louis, the King. Here is the reality
of friends in hiding, of files of soldiers at each railway-station,
of police-examined passports without which one cannot sleep a night
in town, of arms forbidden, meetings forbidden, books forbidden,--all
things forbidden. Here as there men thought that the new could come
only by revolution. Yet one can see, despite all, the germs of
improvement and the upward pressures of evolution.
Move further toward the frontier towns, where the relayed horses
bring the weekly mail,--you have gone back a hundred and fifty years.
You are among our own ancestors of the days of the Stamp Act. Did
the General Howe who governs the oblast from his Irkutsk residency
overhear the school-boys of Troitzkosavsk as they chant the forbidden
_Marseillaise_, he, too, might say that freedom was in the air. These
Siberian frontiersmen shoot the deer with their permitted flint-locks
as straight as the neighbors of Israel Putnam, and with spear and gun
they face the bear that the dusky Buriat hunters have tracked to its
lair.
Our Puritans are there, rugged, red-bearded dissenters, “Stare’
Obriachi,” Old Believers, they are called, who came to Siberia
rather than use Bishop Nikon’s amended books of prayer. Yankee-like,
outspoken, keen at a trade, are these big Siberian sons of men who
dared greatly in their long frozen march. The grants to Lord Baltimores
and Padroon Van Rensselaers are in the vast “cabinetski” estates of the
grand-ducal circle, engulfing domains great as European kingdoms.
Go into one of the villages of the peasants transplanted in a body by
the paternal Government. Here are the patient, enduring recruits for
the army, brothers to the toilers over whose fields the Grand Monarch’s
wars rolled back and forth. Though steeped in ignorance and overwhelmed
by the incubus of communism, they are capable of real and splendid
manhood, and will show it when their world has struggled through into
the century in which we others live.
Go to a mining-camp in the Chickoya Valley. It is California and the
days of ’49. Histories as romantic as those of the Sierras are being
lived out in its unsung gorges,--tales of hardships, of grub-stakes, of
bonanzas in Last Chance Gulches.
When the bumping tarantass rolls across the Chinese frontier into
Mongolia, it enters a kingdom of the Middle Ages flung down into the
twentieth century. Feudal princes, lords of armies weaponed with spear
and bow, tax and drive to the corvée their nomad serfs. A hierarchy
of priests whose divine head lives in a palace at Holy Urga, sways
the multitude of superstition-steeped Mongols, and receives the
homage of pilgrims wending their way from Siberia, from the Volga,
from Tibet, from all Mongolia, to their Canterbury of Lamaism. In
prostrate devotion the penitents girdle the Sacred City before whose
hovels beggars dispute with dogs their common nourishment, and in
whose compounds princes of the race of Genghis Khan, with armies of
retainers, live bedless, bathless, lightless, in the felt huts of
their race. Squalid magnificence and good-humored kindly hospitality
are linked to utter brutality. Sable-furs and silks cover sheepskins
worn until they drop from the body. Here and there among the natives a
Chinese trading caravansary, alien, walled, peculiar, stands as of old
the Hansa-town, with merchant guilds and far-brought caravan goods.
A way of adventure and strangeness, where the years turn back, is this
old road of the Golden Horde, leading down past the ancestral homes of
the Turks to the Great Wall.
The Cossack sentries at Kiahta look Chinaward. They have become an
anomaly, this hard-riding, fierce-fighting soldier class. The plow has
metamorphosed into myriad farms the plains along the Don where once
their ponies grazed. Mining-cuts score the hills in the Urals where
once they hunted. Villages of Slavonic peasants rise along the Amur.
The sons of the old warriors grow into peaceful farmer-folk, differing
in name alone from their blue-eyed neighbors. Soon they must disappear
in all save picturesquely uniformed Hussars of the Guard, and as a
memory, chanted by young men and girls in the Siberian summer evenings
when Yermak’s song is raised. The task of the Cossack, to lead in the
conquest of kindred native races and to weld these through themselves
into Russia’s fabric, is nearly done.
Down the ancient road lies a last avenue of advance. Eastward is
Manchuria, where artillery and science grappling must decide the day
with Japan. Southward is India, where England’s guarded gateway among
the hills can be opened only from behind. But into Mongolia Fate may
decree that the yellow-capped Cossacks, drafted from Russia’s Mongol
Buriats, shall lead once more the nation-absorbing march of the White
Czar. For another memorable ride, the Cossacks, who on their shaggy
ponies led the long conquering way across the continent, may yet mount
and take the road to China.
II
THE GREAT SIBERIAN RAILWAY
How long to Irkutsk? Seven days now, seven years when last I
came.” The bearded Russian standing in the doorway of the adjoining
compartment in the corridor-car of the Siberian Express gazes
thoughtfully at the fir-covered slope, whose dark green stands in
sombre contrast to the winter snows. The train is slowly climbing the
Ural Range, toward the granite pyramid near Zlatoust, on opposite
sides of which are graven “Europe” and “Asia.” Neighbors with easy
sociability are conversing along the wide corridors, exchanging stories
and cigarettes, asking each other’s age and income in naïve Siberian
style.
Regarding the burly occupant of the next stateroom one may discreetly
speculate. From sable-lined paletot and massive gold chains you hazard
that he voyaged with the traders’ slow caravans in the days before the
railway--that he was a merchant.
“A merchant? _Optovi?_ No, I did not come with the caravans.”
From the triangle of red lapel-ribbon, the rank-bestowing decoration,
you venture a second guess.
“Perhaps the _gaspadine_ made the great circuit to oversee the local
administrations? He was a government inspector--_Revizor?_”
“_Chinovnik niet navierno_,” he answers. Most decidedly he was not an
official. The suggestion causes him to smile broadly. “I was with the
convicts,” he says.
Beside the line of rails curves the old post-road winding like a ribbon
through the highlands.
“It was by that road we marched. Seven years of my life lie along it.”
The train swings through a cleft hewn in the living rock, steep-sided
as if the mountain had been gashed with a mighty axe. It rumbles around
the base of an overhanging crag while you look clear down over the
white valley, with the miles of rolling green forest beyond.
“Was not seven years a long time for the march?” you venture.
“For a traveler, yes; for convict bands not unusual. We went back and
forth, now northward a thousand versts as to Archangel, now west as
to Moscow, now south as to Rostov. Again and again our troop would
split, and part be sent another way. New prisoners would be added, from
Warsaw, Finland, Samara. New guards would take charge. Some groups
would go to the West Siberian stations, some east to the Pacific and
Sakhalin. I, who was written down for ten years at the Petrovski Works
beyond Baikal Lake, with a third commuted for good behavior, had
finished my term before I got there.”
“Why did they wander so aimlessly?”
“It seems truly as a butterfly’s flight, but you others do not know the
way of Russia. Very slowly, very deviously she goes, but surely, none
the less, to her goal. We each came at last to our place.”
A match flares up and he lights another cigarette.
“Shall we not go to the ‘wagon restoran’ for a glass of tea?” you ask.
Along the broad aisles you walk, past the staterooms, filled with
baggage, littered with bedding, kettles, novels, and fur overcoats.
Everything is in direst confusion, and the owners are sandwiched
precariously between their belongings. On the little tables which are
raised between the seats, they are playing endless games of cards,
sipping tea and nonchalantly smoking cigarettes the while. You pass the
stove-niches at the car entrances, heaped to the ceiling with cut wood.
The fire-tenders as you pass give the military salute. You cross the
covered bridges between the cars, where are little mounds of the snow
that has sifted in around the crevices; and a belt of cold air tells
of the zero temperature outside. At length the double doors of the
foremost car appear ahead, and crossing one more arctic zone over the
couplings, you can hang your fur cap by the door and salute the ikon
that with ever-burning lamp looks down over the parlor-car. Now you can
sit on the broad sofa set along the wall, or doze in the corner-rocker
under the bookcase, or sit tête-à-tête in armchairs over a miniature
table. Ladies here, as well as men, are chatting, reading, and smoking,
for this combination parlor, _fumoir_, and dining-room is for all,
not a resort to which the masculine element shamefacedly steals for
unshared indulgences.
“_Dva stakan chai, pajolst_” (two glasses of tea, please), your friend
says to the aproned _chelaviek_, a Tatar from Kazan.
“_Stakan vodka_,” you add; for you are willing to contribute twenty
kopecks to the government revenues if this beverage will help out the
memoirs of your friend, the convict.
“_Say chass_,” replies the waiter, which means, literally, “this hour,”
figuratively, “at once,” actually, whenever he chances to recall that
your party wants a glass of tea and another of vodka. When at length
the refreshments have come, your companion gets gradually back to the
reminiscences.
“Were your comrades many on that march?”
“Twenty-six from my school in Odessa,” he says. He tells of the tumult
in the Polytechnic Academy, when he was a boy of sixteen studying
engineering; of the barricade which the students threw up; of the
soldiers sent against it; of an officer wounded with a stone, and
the sentence to the mines. He tells of the journey, day after day,
the miserable company trudging under the burning suns of summer and
shivering under the biting cold of winter, ill-fed and in rags. He
recalls how this friend and that friend sickened and died; how a
peasant-woman gave him a dried fish; how one of the criminals tried
to escape and was lashed with the _plet_ until he fainted beneath its
strokes.
“We were a sad procession. First came the Cossacks on their ponies,
with their carbines and sabres. Then the murderers for Sakhalin, and
the dangerous criminals in fetters; a few women next; then we, the
politicals; last, more soldiers marching behind. Far to the rear
came carts and wagons with the wives and families of the prisoners,
following their men into exile. Slowly we went, scarcely more than
fifteen versts a day, with a rest one day out of three, for the women.
In winter we camped in stations along the road.”
From the comfortable leather armchairs they seem infinitely distant
and dream-like, these tales from the dark ages of Siberia. The
speaker seems to have forgotten his auditor and to be talking to
himself, and soon he relapses into silence. He sits holding his glass
of lemon-garnished tea, like a resting giant with his shaggy beard
and mighty chest. The drag of the brakes is felt through the train.
“_Desiet minute stoit_” (ten minutes’ stop), somebody calls out.
Suddenly, with an effort, the man across the table rouses from his
reverie, and looks about the car, when the broad smile comes back and
he says earnestly:--
“You must not think of that as the true Siberia. It was all long
ago--thirty-five years. And you see I who became a _kayoshnik_,
a gold-seeker, have prospered, and work many mines. I am glad now
that they sent me to Siberia. And many others prosper who came with
the convicts. The old dark Siberia dies, but our new Siberia of the
railroad lives, and grows great.”
He rises resolutely and shakes your hand with a vise-like grip.
“_De svidania!_” (Till we meet again.)
You rise with the rest, draw on your fur cap and gloves, work into the
heavy fur-lined overcoat, and clamber down to the platform. A little
wooden station-house painted white is opposite the carriage door. It
has projecting eaves and quaint many-paned windows. In front of it is a
post with a large brazen bell. On the big signboard you can spell out
from the Russian letters “Zlatoust.” This is the summit station of the
pass that crosses the Urals. Around are standing stolid sheep-skinned
figures, bearded peasants just in from their sledges, which are ranked
outside the fence. Fur-capped mechanics, carrying wrenches and hammers,
move from car to car to tighten bolts and test wheels for the long
eastward pull. Uniformed station attendants are here and there, some
with files of bills of lading. As you walk down the platform among
the crowd, you come upon a soldier, duffle-coated and muffled in his
capote, standing stoically with fixed bayonet. Forty paces further
there is another, and beyond still another, all the length of the
platform, and far up the line. What a symbol of Russian rule are these
silent sentries! And what a mute tale is told in the necessity for a
guard at every railroad halting-place in the Empire!
You stroll along toward the engine. Huge and box-like are the big steel
cars, five of which compose the train. Two second-class wagons painted
in mustard yellow are rearmost, then come the first-class, painted
black, next the “wagon restoran” and the luggage-van, where the much
advertised and little used bath-room and gymnasium are located. The
engine is a big machine, but of low power, unable to make much speed;
and the high grades and the road-bed, poor in many places, additionally
limit progress. It is apparent why the train rarely moves at a rate
greater than twenty miles an hour.
At first you do not notice the cold. But now that you have walked for
a few minutes along the platform, it seems to gather itself for an
attack, as if it had a personality. You draw erect with tense muscles,
for the system sets itself instinctively on guard. The light breeze
that stirs begins to smart and sting like lashes across the face. The
hand drawn for a moment from the fleece-lined glove, stiffens into
numbed uselessness. As you march rapidly up and down the platform, an
involuntary shiver shakes you from head to foot. A fellow passenger,
remarking it, observes:--
“It is not cold to-day, in fact, quite warm. _Ochen jarko._”
You walk together to the big thermometer that hangs by the
station-door. It is marked with the Réaumur Scale, and your brain is
too torpid for multiplications. But the slightly built official, known
as a government engineer by green-bordered uniform and crossed hammers
on his cap, is inspecting the mercury also.
“Eight degrees below zero Fahrenheit,” he says. “Quite warm for
January. It is often thirty-five degrees below zero here in the Uralsk.”
It gets colder at the suggestion. The three starting-bells ring, and
everybody scrambles into the compartments.
The express rolls onward down the Urals. You stroll back to the warm
dining-room and idly watch the groups around. Across the way is an
elderly mild-looking officer, whose gold epaulettes, zig-zagged with
silver furrows, are the insignia of a major-general. He smokes endless
cigarettes in company with another officer lesser in degree, a major,
decorated with the Russo-Japanese service-medal, smart of carriage
and alert of look. By the window beyond is a young German, gazing
meditatively at the hills and the snow through the bottom of a glass
of Riga beer. A rather bright-mannered dame, with rings on her fingers
and long pendants in her ears, chats vivaciously in French with a
phlegmatic-looking personage in a tight-fitting blue coat which buttons
up to his throat like a fencer’s jacket. A quietly-dressed gentleman,
evidently in civil life, is reading one of the library copies of de
Maupassant.
Outside, cut and tunnel, hill, slope, and valley, green forest, white
drifted snow, and bare craggy rocks, the Urals glide past. The little
track-wardens’ stations beside the way snap back as if jerked by a
sudden hand, and the telegraph-poles catch up in endless monotony the
sagging wires.
The Tatar waiter goes from place to place, clearing off the ashes and
the glasses, and getting ready for dinner. There is a table-d’hôte
repast, the Russian _obeid_, a meal which starts with a fiery vodka
gulp any time after noon, and tails off in the falling shadows of the
winter sunset with tea and cigarettes. Or, if one wishes, he may press
the bell, labeled in the Græco-Slavonic lettering, “Buffet,” and dine à
la carte.
“Il vaut mieux essayer le repas Russe,” says the quiet reader of de
Maupassant, joining you.
He is duly thanked for the advice, and we beckon to the aproned waiter.
At once the latter passes the countersign kitchenward to set the meal
in motion, and puts before us the little liqueur-glasses and the bottle
of vodka. While we still gasp and blink over this, he has gotten
the cold _zakuska_ of black rye-bread and butter, _sardinka_, salty
_beluga_, and cold ham, and has started us on the first course. Then
comes in, after the omni-inclusive _zakuska_, a big pot of cabbage-soup
which we are to season with a swimming spoonful of thick sour cream.
The chunky pieces of half-boiled meat floating in it are left high
and dry by the consumption of the liquid. The meat becomes the third
course, which we garnish with mustard and taste.
“Voyons!” the Frenchman observes. “Of the Russian cuisine and its
method of preparing certain food-substances one may not approve.
Frankly it calls for the sauce of a prodigious appetite. But
contemplating the _obeid_ as an institution so evolved as to fit into
the general scheme of life, it finds merit. The Russian meal is a guide
to Russian character.”
“What signifies this mélange of raw fish, eggs, and great slices of
flesh, and mush of cabbage-soup?”
“Not that the Russian has no taste. It is that he sacrifices his finer
susceptibilities to his love of freedom. A regular hour for meals
would seem to him a sacrifice of his leisure and convenience to that
of the cook. The guiding principle of the national cuisine is that all
dishes must be capable of being served at any time that the eater feels
disposed.”
This is a problem to put to any kitchen, we allow. Napoleon’s chef
met it by relays of roasting chickens. But one cannot keep half a
dozen fowl going for each household of the one hundred and forty
million inhabitants of Russia. Thus sturgeon is provided, and sterlet,
parboiled so that it tastes like blotting-paper; and the filet
that is called “biftek,” and the oil-sodden “Hamburger,” that is
dubbed “filet.” These can be started at nine in the morning, and be
removed at any time between that hour and nine at night, without any
appreciable change in taste or texture. The cook of the restaurant,
like his brethren of the Empire, has laid his professional conscience
sacrificially upon the national altar of unfettered meals. If the
_obeid_ is not a triumph in culinary art, it is at least a signal
example of domestic generalship.
We have advanced without a hitch to roast partridge, with sugared
cranberries, which our friend washes down with good red wine from the
Imperial Crimean estates. We get through a hard German-like apple-tart,
and reach the last item of cheese.
When the mighty meal is over, we order tea, light cigarettes, and lean
back in the armchairs to chat and note how our neighbors are getting
through the time.
At the far end of the room a Russian has joined the French lady and
her escort. They are celebrating some occasion that requires heaping
bumpers of champagne. The babble of their conversation is in the air.
It seems to refer to the comparative appreciation of histrionic talent
in Rouen and Vladivostok!
Somebody is being treated to a dressing-down in the latest Parisian
argot. “Ces sont des betteraves là-bas!” one hears scornfully above the
murmurs.
Across the way some Germans are engaged with beer-schooners. One of
them gets excited and brings his fist down upon the table. “Arbeit in
Sibirien nimmer geendet ist; they always want more advice about their
gas-plants.”
In the lull that follows the explosion, a gentle English voice floats
past from the seat behind us. “And so I told him that the station had
nearly enough funds, but we needed workers, more workers.” It is the
English medical missionary on his way to Shanta-fu, discussing China
with the American mining-engineer, bound for Nerchinsk.
The piano, under the corner ikon with its ever-burning lamp, tinkles
out suddenly, and a man’s voice starts up--
You can hear the girls declare,
He must be a millionaire.
He misses a note every now and then, which does not embarrass him in
the least. Caroling gayly to his own accompaniment, he forges ahead.
The crowd in the armchairs around the room, consuming weak tea or
strong beer, and smoking, all join with an untroubled accord and
versatile accents, French, English, and Russian, in the blaring chorus,
“The man that broke the bank at Monte Carlo.”
The train rocks faster on the falling grade; little by little the
mountains drop away; gradually the mighty forests become dwarfed into
scattered clumps of straggly birches, and the great trees dwindle into
bushes; lower and still lower fall the hills, until all is flat. As far
as the eye can see are the snow-covered wastes, treeless, houseless,
lifeless. The lowest foothills of the Urals have been passed. It is the
beginning of the great steppes.
Slowly the daylight wanes. The gray darkness deepens steadily; it
seems to gather in over the gliding snow, and the peculiar gloom of a
Siberian winter’s night closes down. At each track-guard’s post flash
with vivid suddenness the little twinkling lanterns of the wardens of
the road. Involuntarily conversation becomes less animated and voices
are lowered; the spell of the sombreness is over all.
Soon the electric lamps are lighted, and from brazen ikon and sparkling
glasses flash reflections of their glitter. Curtains are drawn,
which shut out the enshrouding blackness. The piano begins tinkling
again; the waiters come and go with tea and liqueurs; the babble of
conversation rises; and the idle laughter is heard anew. Darkness may
be ahead, behind, and beside, but within there is light--enjoy it.
The train slows for a halt. Station-lamps shine mistily through the
brooding night. Lanterns bob to and fro on the platform as fur-capped
train-hands pass, tapping wheels and opening journal-boxes. At each
door a fire-tender is catching and stowing away the wood which a
peasant in padded sheepskins is tossing up from his hand-sled below.
It is Chelliabinsk, whose old importance as the clearing-house of the
convicts has been passed on to the new city of the railroad. Here the
just completed northern branch, linking Perm to Petersburg, meets the
old southern line from Samara and Moscow.
A short stop and the train moves on again. The day is done and
gradually each saunters into his own warm compartment, which the width
of the Russian gauge makes as large as a real room. One can read at
the table by the window, under the electric drop-light, or, propped
in pillows, one can stretch out luxuriously on the easy couch that is
nightly manoeuvred into an upper and lower berth. Practically always
after crossing the Urals, the number of passengers has so thinned out
that each may have a stateroom to himself.
Presently you push the bell labeled, “Konduktor.” A uniformed attendant
appears standing at the salute. “_Spate_” (sleep) is sufficient
direction. The sheets and pillows are dug out and the transformation of
the couch into a bed is effected. “_Spacoine notche_” (good-night) he
says, and you fall asleep to the rhythmic throb of the engine.
During the following hours the train enters the Tobolsk Government,
the oldest province of Siberia, whose 439,859 square miles of area,
nearly four times as large as Prussia, extend roughly from the railroad
northward to the Arctic Ocean, and from the Urals eastward so as to
include the lower basin of the Ob-Irtish river system. This ancient
province has seen much of Siberia’s history, whose predominant features
have been two, growth and graft.
[Illustration: BRIDGE OVER THE IRTISH]
[Illustration: ALONG THE TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY]
Out of evil, somehow, in a marvelous way has been coming good. In the
earliest days, with what smug satisfaction did the Stroganovs find
that the native inhabitants would trade ermine for glass beads! Yet
the fruit of their sharp dealing and purchased protection and special
privilege was the expedition that won Sibir, founded Tobolsk, and
opened to Russia the way into northern Asia. The imperial commissioner
who came to Tobolsk shortly after Kutchum Khan’s overthrow, to collect
the yassak tribute of ten sable-skins for each married man and five for
each bachelor, was detected culling the choice skins for himself, and
substituting cheap ones for his master. But his agents had sought out
the paths and extended the Russian Empire far into the northern forests.
By despotic oppression the inhabitants of Uglitch town, condemned for
testifying to the murder of Dimitri, the Czarevitch, came here into
exile in 1593, carrying with them the tocsin-bell that had tolled alarm
when the Czar wished silence. But they, together with the deported
laborers settled by the same arbitrary will along the Tobol River,
started the permanent settlement of the new realm.
A succeeding functionary called on the natives for a special tribute
of ermine for the Czarina’s mantle. He collected so many bales of it
that the taxed began to wonder at the stature of the “Little Mother,”
and sent a special deputy to Petersburg. The legate discovered that the
Empress was as other women, and on his disclosures the official was
unable to save his own, let alone the ermines’ skins. Yet while the
governor was plundering the fur-merchants of Tobolsk, the frontiers
were extending, until by 1700 they reached eastward to Kamchatka and
Lake Baikal, southeast to the Altai foothills at Kuznetz, and north to
the Arctic Ocean.
At Tobolsk in 1710 Peter the Great established the capital of his
reorganized province of Siberia. Prince Gagarin, whom he appointed
its first governor, found here a systemless extortion unworthy of an
efficient statesman. With the thoroughness of genius he built up in
the unhappy province a regular organization of rascality. His pickets
patrolled the roads into Russia, to prevent the escape of those who
might carry the tale of his oppression. He arranged with high officials
at Court that any petitioners who evaded this frontier net should be
handed over to an appropriate committee. Thus fortified, he began
collections of as much as could be wrung from his luckless subjects.
Every traveler paid Gagarin’s tariff, every farmer sent him presents of
stock, every trapper forwarded the best of his catch. The fur-trader’s
donations and the merchants’ loans were assisted into Gagarin’s
warehouses by thumbscrew and thonged knout.
While these things passed in Tobolsk there came periodically to
Petersburg delegations of outwardly contented citizens attesting the
wisdom of their governor. They brought to the Czar and the Grand
Dukes, in addition to the punctiliously rendered tax yassak, gifts of
especially fine furs. Such was the completeness of Gagarin’s control
that not an echo of the true state of affairs reached the ears of the
astute Peter.
At length, in 1719, Nesterov, the Minister of Finance, was privately
approached by some Tobolsk merchants and was supplied with evidence
sufficient to hang half the officials in Siberia. In a dramatic
presentation the Minister furnished this to the Imperial Senate,
showing so bad a case that Gagarin’s own agents in the ducal circle
rose up against him. The Czar sent Licharev, a major of the Guard,
to Siberia, to proclaim in every town and hamlet that Gagarin was a
criminal in the eyes of the Emperor. As this messenger approached
Tobolsk, official after official came out to turn state’s evidence,
trying to assure his personal safety. The highways to Russia were
guarded by Peter’s own troops, with orders to seize all outgoing
travelers who might be transporting Gagarin’s accumulated spoil, which
with commendable prudence the Czar had allocated to himself.
When Peter was in England he had remarked casually to an acquaintance,
“In my realm I have only two lawyers, and one of these I intend to
hang as soon as I get back.” It was particularly unfortunate for
this ex-governor that the remainder of the legal profession did not
feel himself called upon to explain to Peter the Gagarin campaign
contributions. No one ever needed an attorney more. He was under trial
before an imperial judge who did not know a technicality from a tort,
and whose preliminary procedure was to order a reliable gallows.
For some score of years subsequent to Gagarin, the governors of Siberia
were, in any event, moderate. The province grew apace, increased by
exiles, by land-seeking colonists, by raskalniks,--nonconformists of
the Greek Church, self-called “Old Believers,”--who preferred to come
to Siberia rather than follow Peter’s orders and shave off their beards.
Then Chicherin the Magnificent came. His life was a round of
celebrations. Wonderful stews he concocted for his sybaritic revels.
At _obeid_ an orchestra of thirty pieces supplied the music. Artillery
in front of the residency saluted him with salvos when he drove out.
In Butter-Week all Tobolsk drank the spirits which their governor
bountifully provided. It is hardly necessary to say that the money for
these entertainments did not come from Chicherin’s private purse: the
city merchants groaned over forced loans and benevolences; and at last
their cry reached the throne, and Chicherin too was removed.
With his passing, the Tobolsk Province fell to less spectacular
rulers, but under good and bad it grew steadily, until in 1860 there
were a million inhabitants within its borders, a population which
at the present time has risen to a million and a half. Some forty
thousand of these are exiles; some eighty thousand raskalniks; and
forty thousand Tatars, who feed the flocks where their ancestors once
bore sway, living peacefully side by side with the Russians. Some
fifteen thousand are descendants of the Samoieds and Voguls with whom
the first Stroganov from the adjoining Russian province of Archangel
traded his wares. Some twenty thousand are Ostiaks whose forebears were
alternately allies and enemies of Yermak.
The capital city, Tobolsk, on the Tobol River hard-by its junction with
the Irtish, has grown from a precariously held camp of two hundred and
fifty fugitive Cossack soldiers to a city of thirty thousand. Tiumen,
the easterly city on the Tura River, another of Yermak’s camps, has
grown into a great distributing-centre for produce brought by the
river-highways. From the railway line northward as far as the city of
Tobolsk extends a farm-belt, a continuation of the black-earth region
of great Russia. The fertility of the land may be judged by the number
of villages met as the train speeds on, and the large proportion
of enclosed fields on both sides of the track. Some of the finest
agricultural soil in the world lies here, such soil as composes the
prairies of Minnesota and Dakota. Three million head of live stock
graze in the district, which has a yearly production of ten million
hundredweight of wheat alone, four million of rye, and nine million of
oats. Five million more settlers may live and thrive, and the harvest
will feed the ever-growing cities of Europe when Siberia comes to be
the new granary of the old world. The stress and turmoil of Tobolsk are
passed. Happy the people who have no annals!
Gradually, as the train rolls eastward beyond the Ishim River Valley,
the farm country opens out into the unfenced prairie of the Great
Steppe. The clustered wooden villages that flanked the line through
Tobolsk appear less and less frequently, till at last we seem to glide
over an immense white sea, frozen into perpetual calm and silence. Here
and there a gray thicket of stunted trees and bushes, here and there a
grove of naked-limbed birches, mutely exhibit Nature’s desolation.
As the sullen landscape bares itself, one thinks of the prison
caravans tramping these wastes; of the early neglected garrisons which
Elizabeth’s favorite General Kinderman proposed to victual on crushed
birch-bark and relieve the Crown of their expense; of all the misery
and the wrong that the steppes of Siberia have symbolized. No sign
of man’s handiwork or of Nature’s kindliness is seen,--only the cold
snow and the bare birches, while regularly as the ticking of a clock
the telegraph-poles and the verst-spaced stations snap back into the
wastes. The dominant reflection is not, how great is the achievement
which has mastered these steppes! but, how infinitesimal is all that
man has done in this ocean of untrodden snow! Hour after hour we are
driving on. Yet never is there passed a landmark to conjure into
imagination a picture of progress. One moves as in a nightmare, where
he runs for seeming ages, hunted forward, yet can never stir from the
spot. The horizon-bounded circle of vision is as the ever-receding
rim of a giant dome, the rails ahead and behind bisecting its white
immensity. Above, the vast bowl of the blue sky dips and meets it,
imprisoning us. Where are the fields and villages; the bustling
activity of human life that tells of man’s mastership? Hour after
hour passes without a change in the drear monotony of the landscape;
for miles on miles not a trace is seen of human dominion. Grim Nature
spreading her shroud over plain and pasture is despot here, and Winter
is ruler of the Siberian Steppe.
One could ride due south a thousand versts, through Golodnia the
“hunger steppe” to the borders of Turkestan, and find the same
monotonous plain, snow-covered save where the dryness of the south
has thinned its fall. One could ride from the Caspian Sea due east
to China, with each day’s march a counterpart of the rest. Five
hundred thousand square miles of area are covered with grass and
gaudy flowers in the spring, with low brush and green reeds where
the salt swamp-lakes receive the tribute of snow-fed streams. In
midsummer the growing grass scorches under a heat of 104°. In winter
snow is everywhere,--in feathery flakes that the midday sun does not
soften during whole months of a cold which is a ferocity. Thirty to
forty degrees below zero is not unusual, and the land is swept by
bitter winds that pierce like daggers through doubled furs and felts.
Yet there dwell on the central plateau of Asia a million people,
and one million cattle and three million sheep are scattered over
the tremendous range. As the herds have become hardened through the
centuries and survive in measure despite the severity, so also have
the men. From the train-windows now one may chance to see infrequent
straggling herds of long-horned cattle, lean and gaunt, scratching away
the snow in search of food. Mounted on little shaggy ponies are figures
buried in skins, who keep guard over them.
One detects a new type among the crowds at the stations,--flat faces,
round eyes, square thickset bodies. Here on the borderland, the old
race has fused with the Slav and has become metamorphosed. The sons
of the Tatars, whose very name was distorted into that of a dweller
in Tartarus by those who feared their fierce valor, have become
shopkeepers, train-hands, waiters, and butchers, who come to sell meat
and milk to the chef of the wagon restoran. Sometimes, at the stops,
figures, gnome-like in enveloping red capote and grotesquely padded
furs, hold their ponies with jealous rein, staring curiously at the
locomotive and passengers.
[Illustration: DINING-CAR SALOON, VIEW OF THE LIBRARY]
Looking long from the windows at this steppe, a drowsy hypnotism steals
over the mind--a dull stupor of unbroken monotony. It is better to do
as the Russians--pay no attention whatever to the landscape outside,
but make the most of the life within the moving caravansary,--cards and
cigarettes and liqueurs, tea and endless talk, with yarns that take
days for the spinning.
The uniformed judge, passing by, joins you. He is traveling to a
new appointment with his swarming family of children, shawl-decked
females of unknown quality and quantity, the household bedding, and
the ancestral samovar, all crowded into one stifling compartment. He
discusses volubly the confusions of the Code, and propounds a unique
theory of his own as to Russian jurisprudence, to the effect that all
the best laws of other nations have been adopted, with none of the old
or conflicting enactments repealed. The general drops into the circle.
He is interesting when one has pierced the crust, but dogmatic. At
every station the soldiers of the garrison, not on sentry-duty, jump to
one side, swing half-around, and stand at the salute until he passes,
to the huge inconvenience of the porters. He would undoubtedly vote the
Democratic ticket to repay Mr. Roosevelt for putting Russia under the
alternative of stopping the war perforce, or forfeiting sympathy, when
Japan was said to be breaking under the strain.
“Russia was beaten this time. What of it? _Nietchevo!_” says the
general.
“_Nietchevo_,” we echo, as we sip our tea.
“But the Japanese are wily insects,” observes his companion, the young
service-medaled major. “I was in Vladivostok when our prisoners came
back. They tried to get money for the checks the Japanese had given
them. That was how the big mutiny began. You know, when our men were
taken captive, the Japanese treated them very well, much good food,
vodka, let them write home all about it, and gave them enormous pay,
six yen, three dollars a month, charging the expense all up to the Czar
for after the war. When at last the prisoners were to be released, the
Japanese promised every man double pay, twelve roubles. But they gave
them the money? No, the insects gave them each an order payable by the
Russian commander in Vladivostok. So the transports came, and these men
were sent ashore with these checks in their hands, and they went up to
the commandant of the city, and asked for their cash that the Japanese
had promised. What money did the commandant have for them? What could
he do? He ordered them to go away. So they stood and discussed on the
street-corners. And more men still came from the transports. Then they
said, ‘We will ask the general of the forts.’ So they marched to the
forts in a big crowd, and the general he also told them to go away. For
a long time they talked and they persuaded the sailors to help them. So
they went again to the forts, and the sailors shot at the forts, and
the general ordered the artillery to shoot. But the artillery would
not, so the men broke in and killed the officers and got arms and went
back to the city commander. Him, too, they killed, and all Vladivostok
was in mutiny for two weeks. Not an officer dared show himself. General
Orlov persuaded them to let him into the town. Then many were shot, but
at last the city was quiet. The Japanese are very sly insects.”
His story ends and the two officers go back to join their families. The
train throbs on across the steppe.
The German gas-plant drummer, with his new Far Eastern outfit, is
gathering from the missionary doctor details of treaty-port life,
which are being treasured up as valuable reference data. The French
fur-merchant dips back into his library copy of de Maupassant.
The rigor of the outside scene seems at length to be changing. A few
scattered houses appear, and trees and fenced fields, and villages,
with curling smoke rising from the chimneys. Men and children are
walking about, and finally we come to the Irtish River, over which the
train rumbles on a half-mile bridge. Spires and gilt domes are visible,
dark wooden houses, and bright white-painted churches with green roofs.
Droshkies and carts are passing in the streets, and presently we draw
up to the station of Omsk, the second city of Siberia.
The junction of the Trans-Siberian Railway with the Irtish River, which
is 2520 miles long and open from April to October, would of itself
make Omsk a centre of great strategic importance. But in addition to
this main river-highway, which is navigated by some hundred and fifty
steamers, there are affluents by which one can sail from the Urals
to the Altai, from the Arctic Ocean to China, and these lines of
communication centre here.
From Omsk, following the Irtish down past Tobolsk, one can steam
by the Obi to Obdorsk, within the Arctic Circle. Indeed, a regular
grain-export service was planned via the Kara Sea to London by an
ambitious Englishman. It failed after some promise of success, because
of the ice-packs in the Gulf of Obi. From Omsk, following the Irtish
upstream, steamer navigation extends as far as Semipalatinsk, in the
Altai foothills. Smaller craft may go nearly to the Chinese frontier.
By the Tobol and Tura rivers, Tiumen, in the Ural foothills, may be
reached, four hundred and twenty miles from Semipalatinsk. By ascending
the Obi, a boat may go fourteen hundred and eighty miles east from
Tiumen to Kuznetz on the Tom; through a canal from an Obi confluent the
Yenesei River System may be entered, and from it by a short portage the
Lena System. In all twenty-eight thousand miles are navigable by small
craft, and seven thousand miles by steamer. Omsk is the pulsing heart
of this mighty interior waterway system.
[Illustration: TIUMEN TOMSK PERM CITIES OF NEW RUSSIA]
The train leaves the station, which is at a distance from the town, and
once more we are en route. The eye rests gratefully upon the ribbon
of cultivated fields which follow the Irtish down. But we reënter the
steppe, and again the desolation settles over all. In hours of
looking, not a habitation is seen, not an animal, not a tree,--only
the same white billows. This Barbara district in the Tomsk Government
has an area of fifty thousand square miles. Kainsk, some seven hundred
versts from Chelliabinsk, is the centre. The section, though covered
with the fertile black earth of the adjoining regions, is, owing to
lack of drainage and adequate rainfall, arid and almost untilled.
The round-faced civilian from the compartment further up, whose
familiarity with the country has made him a welcome accession, joins us
at the window. He looks out over the level plain of the Barbara Steppe
with manifest satisfaction.
“You admire the landscape?” we ask satirically.
He smiles. “We got big money when the line went through here. I made my
first fortune then.”
He sighs at the memory of old times, and tells of the railway-building
days when the Czar had given the order for a road across the continent,
and the soldiers of fortune, of whom he was one, had gathered to the
task.
“Not a kopeck had I when the Dreyfus brothers made their big
speculation in Argentine wheat and went down, leaving us young clerks
stranded in Kiev. You know Kiev? Great pilgrimages come there to see
the bodies of Joseph and his brethren, all preserved just as when they
died. We heard by accident of a grading job under a big contractor out
here. None of us knew anything about construction, but three of us
grain-clerks wrote a letter saying we would put the work through, and
started. We had just enough money to get to Samara. In Samara was a
merchant much esteemed, whom I went to see. He went on our bond, never
having seen us before, and gave us enough money to come. So it was in
the old days. The country was flat as a board. We had but to lay down
the ties and spike the rails. Thirty versts we made of this line. It
cost us thirty thousand roubles a verst, but we got fifty thousand.
Would that we might do that now again.”
The contractor, his round jolly face glowing with the recital and his
eyes shining through gold-rimmed glasses, is entertaining a growing
company, for the judge has stopped to gossip, and the railroad official.
“I took my money and bought an estate in the country of the Don
Cossacks,” the contractor is saying. “I paid ten per cent to the
Government for taxes when I bought the land. I had to pay no more taxes
then all my life, but my heir would pay taxes, or, if I sold, he who
bought would pay. So it was done in the Hataman Government.”
“It is just,” says the judge. “Why should they, who get the property,
not pay taxes?”
The contractor shrugs his shoulder and continues: “For five years
I farmed, and though I had a German overseer, I did not prosper.
So I went to one of the cities of Russia and thought to put in a
tramway. The men of the city said, ‘Are all the horses dead? He of the
spectacles is mad.’ Yet by importunity I got them to give me the right
to make a tramway. There were in Petersburg then many Belgians, with
much money, wishing to give it away. So I went to them and said, ‘Here
is a great franchise, but who will build the line and gain the riches?’
“‘We will, we will,’ said the Belgians.
“From them I got a hundred and eighty thousand roubles clear, and an
interest. I sold the interest quickly to other foreigners, Frenchmen,
and went away. Yes, the tramway was built, and the people crowded to
ride on it as I had said. But when it was going well, and the profits
were yet to come, the people said, ‘Shall foreigners oppress our city?’
So the town bought the tramways for what they said was the cost, and
the Belgians went away. And they did not come back to Russia. Thus were
many railways and tramways built and taken. The foreigners will not
come back now, and Russians too do not enter these pursuits, lest the
Government come after them later. It is _hudoo_ (bad).”
“But is it not worse that these men should make a tramway and draw vast
money from the people?” says the railroad official. “For me, I think
the Government should do it all.”
“_Ni snaia_, I don’t know,” says the contractor. “But I who bought
stocks with the Belgians’ money (foolishly thinking that the business
which I knew not was safe, while that which I knew was shaky), I will
not give again to the stock-people the money I shall make from the
oil-fields of Sakhalin, where I go now.”
“But,” says the railway chinovnik, “does not the State do these things
better? Look you at this very railway. For years any who wished might
have built into Siberia. An Amerikanski, and Collins, an Angleski, came
proposing railroads, but all things slumbered. Then in 1891 the Czar
ordered the road to be built, and in ten years we had laid the eight
thousand versts to Vladivostok. I read that the line of Canada, where
too there are steppes and highlands as ours, took ten years for but
half the distance. We made two versts a day for all the years, and they
but one. Who other than the Government could spend a billion roubles
for a line that will bring money returns only in the far future?”
“Ah, you chinovniks, you say, lo, we do all this! But it was such as
I built that road, and because you gave us big money. And is not the
money to support it now got from the peasants’ taxes while so many
clerks and operators waste time in the offices? I have seen a third
as many men as at Omsk do the same work. And your trains go as the
water-snails, twelve versts an hour for freight, twenty versts an hour
for the mail-trains, thirty-five versts for the express. One can go
eighty versts in Europe.”
“Truly, truly, but why go so fast? It costs more for fuel, and the
track has to be made straight. What good does it do you to come in
sooner? If a man is in a hurry to get somewhere, can he not take an
earlier train?”
The group mulls over this knotty point of logic, which is complicated
by the fact that our own train is twelve hours late. They cite
hypothetical men with varying sorts of engagements, and then lightly
switch to talk of the nourishing properties of beer, the utility of
agricultural machinery, and the old tiger battue of Vladivostok.
The birch groves become more frequent now, pines begin to appear, and
at last the country has become forested. Several of the passengers
bestir themselves for departure, gathering multitudinous bundles, and
making the circuit in demonstrative hand-shaking farewells.
“We come to Taiga, whence they go to the stingy town of Tomsk,” the
government engineer observes.
“Why do you call it the stingy town of Tomsk?”
“I will tell you. Tomsk, before the railroad came, was the biggest,
finest, and wealthiest of our cities. She was the capital of the
great Tomsk Gobernia, with three hundred and thirty thousand square
miles of area, and a million and a half people. The Tom brought the
big river steamers to her wharves. In the city she had sixty thousand
inhabitants, increasing every year; a university, Stroganov’s Library,
a cathedral, fine public buildings. The merchants were rich; the miners
came down from the Altai; all things were prospering. When the railway
was ordered, the engineers came through to locate the line. All they
asked was a hundred thousand roubles. But how stingy were the people of
Tomsk! They had given two million roubles for their university, where
the students made speeches and got sent to the Yakutski Oblast, yet
they would not give a hundred thousand roubles to the engineers. ‘Give
fifty, give even forty thousand,’ said the engineers. But the people of
Tomsk said, ‘Are we not the seat of government for all western Siberia?
Have we not Yermak’s banner in the cathedral? Are we not Tomsk? You
must bring the railway here anyway.’ But if the engineers had done
that, who could say where it would have ended? All the other cities
would begin to make excuses. So the grades to Tomsk became suddenly so
bad that the line had to be run away south here, eighty-two versts. The
station where one changes was named, in mockery, Taiga, ‘in the woods.’
The merchants flocked out begging the engineers to come back to Tomsk.
They offered all that had been asked and much more. They hung around
the office and wept over the blue-prints. But how can a professional
man change his plans and sacrifice his reputation? One cannot do such
things. So Tomsk was left, and her trade now falls far behind that of
the other cities, Omsk and Irkutsk. We in Siberia smile at her and call
her the stingy city of Tomsk.”
“We have, too, another jest, of the Tomsk Czar,” chimes in the judge.
“There appeared one day there a stranger calling himself Theodore
Kuzmilch, who bought a little house which he never left save to do
some act of charity. For years he lived; then, when he died, the house
was turned into a chapel because of his good deeds. Many years after
his death, a merchant started the tale that this was the Czar Alexander
I, who did not die in the Crimea, but left a false body to be carried
to Petersburg and entombed in state. He had, it was told, not really
died, and, disappointed at his powerlessness to help his people, had
come, self-exiled, to Siberia. But we others laugh at this tale of
Tomsk as an imperial residence.”
The twenty minutes’ stop at Taiga ends, and the train renews its
journey through the forests.
With rolling hill and long-stretching forests, the watershed bounding
the eastern limits of the Obi Basin is crossed near Achinsk, and the
drainage-basin of the mighty Yenesei River, one million three hundred
and eighty thousand square miles in area, is entered. It just fails
to equal in length the Mississippi-Missouri System. Including the
administrative territory “Yeneseik” of the East Siberian Gobernia,
the river sweeps from the Chinese borderland north beyond the Arctic
Circle. In the far south, where it rises among the Minusink Mountains,
the valley country is like the Italian Alps, mild and very fertile.
Iron-mines of prehistoric antiquity are found in these valleys, relics
of the old Han Dynasty of China.
Of the twenty million bushels of grain produced throughout the
Yeneseik territory, nearly a third comes from the Minusink oasis. The
railroad pierces the central plains, farmed in the most favorable spots
only, and capable of enormously extended cultivation.
Through alternating forest, field, and plain the train moves on, and
crossing the three thousand-foot Yenesei bridge, enters the city of
Krasnoyarsk. When we pull out, the engineer, who has been chatting with
the erstwhile contractor, observes, “This town was a main hotbed of the
great strike. They are well in hand now, but we had our time with them
in 1905. Even I knew nothing of what had been prepared.”
He goes on to tell the most curious tale of the organized strike
movement which introduced the disturbances subsequent to the
Russo-Japanese War.
“On September 15 at noon, no one knows by whom or from what station,
a signal of dots and dashes was tapped off. Each telegraph-operator
answered the message and passed the word to the next, standing by until
it was repeated back. Then, leaving all things in order, he stepped
from the operating-room into the railway-station. With a motion he
gave the countersign to the ticket-sellers, and each, as he received
it, shut his desk, and walked out. The word went to the engineers, and
each, at the signal, drew his fires and left the engine and its train
forsaken on its tracks. Every postman put away his mail, closed the
safe, and left his office; every diligence-agent locked his doors. From
Astrakan to Archangel, from Warsaw to Vladivostok, the electric summons
went, and the whole realm of Russia was paralyzed.
“With two thousand roubles, offered by the Governor-General of Poland,
before them, and ten bayonets on the tender behind, an engineer and a
fireman were secured to run one coach, containing a terrified prince,
from Warsaw to the frontier. In the south, a few cars were started by
soldiers, but beyond such rare instances, for three weeks not a train
was moved. More than this, not a telegram was transmitted, not a letter
delivered. Everywhere was black silence, as if all the Russias had been
swept from the face of the world.
“‘More wages, and the constitution,’ was the slogan of the strikers.
The official cohorts met the issue courageously, with bribes and
bayonets, and little by little got the upper hand. Force and money were
used unstintingly to win the operators needed and break the front of
the strike. A few, who, contrary to the expectations of their mates,
had remained loyal to the officials, were finally secured and protected
by the soldiery. As in time one train after another was manned and
moved, the men who had stayed away lost heart, knowing but too well
what would be the fate of those who were left outside the breastworks.
First singly, then in crowds, they returned, and the great strike was
broken.”
“Here in Krasnoyarsk there was revolutionist rule for a while as well,”
the manager remarks. “The troops were driven out, and we had to wait
for reinforcements. Yet when I came to my office there were sixty
thousand roubles in the safe, not a kopeck of which had been touched.
Some of the best employees were condemned. I was very sad, and the
service was very poor when they marched away.”
“What became of them?” we ask.
In a low voice he answers, “They went to the Yakutsk.”
Everybody is silent for a moment.
“Where did you say?” inquires the missionary.
“The Yakutski Oblast,” answered the chinovnik.
In Europe people talk of the rigors of Russia’s winter. In Russia
of the cold of Siberia. In Siberia, along the railway, when the
thermometer gets down into the forties and the sentries pick up
sparrows too numb to fly, they say, “It’s as cold as the Yakutsk.”
“One starts to the Yakutsk by the steamer-towed prison barge, following
down the Yenesei from Krasnoyarsk,” the engineer continues. “For the
first thousand versts northward the way is through a mighty forest
region. The interior is almost as unknown as when the Samoieds were
its sole inhabitants. Marshes covered with trembling soil, to be
crossed only on snowshoes, alternate with thickets, called _urmans_, of
larches, cedars, firs, pines, and beeches.”
“It is not alluring,” we observe.
“The cold of the winter seems largely to arrest decay, and the fallen
trees, remaining unrotted, form a nature-made _cheval de frise_,
impossible to traverse save along the hunters’ trails. Another thousand
versts up the Upper Tunguska River, at whose limit of navigation is
a crossing into the Lena System, and the Yakutsk Province begins;
eastward to the coastal range overlooking Behring Sea, and northward
to the Arctic Ocean, a million and a half square miles of desolation,
extends this exiles’ oblast. Prison-stations are located in the
forsaken tundra country beyond the Arctic Circle, where scattered
clumps of creeping birches and dwarf willows struggle to maintain
existence in the few unfrozen upper inches of ground, congealed
perpetually beneath to unmeasured depths. Here, where the average
winter temperature is eighty below zero, come the exiles deemed most
formidable.”
“How long do men last in the Yakutski cold?” we ask the engineer.
“Oh, sometimes a strong man will outlive his sentence and return. The
friends of our strikers ask me sometimes about one or another, but we
have heard nothing of them since they marched away in chains. May fate
keep us from that road!”
The theme is not enlivening, and soon we go forward into the
observation-car.
After crossing the Kan River at Kansk, the railroad turns abruptly
southwest, through the hilly country of the Irkutsk Gobernia, and
climbing into the highlands of the Altai, enters the watershed of the
Angara. The drainage-basin of this river equals the combined areas of
Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. It is as
well adapted to agriculture as parts of the best provinces of Central
Russia in the same latitude.
The train pulls next into the station of Nishneudinsk. A booted
peddler is making his way down the platform, with knives, combs, caps,
and cheap knick-knacks. He stops to show us something special, a
miniature of multicolored minerals, glittering from a hundred crystal
facets. The Russian engineer picks out the flaky quartz, the iron
pyrites,--“fools’ gold,” as they called it in old Nevada times,--green
porphyry, iridescent peacock ore of copper, and some black crystals
like antimony, which show here and there. Malachite, serpentine, topaz,
and numberless other minerals are in the mass, which glitters in
kaleidoscopic changes. A small piece of gold ore tops the pile.
“Cabinetski?” asks the engineer.
“Da, da,” assents the peddler. “Cabinetski.”
“It comes from one of the domains of his Imperial Majesty’s Cabinet,”
explains the engineer. “Stretches of forest, belts of fertile river
valley, fur districts, hundreds of thousands of square versts, the
best mines in these Urals which produce sometimes yearly seven million
roubles, the entire Nerchinsk region, producing six million roubles,
are ‘cabinetski,’” he remarks. “Even I, Ivan Vasilovich Poyarkov, am
‘cabinetski’!”
He explains the origin of the term, going back to the old days when
princedoms went to the courtiers of Catherine. Always for a great
enterprise it was necessary to have a friend at Court. So the rich
merchants and miners would form, with powerful members of the inner
circle at St. Petersburg, alliances such as that made by the Stroganovs
with Boris. Gradually, as time went on, the protected were swallowed
by the protectors, until one by one the various estates had passed
into the hands of the nobles of the Imperial Court. The mines in the
Altai, which Demidov had opened up, were taken over in 1747 by the
Emperor, those in the Zabaikalskaia Oblast at about the same time. With
the passing of the years, what had been graft and expropriation was
transmuted into vested interest, until now it is the established right
of the Imperial Cabinet, or the Grand Dukes, to receive the revenues
of these vast domains. In the mining regions their perquisite is from
five to fifteen per cent. Save for the tax, however, miners are free to
operate upon the ducal estates, and many are thus engaged.
A fur-capped station-agent clangs the big bronze bell, waits a moment,
and then clangs twice. The passengers climb back into the box-like
steel cars of the express. The third bell sounds, and the train starts.
We sit down beside the engineer and the conversation takes up the
“cabinetski” again.
“We have great traditions. One Governor, Neryschkin, of the
‘cabinetski’ mines at Nerchinsk, marched to fight the Czar. In 1775 he
was appointed chief of the mineral belt in the Zabaikalskaia Oblast.
He sat for eleven months at home with closed shutters. Then, on Easter
Sunday, singing a devil’s hymn, and with a fat female on either side,
he drove to church and ordered the service amended to suit a rather
bizarre taste. He organized a series of glittering shows at the Crown’s
cost, gave free drink to the populace, and throwing out many of his
subordinates, appointed convicts in their stead. When he had used up
all the tax-money in his keeping, he drew up cannon before the house
of the rich merchant Sibirayakov, the operator of the mines, and made
him hand out five thousand roubles. Finally he got together an army of
Tunguses and the peasants, to march against the Czar. He was caught on
the way and sent to Russia for punishment. It is the great honor of our
service to be governor over the ‘cabinetski’ mines. Perhaps I shall
rise there some day. Perhaps not. But I shall not march against the
Czar.”
The forests of birch and pine and fir, and the hills, as the car drives
eastward, close in again. The crests of mid-Siberian mountains lift
their snowy heads, and the train climbs up and up toward the great
central Lake Baikal, and the city of Irkutsk, 3378 miles from Moscow,
and further east than Mandalay.
When, on this seventh day, the train is winding up the Angara Valley
toward Irkutsk, one may mentally look back over the country that has
been traversed and estimate somewhat the meaning of the railway. The
Urals formed the first landmark. As in the dominion of the blind the
one-eyed man is king, so after the monotony of the plains, the Ural
Mountains seem great and worthy of the name given by the old Muscovite
geographer, the “Girdle of the World.” By actual measurements, however,
in their seventeen hundred miles of length, no peak rises over six
thousand feet. Coming eastward from the Urals the line has cut through
the southwestern corner of the old Tobolsk Government, has skirted
the northern border of the steppe, has bisected the Tomsk Province,
and after crossing the Yenesei River in Yeneseik has entered Irkutsk
Province, and traversed the central highland region nearly to Lake
Baikal.
Many who journey this way will have as their first impression, when the
long winter ride draws to its close, a feeling of depression, almost
of discouragement, so few are the settlements, so desolate seems all
Nature. They see the single line of rails, without a branch or feeder
in the mighty expanse from Chelliabinsk to Irkutsk, save for the stub
put in for the ungenerous outlanders of unlucky Tomsk. They calculate
that for a territory forty times the size of the British Isles, and
one and a half times as large as all Europe, the inadequacy of a
railroad less in total mileage than the Chicago, Milwaukee and St.
Paul, is manifest. Statistically-informed bankers sometimes shrug their
shoulders at the mention of the Trans-Siberian. “Every year a deficit,”
they say. “Gross earnings but twenty-four million roubles,--one sixth
of the Canadian Pacific Railway; one tenth of the Southern Railway.
_Hudoo_ (bad)!” One hears expressed not infrequently in Russia the
opinion that the railway is a sacrifice justified politically by
Russia’s need for a link to the Pacific, but ineffectual to secure
prosperity and advancement to the isolated land of mid-Siberia. It
is deemed, like the Pyramids, a monument to colossal effort and
achievement but of little service to mankind.
Their statistics are correct. But it is to the greater honor of the
road that much which it has accomplished will never appear in credits
on the account-sheets. Where the white stations of the Siberian
Railway stand now were once the wooden prison-pens with their guarded
stockades. Murderers and priests, forgers, profligates, and university
professors, highway robbers and privy councilors, all together have
tramped this way. It is its past from which the railroad has raised
Siberia, the past of neglect and exile that this steam civilizer has
banished to the far Yakutsk.
Closer study gives, too, a better appreciation of the railroad’s
economic significance. The line holds a strategic position as truly as
does the Panama Canal. Though in Siberia proper there is the enormous
area of nearly five million square miles, so much of this is in Arctic
tundra, impassable swamp, forest, or barren steppe, that the really
habitable and arable land narrows down to a tenth of this, which lies
in general between the parallels of 55° and 58° 30’ north, and is
contained within a belt some thirty-five hundred miles long and two
hundred to two hundred and fifty miles broad.
When it is noted that the tillable area of one hundred and ninety-two
thousand square miles in Tobolsk and Tomsk, mostly along the Obi
System, the stretch of twenty thousand miles in the steppe, and that of
one hundred thousand in the Yeneseik and Irkutsk governments of eastern
Siberia, are all in immediate proximity to the railroad, whose course
is generally along the 55th parallel, the economic value of Russia’s
great enterprise takes a different perspective.
Its vantage is still more emphasized when the element of the north and
south watercourses is considered. One after another the great Siberian
rivers are crossed,--in the Tobolsk Gobernia, the Tobol, the Ishim,
the Irtish; in the Tomsk Gobernia, the Obi and the Tom; in Yeneseik,
the Yenesei; in Irkutsk, the Angara. Each of these reaches far up into
the agricultural zone that lies north of the railroad, bringing the
harvests to its cars by the cheap unfettered water-avenues. Thus, to
the part of Siberia that is capable of extensive development, the
railroad is even now in a position to give great aid.
It is from such natural factors as these, not from financiers’ figures,
that one must weigh the potentiality of this great line. Its direct
value is enormous, its indirect commercial services greater yet.
It may best be compared to a mighty river system such as that of
the Mississippi. The latter’s traffic has never directly returned a
dollar of the millions that have gone to maintaining its levees and
training-walls and channels. Yet indirectly the return and the value,
as an asset to the American people, are so great as to be incalculable.
From its controlling position in relation to the cultivatable land and
the interior watercourses of Central Siberia, as well as in relation
to the far eastern artery, the Russian railway is an empire-builder as
important as has been the Nile.
The results already achieved are noteworthy. The city of Omsk, where
the railroad and the Irtish River lines meet, has risen from a
population of thirty-seven thousand in 1897 to seventy thousand in
1908. Further east, Stretensk has sprung from a town of two thousand
people ten years ago to over twelve thousand to-day. Irkutsk has
climbed from sixty to over eighty thousand since the railroad opened.
[Illustration: ISLAND OF KALTIGEI VILLAGE OF LISTVIANITCHNOE LAKE
BAIKAL]
The rural population has increased even as that of the cities. At the
beginning of the seventeenth century, all Siberia contained but two
hundred and thirty thousand souls; at the end of the eighteenth,
one million five hundred thousand; at the end of the nineteenth, five
million. Now, with the railroad-induced immigration, it approaches the
seven million mark. The Steppe Government alone has risen in fifty
years from five hundred thousand to one million five hundred thousand,
and the Tomsk from seven hundred thousand to two million five hundred
thousand.
More in importance than its present utility is the fact that the
railway holds the key to Siberia’s future. The arable territory of
the belt is equal to that of Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas
combined. This land is generally well-watered, in a climate suitable
to grain-raising, and it is, as has been shown, in its whole extent,
adjacent to river and rail transportation.
While such farming districts of the United States have some fifty
inhabitants to the square mile, the most densely populated gobernia,
Tomsk, has but six, and the Yeneseik but six tenths of one.
An immense further area will yield to clearing and to irrigation, as
has been demonstrated in the great results secured from five hundred
versts of canals in the Barbara Steppe. Coal and iron are available in
many places, and timber in the greatest abundance grows in the northern
district.
From a summary of these elements one may glean an idea of the Colossus
sleeping beneath these snows. At a normal rate of increase, fifty
million souls should populate Siberia at the close of the twentieth
century. The agency of their coming and existing will be primarily
the line of rails across the continent. Despite the eight hundred
million roubles expended, with only far-off hopes of profit, the faulty
road-bed, the light rails, the steep grades, and crawling trains, the
glory of Russia is still “The Great Siberian Railway.”
III
IN IRKUTSK
The train pulls slowly up to the white station-house at Irkutsk. A
swarm of porters, _nasilchiks_, white-aproned, with peaked hats, and
big, numbered arm-tags, invade the carriage. They seize each piece
of luggage and run with it somewhere into the crowd outside. You,
encumbered with your heavy coat, laboriously follow. Irkutsk station,
more than any previous one, is crowded with passengers and Cossack
guards. Train officials are shouting instructions, and every few paces
a sentry is standing his silent watch. This is the transfer entrepôt
for all through traffic, as well as the depôt for the largest and most
important city of Siberia.
Threading the press on the platform, you struggle with the outgoing
human current, and in time reach the big waiting-room of the first
class. It likewise is crowded with a mass of people, and its floor
is cumbered with heaping mounds of baggage. One of these hillocks is
constructed from your impedimenta, which are being guarded now by a
porter, apparently the residuary legatee of the half-dozen original
competitors within the car. The man takes the long document that
witnesses your claim to two trunks, and departs. Upon you in turn
devolves sentry duty for the interminable time during which those
trunks are being culled out from the baggage-car.
It is an exasperating wait, but the fundamental rule for Russian
traveling is, “never separate from the baggage.” The parcel-room here
at Irkutsk held for six months a suit-case left by a friend to be sent
to this traveler. The officials would not give it up to its owner or
to any person save the forwarder, though he, oblivious to sequels, had
gone on to San Francisco.
Like the rest, now, you camp, with the baggage in front of you, on the
waiting-room floor. It is a very country fair, this station. At the
far end is a big stand crowded with dishes, on which are cold meats,
potato salad, heaps of fruit and cakes, sections of fish from which one
may cut his own slices, boxes of chocolates, and cigarettes. All are
piled up in heaping profusion. One can get a glass of vodka and eat
of the _zakuska_ dishes free, or while waiting he may buy a meal of
surprisingly ample quantity and good quality at the long tables that
run down the centre of the room. Most of the Russians order a glass of
tea, and with it in hand sit down till such indefinite future time as
the luggage situation shall unroll itself.
We move our baggage and join the tea caravan. Across the table is a
slight, brown-faced man, with an enormous black astrakan cape falling
to his ankles, and wearing a jauntily perched astrakan cap on his head.
“One of the Cossack settlers,” a friend from the train remarks. Beyond
are half a dozen tired-looking women, with dark-gray shawls over their
heads. Near them are men with close-fitting _shubas_, or snugly-belted
sheepskin coats, fur inside, and rough-tanned black leather outside.
Beside the lunch-stand are a couple of young men with huge bearskin
caps, short coats, and high leather boots tucked into fleece-lined
overshoes.
A general at one of the little side tables is talking volubly to a
plump dame with furs, which are attracting envy from many sides. The
lady merely nods between puffs of her cigarette, and sips her tea.
A large fat merchant waddles past, wrapped in a paletot made of the
glistening silvery skin of the Baikal seal. The room is stifling,
full of smoke, and crowded with people. Yet no one seems to feel the
discomfort, even to the extent of taking off the heavy outer coats,
which, with the thermometer at twenty degrees below zero, they have
worn on the sleigh-ride in, from across the river.
Your friends of the train, save those whose possessions were comprised
in their multitudinous valises, are all here, fur-coated likewise and
sipping tea, waiting, without a thought of impatience, for the baggage
to be brought out.
At last appears your _nasilchik_. “They are got,” he cries, and
balances about himself, one by one, your half-dozen pieces of luggage.
Through the noisy, gesticulating, thronging passengers and heaped
belongings, he shoulders and squirms a way to the door and into the
anteroom.
A couple of soldiers are good-naturedly hustling out, from the
third-class waiting-room opposite, a little leather-jacketed and very
dirty mujik.
“I did not owe seven kopecks. I cross myself. I am not a Jew,” he
loudly proclaims.
“_Nietchevo_,” says the soldier. “Out with him just the same!” The
peasants and crowd loafing alongside grin appreciatingly, as the mujik
is escorted, collar-held, through the great doors.
The porter and yourself follow. A plunging line of sleighs, backed up
against the outer platform of the station, extends far up and down
the road. Their _isvoschiks_, leaning back, are shouting for fares.
In sight are your two trunks. “How much to the Métropole?” you call.
The legal fare across the river to the hotel is a rouble, but the
Governor-General of eastern Siberia couldn’t tell how much it would be
if you didn’t bargain beforehand. “_Piat rubla!_” “_tree rubla!_” come
hurtling from all sides.
It is for you to walk down the line calling in the vernacular, “fifty,
seventy kopecks!” One of the drivers will eventually shout a fare which
you feel able to allow, and the porter, who has been watching the
bargaining process with keen interest, gives him the two trunks. The
_isvoschik_ retires then behind the stormy hiring-line, and you renew
the process for a second vehicle. The sleighs are just big enough for
one person to occupy comfortably. Two can squeeze in if they be thin
enough or economically minded. But a second sleigh is needed now for
the hand-baggage, and a third for one’s self. At length the arrangement
is completed. The porter bows low at the donation of fifty kopecks,
“for vodka”; then, “Go ahead! all ready!” you call, and with a flourish
the procession of sleighs dashes out of the station purlieus.
The road to the town mounts first a low hill parallel to the river.
As the horses climb toward its crest the panorama of the city and
stream, hidden previously by the railroad structures, unrolls. Like a
great band of white, the frozen Angara sweeps to the left and right.
Beyond it stand out boldly the clustered domes of the cathedral, their
surmounting crucifixes glittering in the sunlight. At your feet are the
sections of the pontoon bridge, which in summer spans the river but in
autumn is disconnected, the parts being moored to the shore, lest the
drifting ice from partly frozen Baikal cut and destroy their woodwork.
A dark streak crosses the frozen river, with dots moving, as small
apparently as running ants. The deceptive snow has made the distance
seem much less than it is in reality. The streak is a road, and the
seeming insects are the sleighs that pass and repass on the frozen
river-trail. Between scattered wooden houses our cavalcade rides down
to the bank, and at length onto the smooth white sheet. It is like
skating. The big horses on our sleigh are imported from Russia, and
trot splendidly, overtaking one after another of the citizens with
their little shaggy Siberian ponies. The heaped snow is on either side.
The cold air is bracing, almost welcome, until it begins to eat its way
in.
It is a fair drive, this, across the river--a full verst to the
northern bank. We mount the incline that leads up the slope, and come
to the first log houses of the poorer quarter of Irkutsk town. Gaunt
dogs bark feebly, and slink away on either side. The street is almost
deserted; the houses give no sign of life.
Suddenly we come into a square crowded with people, gay with life and
motion, and motley in colors. It fairly buzzes with talk and cries and
chaffering. Low-built booths face every side of the open _piazza_. We
catch a glimpse of one stocked with hardware. Opposite it stands a
little shrine within which are dimly visible pictured saints and the
Madonna, before which are scores of burning tapers. Our _isvoschik_
takes off his hat as he drives past, and reverently makes the sign of
the cross. He crosses himself also as he passes the white church of
St. Nicholas with its green roofs and gilded crosses, and he removes
his cap to the long-haired and dark-robed pope that he meets, for the
Siberian pays much reverence to his Church.
[Illustration: THE ANGARA RIVER THE CATHEDRAL IRKUTSK]
The residences improve from the log cabins of the outskirts, and grow
into the two-storied whitewashed structures of the main thoroughfares.
The streets also have an interesting procession of people. The big
troika of some high official glides past, with coal-black horses and
a coachman padded out into a liveried Santa Claus, after the style of
St. Petersburg. Officers of the garrison sweep by in their light-gray
overcoats. Shoals of sleighs and sledges are going to and fro. At
almost every corner, armed with a sabre and revolver, stands a police
officer.
As one drives along he reads the Russian letters on the placards and
the names on the stores. Many here are Hebrew, for the Siberians of the
cities are more tolerant than their European cousins. Irkutsk has a
very large and prosperous Jewish merchant community, and sent her Dr.
Mendelberg to the Duma. Irkutsk has had its representation cut down,
they say, _post hoc_,--perhaps _propter hoc_.
The driver, who has kept his horses at a moderate trot from the
station through the town, suddenly cries out to them, and swings and
snaps his lash till they break into a gallop. “We always come in
handsomely,” says the city native who is with you, as the sleigh pulls
up triumphantly at the door of the Hôtel Métropole.
A swarm of attendants greet you at the portal, a tall uniformed
concierge, half a dozen aproned porters, a waiter or two, a page,
and behind them the Hebraic Hazan, our host. Each porter seizes a
parcel and the concierge leaves his post by the front door to lead the
procession up the broad red-carpeted stairway. With a rattle of keys he
swings open the door to a salon big enough to give a ball in, and whose
ceiling is six good feet above one’s head. The average New York flat
would rattle around in it. The concierge advances to its centre and
bows. Then he goes on through to another room, almost its duplicate in
size, with a forlorn-looking washstand and a screen across one corner.
“But the bedroom, where do we sleep?” you ask.
“_Sdiece, gaspadine_,” he says, “right here”; and he conducts you to
the screen.
Raised about eighteen inches above the floor is a little wooden
platform-like structure, about the size of a cigar-shop showcase. A
dingy mattress is rolled up at one end of it. As you ruefully feel
its straw texture and survey the planks which it is to cover, the
hotel-keeper pushes in to tell you that sheets will be put on at once
if the _gaspadine_ has not his own. “_Chass! Chass!_ If only the rooms
suit the _gaspadine_, everything will be arranged.”
The porters silently deposit their loads and depart with their twenty
kopecks each. The manager goes out, doubtless to gather his sheets.
Only the concierge stays expectant after he has received his tribute.
You throw your heavy overcoat over one of the armchairs and begin to
open some of the bags. The concierge still stays and looks on. You
begin to segregate laundry, and locate brushes and tooth-powder. The
concierge still stays and looks on. You get out some slippers which are
an improvement upon the heavy snow-boots. The concierge still lingers.
“The room is accepted,” you say finally.
“Yes, yes,” he answers. “_Haracho_, but for the police, I want, please,
your passport.”
To show your passport, true enough, is no more of an incident than to
take out your handkerchief. But to be obliged before you have been ten
minutes in a place to produce a paper for the police telling of your
age and infirmities, the color of your eyes, the number of your arms
and legs and children, seems tiresome.
“Must all give in their passports?” you inquire.
“All, all,” he answers. “I am punished if one person stays here
overnight without showing it.”
He takes the document, visibly impressed with its flying eagle and the
big red seal, and bows his way out.
Now one can stroll around one’s suite and take in some of the details.
There are electric lights with clusters of globes in the big pendant
electrolier of the parlor, and drop-lamps for the massive writing-desk
in the corner! The armchair by the high-silled window is a good place
to read in. Too bad one cannot look out on the shuttling sleighs of the
street below, but the cold has thickly frosted the double windows. Here
is a big sofa, plush-covered, and half a dozen armchairs surround the
polished table, whose top is scarred with a multitude of rings--from
the hot tea-glasses, one deduces.
Mentioning tea, why not have some? There ought to be a bell somewhere.
Unfortunately there is not a bell. In looking for it one finds that
Siberian housekeeping does not include any dusting of the heavy
red hangings which flank the doors and windows. An imperious cry
resounds in the corridor. “_Chelaviek!_” It is followed by a patter
of footsteps. So this then is the custom of the country. You open the
door, and in the tone described in books upon elocution as “hortatory,”
cry out into the dim distances of the corridor, “_Samovar, chai!_”
Somewhere down the line a voice answers, “_Chass, chass!_” and you
retire to wait and hope.
Curiously battered the furniture looks when you inspect it closely.
Here and there a flake is chipped away from the varnish, and cuts or
dents show in the paint. Have sabre fights, perhaps, taken place here,
or raids on assembling revolutionists? Certainly in the generations of
occupants, life has been, in some fashion, tumultuous.
There is a fumbling at the door-knob, and, without any preliminary
knocking, a waiter comes in with a nickel samovar, an empty teapot, and
a glass. He puts them down on the battered table and walks out. The big
kettle hums away pleasantly as the red charcoal in its hollow interior
glows from the upward draft. The preparations seem all made, save for
the tea. Perhaps the _chelaviek_ has gone to get it. You let your eye
rove around to the little ikon far up in the corner, and the sleighing
and wolf-shooting etchings on the walls. But after a time this becomes
tiresome. Has the secret gendarmerie descended on the waiter among his
teapots and trays? Has he forgotten the matter entirely, or what? The
corridor-call seems to be the only recourse. Once again you go out.
“_Chelaviek!_” and from some region he comes trotting up.
“Where is that tea?”
“Oh, _chai_,” he says, illumined. “Has the _gaspadine_ not his own?”
“Most decidedly the _gaspadine_ has not his own,” you retort. “The
_gaspadine_ does not carry pillow-shams or bales with him. He is not a
draper’s establishment or a grocer’s store.”
“_Nietchevo_,” says the waiter, amiably; and runs off, to return with
a saucer of tea-leaves, and another containing half a dozen lumps of
sugar.
“Your pardon, generally the _gaspadines_ have their own”; and he leaves
you to the brew and your meditations.
Well, it is pleasant, after a long train-ride, to stretch out in a big,
if battered, armchair, and sip glasses of anything hot. The little
teapot, full of a very strong decoction, is perched on the top of the
samovar over its chimney. For a fresh glass you pour out a half-inch
of the strong essence, throw in the sugar, and from the samovar’s
spigot fill the glass with hot water. It is thus just the strength
you personally prefer, and always hot. The samovar, by a judicious
regulation of the draft, can be kept for hours exactly at the boil. It
is a fine institution, but cannot be transplanted to a country where
hot charcoal embers are not constantly available.
Comfortably ensconced and sipping one’s tea, one can leisurely, Russian
fashion, think of the most amusing method of passing the time. It is
getting on toward evening; for the day fades early here. To-morrow is
soon enough to look at things and distribute letters of introduction.
The beverage has also blighted the appetite. Perhaps a light supper
and an early couch would be wise. The latter in the far room looks
singularly unpromising, but, “_Nietchevo!_” It is rather early for
dinner or supper, but what of that? As an elusive New York politician
used to say to each of the office-seekers who came to ask his influence
for nominations, “If you want it, there is no reason why you should not
have it.” We will try another summons of the waiter.
Up he comes with the bill of fare printed in Russian and alleged French.
Perhaps some eggs would be good. You decide upon them to begin with,
and you will have them poached.
“_Gaspadine_,” he says, “the eggs to-day cannot be poached. Will you
not have an omelette instead?”
On second thoughts we will not have eggs at all this time; we will have
a sterlet, a small steak, and a compote. He goes off to the nether
regions again. A long time passes, but at length he returns with the
sterlet, its chisel-shaped nose piercing its tail in true Siberian
style. White creamy butter and Franzoski kleb, white bread, round out
the course. The steak is excellent and the canned fruit is satisfying,
eaten beside the singing samovar in the great room of the main hotel of
Irkutsk. Half a dozen letters pass the next hours until it is time to
sleep. They are written on the big desk beneath the drop-light, with a
glass of tea at one’s elbow in warm cosy comfort.
The place is rather warm, and without any apparent source of heat, for
there are no registers or gratings of obvious instrumentality. A search
of elimination, like the game in which one is warm, warmer, very hot,
leads at length to a rounded corner of porcelain built into the wall,
of which only a curved segment shows in an angle of the room. Further
inspection reveals that it is a big cylindrical stove fed by somebody
in the hallway, and so arranged as to warm two adjoining rooms.
In mitigation of the fire-tender’s zeal, we decide to open a window.
Perhaps with an hydraulic jack this might be possible; but to manual
labor it is not. A single pane of the inner window, however, swings
back, and then we can open a similar pane in the outer window, leaving
a hole as big as the port of a ship. It is sufficient in this weather.
Some further corridor-shouting, produces, in due time, sheets and
blankets, and presently we lie down on the straw mattress in the little
wooden-bottomed box called a bed. “_Spacoine notche_,” the attendant
calls, and without trace of irony.
It is one thing to go to bed, another to sleep. Tales are told of
powder-circled couches which the invaders, surmounting these ramparts
by climbing walls, dropped upon from above. There is a legend that
there are some people whom they do not bite. “_Nietchevo!_” Is it not
Irkutsk, the Paris of Siberia? Why then complain of parasites?
Furthermore, a brass band has started up somewhere in the immediate
neighborhood the tune of _Viens poupoule!_ to which there echoes a
popular accompaniment of tapped glasses and stamping feet. Perhaps
one had better get up and see things after all,--“Needs must when the
Devil drives.” We dress again. An exploring expedition reveals the
big dining-room on the floor below full to the doors with uniformed
officers, long-haired students, and assorted civilians. All are
drinking and smoking. On a stage at one end of the room thirty
short-skirted damsels are singing and dancing in chorus, to the great
approval of the audience. As the curtain rolls down on an act, the
_ci-devant_ dancers descend to their friends on the floor. Corks pop,
and sweet champagne flows. The call goes up for “_Papirose!_” and more
cigarettes and more bottles come thick and fast.
Soon there is an air of subdued expectancy, and eager looks are
directed to the curtain. Somebody near by leans close and whispers for
your enlightenment, “All-black man!” Out comes an old Southern Negro,
who sings to the wondering Russians a Slavonic version of the “Suwanee
River,” between verses delivering himself, with many a flourish, of
a clog-dance. Johnson is the man’s name. How he drifted so far from
Charleston he hardly knows himself. He followed the music-halls to
‘Frisco, and somebody, for whom he “has a razor ready,” told him he
would make his fortune in Vladivostok. He kept getting further and
further into the interior, picking up the language as he went, and
turning his songs into the vernacular. Poor chap, the pathos he puts
into the “Suwanee River”! He is thinking, in frozen Irkutsk, of the old
Carolina homestead, and is singing and dancing his way back.
A girl in peasant dress takes the stage after “Sambo.” She is singing
some song that is running its course across northern Asia. The lassies
at the tables and the men join in. Glasses clink and heels tap. The
miners who have made their stake, the prospectors who hope to, the
sable-merchants of the Yakutsk, the wool-dealers from Mongolia, all
meet here as the first place where the rigors of the hinterland can be
compensated. It is very gay--very, very gay.
In the years after the ukase of Paul I, ordering that all officers
who had made themselves notorious for lack of education or training
should be sent to the Siberian garrisons, it may be imagined what a
Gomorrah grew up under the Russian banners. Modern celebrations are by
comparison mild and temperate, as the cold beyond these double windows
is mild and temperate to that outside the Tunguses’ huts, in the
Yakutsk Province. But it is fairly impressive, nevertheless.
Even in a Siberian hotel, the world goes to bed sometime. By four
o’clock the music has stopped, and the traveler is tired enough to
sleep on even the populous plank-bottomed bed. Thus do all things work
together to weave the “web of life.”
It is nearing noon when one wakes to eat a combination of breakfast and
lunch, and plan for the day. The Post-Office and the Bank are the first
material objectives. One must register so that mail may be delivered.
We go down and join two companions of the road. With careful directions
from the porter, the party prepares for the half-mile walk to the
Post-Office. The preliminaries are formidable in themselves. First the
felt goloshes must be pulled over the shoes; then the big fur overcoat
must be swung on and carefully buttoned down its length. Finally a fur
cap, like a grenadier’s, with ear-flaps is tied, and great fleece-lined
gloves are donned. The droshky-drivers assembled before the hotel seem
to take it as an insult to their profession that we elect to walk, and
two or three follow along outside the curb until the group reaches the
corner and turns into the main street, Bolshoiskaia.
[Illustration: A CHAPEL BOLSHOISKAIA IN IRKUTSK]
There is an air of placid quiescence at this noon hour. The policeman
at the nearest corner is ruminatingly handling his sabre-hilt,
and watching the sleighs go by. Here and there a woman, with the
ubiquitous gray shawl over her head, passes, with a preoccupied air.
Sheepskin-clad mujiks are driving along, with sledge-loads of firewood
or stiffly-frozen carcasses, on their way to the bazaar markets. The
shop-windows attract our gaze. Here is one with the word “_Apteka_”
over the door, which is to say, Apothecary. Benches are set in front of
it, on which one may sit and watch the people pass, as in the chairs
before a New England country tavern. Further along is a solidly built
white department store, the Warsawski Magazine, wherein one can get all
manner of apparel,--shawls of the latest Irkutsk pattern, towels and
soap, and--most important--blankets for the trip into the interior. We
stroll in for a moment. An individual looking like a stalwart Chinaman,
with long braided queue, shoulders his way past us to buy some cloth.
“He is a Buriat of the tribe north of Irkutsk,” explains one of the
shop-girls, very close herself in type to those seen at Wanamaker’s in
Manhattan.
Near-by the imposing magazine is a low one-story booth occupied by
a watchmaker. Beyond that is a walled enclosure with lofty gates,
as befits a school. Still further is the yellow and green sign of a
government liquor-_traktir_. The name is said to be derived from the
French word _traiteur_, which was current in the days when Napoleon
and Bourrienne were planning conquests in their Parisian poverty.
As we turn up a side street, the shops for the poorer people appear.
Gaudy pictures, of packages of tea, vegetables, and sugar-loaves,
illuminate the walls, to tell the unlettered that groceries are
sold within. Saws and hammers and vises are painted on the walls
of the hardware-shops. Loaves of bread, crescent rolls, and rococo
wedding-cakes decorate a bakery; boots and high-heeled slippers, a
shoemaker’s booth. The street is an open-air gallery of rude frescoes.
Presently we come to residences, some of cement-covered brick, with
high enclosing whitewashed walls and iron gates, some wooden, with
their rough-hewn logs unpainted save for the brilliant white sills and
window-frames.
At length, far from the town’s busy district, the Post-Office is
reached. The building is thronged. Two soldiers are loading their
saddle-bags with the mail for the regiment. Women are collecting
money-orders. A crowd waits at the window of the girl who sells stamps.
In rushing industry she makes the calculating beads of her abacus
fly across the wires. Everybody is far too occupied to register a
voyageur’s name,--excepting always the half-dozen soldiers posted in
different parts of the room and leaning stolidly upon their bayonets.
We venture to ask one of them which is the registry window.
“_Russisch verstehe ich nicht_,” is the answer.
A Siberian post-guard knowing no Russian and answering in German seems
extraordinary.
“Where are you from?” we inquire in his native tongue.
“Courland,” he answers,--“Courland by the Baltic.”
This city of Irkutsk gave trouble in 1905. If it gives trouble again,
the garrison will be safe.
The registering at length is done and we turn to go out. A tattered
figure, bearded and haggard, with rags bound on his feet, opens the
outer door.
“Will the _gaspadine_ help a man get back to Russia?”
Your companion looks closely at him.
“A convict! very bad people.” He adds: “There is a murder every day
here, and one cannot safely go out at night. Very bad men!”
With the contradictory charity that is so typical of the Russian, he
fumbles in his pocket and gives the unfortunate a fifty-kopeck piece.
We go now to the great market-place and the bazaars. Here where we
enter is a row of hardware-shops. In the first booth a string of
kettles hangs down, and knives, spoons, candlesticks, and hammers
are suspended so as to catch the eye. The proprietor stands outside,
chatting with a passer-by and the tenant of the adjoining booth.
Further on are stationers, with tables of cheap-covered books. The
wall of one is decked with chromos of galloping Cossacks, led by a
long-haired pope with a crucifix. The soldiers are sabring fleeing
Japanese, and red blood is lavishly provided. On the opposite wall are
glittering brass and silver ikons, and lithographs of ancient martyrdom.
Row upon row of red felt boots hang in the next line of booths, and
in still another--the wooden-ware bazaar--are bowls and spoons, and
platters of high and low degree. Further on a dozen women are grouped
around one of their class, who is bargaining for a huge forequarter of
beef, a full _pud_ weight by the big lever scales that are balancing it.
“_Dorogo! dorogo!_” (Too dear, too dear!) she cries. “I will give eight
kopecks a pound.”
The market-woman protests that she will be beggared at less than eleven
kopecks.
A half-_sotnia_ of little Buriat Cossacks come riding by, clad in their
puffy leather _shubas_. Yellow-topped fur caps are their only uniform
garment, and across their backs are hung the carbines. They make merry
at the haggling women. Two swing off their shaggy ponies, and begin in
turn to bargain in broken Russian for some paper-wrapped sweetmeats.
They close the deal finally, tuck these away, toss themselves back into
position, and ride off. Further along, half a dozen men cluster around
a fur-cap seller. He is a merry fellow, and there is much noise and
banter and gossiping. Such is the bazaar, the Forum of old Rome set
down in a Siberian city.
[Illustration: THE BAZAAR, IRKUTSK]
A short further stroll, and the party is at your other objective, the
Bank. You take leave of the rest and enter. At the door, a grandly
uniformed porter helps you off with the outer husk of furs, and motions
you into the outer office, with its half-dozen clerks bending over
sloping desks. One of these takes your card, and returning leads the
way to a capacious sitting-room, with armchairs scattered here and
there, pictures on the wall, magazines of many nations on the centre
table. The American typewriter, which alone betrays that this is an
office, is on a little table at one side. A tall military-looking
man, gray-mustached and grave in manner, is seated beside the window
reading some documents. He rises as you enter, and greets you, and
for some minutes the conversation in French is upon general themes.
Presently you go down into a side pocket and get out letters of
introduction. One is from the Petersburg headquarters. He looks at the
signature--Ignatieff.
“You are his friend?” The polished worldliness falls away as a cloak
that is thrown off. “Splendid!” he says. “Welcome to our city. We
must have tea.” He pushes a bell, and a page, red-bloused and wearing
brightly polished jack-boots, appears. “_Chai_, Alexis,” he orders.
“And how did you leave Ignatieff?” he begins eagerly. “Does he still
drive his black stallions? It is two years that I have not seen him.
When I was in Petersburg last winter, he was in Paris, and when I was
in Paris, he was at Nice. One is very separated from his friends here.
One might as well be a convict.”
You answer all his questions, and begin to feel as if you were
at a little family party. Presently, in the midst of the double
conversation,--for the Russians seem to talk and listen at the
same time,--the boy comes in with a big samovar, and the other
accompaniments. The banker makes the brew in the china pot. From this
each of us serves himself as the compound conversation moves on.
“You have not yet seen the sights of Irkutsk?” he observes at last. “I
will get my sleigh and show you around when we have finished.”
“It is the middle of the day. I cannot break into your work like that,”
you protest.
But he rings a bell for the red-jacketed boy. “Order my sleigh.--We
have the finest city in Siberia,” he continues; “eighty thousand people
now, and growing always. And trade has come with the railroad as we
had not dreamed before. In the days when they used to bring the tea
overland from Kiahta, the sledges from Baikal would carry as many as
five thousand bales daily. We thought when this began to be shipped
through by the railroad that it would hurt the city. But there was so
much other traffic that the loss was hardly felt.”
“The sleigh is ready,” the boy announces.
“May I have the honor?” he says, with his easy grace.
He leads the way to the coat-rack, and is received with the deepest
bows by the uniformed worthy, who solicitously helps him on with his
coat and overshoes. Then with a stereotyped motion the man holds
out his hand for the tip. Though this servant is at the door of the
banker’s own office and presumably upon his pay-roll, the incessant
tribute is his perquisite. It is usual throughout Siberia for wealthy
Russians to scatter small silver everywhere along their path--to
friends’ servants, to house-porters, to beggars on the street. The
most profuse miscellaneous generosity prevails. Riding to-day with
the Russian banker is like watching the progress of a mediæval prince
dispensing his largesse.
At the entrance to the bank is the sleigh, skeleton-framed and
high-built, unlike most of the sleighs of Siberia. Three big black
horses, with the snake-like Arab head that characterizes the best
Orloff strains, are hitched to it, troika-fashion, the centre horse
under a big bow yoke, the outside animals running free. The coachman
has the square pillow-hat, and the enormous wadded corpulence of Jehu
elegance.
It is an interesting ride in which we move slowly up the Bolshoiskaia,
receiving, so far as the banker is concerned, neighborly greetings from
most of the sleigh-riders, and respectful salutes from the foot-passers
on the sidewalks. A nice social distinction our host draws in returning
the formal salute for uniformed officials, the cordial wave of the hand
for intimate friends, a nod for the humbler acquaintances: but none go
unrecognized.
Something like the Roman’s idea of showing his city by turns up and
down the Corso, is this Siberian’s. We do halt, however, and look at
the big Opera House and the Geographical Society’s Museum and the
many-domed Cathedral,--buildings which in no city would be other than
sources of satisfaction. After an hour of driving in the piercing cold,
one’s conscience begins to prick. The banker, even though absent from
his affairs, does not appear to feel either business or atmosphere. At
length we are brought at a gallop to the doorstep of the hotel.
“To-night we dine at eight. Adieu.” With a bow he draws the bearskin
robes about him, and the black horses bear him swiftly around the
corner.
An acquaintance from the train is in the hallway as you climb stiffly
up the steps.
“Has the drive been a bit cold?” he asks. “Come in and have a _stakan_
of vodka.”
“Is that not rather heady for a between-meal tipple?” you suggest.
“This is Siberia. When you run with the wolves, you must cry like a
wolf,--but tea, too, is good.”
You mount the stairs together, to the scene of last night’s orgy, and
order a couple of glasses of tea.
It is a strange anticlimax to find the room so deserted. At three
this morning it was a good imitation of the traditional “Maxim’s.”
At four in the afternoon it is simply a crude wooden hall, with the
stiff-backed, plush-seated chairs ranged in bourgeois regularity at the
discreetly covered tables. Only the shuffle of somebody practicing a
new step on the stage behind the curtains suggests the double life of
this innocent-looking hotel dining-room.
A couple of glasses of tea attack the cold in strategic fashion, from
the inside, and are better than the external reheating method. We sip
in silence for a while.
“I am going to drive over to the Banno and have a Russian bath,”
observes your companion. “I do not like the tin tub they bring around
here at the hotel. Are you impelled to come along?”
“Is there attendance and room for two? I’m not minded to sit around and
wait.”
“Room for five hundred,” he says, with a long sweep of the hand.
“Everybody goes there. It is one of the institutions of the city.”
As you are now warm enough to consider a further drive, you go down
to assist in bargaining for a sleigh to make the tour to and from the
Banno.
A big brick building a verst or so away, with a number of private
equipages and a stand for public sleighs and droshkys, is our
destination. A beggar-woman opens the double doors and gets her service
percentage from each passer.
“How much is given in this part of the world to beggars!” you remark.
The Russian smiles. “It is a part of religion to give. At every big
family affair,--a wedding, a christening, a funeral,--we distribute
money and gifts to the poor.”
In the entresol of the bath-house, a big tiled anteroom, there are
marble-topped tables, around which men and women are smoking and
reading papers. One can dine here, even; but this comes after the
bath. A ticket at the _kontora_ gives, for a rouble, the privilege of
a preliminary boiling and a flaying by one of the naked attendants. A
start is made by washing you with infinite thoroughness, section by
section, the attendant continuing on each spot until told to stop or
advance to the next. An unfortunate foreigner, in Irkutsk, had his
head shampooed seven times in succession before he could recall the
cabalistic word necessary to direct the man’s attention elsewhere.
One is scrubbed and rinsed, and is then conducted up onto a wooden
platform, running along under the ceiling. Here, while the first
inquisitioner dashes water on a steamer-oven below, the second scrapes
the victim with new pine branches. One remembers an Irkutsk Russian
bath at least as long as the smarting and the cold he gets from it
endure.
Back at the hotel one can dig out his rather crumpled dress-suit in
preparation for the evening’s entertainment. Later, he gathers in
another sleigh, and sets out for the home of the banker.
In Irkutsk nobody relies on house-numbers to find his way. Even Moscow
has not yet advanced to this refinement of civilization. If the
driver does not know the route, he stops to ask passers-by, “Where
is So-and-So’s house?” Again and again you are taken to the abode
of somebody else with a name more or less similar. Then the driver
will say, quite nonchalantly, “_Nietchevo!_”--ask the next person he
encounters for directions, and start anew. You leave abundant margin of
time, and usually arrive sooner or later.
Our host of to-night is, happily, well known throughout the city. So
the driver whips up to a gallop and rushes down the snowy streets. It
is not a long ride to the big arched doorway of the white two-storied
plaster-covered house, in front of which the driver pulls up with
a flourish. You ring a bell at the side of the door and wait. The
_isvoschik_ has taken a station beside the curb, has folded his
arms, and is nodding on the box, apparently prepared to camp there
indefinitely. “Eleven o’clock, return,” you say. “_Haracho!_” is his
drowsy answer, given without moving. The horses have drooped their
heads; they too are settled for repose. The tinkle of a piano comes
from within, but minute after minute goes by, the bell unanswered, the
_isvoschik_ immovable on his little seat. Other pulls of the bell are
at last of avail: the door slowly opens. A final objurgation to the
coachman that he is not wanted until eleven o’clock falls on sealed
ears. You go in through the massive doorway.
In the antechamber a gray-bloused attendant helps you off with wraps
and goloshes, then silently disappears through a rear door, leaving
you standing there unannounced. The vestibule is cumbered with coats
and hats on the wall-hooks, overshoes helter-skelter on the floor, and
canes and umbrellas in the corner. It is like a clothing establishment.
Beyond the curtained doorway on the right are lights, and the sound
of the piano is louder. This seems the most promising direction for
exploration, so--forward!
Beyond the portières is a splendidly lofty room, like that of an
Italian palace, brilliantly lighted with electricity. Many-paned
windows run high up, starting from the level of one’s breast, and
long heavy hangings half-conceal them. To the right of the door is a
mahogany grand piano, at which, oblivious of the world, the host is
diligently thumping away at _Partant pour la Syrie!_ with inadvertent
variations, singing carelessly as he plays. Beyond him, in an imposing
armchair of German oak, like King Edward’s throne in the Abbey, is
a lady, propped with many cushions. She is slender and darkly clad,
and is conversing with a young man in uniform, who sits very straight
on a dainty gilt chair of the Louis XVI epoch. A low lacquered table
before them is gayly painted with geisha girls and eaved pagodas.
It holds a massive brass samovar encircled by a row of beautifully
colored tea-tumblers of the sort that one sees on exhibition in the
glass-factories which front the Grand Canal at Venice. The chorus comes
from the banker at the piano:--
Amour à la plus belle;
Honneur au plus vaillant.
[Illustration: THE ICE-BREAKER, YERMAK--LAKE BAIKAL]
There is no use of paltering and waiting to be announced, so we enter
the room. The performer hears the steps on the polished floor and
swings round on the stool. “Ah, voilà!” he says, and rises to introduce
you to his wife.
“A moi le plaisir,” she says, smiling. “Mon frère, Ivan Semyonevich,”
presenting you next to the young officer, who rises abruptly and clicks
his heels as he takes your hand.
You are motioned to a replica of the little chair, and your host
returns to his piano, this time to play with immense satisfaction in
your honor a hazy memory of some bygone variety show: “There’ll be a
hot time in the old town to-night.”
“A friend is very welcome,” says Madame Karetnikov, when he finishes.
“We do not see many from the world here in Siberia.”
“The life, however, is interesting, is it not?”
“O monsieur, I, too, was interested at first, but there are so few
people of the world here, and we see them all the time. C’est affreux!
I give you a month to change that opinion.”
“You give a month, Irina; I give a week,” growls her brother.
“If it were not that we get away during the spring one would perish
of ennui,” the hostess adds. “But Japan is not far. We go there or to
Europe every year. Perhaps soon we shall get a transfer to another
branch.”
“You bankers have hopes,” observes the brother, “but what of us poor
officials of the Justice Department! We are chained to the bench like
old galley-slaves, and all we get is three hundred roubles a month and
a red button when we are seventy.”
As the macerated song floats anew from the piano, the hall-door opens
and there is dimly visible in the anteroom a curious much-encumbered
figure, with a gigantic sheepskin hat and short blue reefer coat. He
divests himself of these, and of a long woolen inside muffler, and,
brushing back his long hair, comes into the room. His blue tunic is
resplendent with brass buttons and he wears jack-boots. A light down is
growing upon his upper lip. He is nineteen or twenty.
“Good-day!” says our host, hailing him in English.
“Good-day, uncle!” he replies.
He presents himself before Madame Karetnikov, who holds out her hand,
which he formally kisses.
“_Zdravstvouitie_, Valerian!” says the official, shaking the young
man’s hand.
Then you are introduced with explanations.
“Valerian here is in his last year at the Irkutsk Realistic School,
studying preparatory to engineering.”
The status of science in Siberia becomes the theme, and the newcomer
infuses considerable local color into his pictures.
“Does the professor in drawing suit you now, Valerian?” the banker
inquires presently. Then he adds to you: “They all went on strike
because the old professor of drawing had a method they did not like.
The authorities had to replace him before any of the students would go
back.”
“The new professor respects our rights,” says Valerian soberly, not
liking the levity of his elder.
Soon, from an adjoining room, come in the children of the host,--a very
pretty girl of the age at which misses wear short dresses and braids;
and a little boy of about eight. The boy very respectfully kisses his
mother’s hand and is introduced to the stranger, but finds a superior
attraction in his father at the piano.
The girl, Marie Pavlovna, sits down beside her cousin Valerian. Lacking
the stock football amenities of a happier land, and half-embarrassed,
half-superior in the status of a budding young man, Valerian is not
much of a conversation-maker. Marie Pavlovna, too, is seen but not
heard. She is evidently the typical product of the French system of
sex-segregation and cloistered study, which keeps girls abnormally
uninteresting until marriage, perhaps to make amends subsequently.
“I think we had better go in and eat. It is half-past eight,” says the
host.
“Si tu veux,” replies his wife; and we stroll out into a big
dining-room, at one end of which is a heavily-freighted oak sideboard.
As we approach this, the host opens a far door, and shouts down into
the darkness:--
“Obeid, Dimitri.”
We turn to the _zakuska_ sideboard. The official reaches for the
vodka-bottle, and the little silver egg-like glasses.
“Vodka will it be, or do you prefer cognac?”
The various guests choose their tipple. With the gulp of a mountaineer
taking his moonshine, the banker swallows the twenty-year-old French
brandy, of the sort that gourmets protractingly sip with their coffee.
The little boy slips out to his particular region of the house. The
hostess takes her seat at the foot of the table, and the gentlemen pass
and repass, bringing her assorted _zakuska_ dishes as at a ball. Caviar
from the Volga, Thon mariné from Calais, sprats from Hamburg, Columbia
River salmon, are spread out and attacked by the rest of us, standing,
free-lunch fashion. One by one the men finish and straggle to their
places at the table.
Three menservants, with gray blouses and baggy silk trousers falling
over their topboots, appear now, one with a huge tureen of bouillon,
another with the little silver bowls, and a third with a plate of the
_piroushkies_ that accompany the soup. Madame Karetnikov deals out
the consommé for the whole table, and also for little Paul and his
governess in some outside quarters. Every one begins to eat, without
waiting for the hostess or for anybody else.
“It is hard work managing a big family like ours,” she allows, in reply
to your question about the domestic problem. “We always have seven or
eight, and one can never tell how many friends will come in to dine
with us.”
She casts a solicitous eye over the table, to see that no one has been
neglected, and then serves herself.
“One must keep the men well fed,” she observes. “Remember that, Marie,
when you get married.”
Marie at the far end of the table nods assent.
“But you must not think of marrying until you are told,” adds the
banker.
She nods assent to this, too.
“Don’t mind him, Marie,” says the official. “He thinks he is living in
the time of the Seven Boyars. Take my advice. Pick out the man you want
and go for him. You can’t fail.”
“Such ideas to put in a girl’s head!” says his sister, smiling.
The soup-course is nearly over, when suddenly the banker ejaculates,
and jumps up to welcome some new arrivals.
“Ah, father!”
He runs to a sturdy benignant-looking old man, and kisses him on both
his white-bearded cheeks, then does the same to the little old mother.
“Come in, come in; we are just beginning.”
At once the table is in a state of unstable equilibrium. The old lady
is steered to a chair at the head, and the rest are pushed along to
make room. The father makes his way, under similar escort, in the
direction of the vodka-bottle.
“No French brandy for me!” he says, and puts the fiery Russian liquid
where it will do the most good. He, too, goes to the far end of the
table.
The student tells in a low voice that the newcomer is a veteran of
Sevastopol, was once the personal friend of Czar Alexander, the
Liberator, and was decorated by him for gallantry at Plevna.
“What a splendid old Russian he is!” one thinks, noting all the
kindliness and courtesy of his honored age, and the grip of a bear-trap
in his hand. Yet there is an indescribable air of melancholy about him,
as if a great sadness were being bravely and uncomplainingly faced. A
remark from the hostess turns you to her.
“Father is one of the Colonization Commission. We are all very much
interested in hearing about his discussions with the settlers!”
“Colonization for the settlers or for the exiles here?” you ask.
“It is the government assistance for the voluntary emigrants, not for
the unfortunate ones.”
“But the latter must be a problem in themselves?”
Madame seems embarrassed.
The student leans over and in a low tone whispers: “His youngest son,
the brother of Vladimir, is in hiding, is under sentence of death. They
don’t speak of him here.”
“He has just come from the Governor,” adds Madame Karetnikov, “who is a
great friend of his. The Governor has heard from Petersburg that they
may bestow the cross of St. Stanislaus.”
“That is the autocracy here, which you do not know in your country,”
adds the student, in a low voice. “He is an intimate friend of the
Governor and two of his sons are officials, yet his last son is beyond
pardon. The old man himself knows not where he is. Yet they decorate
the father. He still believes in the Emperor.”
“Do not let my nephew talk politics to you,” says the hostess, rather
anxiously.
Valerian is silent.
A supplementary tureen of soup makes its appearance, and the two
newcomers are served with it. The rest of the party have advanced to
boiled sturgeon, with a thin sauce, compensated by Russian Château
Yquem from the Imperial domain in the Crimea. Roast beef follows the
fish, with the old general and his wife at length even with the rest.
Then come duck and claret, and finally dessert and champagne. The toast
of the evening is drunk to the old general, who brightens as the meal
advances. In the big reception-room, Turkish coffee is brought, which
is poured from the brazen ladle and served in exquisite little cups
without handles.
“We got them in Damascus on one of our trips,” says the host.
Conversation goes round the table. The official is in eager talk
with Madame Karetnikov about a common friend in a smart Petersburg
regiment, who has got badly in debt.
“He ought to apply for a transfer to the Siberian service. The officers
get more pay, and it costs less to live,” she is urging.
“But for Serge we must consider how much greater is the cost of
champagne here,” retorts the official.
“We can marry him to Katinka, and make her father get him a promotion,”
the sister suggests. “I think he ought to have left the army and gone
into the contracting,--every contractor I know is as rich as sin and
goes to Monte Carlo.”
So the conversation rambles on. Cigarettes are passed. The hostess will
not have one.
“I used to smoke, but it is so common now,” she explains. “Every
peasant’s wife hangs over her oven with a cigarette in her mouth. Even
a vice cannot survive after it has become unfashionable.”
The host comes up to show you his curios.
“This Alpine scene is one of Segantini’s. We got it in Dresden before
he had earned his repute. I am very proud of my wife’s discrimination.
The statuettes are from a little sculptor in the Via Sistina in Rome.
Rien d’extraordinaire. The vase came from the Imperial Palace in
Peking. I bought it from a Cossack for fifty kopecks. I have been told
it belongs to the Tsin Dynasty, and is better than those they have in
Petersburg Hermitage.”
So you are shown the spoil of two continents in connoisseur purchases.
“Hardly to be suspected in Irkutsk,” he allows, complacently.
Every year host and hostess visit the Riviera, taking a turn at Monte
Carlo and Nice and Cannes. The banker speaks English, French, German,
and Italian fluently, and half a dozen other languages passably. His
wife acknowledges only French and Italian.
The conversation turns to the idealism of Pierre Loti’s description of
the road to Ispahan. The banker has followed this road himself, and he
has a much less poetic memory of it. The veteran--his father--is not up
in French or English, but he has a good knowledge of German left from
academy times. In this language he tells of the old days of the serfs
and of the Crimea. He talks with the kind frankness of age that does
not need self-suppression to prompt respect. When the guests rise to
leave, and the buoyancy of the entertainment is passed, his cloud comes
back. His voice has just a touch of bitterness as he says good-bye.
“I am glad we can welcome to our country a man traveling for pleasure.
So many who come are here under less pleasant auspices.”
“_De svidania_,” you say at last to everybody, and out you go into the
midnight frost. The droshky-driver is still there waiting. He has slept
since you entered, unmoving through the hours. “_Gastinitza_,” you
direct; and he drives to the hotel through the bleak starlit night.
Valerian comes a few days later to visit us, and volunteers to be our
guide for Irkutsk.
“If I miss a few days at the Academy, what matter? I shall improve my
English,” he explains.
Valerian is typical of the student class, all ideal and aspiration.
He has gathered the heat of the epoch, and has concentrated it upon
his philosophy. He is saturated with the French Revolution. Does he
mention Danton, for example, it is with intentness of loyalty for the
great Mountain speaker, which makes one almost think that the year
is 1792, and that the place is sans-culottic France; “debout contre
les tyrans!” He sings fiercely with his comrades, to the tune of the
_Marseillaise_, the Russian revolutionary anthem, ending it with a
swirl. “For the palace is foe to our homes!” America he considers one
of the free nations, but he has reserves. Though he is not at one with
our political system, yet he thinks that all learned about it is a
great gain.
“Your land is free politically,” he specifies, “but it is not yet
emancipated from capital,--it is not free socially. You have an
industrial feudalism and a proletariat. So will it not be when we have
won our revolution.”
Many are his anecdotes of the uprising of 1905, whose tragic drama will
never be fully pictured and whose history is to be gleaned only from
the mouths of cautious witnesses.
[Illustration: THE ORGANIZERS OF THE CHITA REPUBLIC]
“We rose at Irkutsk, many of us, students and workmen, but General
Müller had a strong garrison of troops here. We tried them, but they
would not come over. They shot down our men and dispersed all the
meetings, and now he is Governor in the Baltic Provinces. They say
that when he was drunk, he would shoot accused men in his own railway
carriage; “the butcher!” we of the Cause call him. At Tomsk and
Krasnoyarsk the city was held for weeks by our party. The railway men
would not run troop-trains and the Government was paralyzed. Chita was
held by a Revolutionary Committee of Safety. We manned the entrances
with artillery. We took turns watching, and ran the whole city, not
touching the money in the Treasury. But we were few, and word came
that the insurrection was everywhere broken. Müller was marching from
Irkutsk, and Rennenkamp came back with the troops from Manchuria. He
promised moderate terms to all but the leaders. The townspeople were
afraid, and rose against our men. Many were taken. Many fled away and
got to Japan and America. Some were shot and some were sent to the
Yakutsk. So it was crushed, and our great chance was gone.”
“Will it come again?”
“_Ni snaia!_ The workmen are ready. The intellectuals are ready. The
peasants back in Russia cry for land. Perhaps they too will be ripe
next time, and the soldiers will be with us. In any case Siberia has
seen the red flag float over the Chita Republic.”
Many-faceted is the life in a Siberian city. In numerous ways it
seems feverish and abnormal, for it represents the young blood of a
capable race struggling upward, and knowing that in much its battle
is desperate. The towns have hardly yet got settled methods; they are
outgrown villages where men of all stamps, who have become enriched
in the new land, come for the pleasures or the benefit of a less
monotonous existence. The traditions of peasant origins survive in the
conditions and general civic neglect.
Irkutsk, once its novelties have become familiar, has lost its charm.
That it is provincial is no discredit, but its amusements are of the
grosser order, unredeemed by wit. Every evening the tawdry dining-room
at the hotel echoes the songs and noise of the revelers. The same
circle attends the theatres. The students discuss hotly the rights
of man and the Valhalla prepared for all martyrs, and calm simple
wholesome life seems to be reserved for the workaday world which moves
on its slow toilsome upward way in silence.
There is, however, to-night an unwonted stir at the Hôtel Métropole.
The corridors are thronged. A Russian friend points out the notables.
The blue-uniformed official yonder with the gray mustache and the row
of glittering orders on his breast is the Governor-General. Half a
dozen members of the local bar, in frock-coats, pass through. In the
dining-room a young lieutenant, dashingly clad in long maroon coat
with the row of silver-topped cartouches and the clattering sabre of
the Emperor’s Cossack Guard, is being deferentially entertained by
officers of the garrison. Three officials are taking champagne with
two beautifully gowned women, Parisiennes even to their long pendant
earrings. The hotel-pages in fresh red blouses and high boots pass here
and there with messages. The waiters, with intensified deference, glide
among the crowd in its many-colored uniforms and glittering war-medals.
“Who has arrived?” we ask, surveying the scene.
“A member of the Imperial Cabinet.”
The announcement of his name has a personal interest and memories of
earlier stays in Russia.
The Minister’s life has been a romance indeed. Disagreeing with his
family through liberal ideas, he went in 1862 to Birkenhead as a
locomotive engineer, to the United States, to Argentine, and returning
to Russia worked up from a very small government position to be chief
of all the Russian roads, railways, and telegraphs, and Minister of
Ways and Communications in the Czar’s Cabinet. His brain threw the line
of rails over half a continent. On the outbreak of the Japanese War he
was called from his retirement to the colossal task of bringing to the
front across the width of Asia half a million men, their artillery and
arms, their food, their transport, all on the one line of rails. He has
served under three Emperors and is life-member of the Senate.
You send a card in through one of the attachés. In a few minutes there
is delivered to you the Prince’s card, across which is written: “At
noon.”
At the hour appointed you mount to the apartment overlooking the
Bolshoiskaia. Guards at salute, staff in brilliant uniforms,
secretaries and callers in full dress,--the antechambers are full. You
pass through to the furthermost room.
In a nest of books and maps, with blue-prints outspread on floor and
chairs and sofas, is an elderly man in a plain frock-coat, without a
ribbon or a button to hint his honors. He is vigorous, hearty, simple,
almost unchanged from your earlier acquaintance, his keen flashing eyes
hinting ever a reverse side to the great repose of his manner.
Personal questions occupy the first minutes, but presently we are into
larger themes, and you begin to feel subtly the man’s power. He has
come on a special tour, to inspect, with his own practiced eyes, the
projected double-tracking of the Siberian Railroad. Every brakeman
and locomotive engineer, every traffic superintendent and division
manager along the route knows he could step down from his private car
and handle the levers and give them directions. His mind is a very
vortex of ideas, and his range of conversation reflects world-wide
interests. The talk gets to the American political situation and the
race-problem. Later it shifts to the Japanese War, and he tells of some
of his experiences getting the troops into Manchuria. A mention of the
overland road to China awakens reminiscences.
“It was long before the railroad that I went over that route first,” he
says. He tells of his months-long horseback ride beyond Baikal before
the railroad went through, inspecting the trade-route and the prospects
of the country. By and by the conversation has got to the special
problems of the Slav. With the straightforward frankness of a great
nature which wishes the best for his country, he tells of the Russian
aspirations from the standpoint of those who are facing the problems of
the nation in their fact and practice.
“I too,” he says, “was once for changing much in a little time, and
worked to free the serfs and to start the elective Semstvos throughout
the Empire. Alas! so much that they want is possible to no government!
One cannot by enactment abolish want or bring all men to a _niveau_.
We are trying to give every man the chance to rise, unchecked by any
administrative barrier. But one sees as he lives longer that all which
one wishes cannot come at a _coup_. Great changes, great improvements,
I have witnessed, but they have not come by violence. We must keep
order, and hand on to our sons an undivided Empire of the Russias.”
You leave this patient builder of the new order alone amid his maps
and studies in the idle Sunday city. As you descend the steps, a
black-capped student passes the door. He is humming the forbidden
_Marseillaise_.
IV
SLEDGING THROUGH TRANSBAIKALIA
The sledge-route that leads to the Chinese frontier goes southward
from Verhneudinsk across the territory of Transbaikalia. In old days
one reached its starting-point by traversing the frozen Lake Baikal in
sleighs, muffled in furs against the sweep of the terrible winds, with
plunging ponies at full gallop.
Now, after mighty effort and at monumental cost, the line of the great
railroad has been driven through the last obstacles that blocked an
open way, and trains carry the traveler through the deep cuts and
tunnels that pierce the barrier crags around the Holy Sea.
It is not the express that one takes at the Irkutsk station to reach
the ancient fort, but the daily post-train, the servant of local
traffic. Luggage-cumbered passengers crowd into the cars wherever
there is a place. A few, and these mostly officials, establish
themselves in the blue-painted first class. Many press into the yellow
second class--merchants, lesser chinovniks, tradesmen, popes, and
children on their way to the city schools. Swarms pour into the green
wooden-benched third, where the thronging tousle-headed emigrants
patiently huddle closer to give room to newcomers. Next to the engine,
with its big smokestack, is the mail-wagon, on whose sides are painted
crossed post-horns and the picture of a sealed letter. Behind this,
with a sentry on guard, is the baggage-car. The sinister compartment
of drawn shutters and barred windows is for the prisoners. In this
princes or artel-workers, their identity unsuspected, can be run across
a continent to their unknown places of exile.
The post-train starts from Irkutsk occasionally on time. In general,
along the local line the time-table is about as reliable a guide as the
calendars sold to the mujiks, with weather prophecies for each day of
the year. Fifteen miles an hour is mean speed. Stops may be for minutes
or for hours. One settles down therefore in the attitude sacred to a
yachting cruise,--foie gras and bridge, if it is calm; double reefs and
pilot-bread if it blows up. The high heavens alone know when we are to
get in, and nobody cares. It is not unpleasant withal to sprawl over
a great broad couch, and as the train crawls forward watch the white
highlands slowly unroll, the towering cliffs and peaks with spear-like
pines driving up through the snow, and the icy lake below.
For meals, one dashes out during the station-stops, and before
the third bell gives warning of the start, devours meat-filled
_piroushkies_ and swallows lemon-tinctured tea at the long
buffet-tables decked with hollow squares of wine-bottles, and beer
from the seven breweries of Irkutsk. If one has a teapot he can get
boiling water from the government-furnished samovar, and milk from the
peasant-women who stand in booths hard-by. He can add salt fish and hot
fowl, together with rye-bread and butter, and then consume his rations
at leisure in the compartment. At night the seats are let down, and one
sleeps in fitful naps among the hills of baggage. When morning comes,
an hour-long procession forms to take turns at the wash-bowl with its
trickle valve, in a towelless, soapless, and cindered lavatory.
We leave Irkutsk at ten in the morning, and reach Verhneudinsk at seven
next day, covering in twenty-one hours the 446 versts. Here is the last
of the railroad. With troika, sledge, and tarantass, by highway and
byway, over frozen rivers and camel-tracked trails, we must now follow
the old road into the heart of Asia.
The post-station that serves as point of departure for the sledge
journey lies some distance away, at the edge of the town. An
_isvoschik_, after due bargaining, proceeds to transfer thither us and
our dunnage-bags.
As we ride through the town, just waking for the day, the streets, the
lamps, the telegraph-wires, the comfortable houses,--each and every
symbol of civilization takes on a new significance now that it is to
be left behind. On the parade-grounds the recruits are at the morning
drill, shouting lustily in unison, “_Ras, dva, tre!_” to keep the
step. We pass the barracks, the shops with their brightly illustrated
signs, and ride under the wooden yellow-painted Alexander Arch.
[Illustration: BAIKAL STATION]
[Illustration: THE HIGHLANDS OF TRANSBAIKALIA]
Soon we reach a street of low log houses, and a lofty boarded enclosure
is ahead. At its gateway is swinging a black signboard, painted with
post-horn and the Czar’s double-headed eagle. “_Postava Stancie_,”
is inscribed over the lintel. Between the black and white-striped
gate-posts we swing into the courtyard. To the left stretches a low
log house. To the right, along the wall, are ranked sledges. In front
are the stalls. Grooms, whip in hand, stand around in the courtyard,
muffled against the cold.
“Is the _gaspadine_ going on?” one of them asks.
On the reply, “Yes, at once,” he scurries off to start harnessing, and
you shoulder open the low felted door of the post-house and enter the
big waiting-room.
“Three horses?” asks the young black-mustached agent within.
“Yes, a troika sledge.”
He turns to the book of registry attached to the rough table by a long
cord fastened with a big red seal, and begins to write.
“The name?” he asks. It goes down.
“The destination?”
“The Chinese frontier at Kiahta.”
“Your first relay-station is Nijniouboukounskaia, twenty-seven versts.”
The fare is set out in a printed placard posted up on the wall; as is
the price of a samovar, fifteen kopecks, and all the other items that
the traveler may require.
The agent hands you the slip: “One rouble, eighty-two kopecks, for two
persons, the _gaspadine_ and his courier”; something under three cents
a passenger-mile.
As you wait for the harnessing of the post-sledge, the courier
overlooks anew the bags and counts out again the parcels. As light as
possible must be the impedimenta. Now is the last chance for change.
The big station-clock ticks on. The agent moves about in the warm dusky
silence of the house. The courier straps tighter the dunnage-bag.
“Look that your furs are snugly fastened,” he says.
There is trample of footsteps by the door. A fur-clad, ruddy-faced
driver stumbles in, makes the sign of the cross before the ikon on the
further wall, and beckons to you.
“Ready!” he says.
Three shaggy ponies stand hitched to a wooden sledge, not high like
those of city _isvoschiks_, but low and shaped like a wide bath-tub.
The bottom is cushioned with hay and you are to sit some six inches
above the runners. The bells hanging from the big arched _duga_ over
the centre horse jingle as he frets. The side horses, that will run
loose between rope-traces, look around at the _yamshik_ who stands
by. He holds in his mittened hands four reins of leather, twisted into
ropes--two for the centre trotter, one each, on the outside, for the
gallopers.
You climb into the nest of rugs and furs superimposed upon your
baggage! The _yamshik_ leaps to the precarious perch that serves as
his seat. The whip falls, and with a bound the horses are off. Always
one starts at top speed, however bad the way. Always one finishes at a
gallop, however jaded the horses. It is the rule of the Russian road.
With bells jingling, the driver shouting to clear the way, and a white
cloud rising behind, the sledge skims out between the log houses
which flank the straggling street. Dogs bark and the idle passers-by
stare. Fur-covered pigs scramble up with a squeal, and scurry from
their resting-places in the road. Girls, with shako-capped heads, peer
through the windows. Little chubby boys, in big brown felt boots, cheer.
Soon the uttermost houses of the town are left, and emerging we plunge
into the country road through open fields, dazzlingly, blindingly
white. The trotter’s legs seem to move too fast, as if seen in a
cinematograph. The gallopers, free of all weight and held only by the
two traces which fasten them, outrigger fashion, swing on like wild
ponies of the steppe. Crude and massive as the sleigh may look, its
burden is almost nothing on the hard compacted snow. The horses in the
rush through the bracing air seem to be the incarnation of the wind. A
rut in the glistening road does not produce a disjointing shock, for,
as a huntsman’s bullet glances from the skull of a wild boar, so the
sleigh glides into the air and swiftly down again at a long low angle.
It is a fact of “flying.”
The cold is intense. After an hour of riding you have learned a
certain lesson which adds to your experience. Whether the traveler
shall make this winter journey equipped with full camp-kit, portable
stove, folding-forks, thermos bottles, and shell-reloading tools, or
Tatar fashion, with a rifle and a haunch of mutton, is important but
not vital. Let him make sure, however, that the huge all-enveloping
sheepskin overcoat is at hand to supplement the coats beneath, and
that a shaggy sleeping-rug is provided in addition to the blankets.
One obstinate newcomer started with the insistence that a mink-lined
Amerikanski overcoat, with two heavy rugs as lap-robes, would be ample.
After an hour on the road, he turned into a peasant’s hut to thaw out
upon boiling tea, while the driver went back to the town to buy the
hairiest robe and coat obtainable. These were thenceforth worn on top
of the initial outfit. Siberia for a midwinter sledging journey exacts
this tribute of respect.
For versts the winter road follows down along the river between
towering pinnacled rocks, where in summer eagles nest. The cliffs are
vividly spotted with orange and green lichens; below they are fretted
with the scourings of ice brought down in the spring freshets. All
along beside the road are the familiar pine-saplings planted in mounds
by the villagers to guide the way. In the vast monotony and drifting
snows travelers would be lost but for these landmarks. Along the
fertile river valleys hamlets are thick. A cluster of houses is met
every six to ten versts. Presently the road leaves the river and bends
to the left, cutting across fields. When it quits the bank, it climbs
sharply a five-foot ascent. The driver does not even slacken speed.
At the turn he swings the sure-footed ponies suddenly, and takes the
slope, letting the outrigger bring up against a stiff clump of bushes.
There is a crash, the sleigh has caromed off at right angles, nothing
has befallen, and we are on again.
Verst after verst of plateau goes by, with rounded rolling hills
of dimpled snow, treeless, houseless, a barren waste. Then comes a
crest so steep that the horses can only toil up it at a walk, and the
passengers must climb beside them. The forest closes in as the height
is mounted,--white leafless birches and dark green pines. The light
snow is seamed with rabbit-runs, and here and there are the far-spaced
tracks of deer or wild goats.
A mound of stones and a small pole with a Buddhist prayer-flag--for
here is the ancient home of the Buriats--mark the top of the ascent.
There is a moment’s halt while you climb in and the driver tightens
the saddle of the centre horse; then down the giddy descent we sweep,
in full gallop once more. The pines flash past, and you hold your
breath in fear of the smash that must come should a horse fall, should
a trace break, should a side rut swing the sledge over. One is,
however, so close to the ground that an overturn is usually harmless,
save to the clothes and the nervous system, both of which are at a
discount in Siberian sledging. Then too the outrigger arrangement is
such that the craft turns a quarter of the way over and slides on the
supplementary runner until it rights.
The cold is intense. One wipes away the snow from his fur collar, and
the dampness on the handkerchief has caused it to become frozen stiff.
It is a crackling parchment that goes back into the pocket. Eyeglasses
are unwearable, for the rising vapor from one’s breath is caught and
frozen on them in an opaque film. Fingers exposed but a moment become
numb and useless, and uncovering the hand is an agony. Gradually as
you ride, through the great felt boots, the triple flannels, the
camel’s-hair stockings, the fur-lined gloves, the coats and rugs,
the cold begins to bite. You have become fatigued and depressed of a
sudden. The driver points to your cheek, where the marble whiteness is
eating into the flesh, and bids you rub it with snow. An involuntary
shudder grips and shakes you relentlessly from head to foot.
It is time to stop. If you try to go on beyond the next station you
will, if the gods are lenient and you do not freeze, get out nerveless
and trembling, not for hours to rally strength and energy. The chill
will cling, however hot the post-house oven. Even now you are weak,
beaten down, querulous, in a sudden feeble old age. The shudder means
that the human animal is near his endurance limit.
On an urgent call, with special preparations, you may travel for a
hundred hours, night and day, without halt save for change of relays.
Physically, it is possible to fight cold for a time. You can run along
in all your furs beside the horses, you can beat your arms together,
and rub nose and cheeks to keep the blood in motion. You can drink
copious glasses of scalding tea in the post-houses, and live by
stimulants on the road. Through ceaseless vigilance and resolution
you can keep from freezing, even while intense fatigue creeps on and
vitality is going. But the persistent awful shudder is Nature’s red
lantern. Run past it if you must,--it is at your peril.
Dark against the snows, now a low-lying village comes into
sight,--Nijniouboukounskaia,--and among its first log houses is one
bearing the post-horn signboard. A cry rouses the jaded horses to
a gallop, and covered with snow, the sledge sweeps into the yard.
Steaming and frosted white, the animals stand with lowered heads.
Stablemen run to unharness them. Stiff with cold and muffled like a
mummy, you clamber out, and on unsteady legs mount the steps to the
felted door of the posting-inn. In the big bare room, beside the warm
oven, robes and overcoats can be thrown off. A red-capped girl loads
the samovar with glowing brands from the fire, and sets it humming for
tea. Brown bread is produced and eggs, and a great bowl of warm milk.
With these, and the contents of your bag of provisions, can be eked out
a welcome _obeid_.
For the night’s rest one need not seek a bed. There is never a spring
to ease the bones from Verhneudinsk to Kiahta. There was discovered
just once on the journey--at Arbouzarskie--an iron skeleton, bearing
to a spring bed about the relation that the three-toed Pleistocene
prairie trotter holds to a modern horse. The post-keeper had carefully
hewn with his axe five pine planks to cover the gaunt limbs of it. The
voyageur slept on the soft side of these timbers. Bed and board are
synonyms in Siberia.
For a couch there is to-night the narrow wooden law-provided bench,
or--a less precarious perch, and equally resilient--the sanded floor.
For bedding, one has one’s own blankets and coats. What if the shoulder
slept on numbs with one’s weight, or the corner of the soap-box in the
traveling-bag, serving as a pillow, dents the tired head! One draws off
felt boots and some of the outer layers of clothes, rolls the sheepskin
about one, covers the head with a blanket, and sleeps like the forest
bears in their winter dens.
Just before daybreak is the best time to start, so that one can cover
the most road possible while the sun is up. At ten or eleven, an
hour’s stop for lunch is advisable, and then on again until sundown.
It is better not to travel after nightfall, as the cold is so much
more intense. We dedicate the evening to hot tea, and then turn to the
blankets and the bench.
The stretch between Verhneudinsk and Troitzkosavsk, officially rated
at two hundred and eighteen versts, is really somewhat longer. A
run of average record took from 4:20 P.M. Tuesday to 11:30 A.M.
Thursday--forty-three hours and ten minutes. This included all
relaying, seven hours a night for sleeping, dinner and breakfast halts,
two accidents (an overturning and a broken runner), and one calamity--a
Siberian who snored. The actual driving-time, over a road for the most
part hilly, was twenty-two hours, five minutes, or just about ten
versts per hour.
Horses stand always ready, with special men at hand to harness. Drivers
swing on their shaggy greatcoats, and with almost no loss of time one
is out of the shadowed courtyard and on the road again in the dazzling
whiteness of the winter day.
In traveling “post,” however, with relayed sleighs and big empty
guest-rooms, one does not become acquainted with the life along the
way. One has only hurried glimpses of slant-eyed Buriat tribesmen, of
galloping Cossacks, trudging peasants, post-agents, girls who carry in
samovars and silently steal out, rosy-cheeked boys on the streets,
and women at the house-windows. To know the people and see their daily
life one must get away from the beaten highroad, strike out from the
government-regulated inns, and blaze one’s own path into the interior.
First, you get a low passenger-sledge, long enough to admit of
stretching out, and without too many projecting nails on the inside;
then, three good ponies of the hardy Cossack breed, that are never
curried or taken into a stable through the bitterest winter. The best
animals procurable are none too good for climbing the passes away from
the river-courses. The whole outfit can be bought for three hundred
roubles in any of the interior towns.
For drivers, there is a class of _yamshik_ teamsters, who spend their
lives guiding the sledge-caravans which carry the local traffic. One
of these men, Ivan Kurbski, can guide you through a whole province,
and lodge you every evening with some hospitable friend or recommended
host. Whether he has himself been over all the changing by-paths in
the wilderness of the Zabaikalskaia Oblast, or whether he mentally
photographs the directions of his friends regarding each village, is an
unsolved mystery.
[Illustration: SLEDGING SOUTHWARDS]
When the day’s journey is done, Ivan will drive slowly down the crooked
street of the village he has settled upon for the night’s repose,
looking keenly for landmarks visible only to him in this country, where
every village and every house is mate to all the rest. Sometimes he
will ask a question of one of the innumerable urchins. But generally
he seems of himself to hit upon the desired domicile. Day after day
he will take you the sixty versts, lead you to the village stores to
replenish the supply of candles or sugar, bring you surely to food and
shelter at night, and take off all the burden of care for the outcome
of each day’s journey.
If for the third member of your personal suite you can get an old-time
servant to keep the guns clean, build the camp-fires when midday tea
is to be taken out of doors, bring in the baggage and rally the best
resources of each halting-place, you are doubly lucky. You will be
sedulously tended, and be treated partly as a prince, partly as a
helpless baby.
Of this order is Jacov Titoff. Not the smallest personal service that
he can render will you be permitted to do for yourself. The telling
of unpleasant truths will be carefully avoided, however certain the
ultimate revelation. Though honest beyond question, he pays you the
naïve compliment of relying upon your generosity in all the little
matters that concern provisions and petty luxuries. He will open the
package which he is carrying back from the _torgovlia_ to extract
matches and cigarettes for his own delectation, and will rifle
unstintingly the reserve of canned _sardinki_. He cheerfully freezes
himself waiting for deer, and stumbles up miles of snowy mountain
in the beats. He is always in good humor, and without complaint for
whatever comes. He is ready anywhere, at any time, to sleep or drink
vodka.
Thus outfitted and manned, take your place, muffled in furs, and seated
on the felt sleeping-blankets. Guns are at your side, the bag of
provisions is in front, your own little ponies paw the snow. They start
off now, trotting and galloping beneath the _duga_. The air is frosty,
clear, and thrilling as wine; the snow is feathery and uncrusted, as
when it fell months back; bells are jingling, and the driver is crying
his alternate endearments and curses upon the shaggy ponies. Down the
long rock-flanked river valleys, amid birch and pine forests, you will
skim, by unwonted paths, through out-of-the-world villages, to see in
their own homes the red-bloused peasants, the women spinning at the
wheel, the peddlers and priests, the traveling Mohammedan doctors, the
rough Buriats, miners and merchants, along the white way.
The smooth main road is left now for newly broken sledge-trails across
fields and over snow-covered marshland. Every available river is
utilized as a highway, for along its winding length the path, smooth
and level, is marked like a boulevard by the evergreen saplings planted
by villagers to guide the winter traveler. One can pierce the districts
flanking the Chickoya’s gorges, reachable at other seasons only by
breakneck climbs. And one can see the real Siberia.
On this first night of his incumbency, Ivan Kurbski lodges us with
friends. He leaves us for a moment while he enters the yard by the
wicket-gate to make due announcement, and the ponies hang their tired
frost-covered heads. Your own bows under an equal fatigue. But the wait
is very brief. Soon the big double gates of the log-stockaded courtyard
open. The horses of their own accord turn in, and swing up to the steps
of the house. You are handed out like an invalid grand duke, and are
welcomed at the threshold, with a hard hand-shake, by a red-bloused
peasant who ushers you up the steps, across the low-eaved portico, and
through the square felt-padded door into the big living-room.
As we all enter, Ivan and Jacov, caps in hand, bow and make the sign
of the cross toward the grouped ikons high up in the corner opposite
the door. The saints have guarded you on the way--are not thanks
the devoir? Then you, as head of the party, must salute, with a
“_Zdravstvouitie_,” your host, the old _Hazan_ father of the peasant
who, wearing a gray blouse sprayed with vivid flowers at breast and
wrists, sits on a bench beside the window. Now you may sit down beside
the massive table on the other bench, which is built along the whole
length of the log walls, and survey the curious world into which you
have fallen.
A woman of middle age, clad in bright red, is busy with a long hoe-like
instrument pushing pots into a great square oven six feet high, ten
feet to a side, and spotlessly whitewashed. To her right, in the
room beside the oven, is a girl of fifteen or sixteen, rolling brown
rye-dough on a little table, in perilous proximity to a trap-door
leading into some dark nether region. An old bent woman gravitates
between the two. Glancing up, one meets the wondering eyes of three
sleepy blinking urchins, who peer down in solemn interest from a big
cushion-covered shelf, two feet beneath the ceiling. Looking about to
locate the muffled sound of crows and clucks, one discovers, beneath
the oven, a corral of chickens, pecking with perky bills at the
whitewash for lime. On the floor is sitting a little girl crooning some
endless refrain to a baby in a sapling-swung cradle.
“The _gaspadine_ will take _chai_?” asks the patriarch. From the
woman’s room beside the oven the girl brings a samovar. She sets it on
the floor, beside an earthenware jar standing near the door, and dips
out the water to fill it. Then with tongs she takes a long red ember
from a niche cut in the side of the oven, and drops it down the samovar
funnel. Round loaves of frozen rye-bread are brought out and set to
thaw. A plate of eggs is produced from the cellar. One rolls off as
the girl passes, and falls to the floor. Instinctively you start. Not
so the others. The egg has dropped like a stone and rolled away. But
it is quietly picked up and put to boil with the rest. It is frozen so
solidly that there is not even a crack on the shell.
Jacov meanwhile is making earnest inquiry of the “old one.”
“How are your cows, Dimitri Ivan’ich? Your horses, are they well? And
your sheep? All well? And have you had good crops? Is there still
plenty of pasture-land in this village? _Good!_ GOOD!--and how is your
wife?”
Poor withered wife; she is bustling around looking after the children,
and trying to help her daughter-in-law. Not so the “old one,” the
ancient man of the family to whom these courteous questions are
addressed. The patriarch stopped his labors at fifty, and sits
slumbering away his second prospective half-century in honored
idleness. “Everybody works but father!”
The samovar is humming now, and the table is decked with a
homespun-linen cloth ready for the _obeid_. The first formality, as
dinner is about to begin, must be observed. The various members of the
family turn, one after another, toward the ikons, reverently crossing
themselves. Then the host produces a bottle of a colorless liquid,
shakes it up and down, and brings the bottom sharply against his palm.
The cork shoots out, and he pours into a little glass a drink of the
national beverage, vodka, which one is supposed to swallow at a gulp.
Every time a guest enters, a bottle of vodka is brought out, costing
49¼ kopecks, half the average day-laborer’s pay in this district. On
feast-days the visitors go from house to house drinking,--and these
_prasdniks_ number some fifty-two days in the Russian year. Every
business deal is baptized with vodka. Every family festival, the
return of a son from the army, the marriage of a daughter,--all are
vodka-soaked. As one passes through villages on a saint’s day, he
may meet a dozen reeling figures and hear the maudlin songs from the
courtyards where the men have gathered. The part played by vodka in the
people’s life is appalling.
In the house now, all, beginning with the “old one,” partake of this
stimulant, solemnly gulping down their fiery potions. Then the family
sits down in due rank and order, the “old one” in the cosiest corner,
with the samovar convenient to his hand. You, as the guest, are beside
him on the bench that lines the wall, then comes Jacov, next the son,
then Ivan Kurbski the _yamshik_, and on stools along the inner side of
the table, the grandmother and assorted infants. The mother alternates
between the table and the oven.
The samovar is tapped for tea as the first course of the evening. For
all who come, tea is the obligatory offering, in a cup if the visitor
be familiar, but for special honor in a glass with a ragged lump of
sugar hammered from a big cone-shaped loaf. This one nibbles as he
drinks, for sugar is a luxury, not to be used extravagantly. The brown
rye-bread, which has been thawed at the gaping oven-door, is next
brought out, and raw blubber-like fat pork, in little squares, eaten
as butter, and boiled potatoes, and the boiled eggs, curdled from the
freezing.
At Little Christmas, the _prasdnik_ day which comes in early January,
_pelmenis_, or dumplings, egg-patties (grease-cooked), and meat will
be served, with cranberries and white bread. In Butter-Week everybody
gorges on buttered _blinnies_, or pancakes, garnished with sour cream.
Even a substance showing rudimentary traces of a common ancestry with
cake may be produced.
As the shadows of the northern evening close down, a piece of candle
is lighted to-night in our honor. Generally the burning brands for the
samovar, propped in a niche cut at the height of a man’s shoulder in
the outer edge of the oven, throw the only light. Presently the candle
is used up and the brands give a fitful flame, leaving the corners
black as Erebus.
From the baby’s cradle comes now a plaintive cry, and one of the little
girls goes over to dandle it. Up and down, to and fro, for hours
together she works, singing her monotonous lullaby. The children, who
have been lifted down from their eyrie above the oven, play on the
sanded floor. The men remain oblivious and smoke their pipes, letting
fall an occasional word, which comes forth muffled from their great
beards.
Ox-like, all sit for a while, sipping occasional cups of tea. Then the
woman and the girl go out and get wood, remove the pots from inside the
oven, and build up a roaring fire. The children are rolled up for sleep
in their little blankets on the floor. The men reach for their furs and
felts. They go to the left of the oven, the women to the right, and
the children are between, making a long row in front of the fire. Soon
all are sunk in heavy sleep. The little girl alone sits up to rock the
baby. As you doze off in the genial warmth of the newly-stoked oven she
is still crooning her lullaby in the dim fitful light of the firebrands.
Through the long night all lie like logs. Toward morning, as the oven’s
heat dies down and the bitter cold creeps in, sleep becomes uneasy. One
stirs and then another. Finally the woman rises and wakes the girl, and
they go out into the cold for wood and water. Presently the men bestir
themselves, get up, and wait for their tea. The rising sun of another
day casts its rays through the windows.
As the sleepers one by one arise and stretch, their blankets are folded
by the watchful woman of the house, and thrust up on the children’s
shelf. Some of the men go across the room and let the water from the
little brass can in the corner trickle over their hands. Some do not do
even this.
For the outlander of washing proclivities, peculiar problems are
offered by a country of no wash-bowls, no soap, only occasional towels,
and the tea samovar as the only source of hot water, a copious draft
on which not only postpones breakfast but compels some of the women of
the family to go out and chop ice for a new supply. Necessity evolves
the tea-tumbler toilet method as our solution. You borrow one of the
precious tea-glasses from the old woman, fill it to overflowing with
warm water from the samovar, and prop it up on the window-sill. The top
inch of water is absorbed into a sponge which is put aside for future
use. Into the remaining two and a half inches a soaped handkerchief is
dipped, with which one washes one’s face, touching tenderly the spots
recently frozen. The reserved sponge will do to rinse off the detritus
of this first operation. Two and a quarter inches of water are left, of
which half an inch may be poured over the tooth-brush. With an inch and
three quarters left, one has ample to lather for a shave, as well as to
wet the nail-brush which is to scrub one’s hands that will be rinsed
with the sponge. Half an inch remains finally to clean the brushes and
razors. “There you are!” With two glasses one may have a bath.
When the breakfast of rye-bread and tea is ended, the men go out to
their various winter tasks, of which the most serious is felling trees
in the forests, cutting them up, and getting home the wood. The women
keep stolidly at their cooking, cleaning, child-tending, and turn to
the spinning-wheel and hand-loom when other work does not press.
In the weeks that follow, each night brings us to a different home,
but never to a changed environment or atmosphere. This type of life is
found, not only among the Trans-Baikal peasantry, but throughout all
Siberia. The log houses down the long straggly village streets look out
upon the same wooden-walled courtyards,--the women peering from their
little windows as the sleighs jingle past. The same ikons with burning
lamps look down as you enter; the same whitewashed oven and shelf and
cradle are there as you push open the felted door. The women of each
district wear the same traditional costume. The bearded host produces
the same vodka. One of the most impressive sights, when one drives out
before dawn into the frosty air, is to see at almost the same moment
from every chimney the black smoke roll upwards, then dwindle to a
thin gray streak. Each woman has risen and heaped green wood into the
cooking-oven. It is as if one will actuated simultaneously all the
people.
At places the master of the house has a trade, shoemaking or saddlery,
and the big living-room is littered with pieces of leather and waxed
cord as he stitches. Sometimes there are hunters in the family, and
ancient flintlock muskets rest on the antlered trophies. The men gather
together occasionally to drive deer. But in general, as the winter is
the men’s idle time, a little wood is cut, the cattle are seen to, and
for the rest, talk, tea, and tobacco, until it is time to eat and sleep
once more. The women on the other hand seem to be always occupied, but
they are not discontented.
[Illustration: PEASANT VILLAGE STOREKEEPER SIBERIAN TYPES]
The customs and institutions which bind together the household group
are unique. In all families the _Hazan_ is supreme. To him first of
all, strangers pay their respects. To him every member of the household
comes for advice as to whom he or she shall marry, and which calf
shall be sold. Howsoever hard of hearing he may be, there is related
to him all the events of the neighborhood with infinite minuteness. He
is the repository of all moneys earned by logging for a neighboring
mine-owner, or for bringing out to the railroad the sledge-loads of
rye. As head of the family he can summon a forty-year-old son from the
merchant’s counter in Krasnoyarsk, or his nephew from the fur-traffic
in Irkutsk, and bid him return to his peasant hut. If a grandson wishes
to go to Nerchinsk to seek his fortune, the “old one’s” consent must
be obtained before the youth receives his passport. It is all at the
patriarch’s sovereign pleasure.
We come one day upon a vexatious example of this ancestral authority. A
report reaches us, by chance, of a hibernating bear’s hole some fifty
versts away, which one of the peasants has located. The host, noting
our interest, asks:--
“Would the _gaspadine_ like to hunt him?”
There is no question on this score, so the peasant is quickly brought
to the hut. Numerous friends crowd in with him, for one person’s
business is everybody’s business in these primitive communities. For a
liberal equivalent in roubles the man agrees to act as guide, and the
start is to be made early next morning. All is arranged and he goes out
with his body-guard to make the necessary preparations. By and by there
is a stir. Our sledge-driver comes in with a long face. Then half a
dozen peasants add themselves to the family quota in the hut. Soon more
come, until the stifling room is as populous as a Mir Assembly. They
are all talking at once, and there is a great hubbub. At length one
voice louder than the rest seems to call a decision for them all. They
turn backward again, and with many gesticulations bustle through the
felted doors into the snowy streets, and through the village to a house
which they enter in a body as if with intent of sacking it. Instead
they bring out and over to our hut a slight bearded old man, bent with
the weight of many winters--the father of the peasant guide.
Humble but resolute, he faces the assembly.
“No, I cannot consent that he lead the _gaspadine_ to the Medvetch Dom.”
“But assure the ‘old one’ that his son will only point out the den and
then go away.”
The “old one” answers:--
“The bear does not come to steal my pigs. Why should I get him shot?
Besides, a bear chewed up three Buriats last year. It would be sad to
be devoured even for the _gaspadine’s_ fifty roubles.”
The reward is doubled, and forty kopecks’ worth of vodka produced. Many
advisers give aid, and one suggests that “the son may mount a tree one
hundred _sagenes_ from the mansion of the bear!”
But still the father refuses. “No, I will not allow him to take out his
horse and hunting-sledge.”
The son, whose half-dozen full-grown children are looking on, shakes
his head dolefully. A big eagle-nosed peasant, of hunting proclivities,
comes in.
“I will give my hunting-sleigh if he will go,” he calls.
But the shrill voice of the “old one” rings out again, “I do not
consent. I do not consent. My son shall not go to the mansion of the
bear.”
The guide shrugs his shoulders. We have hit the ledge of Russian
authority. No one will budge. The old man has his way.
As is the management of the household, so is that of the village. While
the _Hazan_ rules over the common property of the family (_izba_),
the village elder (_Selski Starosta_) is guardian over the grouped
households which make up the Mir. As the household goods belong to no
one individual, but are common property, so the land farmed by the
villagers is a joint possession whose title rests with the commune. The
family is held for the debts and behavior of all of its individuals;
and similarly, with certain limitations, the village community is
answerable for the taxes and discipline of each of its members.
On a humble scale it is the spirit of socialism incarnate. Within the
commune no capitalistic employers, no wage-taking worker-class, no
castes exist, and no individuals are born with special privileges. No
distinctions of rank or fortune lift some above their fellows. The
manner of living is the same for all. Each head of a family has a right
of vote, and elects by the freest, simplest means his own judges and
village rulers. The land, the source of livelihood, is divided among
the producers by their own unfettered suffrage.
The chief man of the community--he who drums out the voters to the
Mir, lists those who do not work sufficiently on the pope’s field,
and reports the toll of taxes to the Government--is simply an elderly
peasant clothed with a little brief authority. There is no household
in the average village which is looked up to as more genteel than the
rest. No such distinctions as prevail in America will reveal that such
a farmer’s family is musical and well-read, such another has traveled
to Niagara Falls, such a third has blue-ribbon sheep. In Russian
peasant circles all is equality, almost identity.
Here is presented the best example in the world to-day of an applied
system based upon the communistic as opposed to the individualistic
theory. It is therefore of more than local interest. Most apparent
of all results is the economic stagnation which has accompanied the
elimination of special rewards for special efforts. The man, more
daring or more far-sighted than his fellows, who would take for himself
the risk of a new enterprise, who would mortgage his house to buy a
reaper, or would seek a farther market, is fettered by his plodding
neighbors. His financial obligations, if he fail, fall on the others of
a common family, whose members have a veto on his freedom of action.
His own and his neighbor’s fields by the allotment are proportioned
in extent to the old hand-labor standard. A machine has few to serve
until the fields are readjusted to a new standard. While technically
a man may buy or rent lands outside the commune and may introduce a
new rotation of crops or agricultural tools, actually the inertia of
the peasants bound to him by the brotherhood of the Mir weighs the
adventurous one hopelessly to the earth. Who can persuade an assembly
of bearded conservatism-steeped “old ones” to buy for the Mir the
costly new machines? Perhaps, with the visible demonstration of profits
which private enterprise could make under an individual régime, the
doubting elders might consent. But who is there to show them when every
village checks back the swift to the lock-step of the clod?
Nor is it simply in material things that communism manifests its
lotus-fruit in these country hamlets. Ignorance, unashamed, broods
over them one and all. What a dead level is revealed by the fact that
one peasant in a populous village on the Chickoya, our guide upon a
shooting-trip, could not tell time by a watch, and had never seen such
an invention.
Some instances are related where the more ambitious men of a Mir have
clubbed together to bring in a teacher at their own expense. The
Semieski, or “Old Believers,” big, red-bearded, obstinate men, settled
in Urluck in the Zabaikal, who dissent from the sixteenth-century
revisions of Bishop Nikon, will not send children to Slavonic schools
and may have schools of their own. But these cases are rare. There
is among the peasantry almost no education and comparatively little
desire for it, yet how far this sentiment is from being a racial
or national failing the crowds that come to the city universities
bear ample witness. In one of the villages a teacher from Chita is
established in the side room of a peasant’s house, wherein one night
we sojourn. He has been appointed by the Commissioner of Schools
of the Cossack Government. He is of a good Nerchinsk family and is
brother to an elector of delegates to the second Duma. He is one of
the “Intellectuals”--the student class which forms almost a caste
by itself. A free-thinker, keenly interested in the rights of man,
a Social Democrat by politics, he goes shooting on Sunday with some
peasant cronies. He plays Russian airs on his _balilika_ and gets the
peasant’s daughter to dance for the guest. He produces specimens of
antimony and chalcopyrite, and discusses the geological probability of
finding silver or platinum ores in these districts. Photographs of the
amateur-kodak variety are along the walls, and on a table in the corner
are a mandolin and a pile of books. We pick up a volume,--“L’Évolution
de la Moralité,” by Charles Letourneau. The young owner, who consumes
a prodigious number of Moscow cigarettes, tells of the indifference to
education among the people.
“Here we have a school in a big village, with two other communities
near by. There are easily five hundred households,--with how many
children in each, you can see. Yet we have but thirty boys at school.
What can we do?”
He is discouraged, this single “Intellectual” of Gotoi. Profoundly
solicitous for the future, an idealist, boundless in hopes for the good
of his race, he sees the younger generation submerged at the threshold
of opportunity by the inertia of the old.
“‘What good will it do for him to read?’ ask the peasants, when I urge,
‘Send your boy to the school.’ What can I say? The boy comes from my
class after two years, and goes out with the men. He has no money to
buy books if he wants them. No newspapers come to the village, no
printed matter whatever, save that on the pictures which they buy in
the fairs. In a few years all I have taught is forgotten. The darkness
is over these villages. One must lift them despite themselves.”
Beyond the range of the village communes, no people show a more eager
zeal for knowledge and study. In the cities almost all of the younger
generation can read and write. The school-boys, with their big black
ear-covering caps, smart blue coats, brightened with rows of brass
buttons, and knapsacks of books, are one’s regular morning sight.
“Realistic” and “Materialistic” schools are established in many towns.
The apathy of the rural element is to be laid at the door of the system
which hinders those within the confines of the communes from reaping
the fruits of special sacrifice and effort. No one attempts to raise
himself in the Mir, where the dead weight of those bound to him is so
hopeless. If any boy, brighter than the rest, follow some lodestar,
it must be to a city. The aspirant must bury ambition, or leave the
drudging Mir with its toll of taxes and recruits. He will not study law
before the wood-fire as did Lincoln in his log cabin.
The cloud of deadening communism over their lives utters itself in
the words continuously on the peasants’ tongues. It is the northern
equivalent for that buttress of despotism--“_mañana_.” The possibility
of the Russian condition is “_nietchevo!_” If the red cock (_krasnai
petuk_) has crowed and has left the forty householders with charred
embers where stood their homes, “_nietchevo!_” They build it up of wood
and straw, with the oven chimney passing through as before. Does a
raging toothache torture, “It is the will of God,--_nietchevo_!” If the
weary day’s climb sees a gameless evening, “_nietchevo!_” If the son is
frozen in the troop-train, “_nietchevo!_” If the Little Father send to
Yakutsk the other one who has gone to the city, “_nietchevo!_” Is the
unrevised tax for a family of ten men pressing down upon three, “It has
got to be borne,--_nietchevo!_” It is this bowing to fate as a thing
begotten of the gods, when it is a force to be fought here on earth;
the long-taught submission to evil, when evil is to be conquered, to
limitation when opportunity is to be won,--it is this spirit which is
holding rural Russia still in her Dark Ages.
The origin of the present village-system goes back to the time of
serfage, when the overlord held his dependents herded together for
easy ruling. That it extended to unfettered Siberia, where the rewards
of individual effort were so obvious, cannot be laid entirely to old
custom or government compulsion. Nor is it to be explained by the early
necessity for protection against wild beasts or hostile natives. The
same dangers threatened the pioneers of our own country. Perhaps the
Russian spirit of gregariousness lies at the root of the fact that in
the Czar’s domains the peasant lives away from his fields to be near
his neighbors, while our people live away from their neighbors to be
near their fields. Whatever the cause, the outcome is that practically
the whole rural population, even in the most thinly settled districts,
is gathered into villages, and owns the lands in common.
The system makes enormously for homogeneity, welding, solidarity. The
people are a “mass.” Units are lost in unity. Nothing save Nature’s
imprint and law of individuality, that decree under which every created
thing is some way different from every other, keeps the Russian peasant
from quite losing his birthright. The commune, vodka, and resignation
are the incubi of Siberia. In the towns and cities gather the energetic
natures that have climbed out and above them. What these have done,
their allied people--the peasants--can do. Beyond the horizon of the
latter’s narrow lives lies still the borderland of possibilities. One
cannot doubt the vigor of the stock, nor the certainty of its rise.
This quality of rugged worth is the basis of all the great advance that
the pioneers and the city populations have made. It is only in the
Mirs, frozen fast in their lethargy of communism, that resurrection
seems such a far-off dream. The way is long for the peasants of
Siberia--long and toilsome. But their vast patience is allied to as
vast a courage, and both will lift them into the larger day.
The measure passed by the last Duma, decreeing the division of the Mir
lands in severalty, and private ownership of property, will be one of
the most momentous and far-reaching enactments ever legislated for a
people. It should end for rural Russia the stagnation, and open an era
of mighty endeavor and achievement.
There are many races here among the serenely tolerant Siberians,
undiscriminated against and uncoerced. While one of the Orthodox may
not abjure the state religion without severe punishment, those born to
an alien faith are unmolested by official or proselyting pope. “God has
given them their faith as he has given us ours,” is the Russian rule.
This medley of races beneath the Russian banners gives to one’s
earliest contact the conception of a heterogeneous disorganized jumble
of nations and peoples. But closer acquaintance impresses upon one
the dominating and surviving qualities innate in the Slav, whose
unalterable solidarity is beneath and behind the kaleidoscopic types
of aboriginal tribes and exiled sectarians. By race-absorption, like
that which has evolved Celts, Danes, Saxon, and Norsemen into English;
British, Dutch, Swedes, Germans and Italians into Americans, the Slav
is dissolving, transmuting to his own type and moulding to his own
institutions the varied peoples.
Though the heterogeneous blood adds to the total of Siberian country
life, it is the Slavic race that determines the permanent order of
this great land. Primarily too it is the peasantry who shape its
destiny. Their possibilities are the limit of Russia’s ascent. Their
condition is therefore of far deeper than sightseeing interest to the
student. Unlike the picturesque peasantry of Holland, here they are the
foundations of the state, forming not an insignificant minority but
ninety per cent of the population.
Somewhat of a new spirit flickers here and there in Siberian hamlets.
The peasant is superior to his Russian brother. The traditions of
serfdom were broken by his severance from the old environment, and
wider lands give him an abundance unknown save in a few favored parts
of Europe. The political exiles have through the centuries added an
upsurge of independence and personal self-consciousness, which is
markedly higher than the Oriental humility of Occidental Russia.
The influence of the criminal, as distinct from the political convict,
is felt primarily in the cities, such as Irkutsk and Vladivostok, to
which the time-expired men drift. The convict element is always met
with. It has been customary to billet a condemned, who was not wanted
at home, upon some out-of-the-way village, giving him a passport for
its confines alone. The victim might have been a Moscow professor or
a locomotive engineer, but in the Mir he must farm the land given
him. Naturally such seed as this planted in Siberian hamlets does not
produce the traditional peasant faith in God and the Czar so faithfully
preached by the popes.
Another influence making for upheaval is the returning recruit. We
are in a peasant house when a _soldat_ comes back to the family from
his service. If he has not brought any great burden of salary, he has
accumulated tales enough of the outer world to hold in breathless
excitement the circle of friends and relatives which gathers at once
when the tinkling sleigh-bells and the barking have announced to the
village his return.
Far down the street is heard the jingle of his sledge. It brings every
girl to her peep-hole window, and every boy from his sawing to the
courtyard door. At the gateway where the newcomer turns in, he is
heralded by the commotion of the household guardians, wolf-like in
appearance and nature. Everybody within the important house runs to the
door. The village knows now which family is making local history. The
arrival is accompanied already by two or three men who have recognized
him as he descends. He tramps in with military firmness of tread,
head erect. Before he greets the grandfather even, he makes the sign
of the cross to the holy ikons, and, bowing down, touches his lips
to the floor. Then comes the respectful kiss to the old man, next to
the mother, while the younger brother, soon to go to service himself,
stands awkwardly by, and the little children look half-dubiously at a
form scarcely known after his four years of absence.
Then there is a scurrying of the grown and half-grown daughters to
prepare _chai_ and to produce the _pelmenis_ and brown bread. The
villagers drift in one by one, cross themselves, and speak their
greetings, until the little house is packed, and as hot as the
steam-room of a _banno_. The vodka-bottle is out and everybody has
settled down for an indefinite stay. The soldier’s tales of war and
garrison duty and government and revolution hold the family and the
audience breathless through the long evening. As you drop asleep, the
hero is still reciting and gesticulating. The guests in departing will
be careful not to stumble over you, so _nietchevo_.
In one of the houses where we put up, a shop adjoins the big
living-room. It has dingy recesses from which hatchets and the commoner
farm utensils can be produced, shelves of homespun cloth, and gaudy
cottons for the men’s blouses, and beads for the women’s bonnets.
Here, as in the country-stores of our own land, during the long idle
winter days there is always a crowd and endless discussion of the
village events,--the health of each other’s cows, births, marriages,
deaths, drafts into the army, taxes. Even in this remoteness something
of the echo of great Russia’s struggle is heard over the shopkeeper’s
tea-cups. We hum, unthinking, a bar of _Die Beide Grenadier_, in which
a refrain of the _Marseillaise_ occurs.
A peasant looks quickly up. “It is not allowed, that song,” he says.
“Why not?”
“That is the song of the strikers.”
“But the _gaspadine_ is a foreigner. He may sing it.”
“Yes,” says the peasant, “he may sing it, but I may not. Would that I
might!”
One meets quaint characters in this inland journeying--veteran soldiers
of the Turkestan advance; “_sabbato_ sectarians,” who keep Saturday
holy rather than Sunday; austere “Old Believers,” traveling peddlers,
teamsters who have tramped beside their ponies over three provinces.
One comes upon peripatetic Mussulman doctors, in snug-fitting black
coats and small black skull-caps, who show their Arabic-worded
road-maps and much-thumbed medical works bound in worn leather. Beside
their plates at table the kindly hostess puts piles of leathery bread,
unleavened, and made without lard in deference to their caste rules.
[Illustration: PEASANT TYPES]
A shop in one village is kept by a Chinaman, who, lettered like most
of his race, seems a far shrewder and more intellectual person than
the uneducated Russian peasants. He invites the stranger to drink
tea that his special caravan brings, and presents Chinese candy with
the courtesy of a grandee. When, in reciprocity, the traveler buys
sugar for his _chai_, he receives it wrapped in paper covered with
hieroglyphics and exhaling the faint unmistakable Chinese odor.
Going always southward, one begins to meet more and more frequently
the villages of the Mongol-descended Buriats. “_Bratskie_” (brotherly
people), the Russians call them, for despite the forbidding aspect
that flat Mongolian features, high thin noses, yellow-brown skins, and
big squat bodies give them, no more peaceful, harmless, and hospitable
people exist. They are great and fearless hunters, unexcelled riders,
and though still only on the threshold of civilization, are rapidly
moving to better things.
All phases of the advance from the nomad to the agricultural stage may
be studied among them. The pastoral Buriats, decorated like the Chinese
with queues, ride around after their flocks. Their villages lie far
away from the lines of convoys, unmarked on the Ministry map, which one
is supposed to be following. Each family occupies a little windowless
wooden hut, some fifteen feet in diameter. In front of it is planted
a pole, carrying at the top a weather-faded pennant, the colors of
which in Buriat heraldry indicate the tribe and name of the occupant.
Behind the hut are stacks of hay and a wooden corral with sheep and
horses. Beside it stands the summer tent, of felt, looking like a great
inverted bowl. It is empty in winter, save for a shrine with grotesque
pictured gods, fronted by offerings.
In the homes of these least advanced Buriats we loiter no longer than
we must. The wooden house which shelters them is hermetically sealed,
and is crowded with people and animals. Fenced off in a corner of
the first that receives us is a corral of thirteen lambs, which at
uncertain moments begin to bleat suddenly in unison, producing, with
startling effect, a prodigious volume of sound. When one has been
roused from sleep half a dozen times a night by this chorus, he is
strongly inspired to move on. The men are out during the day looking to
their flocks. The women spend a good part of their time sewing furs or
making felt. They are very unclean, and it is a decided relief to get
out of their homes, to which the cold compels one to have recourse on
a long journey. In spring, with great and understandable relief, these
semi-nomads take to their felt tents and move where fancy and pasturage
dictate.
One grade higher are those Buriats who have learned some rudimentary
farming from the Orthodox. You will see the men threshing on a level
floor beside the corral. They are dressed in long blue or magenta
fur-lined cloaks and colored cone-shaped hats. Other Buriats are
permanently resident in the Slavonic settlements, and send their
rosy-faced children to school. They mix with the Russians, subject to
almost no disabilities, and their better classes contract inter-racial
marriages, which seem, to an outsider, at least, completely happy and
successful.
It is no small thing, this which Russian rule has done for the Buriats.
A people whom any other nation would spurn in racial ostracism, perhaps
would eliminate, live side by side with the good-natured Slav in
perfect accord, progressing in civilization and material well-being as
high as the individual can aspire to and attain.
They are ruled by their own chiefs, whose sway is tempered by the
benevolent supervision of the general government. They are represented
in the Duma by men of their own selection. They freely worship the
Buddhist Burhan in their lamasery near Cellinginsk, without pope to
preach or missionary to proselyte. Their easy citizenship is unharassed
by money taxes, and their only obligation is Cossack service in the
army. But Cossack service to a Buriat is what a picnic is to a boy.
Riding around on horseback, rationed by the Government, visiting a
city with real tobacco and vodka sometimes attainable, sleeping on a
straw-stuffed mattress with no tethered lambs to murder sleep, when
they are used to a sheepskin on the dirt floor,--all this is luxury of
blissful memory, during the years of the reserve. The net result is
that the Buriats are entirely content. They are progressing all along
the line, and are being made useful to the nation, not by unpayable
taxation, but by the service which they are so especially fitted to
render.
As one nears Chinese territory, by the lower waters of the Chickoya
River, the villages of Slavic colonists who hold their land on
tax-paying peasant tenure, have given place to the Buriat tribesmen
and to the _stanitzas_ of the Cossack guard that occupy the pale of
land flanking the frontier. Within this border-belt, every village
_stanitza_ holds its quota of Cossacks. These soldiers are for the
most part descendants of the levies from the Don region, transplanted
to the Trans-Baikal by the Government’s despotic hand in the
eighteenth century, and since then forming an hereditary military
caste. Many of them are bearded Slavs, indistinguishable, save for
their accoutrements, from their more peaceful neighbors. Others
are of a peculiar cast of countenance, due to the mixture with the
Asiatic tribes in ancient times, when the hunted people fled to their
ancestors’ asylum, the territories beyond the Volga and on the Don.
There is great variation in type among the imported Cossacks. Most are
Orthodox, but a very large number are “Old Believers,” or Semieski. In
all the houses now hang the yellow cap and the uniform coat, which must
be ever ready against the call of duty. Arms are in the corners of the
rooms, and everything has a military look, in marked contrast to the
peasant homes. Crude, highly-colored prints of Japanese defeats, which
circulated broadcast in Russia during the war, share the attention
usually devoted exclusively to holy ikons. Portraits of Generals
Linevitch and Kuropatkin, and Admiral Alexiev, are tacked to the
walls. In one house we saw hanging a prized silver watch, one of those
distributed by General Rennenkamp among the soldiers of his command.
One of our Cossack hosts is an old man, Orthodox, and of Russian
origin, but with some ancient Asiatic blood, for only a stringy beard
grows on his kindly, wrinkled face. With reluctant pride he tells of
his three sons away on service, leaving but himself and two daughters
at home. With frank happiness he shows you his medals. Every soldier at
the front received a round brass service-medal; his, however, a silver
cross with St. George and the Dragon on it, is given for valor. He will
not drink the vodka he offers you,--rheumatism. But in order that you
may smoke some alleged tobacco that greatly interests him because he
gathered it himself by the roadside, in Manchuria, he starts up his
pipe despite the dust-induced coughs that it begets. He is a kindly,
loquacious old man.
Another Cossack, privileged to the broad yellow top on his cap and
the yellow stripe on his trousers, is, for the time, our guide and
gun-carrier. His flat strongly-mustached face is open and ingenuous. He
tells of his _sotnia_ in Manchuria.
“I was with Mitschenko at the front during the war, in his great
raid,” he says. “Ten of our _sotnia_ of a hundred were killed, forty
wounded. We got behind the Japanese and burned four hundred of their
wagons. We had two hundred rounds of cartridges, and more when we
wanted them. But food often not, and meat sometimes not for two months.
We had thirty Buriats in our hundred, but the Verhneudinsk Polk were
almost all Buriats.”
In one house where ikons, oven, bench, and stockade reveal the Slav
peasant’s home, the mirrors are shrouded for their forty days’
veiling. It is a place of death. The owner was a full-blooded Buriat
married to a Russian woman. In silent grief she plods through her
mechanically-executed duties. Their son, in red blouse, is in prayer
beside his father’s body. They have pressed us to remain. The advent
of strangers seems to distract their thoughts a little. From outside
comes a hail, and heavily there dismounts from his pony an old grizzled
Buriat Cossack. He has ridden two hundred versts to pay this last
respect to his friend.
His military training makes the Cossack a little less gentle than the
average peasant. When off duty, hen-roosts near a garrison are in
some danger. For the rest, he is naturally brave, generous, and will
share the chicken he has just ridden forty versts to lift. He will
give his pipe to be smoked, and will behave with a thoughtfulness and
courtesy that is not found in finer circles. His children have the free
unrepressed air which speaks of genial home kindliness and sympathy.
His wife is far from being a mute drudge.
Assuredly this is not the Cossack of legendary fame, the “implacable
knout” of the czars. It requires almost courage, in the face of the
savage of literary tradition, to assert that the Cossack is other than
a dehumanized monster of oppression. Why then did he cut down with
utter ruthlessness the helplessly frozen grenadiers of the Grande
Armée? Why will he massacre indiscriminately men, women, and children
on his path from Tien-tsin to Peking? Why will he beat with his knotted
whip the striking girl students of Kiev? Who shall tell? To a certain
extent he is callous to suffering because of a defective imagination.
He will ride his best horse to death if need be. Loving it, he will yet
leave it out in weather forty below. He is cruel, often, because he
has not the substituting gift needed to translate another’s suffering
into terms of his own. He is valorous because, even so far as regards
himself, he cannot think beyond the immediate privation into the future
of imaged dread, so he goes fearlessly into unpondered peril. He
offends the traditional ideas of humanity and civilization in killing
people, because of his failure to recognize a wider radius of sympathy
than circles his own tribe. But if the tribe circumscribes his idea,
the nation circumscribes the sympathies of others who make tariffs to
crush an extra-national industry and raise armies to destroy a foreign
liberty. But if outside the Cossack’s recognized circle, you are to
him beyond the pale, in his home, you are, _ipso facto_, a member of
the tribe, a brother in whose defense he will gayly risk his life, and
spend his substance.
The deeds that are recalled to the Cossack’s discredit often fall for
judgment really to those who plan and issue the orders which loyalty
makes him obey. Where his allegiance has been once given, there it
remains. His _hataman_ is more than a superior officer; he is the chief
of the clan, the head of all the tribe, and the subordinate is united
to him by the traditions of centuries of mutual dependence. Where other
than blood-kin officers are put over the Cossack he mutinies, as when,
in Manchuria, Petersburg-schooled lieutenants were drafted and raised
to command. But give him his own rightful chief, then if the Cossack is
told to do something it is done. He will cross himself and jump from
the tower, as in Holland did Peter the Great’s guardsman at the word of
the chief to whom he had given his loyalty.
The savage valor of the warriors in Verestchagin’s picture, _The
Cossack’s Answer_, is typical of the spirit of these soldiers.
Surrounded by battalions of the foe, fated to annihilation when the
summons to surrender is rejected, the leaders, laughing uproariously in
approval, hear their _hataman_ dictate the insulting reply that dooms
them all. If one would ride to China he can have no better guards and
comrades than the Cossacks.
We are close to the border now, climbing the last crest which separates
the Chickoya from the Cellinga Valley, our toiling tired ponies white
with frost. All day the long sweep of the hills has been taken through
heavy snow. The landscape is barren, desolate, and lifeless save for
the occasional sight of a distant Buriat horseman. The sun is slowly
sinking.
The crest at last! The driver points with his whip to the dark masses
of houses below, wreathed in the curling smoke of the evening fires.
Here and there is a brilliantly painted building or tower, and sleighs
and horsemen are passing in the streets. “Troitzkosavsk!” he says. He
points further ahead to another more distant town, whose most dominant
features are the great square tea-caravansaries and a mighty church,
green-domed, with a gilded far-glimmering cross. The huddled houses
end sharply toward the south, as if a ruler had marked off their limit
in a straight stretch of white. Along this pale are little square
sentry-boxes, striped black and white. In the evening sun a distant
glint of steel flashes from the bayonet of a pacing sentry. “Kiahta!”
the driver says. Then, across the white strip where a wooden stockade
girds a settlement of gray-walled compounds, fluttering with tiny
flags, gay with lofty towers and temples flaunting their red eaves, he
points a third time: “Kitai!” (China).
He picks up the reins, and lifts the whip; “Scurry!” he cries to the
horses. The ponies leap forward, throwing their weight against duga
and collar, and we sweep down the hill toward the nearest Russian town,
Troitzkosavsk, four versts from the border.
As we come down to the main road hard-by the town, officers of the
garrison drive past with their spick-and-span fast trotters, city-wise,
as one sees them in Irkutsk. Behind rolls a Mongol cart driven by a
burly Chinaman. A Buriat, come to town to replenish his supply of
powder and ball, follows on his shaggy pony.
Down a long street, flanked first by log cabins with courtyards and
fences like those in the peasant villages, then by stucco-plastered
houses, cement-walled government buildings, and great whitewashed
churches, we pass and reach the centre of the town. Then we turn up a
side street to the house of a mine-owner, to whom we are accredited.
Nicolai Vladimirovitch Tobagov meets us at the door of his log house,
clad in gray flannel shirt and knee-boots. A not unnoteworthy product
of Siberia is this man,--squarely built and yet wiry, with nervous
strength expressed on his bearded face. He is self-made, risen
from the masses. A peasant-boy, he started life as assistant to a
surveyor, learning to read and write by his own efforts. During this
apprenticeship he studied his chief’s books on geology, by the light
of the brands for the samovar in the peasants’ houses where they were
billeted nightly.
He located placer gold in a number of spots, at a time when the oblast
was a lawless “no man’s domain,” without any legal means in existence
for acquiring title to property. Guarding in silence his secret, he
waited years, until at last a mining-law was enacted for the oblast
where his prospects lay. When this law ultimately made private
ownership possible, he started in to realize. A friend lent him the
money for a mill, which he constructed, according to book-descriptions,
on the model of those in California. At first it failed to work, and
broke again and again. His riffles were set too steeply. They had let
the gold scour away, and his neighbors reported that there was no
gold to collect. But he fought it through to victory, returned every
borrowed kopeck with interest, bought new machines, and prospered; till
now, besides controlling several mines, he possesses a great domain in
the river valley, some hundred versts away, with fields of wheat and
rye and hay-meadows.
When the visitor has stamped the snow from his felt boots and emerged
from his shaggy bearskin coat and hooded fur cap, he enters the main
room, with its walls of great logs bare of ornament and showing the
scorings of the axe, but clean as new-planed wood can be. Between
the chinks straw and moss are packed to keep out the cold. Two great
benches flank the sides of the room. Not a picture, not an ornament,
not a curtain, not a drapery, not a shelf, breaks the plainness
of the log wall, but here and there are hung guns and rifles. In
essentials this large house does not greatly differ from the typical
peasant’s dwelling. But a copy of the “Sibir” newspaper lies on the
table, and photographs of the female members of the family are added
to the many reproductions of relations in military dress, which the
photographer has touched up with brilliant dashes of red, to pay
tribute to the coat-lining, and white to indicate the gloves. Lamps
replace the lowly tapers, and they burn before more gorgeously gilt
ikons. The windows are double, with cotton-wool and strips of colored
paper between. This is a great improvement on the single ice-crusted
window, with its perpetual drippings down along the sill. There are
the little sheet-iron stoves, whitewashed after the tradition of the
oven; chairs with backs, as well as the square stools; and small rooms
curtained off from each other. A clock hangs on the wall, and there are
carpets on the floor. A large table stands at one end, on which is the
ever-boiling samovar, which is nickel instead of brass.
We are made acquainted with the wife of the host, a stout matron of
fine domestic proclivities. Though of humble origin, she has discarded
her peasant shako and bandana-handkerchief headdress for a bonnet, and
dispenses, as to the manner born, many luxuries. On the other hand,
she has lost the robustness which keeps her peasant sisters fresh and
hearty. Sewing-machines, and beds, and servants, must exact toll even
in Siberia. Her boys are clean-cut and intelligent. They go to school
and are the future “Intellectuals” that are seeding Siberia. Sixteen
children--eleven Nicolai Tobagov’s own, five adopted in open-hearted
generosity--sit down to four very solid meals a day in the big hall.
Ivan Simeonski, _optovie_ and _argove_ merchant, and Nicita Baeschoef
the lieutenant, traveling west on furlough, are stopping in this
friendly house, and many other guests are here. The hospitality of the
household is conducted on a scale of patriarchal magnificence.
Before our furs are fairly off, the host has called aloud for _obeid_.
One’s first formality is, as usual, to salute the ikons and the guests.
One’s second is to escape the scalding vodka, seventy proof, and then
begin with the _zakuska_ of ten cold dishes on the side table. There is
black caviar from the Volga, though the rapid diminution of the supply
has raised the price to ten roubles a pound. There is red caviar from
the Chickoya, cold mutton, cold sturgeon, sardines, ham, and sliced
sausages made at home. The latter must be abundantly and appreciatively
sampled, because they have been specially prepared under the direction
of the _souprouga_ herself. One stands before the _zakuska_ and dips
from dish to dish. Next, the guests take the square wooden stools and
draw up to the great table, where the plates are set for the real
dinner. Each one helps himself to the smoking soup, which is passed
in the tureen. As this is being ladled, a plate of round balls comes
by, the delicious _piroushki_, dough-shells filled with hashed meat,
always served with soup. We have entered upon a typical Siberian meal,
with the boiled soup-meat eaten as the second course, and madeira,
champagne, claret, and rum, indiscriminately offered. A perfect babel
of conversation goes on, and one is pressed to try this, try that, try
each and everything of the long menu, under the watchful eyes of the
kindly host and hostess.
At all times of the day the samovar is left simmering, ready for
any one of the multitudinous household to brew tea, and constantly
replenished _zakuska_ dishes deck the sideboard. Guests, attendants,
children, and friends come and go in the utmost freedom. Such is the
_Hazan’s_ life.
In another part of the building there stuffs to repletion an army of
dependents. Servants, artisans, drivers from the caravans which pass
up from China by the road below the house, a whole other below-stairs
world is here. Twenty caravan teamsters, _karetniki_ or _isvoschniki_
of the sledges and carts that fill the ample courtyard, huddle in the
back rooms for tea. An old bespectacled maker of string-net doilies,
who reads Alexander Pushkin’s poems, is working out a week’s board in
the room where the chickens are kept. The housewife does not disdain,
either, to find a place for the traveling _sapojnik_, who will put
leather reinforcements on the felt boots which have been worn
through at the heel. It is a large easy way of living, this of the man
who holds a leading place in the border city.
[Illustration: A CHICKOYA GIRL]
[Illustration: TROITZKOSAVSK STUDENT]
A mixture of crudeness and culture, of luxury and hardship, of Orient
and Occident, runs through the quaint fabric of frontier society, with
its medley of races and types. Fine avenues flanked by stuccoed houses
pierce the main city. Back of them lie the log houses of the plainer
citizens, while the outskirts are occupied by the felt huts of the
Buriats and Mongols. Students in uniform elbow Cossacks of the Guard,
and maidens from the seminary brush the Mongol wood-choppers.
“Téatre?” suggests one evening the twenty-year-old son of your host.
Of course the invitation is accepted. At eight o’clock you put on your
felt boots, and tramp down past dark-shuttered log houses and the
silent white church into the field, where stands a barn-like building
placarded with the programme. The young guide secures seats at the
ticket-counter of rough lumber. Seventy-five kopecks they are, each.
With them are handed out eight numbered slips of red paper. Then
together you break a way to the front rows, through the crowd of burly
Cossacks of the garrison, bearskin-capped students, citizens with shiny
black boots, and here and there a husky stolid-faced Buriat. Keeping
hat and coat on, as does every one else, we find seats on the rough
benches wheresoever we like or can; for nothing is reserved save the
elevated perch of the musicians, where a four-piece orchestra drones
out a monotonous Russian march. What a fire-trap! is the first thought.
To each of the posts that sustain the rafters is fastened a lamp
shedding an uncertain light on the hangings of bright-red cotton cloth,
in dangerous proximity to which, utterly disregarding the “no smoking”
signs, stand the crowd of forty-kopeck admissions, rolling and smoking
perpetual _papirosi_.
As the impatient audience begins to pound and stamp, a bell rings, and
the curtain rises on two comic characters busily engaged in packing for
a hurried departure from their lodging. The stage has become a room,
with red-cotton-covered walls and bright green curtains. A merchant
comes with a bill for comestibles six months due. He is quieted with
extravagant tales of forthcoming change for a hundred-thousand-rouble
note. The landlady enters, and the shoemaker’s apprentice with a pair
of mended boots. Both are likewise cajoled and bullied away. The Jewish
money-lender is more difficult, but at length, to the manifest delight
of the audience, he, too, is staved off, and the pair draw the vivid
green curtains and go out through a window for parts unknown, amid much
glee and applause.
We now go out to the “buffet” and contribute to the dangers of
conflagration by smoking an offered cigarette. We also add to the
theatre’s income by buying a glass of hot _chai_ for ten kopecks.
Something special is in the air for the next act. The audience is
buzzing and moving in eager expectancy. We return to our seats. The
curtain rises upon a double row of two-_pud_ (sixty-four-pound)
weights, such as are used at the bazaar to sell frozen beef. Amid a
thunder of stampings on the plank floor one of the escaping debtors
of the last act, dressed in tights, comes out from behind the green
curtains, and lifts one of these above his head. Then he poises one
with each hand. Finally a wooden harness is adjusted to his body, and
sixteen weights (or about half a ton), are heaped upon him by the
jack-booted Buriat stage-attendant on one side, and the defrauded
merchant of the first play on the other. It is the most unspectacular
performance possible, this athletic test, but it takes the place of a
football match in Siberia. The applause is ferociously appreciative.
More _chai_ and cigarettes, and we come back to hear a very pretty
girl, dressed in the peasant’s costume of Little Russia, head a chorus,
and to see a boy in red blouse and boots dance the wild dervish whirl
which the peasants of tradition are supposed to execute. The boy is
in the midst of his performance when there is a tumult among the
forty-kopeckers under the musicians’ eyrie. The latter, being human,
try to watch what is going on below and play jig-music at the same
time, and sharps and flats fly wide of the mark till the sounds become
frightful. Everybody jumps up on his bench to see a peasant having a
turn with a Buriat, and further trouble brewing with a Cossack who has
got upset in the mêlée. There is a chaos of tossing hats and brandished
fists, and the two armed soldiers who are on guard as policemen press
in, with gruff shouts to make them way. The tumult finally goes out the
door and into the street, and we turn back to the poor dancer still
trying to beat out his stunt.
The curtain rises next on the manager, who has been up to date
weight-lifter, escaping boarder, and part of the peasants’ chorus. He
is seated at a table, looking very ordinary in his street clothes.
Behind him is another table covered with an assortment of crockery,
mirrors, spoons, vases, pieces of cotton cloth, and a big striking
clock. He calls for a volunteer from the audience for some unknown
purpose, and a little rosy-cheeked uniformed Buriat schoolboy, who
has been peeking behind flapping curtain between the acts, responds.
The boy reaches into a box and pulls out a slip of paper. The manager
reads a number from it, “_Sto piatdeciet sem_.” An eager voice from the
rear answers “_Jes!_” The stage-attendant takes a glass tumbler from
the table and carries it solemnly to the man who has answered. Your
host nudges until you comprehend that you are to excavate the eight
theatre-slips, which you do, to find that two only are seat-tickets.
The rest are numbered billets, and you are liable at any moment to
receive a perfumery-bottle or a candlestick from the lottery which is
in progress. The scene now takes on an imminent personal interest
shared with the banked forty-kopeckers behind. A breathless strain
accompanies the drawing of the numbers. It mounts to a climax as the
big musical clock is approached. The fateful billet is at last drawn
in intense silence. Every eye is fixed on the reader. Not a Cossack
speaks, not a Mongol moves.
“_Dvesti tri!_” and a sharp “_Moi!_” tells that the clock goes to
ornament the table of a burly peasant, who grinningly receives it. The
tense breaths are let out, the forms relax, and the crowd straggles to
the door, lighting cigarettes and pulling down caps. The drama is over.
Next morning at eight a soldier visits your host with a message from
his chief.
“Bring to the police-station the passport of the stranger seen with you
at the theatre last night.”
A town droshky will take one the few versts to Kiahta, where in the
Geographical Society’s museum is the celebrated sketch of the Dalai
Lama made at Urga by a Russian artist, when the young Tibetan monk
had fled before the English expedition to Lhassa. Here, too, are ore
samples and reconstructed Mongolian tents. But it is hard to look
at fossil rhinoceros-heads and at stuffed sabre-toothed tigers and
musk-deer when the camel-trains are passing and China is a verst away.
A courier is necessary now, for resourceful Jacov and driver Ivan are
strangers beyond the border. Perhaps our host knows of a man acquainted
in Mongolia? He will inquire. Next day there presents himself a slight,
bearded, intellectual man, Alexander Simeonovich Koratkov, usually
called, for short, “Alexsimevich.” Bachelor of forty, educated in
the Troitzkosavsk “Realistic” school. He speaks, as well as Russian,
Mongolian, English, French, German, and some Chinese. He has translated
for the English engineers who were brought in to work the Nerchinsk
mines. He is deeply read in Buddhist mythology and sociology. Will he
go down into Mongolia with you? Yes; and so it is arranged.
Provisions are cheap and abundant in the Siberian towns. Sixty kopecks
buy a pound of caravan tea, seventeen kopecks a pound of sugar, the
sort that comes in a cone like a Kalmuck hat. It is a luxury by warrant
of public opinion, so much that it has, of note, been served on baked
potatoes. Before the Buddha pictures of the Buriats, a few lumps may
be the choicest offering. Flour costs six kopecks a pound. Beef, if a
great pud-weight forequarter is bought at the market, twenty kopecks.
Frozen butter will cost twenty-five kopecks per pound. Eggs, of the
Siberian cold-storage variety, forty-eight kopecks a dozen. For thirty
kopecks one gets a piece of milk as big as one’s head. But do not try
to go beyond the native produce, for canned goods, coffee, or sardines.
It is bankruptcy speedier than buying bear-holes. A big magazine will
sell pâté de foie gras, imported from France, at two roubles the tin;
while beneath the Chinese caravansaries’ arcade, bales of tea will be
sold at a few kopecks a pound. One gets cigars in a glass-covered box,
with the government stamp, for a rouble and a half, and they will be
worth about as much as the strings of twisted tobacco-rope which the
Mongols carry off as their single cherished luxury.
And now for transportation. The sledge can serve no more, for the snow
goes bare in places along the caravan trail. We must have a tarantass,
and in time one is produced for inspection. A cask sawed in half,
lengthwise, is the image of its body, a lumber-cart the model of its
clumsy wheels and framework. To the tarantass is hitched the trotter,
with his big bow yoke to bring the weight of collar and shafts on his
back rather than against his neck. At each side of him, with much such
a rig as is used to tow canal-boats, are made fast the two galloping
horses.
When one goes beyond the post-route with his own equipage he has,
fastened under the driver’s seat and behind his own, bags of oats and
hay, which must serve as emergency-rations for the horses against the
days in which none can be secured along the often deserted trail.
Personal provender must be likewise stored away, bags of bread, frozen
dumplings to make soup with, tea, sugar, milk-chocolate, milk, candles,
cheese, matches, kettles, and whatever else one can think of, or
that the ingenuity of Alexsimevich can devise. Hay is piled into the
tarantass bottom to supply the want of springs.
A driver who knows the trails has been found, André Banchelski, a tall
Siberian, of timbering and hunting antecedents, who has a small stock
of Mongol idioms regarding the price of hay and the location of water.
He has reached a very good understanding with Katrinka, one of the
household dependents, and Nicolai is taking an interest in him.
To-night we go to sleep on Nicolai’s plank couch, ready for the march
of the next day. All is ready. To-morrow we cross the Chinese frontier.
V
IN TATAR TENTS
The shaggy ponies, white with the frost of the morning, stand harnessed
to the tarantass; André in his belted sheepskin _shuba_, whip in hand,
is perched on the bag of oats; Alexsimevich sits in a greatcoat of
deerskin, with only a nose and a triangle of black beard visible. The
host, in his gray surtout, and the red-bloused drivers of the sledges
scattered in the courtyard, all have left their samovars to see the
start. The children of the family peep from behind the mother with her
gray shawl-covered head. They group at one side, under the eaves of the
doorway, while Josef, one of the household servants, swings back the
ponderous gates. The reins are drawn in, the whip is lifted, the horses
are leaning forward into their collars, when the cry of “André!” comes
through the opening doorway.
From behind the gathered onlookers, who turn at the sound, runs out
Katrinka, dressed in her best red frock. “André!” she cries. He pulls
back the starting horses, and Katrinka lifts up to him a little bag
embroidered with his initials in blue and red. “For your tobacco.”
He looks down into her eyes and smiles. “_Spasiba_ _loubesnaia_,” he
says, and pushes it into the breast of his shuba.
“_De svidania_, André!” she whispers, then runs back, confused.
The teamsters laugh, pleased and amused as big children at her blushes,
and her brother shouts a commentary from the gateway. “_Vperiod!
vperiod!_” says the interpreter. He has reached forty now without
falling before the charms of any Siberian girl, and he does not
sympathize. “On! on!”
The horses swing out of the great gateway into the snowy streets, with
“Good-bye! Good road!” called in chorus after us.
At a slow trot the lumbering carriage rolls through the quiet town,
misty in the cold of the morning. The row of shuttered shops, with
their crude pictures of the wares within, are opening for the day.
The little park with the benches, which are trysting-places of summer
evenings, cushioned now with six inches of snow, and the low log houses
beyond, loom up and retire rearward, as we pass. The white church and
the fenced cemetery of Troitzkosavsk are left behind, and we are on the
broad paved road by which a sharp trot of half an hour brings us to
Kiahta.
Its scattered houses now in turn begin. The big tea-compound, of four
square white walls, flanks us and is gone. The officials’ residences
and the barracks of the garrison appear and vanish behind. The street
opens out into a big square, where, shimmering against the white
ground, stands the great church of _Voskresenie_, the Resurrection.
On its green dome, lifted high in appeal and in promise, gleams the
gilded cross. In white and green and gold Russia raises inspiringly
the symbols of Slavonic faith before the doors of the heathen empire.
As we pass the white Russian church, the litany of the popes and the
answering chant of the choir come faintly wafted from within. But even
as the Christians sing, the clash of distant cymbals and the roll of a
far-off prayer-drum meet and mingle with the echoes. On the hill across
the border, in vivid scarlet against the snow, with painted walls,
sacred dragon-eaves, and flapping bannerets, flames a Chinese temple.
Here now is the borderland of empires. The neutral strip is in front,
a hundred _sagenes_ broad. The Cossack sentries stand at ease before
their striped boxes, which face toward Mongolia. Far to the east and
far to the west are seen stretching the long lines of posts marking the
boundary. The outmost sentry, as the tarantass rolls across the strip,
hails you with a last “_De svidania!_” (God speed!)
Past the Chinese boundary-post, covered with hieroglyphic placards and
shaped like the lotus-bud, we drive, and in under the painted gateway
of the gray-plastered wall. No Männlicher-armed Chinese regulars,
like those that in Manchuria throng to hold what is lost, guard this
half-forgotten road. No sentry watches; no custom-officer bids the
strangers stop. Through the open gate we ride into the narrow street of
the trading city of the frontier--Maimachen, the unguarded back door to
China.
In life one is granted some few great impressions. None is more
striking than that experienced in passing beneath the shadow of this
gabled gateway. Behind are kindred men, the manners of one’s own kind,
police, churches, droshkys, museums, theatres, the whole fabric of
European civilization. From all these one is cut away in the moment of
time taken in passing the neutral strip. Two hundred yards have thrust
one into the antithesis of all western experience, into an utterly
strange environment, where the most remarkable of the world’s Asian
races lives and trades, works and rules.
Everything which is made sensually manifest by sight, by sound, by
scent, by action, is weirdly alien. You three in the tarantass are as
men from Mars, isolated, and moving among people foreign to your every
interest and experience. The solitary strangeness of your little party
in the tarantass, started into a forbidding land, the first confronting
vision of the eternal Orient--these are the things for which men travel.
As you go slowly down the narrow lane-like street, you catch glimpses
of banner-decked courtyards seen through great barred doors in the
gray mud walls. Here and there a sallow blue-coated Chinaman, with
skull-cap and queue, passes by, his folded hands tucked into his long
sleeves, fur-lined against the cold. Chinese booths and shops are open.
Waiting traders, seeing yet invisible, behind the many-paned paper
windows, look outward through the peep-hole.
In the city square a halt is made before a Chinese store, for a last
provisioning. At the entrance half a dozen Russian sledges are drawn
up. Here can be had the supply of small silver coins indispensable for
the road, canned goods of European origin, and a bottle whose contents
may be less like medicine than is vodka. Though the goods come all
the way from Peking on camel-back, they are much cheaper than the
tax-burdened provisions over the border in Russia. Indeed many of the
main Chinese stores, with their surprising stocks of wines and pâtés de
foie gras, candies, and Philippine tobacco, are supported by Russian
inhabitants of Kiahta and Troitzkosavsk. It is amusing to watch the
enveloping of champagne-bottles in sleigh-robes, and the secreting of
cigars beneath fur caps for the return journey.
We stroll a little way down the street, among the Chinese booths for
native wares, where sturdy shuba-robed Mongol tribesmen are bartering
sheepskins for blue cotton cloth, metal trinkets, quaint long-stemmed
metal pipes, and wool-shears with big handles. They are probably
getting deeper in debt, as usual, to the wily traders. We pass the
haymarket in the shade of a ruined temple, where the Mongols have
heaped their little bundles of provender.
All the while one has an eerie undefined sentiment that something is
lacking. It is not that the houses which face the narrow main street
are low and poor, that the gray mud-walled compounds are grimly
unwelcoming with their closed iron-studded gates. It is not that the
small stocks of goods in the shops tell of a vanished prosperity, now
that the bulk of the tea-trade has left. It is not anything material,
but an oppressive indefinable feeling that something is lacking. Only
when Alexsimevich makes a chance remark, do you realize consciously
what it was you instinctively felt, “It is queer to be in a city where
there is not a woman or child.”
Some have explained the exclusion law which controls the situation by
the self-sufficiency of the Chinese, who wished no real settlement of
their people here,--the fruit of a pride deep-rooted as that underlying
the custom which brings every corpse back to China for burial. Others,
by the desire to avoid transmitting to the Empire the diseases that are
rife in Mongolia. Whatever the basis, the regulation is in full force
to-day. At one time merchants in Maimachen kept their wives across
the border in Russia, which under a subterfuge was not technically
forbidden. But the ability to hide behind a technicality is a blessing
enjoyed especially in democracies. It did not go with the chief of
police, who came down for a squeeze which made it more profitable to
pay the women’s fare home than to continue to offend.
[Illustration: A WAYSIDE TEMPLE]
Associating with the native Mongol women is here precluded by the fact
that there are no settlements near by from which the Chinese might get
indigenous consolation. A deserted tract lies behind the town. Only
camel-drivers, wood-cutters, and sellers of cattle come into Maimachen,
and they leave at night. For though the Mongols, in their pointed hats,
pass along the streets, none may lawfully live within the stockaded
walls, and none keep shop beneath the carved eaves of the houses which
flank its narrow streets. This is the prerogative of Chinese traders
from beyond the far-off Wall.
The spectacled merchant Tu-Shiti, who has become prosperous from the
sale of Mongol wool, retakes for a visit, every two years, the long
camel-trail to Kalgan and China. The tea-trader, Chantu-fou, drinks
his wares alone. The slant-eyed clerks and booth-keepers trotting down
the streets in their skull-caps, hands tucked up the sleeves of their
blue jackets, plan no theatre-parties or amity balls, or sleigh-rides
in the biting air, as over the way in Kiahta. The seller of sweetmeats
will never be told to be sure and inclose the red and black New Year’s
card. There is no red-cheeked Chinese boy to smile as he munches your
sugar; to puzzle over your ticking watch as at Kotoi, or to tease the
tame crane in the courtyard. Not a girl appears on the narrow streets.
It is the sentence passed upon the generations of Chinese who have
gone to Mongolia, that no woman of their race shall pass the Wall. And
so it must remain, for never a home will be founded till China, the
unchanging, shall change.
Back and forth through the thoroughfares go the little men with the
queues flapping against their backs and their sallow uncommunicative
faces. Are they thinking of the time when they will have made their
little fortunes and can get back to China to enjoy them? As they wait
for customers in the little booths, do they plan the homes which none
of their blood may ever possess in Mongolia? When they sleep on their
wooden platforms, do they dream of faces in the Kingdom of the Sun?
Never will one know. Around the thoughts of the Chinaman arise the
ramparts of his isolation. What he believes, what he hopes, what he
dreams are not for you. The soul of China is behind the Wall.
The tarantass rolls out of the quaint weather-worn gateway of the
woman-less city of Maimachen. “How much they miss!” says André,
filling his pipe from the new pouch. “How much they escape!” retorts
Alexsimevich.
When in hot haste Pharaoh ordered out his great war-chariot to pursue
the rebellious Children of Israel, and thundered through his pyloned
gateway with plunging horses urged by the shouts of his Nubian
charioteers, he must have experienced, despite contrasts, much the same
physical sensations as those which we feel when the tarantass starts in
full gallop across the level plain to the distant range of mountains;
but where Pharaoh’s robe was white with dust, ours is white with snow,
and the sun, which baked his road, makes ours endurable.
The horses leap free under the knotted lash of the Siberian driver.
With the rumble of low thunder the ponderous wooden wheels bound over
the rutty road, hurling the springless tarantass into the air and from
side to side. You brace yourself with baggage and hold to the sides,
but toss despite all, like corn in a popper. The hay on which you sit
shifts away to one side, leaving the bare boards to rub through clothes
and packs. A sudden splinter makes you jump like a startled deer beside
the way. In this noisy tarantass, down the narrow road grooved with
the ruts of the Mongol carts and sledges that have gone northward, you
tumble and groan and bump and roll out across the open country.
There is a wide plain from Maimachen. It climbs into the first
barrier-range and the forest belt of Mongolia, whose plateau is the
third terrace in the rise of land from the low frozen flats of the
Northern Lena to the Roof of the World,--the Himalayas of the south.
The northern city of Yakutsk is at a very low elevation, only a few
feet above the sea. Irkutsk on the fifty-second parallel is 1521 feet
in altitude, Troitzkosavsk on the fifty-first is 2600, Urga on the
forty-eighth 3770, Lhassa 11,000 feet.
Far to the northwest, Mongolia is a forested fur region; far to the
south is Shama--the desert. Here at the north and east the forested
belt of the Siberian highlands south of Baikal breaks off almost at the
boundary.
Snow is over everything, but thinly. It has been worn away on the road,
leaving brown patches over which the tarantass, mounting the long
slope with horses at a slow trot, lugubriously thuds. A long stretch
of straggly trees and stumps tells of Kiahta peasants going over the
border to cut wood where no timber-laws limit. Up and up we go, the
way steeper every _sagene_,--afoot now and the horses leaning and
pulling at the traces. Finally silhouetted against the sky appears a
rough pile of stones. At its top bannerets are waving from drooping
poles. It is the Borisan on the summit of the pass to which every
pious Mongol adds an offering, until the pile is many feet high, with
stones, sticks, pieces of bread and bones. Some throw money which
no one save a Chinaman will commit the sacrilege of touching; some
give a Moscow paper-wrapped sweetmeat, some a child’s worn hat or
yellow-printed prayer-cloths waving on their sticks and fading in the
wind;--everything is holy that is given to the gods.
A piercing wind, searching and paralyzing, meets the tarantass
beyond the crest at the southern border of the forest: it is Gobi’s
compliments to Baikal, the salute of the great desert to the great
lake. The horses stumble through the drifted snow, scarcely able to
walk. The driver, blinded, half-frozen, keeps to the general direction
of the obliterated trail. Barely one verst an hour is made, until,
under the shelter of the bald white range of hills, the road reappears
and the wind is warded off.
A rolling plain between the heights is the next stretch of the way. The
afternoon sun, dimly bright, creeps haloed through the lightly falling
snow. Deep in the mist appears a dark moving mass. It grows, focuses,
and takes shape into a shaggy beast of burden, and camel after camel
emerges from the haze, loaded with square bales of tea.
“Ask if there is shelter near,” you shout to the muffled head of the
interpreter.
“I will ask,” he replies. Then to the caravan leader: “_Sein oh!_” he
cries in greeting.
The foremost camel stares stonily as its Mongol driver twitches the
piece of wood which pierces its upper lip, and the whole train stops.
“_Gir orhum beine?_”
“_Ti, ti, orhum beine!_” comes the answer. “It is close at hand.”
Forward the caravan slowly paces, each camel turning his head to stare
as he passes out into the mist again. One of them has left a fleck of
blood in each print of his broad spongy foot which the driver will
cobble with leather at the next halt. Along their trail you drive
southward. The mist is clearing as you rise, and the sun shines down
on the snow which has crystalized in little shafts an inch high. These
spear-shaped slivers have a brightness and a sheen of extraordinary
brilliance, and like prisms show all the colors of the rainbow. They
cast a gleam, as might a mirror, a hundred yards away. It is as if upon
the great white mantle had been thrown haphazard treasuries in rubies
and emeralds and diamonds and opals,--myriad evergrowing rivals of
Dresden regalias. The sun goes down with its necromancy. Beyond, the
soft blanket enfolds the rolling hills. It drapes the rocks and weaves
its drooping festoons about the barren mountain-sides.
“Mongol _yurta_!” calls André, turning to point out with his whip the
low dome-shaped hut, black against the darkening sky. On its unknown
occupants we are to billet ourselves, sheltered by the rule of nomad
hospitality. As the tarantass nears the wattled corral, the watchful
ravens stir from their perches. The picketed camels turn to stare. A
gaunt black hound stalks out, with mane erect and ominous growls.
“_Nohoi_,” cries out Alexsimevich, to the inhabitants of the hut; then
adds to you, “Very bad dogs! It is a Mongol proverb: ‘If you are near a
dog, you are near a bite.’”
Beneath an osier-built lean-to a woman is milking a sheep, with a lamb
to encourage the flow. She calls a guttural order to the dog, which
slinks back. Then she comes to the wattled fence, while the sheep
which has been getting milked escapes to a far corner of the yard. The
woman’s head is curiously framed by a triangular red hat, and silver
hair-plates, which hold out like wings her black tresses. The shoulders
of her magenta dress are padded up into epaulettes two inches high. She
is girded with a sash.
“_Sein oh!_” says Alexsimevich.
“_Sein!_” she answers, and opens the gateway to the enclosure around
the hut.
André drives in among the sheep and cows, and you climb lumberingly
down with cold stiffened limbs. André puts his whip upon the felt roof,
for it is a deadly breach of etiquette to bring it into the house.
“You go in,” said Alexsimevich.
It is like entering a kennel, this struggle through the narrow
aperture, muffled to the eyes in double furs and awkward felt boots.
As you straighten up after the crawl through the entrance, a red glare
from the fire just in front meets the gaze. Stinging smoke grips the
throat; you choke in pain. It blinds the smarting eyes. You gasp and
stagger. Then some one takes your hand and pulls you violently down
on a low couch to the left, where in course of time breath and sight
return. There is no chimney, nor stack for the fire of the brazier,
which stands in the centre of the hut. One can see the open sky
through the three-foot hole above. The smoke, finding its way toward
this aperture, works along the sloping wooden poles which form the
framework of the felt-covered tent, filling the whole upper section
with its blinding fumes. To stand is to smother. Sitting, the head
comes below the smoke-line.
With recovered vision, one can look around within the hut. The couch of
refuge, raised some six inches above the floor, is the bed by night,
the sitting-place by day. Against the wall at the left hand, and
directly opposite the door, is a box-like cupboard, along whose top
are ranged pictures of grotesque Buddhist gods, before whom are little
brass cups full of offerings, millet or oil, in which is standing a
burning wick. Beside the door is a shelf loaded with fire-blackened
pots and kettles. Branches of birch for fuel are thrown beneath. On
the far side of the room, three black lambs, fenced off by a wicker
barricade, are huddled together, quietly sleeping.
[Illustration: A MONGOL BELLE AND HER YURTA]
[Illustration: A ZABAIKALSKAIA BURIAT]
Seated beside the fire close by is the girl of nineteen who has just
saved you from asphyxiation. The long fur-lined working-dress, common
to all ages and sexes of Mongols, is buttoned on her left side with
bright brass buttons, and is belted in with a sash. She has not the
padded shoulder-humps, nor the spreading hair arrangement, which
gave to her mother, who welcomed us, so weird an appearance. Her
complexion is swarthy like an Indian’s, not the Chinese chalky yellow,
and she has red cheeks and full red lips. Her eyes are large and black.
The rest of the party have stayed a moment outside to ask about hay and
water. You have made this solitary and awkward entrance. The girl has
no more notion than a bird who the strange man of another nation may
be, who has stumbled into her home. But it does not trouble her in the
least. For a moment she looks you over calmly, with a smile of amused
curiosity, rolling and wringing with her fingers a lambskin which she
is softening. Then composedly she bids you the Mongol welcome, “_Sein
oh!_” and holds out her hand. Her grip is as firm and frank as a
Siberian’s.
Now Alexsimevich comes tumbling through the door, and next André. Both
are used to these huts, and artistically stoop below the smoke-line.
All our impedimenta--blankets, furs, pots, kettles, bread-bag,
rifles--are heaped in a mound within the space between the couch and
the tethered lambs. The girl has not stirred from her work.
“They are friends of yours then, Alexsimevich?” you ask.
“No, no, I never saw them,” he answers. “Any one may take shelter in
any _yurta_ in Mongolia.”
A small head suddenly makes its appearance from the pile of rugs on the
sofa opposite on the women’s side of the tent. There emerges, naked
save for a bronze square-holed Chinese _cash_ fastened around her
neck, a little slant-eyed three-year-old. The water in the small cups
offered to the _dokchits_ has long been ice, and one has full need of
one’s inner fur coat and cap in the hut, where the entrance, opening
with every visitor, sends a draft of air, forty degrees below zero,
through from the door to the open hole which serves as chimney. And
still this tot can step out naked and not even seem to feel it.
“The child’s name?” asks Alexsimevich.
“Turunga,” replies the girl.
“And your own?”
“Sibilina,” she says, and smiles.
Turunga carefully inspects you, and solemnly accepts a lump of sugar
which she knows what to do with, even if it is a rare luxury offered
to gods. She sits down, in an evidently accustomed spot on the warm
felt before the brazier, to play with the scissors-like fire-tongs,
carefully putting back the red coals that have fallen out on the
earthen platform.
The tarantass-driver, having piled up your impedimenta, excavates from
its midst the bag of rye-bread, which he sets to thaw. He gets next the
little bag of _pelmenes_, the meat-balls covered with dough-paste which
you carry frozen hard. The mother comes in from under the _yurta’s_
flap, and, placing a blackened basin over the brazier, puts into it a
little water and scours diligently with a bundle of birch-twigs. She
brushes out this water on the earthen floor near the entrance. This is
the picketed lamb’s especial territory, to which the felt rugs before
the couches and the altar do not extend. A big bag of snow which she
has brought from outside is opened and the chunks are piled into the
basin, where, while one watches, it melts down into water.
“_Boutzela! boutzela!_” she cries soon, holding a lighted sliver
over the basin to see by: “it boils.” Into the Mongol’s pot go our
_pelmenes_, to brew for a few moments. An accidentally trenchant
description of Siberian _pelmenes_ was given on the quaintly-worded
French bill of fare in the hotel at Irkutsk: “Meat hashed in bullets
of dough.” They come out, however, a combination of hot soup and
dumplings, very welcome after the long cold day’s drive across the
plains, the frozen marsh, and the rolling hills. The wooden Chinese
bowls from the bazaar at Troitzkosavsk are filled now with our
hostess’s big ladle, and the application of warmth inwardly gradually
thaws the outlying regions of the body.
But there is trouble in camp. Turunga is moved by the peculiar passions
of her sex and her age, curiosity and hunger. It does not matter in the
least that she has home-made _pelmenes_ every two or three days--she
wants these particular meat-balls. The little mouth begins to pucker
and the eyes to screw up. No amount of knee-riding by the mother takes
the place of the _pelmenes_. We fill a heaping ladleful and André
furnishes his own bowl. The mother receives it, holding out both her
hands cup-fashion as is the etiquette, and Turunga is satisfied.
The mother looks kindly to the stranger and smiles at André, then
throws more sticks of the precious firewood on the embers. André has
caught, likewise, the not unadmiring glance of the young maid. The girl
who waits in Troitzkosavsk is not the only one who appreciates our
six-foot Siberian hunter.
The dog barks in the yard, but without the menace which hailed us, and
the crunch of a horse’s hoofs sounds on the frozen ground outside. The
flap opens, with its inrush of freezing air. Stooping, there enters a
typical Mongol, squat of figure, round of head, with broad sunbrowned
face and a short queue of black hair. He wears a funnel-shaped hat,
magenta-colored, and is enveloped in a long _shuba_, with brass buttons
down one side like a fencer’s jacket. About his waist is a sash with
jingling knives and pouches. He is the head of the family, come in from
herding his horses. He turns back the long fur-lined cuffs which have
protected his gloveless hands, and stretches out both his arms for you
to place your hands over his. It is the man’s ceremony of welcome. Then
he produces a little porcelain snuff-bottle. This must be received
in the palm of the right hand with a bow. It is to be utilized, and
passed back. If the herder is out of snuff, the bottle is offered just
the same and you must appreciatively pretend to take a pinch. Such is
etiquette.
The soup is gone now; the pot, cleaned out for the tea, is again on the
boil and the leaves are thrown in. André has borrowed a hatchet from
his host, and has chopped off a piece of milk, which goes in as well.
It is in order to ask the new arrival, Subadar Jay, to pass his
wooden cup for some of the beverage. He takes it and the lumps of
sugar without a word of thanks. The Mongol language has no expression
to signify gratitude. Silence does not, however, mean that he does
not appreciate. The dozen pieces of Mongol sandal-sole bread which
he gives you later are worth two bricks of tea in open market, and
this current medium of exchange--caravan-brought tea--is worth sixty
kopecks the brick. No small gift, this bread, to an interloping
stranger who is brewing tea by his fire, and camping unasked on his
bed. A Tibet-schooled lama knows the Buddhist maxim, “Only accomplish
good deed, ask no reward.” But the unlettered Mongol layman knows its
practice.
Little Turunga has played naked before the fire long enough now; she
is caught up; her reluctant feet are put into the boots with pointed
upturned toes, and her body into a miniature sheepskin “daily,” such as
her mother and father wear. The little girl is as smiling and shy and
coquettish as any child of white skin and complex clothes.
“Will you sell Turunga for a brick of tea?”
“No, no,” says the mother, gathering the little one quickly up into
her arms, while the rest of the family smile at the offer and her
solicitude. “No, no, not even for ten bricks!”
Everybody laughs, Turunga with the rest, in a child’s instinctive
knowledge that she is the centre of admiring attraction.
Far more petting than the Russian babies get is lavished on the
little Mongols. Perhaps the much smaller families (only two or three
children to a hut) allow more attention per capita. The mother hands
Turunga over to her father,--unheard-of in Siberia,--and he plays with
the child, giving her pieces of sheep’s tail to eat from his mouth,
answering her prattle or baby-talk and endless questions. At night,
about eight o’clock, the mother takes the child to the couch and they
both go to sleep, Turunga cuddled warmly under her mother’s _shuba_.
Meanwhile we men sit cross-legged by the fire and talk of many
things,--of the pasturage for the sheep, of the snow on the road, of
the beauty of the housewife’s silver headplates, of water and roads,
of whether or not the Mongol _dokchits_ on the altar are like the Gobi
wolves that hate Chinese.
It is interesting to note how some of the words used (few, however)
have a familiar sound--although there is said to be no common ancestry
with the Indo-Germanic tongues; perhaps it is only the instinctive
sound-imitation which makes the Mongol baby cry “Mama” to its mother,
as does the child in Chita and in Chicago. “Mine,” for instance, is
_mina_; “thine” is _tenei_. A horse or mare is _mari_. The word for “it
is,” “they are,” is _beine_, a fairly respectable form of the verb “to
be” in Chaucer’s English.
The grammar is delightfully simple. In the vernacular there is no
bothering about singular or plural. “One hut” is _niger gir_; “two
huts,” _hayur gir_. “Milk” is _su_, and apparently the word for “water”
was formed from it--_ou su_. If one wants to know whether it is time
to throw in the meat-balls he says, “_Ou su boutzela?_” with a rising
inflection (“Water boils?”) and the answer is, “_Boutzela_.” The “moon”
and a “month” are _sara_, and the years go in cycles of twelve. If one
wants to compliment the host on the excellence of the sandal-shaped
bread which he hands out, loaded with gray chalky cheese (_hourut_),
one says, “Bread good be” (_Boba sein beine_); this gives him great
pleasure.
Some of the written numbers are somewhat like ours: 2 and 3 are nearly
the same, but they have fallen forward on their faces; 6 has an extra
tail. When the teapot overturns, they say “_Harlab!_” to relieve
their feelings. There is no word for “so good,” “farewell,” or “much
obliged.” These are just squeezed into the heartiness of the final
“good” (_sein_). So when one leaves, he holds out both arms, palms up,
for the host to put his own upon, and says loudly, “_Sein oh!_”
A not unbarren amusement is to study out one’s own derivations for some
much-explained words. _Tamerlane_ is often given as meaning “the lame.”
Why does it not rather come from _temur_ (iron) and mean “man of iron,”
as the ruler of the Khalka tribe was called Altan Khan, the golden
king? The Amur River has _khara-muren_ (black water) usually given as
its derivative root. Why not the Mongol word _amur_, which means simply
“quiet”?
In the hut to-night, while we are comparing mother tongues, the
brazier-fire has burned to red brands. The girl reaches into a basket
beside the door for pieces of dried camel-dung, and puts them on, that
the embers may be fed and live through the night. These _argols_ do not
smoke; she may close the chimney-hole with the flap of felt, and the
hut will be kept somewhat warm through the night. The Mongols prepare
for sleep: they take off their boots, and slip their arms from the
sleeves of their fur _shubas_, in which they roll themselves up as we
in our blankets. But how hardened they are to the cold! A naked arm
will project and the robes become loose, but they do not wake.
We keep on all our inner clothing and roll ourselves about with skins
until we are great cocoons. André gives a good-night look to his
horses; then he, too, lies down. With our heads beside the altar of the
gods, we sleep, in the Mongol’s _gir_.
How cold it is in the morning when we wake! The embers have burned to a
gray ash; the iciness of the waste outside has gripped like an octopus
the little hut, and sucked its precarious warmth through the night-long
radiation. The chimney-hole is open again, and the mother is starting
a blaze with her few pieces of birch firewood. André has gone out to
harness the horses. He has left the door flap a little wrinkled, and
the wind whirls through it and up the chimney, keen as a scimitar.
Alexsimevich is getting out the tea-bowls and the bread. You put a
reluctant hand from under the blankets and seize your fur cap. Then
you disengage the inner fur coat from its function of coverlet, and
struggle, sleepy-eyed, into it. If you have the moral courage to take
off these friends in need, and the inner coat and sweater, to get a
bowlful of snow-water, and hunt among the baggage for soap and a towel,
all at five o’clock in the morning of this freezing weather, then you
have full license to call the Mongols dirty degraded heathen. If,
however, you sit and shiver, and promise yourself that you will bathe
at Urga, it is elementary fair play to be discreetly silent about the
little failing of your hosts. You will rejoice, too, in open admiration
of courage, when you find, as you sometimes will, a clean-shaven
well-groomed lama, or a washed and combed village belle, on the road to
the sacred city.
“Ready,” says André. You finish a goodly portion of rye-bread and
several bowls of Alexsimevich’s tea, while he is carrying out the
luggage and making a pyramid of it in the tarantass. You put both
hands out to shake those of Subadar Jay, of his wife, and Sibilina. You
give a last chunk of sugar to little Turunga, and crawl out under the
tent-flap. The family calls “good-bye” from the gateway as you climb
in. Then up the hill you start, for the next day’s ride.
It is slow to travel by this schedule. One can advance by day and rest
by night, but daylight travel and night sleep, while most comfortable
for a man, are the least efficient for a horse. If progress be the
aim, one must adopt the teamster’s system. This involves a start at
midnight, and eight hours of travel at a slow trot,--six to seven
versts per hour. Then, at eight in the morning, a halt for the ponies.
One hour they stand in harness, before getting their quarter _pud_ of
hay; after which comes water, and finally, seven and one half _pfunde_
of oats. Four hours of halt are involved, in which one can roll up in
his blanket and sleep. Then off again for eight hours of trot, and
another four hours of halt at eight in the evening. So the watches go,
with some hundred versts made daily.
Noon to-day finds us climbing the hills on foot, to stretch our cramped
limbs and ease the horses, as in old times the English tourists climbed
the St. Gothard on the way to Italy. We are chilled, and racked by the
jar of the road, and glad of even strenuous freedom. Presently we get
on again, and ride down the far slope. It is the camel-boat of the
steppe, this tarantass.
A solitary gnarled tree shows in the waste of snow--the one seed
that lived, on the barren waste, of all that the Siberian winds had
brought. An eagle is watching from its upper branches. Further on are
higher hills, with trees growing on their northern declivities alone.
No foliage can stand the sun, which steals the moisture and bakes the
rocks on the southern slopes. As we pass one of these isolated groves,
the bald trees are seen to be packed with old nests; for the birds
from miles around come hither, as the only refuge for their eggs. Deer
watch us, standing ten yards off; for these Mongols are poor hunters
and their religion sanctifies life. A lama may not kill even a fly: it
might be his own father, transmigrated into this form for insufficient
piety. A big white hare starts through the trees, stops, and runs
again. Thousands of little marmots scurry to their holes in the plain
at the alarm of the tinkling bells. A kite soars with a marmot writhing
in his claws. Big gray jack-rabbits bound along the road ahead. A troop
of partridges let us pass their wallowed holes six feet away. They
peer up, their heads protruding from the snow, their yellow aprons
glistening like shields, tame as guinea-fowl. At length we drive into
Zoulzacha village.
One becomes after a time somewhat of an adept regarding quarters.
To-night the village gives a chance. The most promising exterior is
selected, and driving up, we prepare to enter. Cold and cumbersomely
muffled, you worm under the felt hut-flap, and see through the pungent
smoke of the brazier a dim figure seated to the left of a veiled altar.
Bowed over a red-beaded rosary, he is chanting in a low voice, a weird
oft-repeated phrase. He ceases as you struggle in, becomes silent, and
looks up. “_Amur sein!_” he salutes in quiet greeting, and motions you
to a place on the low sheepskin-covered couch, to the right of the
altar, opposite him.
The open smile of his welcome shows white teeth hardened by the tough
biscuit of his daily diet. You note next, with the pleasure born of
seeing anything good of its kind, the light color and unwrinkled
features of this young man of twenty-five. The gaze of his brown eyes
is direct and frank. He is clean-shaven, his hair is close-cropped,
and he has the appearance of a well-groomed horse. In contrast with
the smoke-blackened, hardship-wrinkled faces of the older Mongols, his
is as a drink from a clear mountain spring after stale drafts from a
long-carried canteen. His color is that of an athlete trained under
the suns of the running-track. His features are defined, the nose not
so flat, the eyes larger than the usual Mongol type. His expression is
earnest and sincere as he now stands up in his robe of rich orange,
trimmed and girdled with red.
He welcomes the guests without question,--it is the rule of Mongol
hospitality, but you feel for the first time what an intrusion it is
for your great Russian tarantass-driver to shoulder his ponderous way
into the home of a stranger, loaded with your bearskin rugs and rifles
and bags of bread, and to pile them loutishly on the native’s couch. At
the other huts wherein you have lodged, this sentiment has not come so
strongly. Poor places they were: the hardship-lined faces; the soiled
and ragged robes of the women, the threadbareness of the heaped-up
sheepskins on the couch, all these revealed that your two-headed eagle
of silver was needed, and your coming a windfall. But here are no sheep
fenced in, making one feel that standards are superfluous. The fuel is
put away in a basket, the bright fire-irons are ranged in a row. The
couch of polished wood is orderly, and the skin-rugs on it are folded
in their places. The little chests of drawers are brightly polished,
and the yellow cap, with its lining of fox-fur, on one of them is new
and clean.
But most of all, in the proprietor himself is there an air of freshness
and cleanliness, of youth and vigor, and of self-confidence. When you
burst into a place like this, covered with snow and muffled up in furs,
disturbing the master of the house at his prayers; when your driver
lays the uninvited mattress down in the warmest place, a man cannot
but feel like a thrice-dyed barbarian bounder, even if the home be a
fifteen-foot felt hut open at the top, and situated on the borders
of the Gobi Desert. So feeling, the first impulse is to let the host
know that you are not quite, of intent, what you are by accident,--a
big hulking foreign savage. So you hastily think over what you can
give to put yourself less at a disadvantage. The prized reserve of
milk-chocolate comes to mind. “Will the host have some?” you ask.
“_Da blagodariou!_” he answers in Russian, to your surprise.
With mixed gladness at having made good thus far in any event, and
regret at the diminished store of this commodity, you take a little
spoonful of the snuff which the host is now offering in a beautiful
porcelain bottle, patterned in flowers. Then you come back with a
cigarette. Most of these people know what cigarettes are, though some
smoke them with their noses.
“No, thanks!” and he points to his closely-cropped head.
Alexsimevich, who has followed into the hut, explains: “You speak to a
priest, he does not smoke.”
A screen hangs before the altar opposite the door. You look
hesitatingly at it. Without demur, the lama, at the visible interest,
draws back the veil. There, in painted grotesqueness, is Janesron, the
red god of Thunder, and bearer of the lightning sword. He glares down
with his three eyes upon the sunken orbits of a sheep’s head, laid
out as an offering. Black Gumbo, the six-armed good spirit, is also
there, and both are surrounded by attendant demons. All are pictured
artistically, the minute detail of Tibetan workmanship showing in
their squat bodies. The polished wood of the frames is as finely
wrought as a Japanese sword-hilt.
On the box-top, beneath the gods, are set out in neat array the best
of Mongol dainties. These are disposed in little polished brazen
cups shaped like wine-glasses. There are raisins and dried plums,
caravan-carried from the far-off Middle Kingdom, and lumps of sugar
brought down from Russia in some trader’s pack. Millet fills one cup,
water another; each symbolizing some ancient seizin. A wick, sunk in
oil, flares in the centre, and casts a flickering, uncanny light upon
the deities. Spread on a low seat, six inches above the felt rug on
the floor, are rows after rows of _boba_, the gray Mongol biscuits, in
shape like the thick soles of a sandal. As a centre-piece between the
stacked loaves rests the brown roasted sheep’s head. It is the feast
of the New Year that this unusual volume of offerings betokens. The
old year of the Horse passes with the rise of to-night’s new moon. The
leap-year--that of the Ram--will then begin. All the families in the
_eimucks_ of Mongolia will feast on the grosser part of the offering
which now lies in its ranked regularity undisturbed. For the present
the priest takes light refreshments while waiting for his midnight rite.
“Will you have some of the tea that has been brewed for you by the old
mother while you were looking at the altar?” asks Alexsimevich.
It has been made, not from the loosely-packed leaves, but from the
hard tea-bricks. A chunk of this has been cast into the great iron bowl
over the brazier when the fagot-fed fire has melted the ice and has
brought the water to a boil.
Solemnly you are presented a wooden bowl of tea, which you receive in
both hands, and as solemnly sip. The evening meal is cooked and eaten,
your sugar reciprocating the lama’s tea.
As the evening wears on, amid the smoke of cigarettes and brass-bowled
pipes, the lama brings out quaint paper slips of Buddhist prayers.
“You are interested?” He will write for you a charm. “_O mani
padmihom_,” he tells you. “The Buddhist prayer.”
“Oh, thou jewel in the lotus-flower, hail!” says the interpreter.
It is mighty, this ancient Buddhist prayer, which is murmured by so
many millions from Japan to Persia, from Malay to Siberia. It is
symbolic, esoterically, of much. The jewel is the soul, the lotus is
Buddha, the prayer, a wish that the spirit be in them which was in
_Saka-muni_, their Lord. On endless rosaries this prayer is told. It is
on the lips of priests and women, it is carved around the stones which
travelers throw upon the _obos_, the “high-places” of Old-Testament
record. It is murmured by the pilgrims as they prostrate themselves.
The disciplined body, the praying tongue, and the mind intent on sacred
things, all incline the soul to the acquirement of merit.
The lama draws now with his quick hand, trained to the Tibetan script
of the Urga monastery-school, sketches of his temple, _Zoulzacha
Soumé_, of his people’s summer tent of cloth, and winter hut of felt.
He writes out the Mongol numerals, and explains the cycles of years, in
answer to questions regarding the New-Year festival. He describes the
puzzling element-and-animal system, by which the _chére mari_, or earth
horse, is 1907, the _chére khoni_, or earth ram, is 1908, and so on
through a sixty-year epoch.
He quotes Mongol proverbs come down from old priests and rulers: “One
may buy slaves, but not brothers,” and, in the spirit of Macchiavelli,
“You can govern a State by truth as well as you can catch a hare with
an ox-cart.”
Now it is nearing moonrise. From his rolled purse the priest draws a
small slip of paper ruled into a half-inch checker pattern, in every
square of which there is a symbolic group of letters. The lama consults
this. Then he brings from the chest beneath the altar a long narrow box
in which are strips of faded paper thick as parchment. On these in red
and black are traced quaint characters, written, as is our script, from
left to right. The priest selects a dozen of his long sheets and puts
them carefully on his couch. He touches the box to his forehead and
restores it to its place. Then he turns and speaks to the interpreter.
“The lama must make ready for the night of the New Year,” you are
told; and as you look, off comes the red sash and yellow robe. The
young priest stands up in his vivid blue jacket and walks to the
entrance of the _gir_. From a cupboard he takes a towel, and from the
fireplace, ashes. Pouring warm tea into a wooden bowl, he scrubs hands
and face with the vigor of an athlete after a run. Then back to the
cupboard he goes, and off comes the blue jacket for a clean new silken
one. A rich yellow robe is donned. A bright silver knife is slung upon
a new red sash which girdles his waist; and smart and erect as an
officer of the Guards, the lama steps over, prostrates himself before
his deities, then goes out into the night to his temple service.
“Creeds are many, but God is one,” murmurs Alexsimevich.
It is regrettable that the rule of lama celibacy prevents the
arrangement of the usual kidnapping marriage-ceremony between this
young priest of Zoulzacha, and Amagallan (blissfulness), the belle of
the Odjick encampment. It is early in the first moon, Sara, of the year
of the Ram, and holiday still reigns in Mongolia. Doubtless she, too,
is a sooty Cinderella at other times; but to-day she is a reigning
princess, dressed in the best that a father, owner of a hundred sheep,
can furnish. A bright new blue coat, lined with fine white lamb’s-wool,
is belted around her rather ample waist with a red sash. Her boots are
of evident newness. But the triumph, the chef d’œuvre, is her pointed
red hat made of the brightest Chinese silk. It is topped with a gold
and black knot and is garnished with gold braid. The flaps, turned
up at the sides and the back, are of a long silky dark-gray fur. A
broad red ribbon fastened behind is brought forward and rests on her
breast. She has a feminine eye to its brilliant contrast against the
blue dress. Two long tassels of pearls, set in coral-studded silver
earrings, frame a rosy, laughing face; for Amagallan is exhilarated
with the consciousness of being very well-dressed.
The presence of two young herdsmen in dark red and blue, and one lama
of the first degree,--and consequently not estopped from the race,
like a full-fledged priest,--bears testimony to the effectiveness of
the costume and the girl. The wiles with which she distributes a smile
to one, a dried Chinese plum to another, and a mild frown to a third,
reveal even more the universal woman. Amagallan is not at all averse
to adding to her string three masculine Russians. There are only two
foreign nations in Mongolia, Chinese and Russians. Into the latter
class come all stray visitants--Americans, Buriats, and Troitzkosavsk
teamsters. The girl stands up now and greets this American with a frank
hand-shake. She invites him to sit down with the rest. Since there is
scriptural permission to eat meat offered to idols, the fact that the
evening’s feast has stood at the feet of Buddha need not deter one from
partaking of the little dumplings, gray cheese, and dried fruits.
Amagallan hands them out on one of those sole-shaped biscuits, which
serve as plates until one has eaten what is on them, after which they
go down themselves. A fat sheep’s-tail is sliced for your benefit,
while a coarse lump of dusky-looking sugar is an ultimate delicacy,
eaten as candy. Muddy brick tea follows, of course. The Mongol bread is
good, but it takes resolution to do one’s duty by the gray cheese, the
resin-like desiccated milk, and the sheep-fat just seethed.
A chatter of conversation goes on, the neighbors drift in and out,
and those of our _gir_, as the evening wears on, make excursions to
the other huts and exhibit and drink more muddy tea for politeness’
sake. The hostess in each tent shakes your hand before feeding you.
The formality makes you temporarily one of the tribe and family, to
be treated with courtesy and hospitality. Thus you are taken into the
social life of a simple affectionate people.
We meet in one hut a traveling friar who has tramped sturdily from
Tibet, pack on back and prayer-beads on arm, begging, praying, selling
relics claiming to cure rheumatism, and the eye-diseases which the
smoky huts induce. He carries on a pole an image of Gumbo and others
of the _dokchits_, together with a hodge-podge collection of rosaries,
strips of silk, bells, beads, pipe-picks, etc. These are jingled during
parts of his prayer, where it is necessary to keep the god attentive.
[Illustration: A MONGOL “BLACK MAN”]
In one hut they are playing the age-old game of _tawarya_. A bag
is produced containing hundreds of sheep’s-knuckles, colored blue.
Everybody gets a handful. Then a girl holds out her fistful of them,
and each man guesses the number. There is a rapid fire of shouted
numerals,--“_niger, hayur, urbu, durbu!_” The one who guesses correctly
gets the handful of knuckles. This person next holds out his fistful,
and so it goes. It is an uproarious sport, interspersed with quite
unnecessary grabbings of disputed handfuls,--part of the game that
Amagallan is playing, even if not germane to _tawarya_.
Finally through the darkness you make your way back to the _gir_
in which you are billeted. The wreathing smoke from its dome is
illuminated to-night by the beams from the fire below. It rises in
dimly bright convolutions, beautiful in its small way as the great
Northern Lights. You spread your felt on the floor of the tent and roll
up in your rugs. The teamster needs a timepiece to regulate his hour of
harnessing, for you must start at daybreak. Leave your watch for him on
the altar of the _dokchits_. It will be safe in this hut by the desert
of Gobi, among the remnant of the Golden Horde.
* * * * *
The days’ marches have taken us well up among the ridges of the Kentei
Mountains. To the eastward is the peak which, despite the claims of
Urga’s Holy Mountain and of a site near Tibet, has the best authority
for being the burying-place of Genghis Khan.
In 1227 the great conqueror died. The confused records tell of his
body’s being taken northward to a mountain which was the heart of his
empire, from whose slopes sprang the sources of the three great Mongol
rivers,--the Tola, the Onon, and the Kerulon. Beside its sacred lake
the Manchu Amban of Urga sacrifices annually to the Nature-spirits.
It is both a survival and a memorial to the bloody sacrifice of every
living being on the road to the grave,--a tribute which tradition says
the guards of Genghis Khan’s funeral cortège offered to their departed
chief.
Huts are far apart in these highlands now, and the whistling winds
pierce the very marrow. The tired horses can hardly crawl forward on
the doubtful trail. Far up in the heights, beside an old caravan-route,
superseded by a newly-cut artery of travel, we come very late upon an
ancient wooden shrine.
The worshipers have gone. They lived their time in a village near
by, but with the exhaustion of pasturage for the flocks, under nomad
necessity they moved. A new camel-road was tramped out by drivers, who
must find shelter amid habitations. So in the shrine, long unpainted,
the smiling Buddha presides now over his famished altar.
Very, very old, very, very poor, is Archir the warden, who
welcomes you. For forty years he has watched in his _gir_ by the
dragon-gargoyled gate. The spear with which he stood to his post
of old is blackened, and its red tassel is dulled and faded. A
tattered fringe is along the edge of the felt door to his _yurta_, and
holes are under its walls close to the ground. His pile of wood is
pitifully small, and few are his sandal-sole biscuits. His _shuba_,
sheepskin-lined, is blackened with the soot of years.
Archir refuses courteously what he knows is a rare foreign delicacy,
a Russian cigarette. “A lama,” he says, “may not smoke.” But his own
hospitality is of the thoughtful kind which comes from the heart. He
hands you a sheepskin softened by long massaging between his trembling
old hands, that his own covering, not your coat, be burned by the
sparks from the brazier. He notices that your tea-bowl is awkwardly
held, and he brings a little table to put before you. He sees your
driver fumbling for a match to light his pipe, and reaches him a coal
with the fire-tongs. He clears his couch that you may sit in comfort.
He offers you the first use of his fire for cooking.
In the old days many came to pray to the smiling Buddha. The drivers
of the tea-caravans from far-off China left their offerings of fruit
and silk scarves. The herdsmen whose lambs had lived well through a
bitter winter gave sheep fat of tail to the two yellow-robed priests
who chanted and clashed the cymbals through the long days and into
the nights. The little boys dedicated to the gods, shaven-headed,
rosy-faced, crooned their lessons in the Tibetan tongue, sitting on the
floor of the big blue school-gir beside the shrine. Every day pilgrims
on their way to Urga stopped to pray in the _soumé_, and filled the
tent of the young guardian with eatings of noodle-soup and drinkings of
tea, with gossip and with song.
But all is changed now in his little hut. The rule of non-marriage
he keeps in the spirit, where so many lamas observe it only in the
morganatic letter. This has left him alone in his old age, and
pitifully solitary now that even the dwindling camel-trains, of whose
tea-traffic the Manchurian Railway has robbed them, pass by no more.
The priest is unfed even by pilgrims. These have gone with the rest to
the routes of a better prosperity.
Archir has seethed his evening meal of sheep-meat and flat pieces of
dough. He has let the fire die down to embers, and has pulled the
covering over the round hole. The freezing winds very soon make his
hut so cold that one feels like a thin shaking uncovered creature even
beneath the heaped furs. One’s ungloved hands grow numb as he lies by
the brazier.
In the morning we too depart, and like the Roman legionary beside the
Vesuvian gate of Pompeii, the old priest waits, alone, unquestioning,
uncomplaining, till a greater God than he of the _soumé_ shall send the
summons of relief.
* * * * *
The mountain-ranges, one after another, stretch their towering barriers
across the path. They trend northeast and southwest, as in Siberia.
First comes the Sharan Daba, the white range, whose pass leads down to
the Iro River, rich in alluvial gold. The streams flow westward into
the Cellinga, whose waters empty into Lake Baikal, and thence by the
Angara River, into the far-off Arctic Ocean.
Ridge follows ridge now, and valley follows valley,--narrow cuts, with
shallow streams, and huts clustered upon their sides. Out from the
almost deserted borderland, the Mongol encampments are not unfrequently
pitched where there is water for the flocks. If any wood be near by, it
is well, since then the dried dung can be reserved for the smokeless
evening fire when the top hole is closed.
When the steep mountain climb has been passed, it is as if a gateway
had been opened through the constricting ridges. The broad valley of
the Haragol stretches out. Down, down, we go, onto a plain, in the
centre of which we come to an enclosure with a high mud wall and a
peaked gateway, gaudily decked with red banners and vivid placards.
Outside the mud walls of the compound, far and wide, are checker-board
squares with irrigation ditches between. Huge stacks of hay and straw
are piled up near the gate, the wonder and envy of the nomads, who
never have more than the scantiest store. Within are booths facing the
courtyard. A little temple occupies one corner. Two-wheeled carts are
drawn up along the wall. Troughs and picket-poles are ranged in line,
ready for the caravans.
Now, around the tarantass, there gather from their threshing the
dwellers of the compound,--coolies from the far-off Pink Kingdom, with
puffy blue trousers and tight-buttoned jackets, flail in hand and metal
pipe in mouth. They stare stolidly without comment at the frost-covered
horses, the robes, and the bearded strangers. Expressionless they stand
watching every movement. Alexsimevich asks a question; no one answers.
We sit for a moment mutually expectant. Not one of the Chinese stirs or
speaks.
Then André swings down and leads the team through the gateway into
the compound. Alexsimevich leads the search for shelter. We cross the
courtyard to the building which serves for the lodging of travelers.
Its walls are of mud, and a big adobe chimney projects up one side.
Beneath low eaves a small window with white paper panes blinks like
the sightless eyes of a blind man. We stoop, pushing open the crudely
pivoted door, enter the smoky chamber, and the door swings back behind.
We are standing in what seems an unreal world--a stage-scene or a
cavern from the Arabian Nights. In front and on each side close in
dark windowless walls. Behind comes a feeble light from the little
paper-paned window. In the dimness, a flickering fire throws fitful
gleams on dusky figures, idols, and wearing-gear hung on pegs driven
into the wall.
As your eyes become accustomed to the gloom, the details take shape. A
clay stove is to the left. Fagots are heaped beside it, copper kettles
rest upon its top, pigtailed figures are crouching around. In front,
a platform, raised four feet above the clay floor, occupies the whole
width of the room and extends back into the darkness. A group of men
are seated, cross-legged, around a little brazier, smoking. Others are
lying rolled in blankets.
With our luggage André staggers in. No one stirs. Some of the group
around the stove turn their heads to look, but that is all. André
heaps the food-bag and blankets in a vacant spot on the _kang_. We
make room on the stove for our pots to boil the water for tea. On this
self-elbowed place amid the rest we sit cross-legged, propped against
the clay wall. The smoke from the oven, led under the _kang_, warms it
so that the outer coat can come off. A little tabouret some six inches
high stands in a corner, and serves as a table for the repast.
The shelter is far better, as comforts go, than any of the Mongol
tents. The icy wind that sweeps the latter is barred off. There
is a stove to replace the nomad’s brazier; a warm _kang_ instead
of the floor to rest upon. But how different is the spirit of the
hosts! There are no frank hand-clasps here, no interested gossip and
inquiries of the adventures by the way. No generous bringing out of fat
sheep’s-tails and snuff-bottles for the guests’ delectation. You cannot
but have the feeling that these people are as indifferent to your
existence as they are to the pariah dog that howls outside the walls.
They are exclusive, non-welcoming,--these Chinese. They are strangers
to the land, self-sufficing in their toilsomely cultivated rye- and
wheat-fields, an isolated, womanless, working settlement.
Despite the better quarters and comfort which these inns afford, one
prefers to go to a Mongol tent and be among men more human, if less
civilized. When the bread is thawed and the tea is boiled, we eat, pay
the Chinaman who gave the wood, and with a sense of relief go out again
to the tarantass and the road.
For versts now the way is along the alluvial plain, seamed with
irrigation-ditches and dominated by several of these walled Chinese
factories. As the sun goes down, however, there appears a solitary
building, and André gives a glad shout, seeing that it is built of wood
and has windows and big centre chimney. “_Russky dom!_” he cries.
A low mud wall surrounds the enclosure. Inside some quilts are hung in
the air, that the cold may kill the vermin. A big black dog comes up,
but unlike the scavenger beasts of the Mongol encampments, it signals
welcome with friendly tail-waggings and good-natured barks, approaching
at once as if accustomed to kindly treatment.
The quilted door of the house opens. A booted figure appears with
the familiar red blouse, and the Russian greeting hails you,
“_Zdravstvouitie!_”
“An Orthodox Buriat,” says Alexsimevich.
We mount his wooden steps, shake his hand, and enter the big warm room.
It is as if one were back in Siberia. The Buriat’s Siberian
wife, in shawl and kerchief, is busy at the whitewashed oven.
Brilliantly-colored comic prints detail the misadventures of the young
recruit, with doggerel ballad rhymes beneath. Chickens peck beneath
the stove, the samovar hums on the table, and figures sipping tea are
grouped around it on the benches, or are lying on the floor enjoying
the genial warmth.
“Hail, Alexsimevich!” comes a voice; and a tall bearded Siberian,
dressed in a Mongol robe, rises.
“Aha, Vladimir Vassilivich!” answers our interpreter. “Good-day!”
A volley of questions at once overwhelms him. The party has been long
away from Kiahta, and we have the latest news.
“A Kiahta merchant, my friend, and his son,” Alexsimevich explains.
Overcoats are being doffed, mufflers unwound, and boots kicked off.
The babble of talk continues. A place is made for us at the table,
and glasses of tea, with immense slices of cheese and ham, are placed
before us. When more tea and cigarettes have completed the repast,
Alexsimevich paces up and down, relating with dramatic gestures the
latest gossip from Troitzkosavsk.
In the midst of his narrative, which all are following with great
interest, there comes an incident of heightened vividness.
“Sh--sh!” a warning signal sounds. One of the auditors points to a
shape rolled in blankets, and lying on the bench.
“_Gaspaja_” (a lady), they say.
Alexsimevich completes his tale in a lower tone and with more artistic
circumlocution.
But it is the other side’s turn to tell a tale, for why, in the
ferocious cold of midwinter, with--save for this one Buriat’s
house--the Mongol huts only for nightly shelter, why does a lady come
down here?
The merchant explains: “She has twisted her knee-joint, and in Irkutsk,
in Tomsk even, the Christian doctors cannot heal her. A lama tells us
that warm sulphur-water will soften the sinews, and the bone can be
brought back into place. We go to the warm springs of the Holy River. I
have been there in old times, and I know the way.”
With pathetic eagerness the party has gone to do the lama’s bidding,
and bathe in the Mongol Jordan. Evening comes. The lady’s bench is
pulled over close to the oven. The merchant and his son lie down beside
it on the floor. Servants and drivers roll up at their feet, and all
sleep, in amity.
It takes resolution to awake at daybreak and leave the luxury of this
shelter. But when horses are harnessed, riders must ride. The rising
sun comes up over the white plain. The Buriat waves “good-bye” from
his doorstep; the dog barks in farewell, and we lumber on southward.
A sugar-loaf hill marks the end of the valley. We turn up now into the
mountains, the driver somewhat in doubt as to the way. A boy of about
fifteen years, a yellow-robed lama novice, rides by. Alexsimevich hails
him to ask the road to Urga. A complicated explanation follows, hardly
understood.
“I show you,” says the boy.
For a dozen versts he rides along on his pony beside us, chattering and
laughing. When, after a devious trail, the pass is in sight, he starts
off, and will not, at first, accept any present for his trouble.
Valley follows valley now, the trail fairly well defined. Mongol huts
give a chance for rest and for cooking. A welcome is bidden us in each,
the nearest water is shown, and invitations to come back are freely
extended.
There is now one last range to cross, the Tologoytou, highest and
steepest of all. Even the mounted Mongols, who have caught up with
our toiling tarantass, swing off and climb afoot. Trees are on either
hand, and the white wall-like face of the barrier passed in the morning
seems a bare verst away. There comes a whole slope of boulders and
rocks, jagged and broken, like the moraine of a glacier. And then, at
long last, we reach the high-heaped Borisan at the summit, with its
fluttering prayer-flags. The foremost Mongol throws on a rock, leaps
upon his pony, and rides twice around the mound.
“_Argila! argila!_” (bridles free! bridles free!) he cries, and trots
down behind the crest.
We, too, throw on a stone, and take the steep descent.
Beyond the low rolling ridges below is the white of the Holy Mountain,
topped with green foliage. Here one may not kill the thronging hare and
deer and pheasants. As we gallop down, the _obos_, the white memorial
monuments, take shape from the snow. In the dark-gray dimness of the
city beyond, green and gold roofs become distinct, lighted by the last
glow of the sinking sun. Huts cluster close now along the road, and the
shadows of innumerable dogs pass and mingle and pass again, where the
gray mud walls and houses begin to be continuous. In the dim twilight
the tarantass thunders into the great wide way which ends in the main
street of Urga.
Two hundred feet broad is this street. Mud walls twenty feet high flank
it. The gates to the enclosures are closed. The fast-fading light
discloses hardly any passers-by. Save for a distant tom-tom there is
deep silence brooding over the city. A great empty square is entered,
where a few figures are passing in the distance. We approach one of
these, who upon our question lurches up to the tarantass. He is a
Russian clad in Mongol _shuba_, rather the worse for liquor.
“I will show you,” he says amiably.
Affectionately leading the horses, he reels down one dark alley,
then down the next, until we come to a second broad street and to an
enclosure with a lantern-lighted gate. A cry brings at length a stir
within. The gate swings open.
“The _Varlakoff_ house!” says the guide thickly.
The tarantass is led in, and we stumble through the darkness into a
Russian home of some pretensions. In the main room is a lamp and a
table covered with a red cloth. A glass of tea is available and is
quickly swallowed. Then, tired out, we roll up in our blankets, on the
floor, and drop off to our first night’s sleep in Urga, the Holy City
of Mongolia.
VI
THE CITY OF THE REBORN GOD
The murmur of many voices pierces the blanket over your head.
Sleepy-eyed in the warmth, you peer out from the chrysalis of coverings
to watch the people moving about. Alexsimevich has extricated himself
from the mound which he constructs nightly on the floor, out of
luggage-bags, felt mats, rugs, and overcoats. Under all the heaped
wrappings that he uses in the icy Mongol tents, he has camped and slept
close up against the white wall of the oven. Truly the Siberian is
brother to the salamander. He pulls on now his big felt boots and runs
a pocket-comb through his beard.
The wife of our host, come to the door for a survey, notes progress and
returns to the female region. The Hazan Varlakoff, gray-bloused and
wearing deerskin boots, enters next. He lights his first cigarette; his
wife with the bowl of sugar and the plate of bread follows. She has
gotten up earlier than her husband, so she is several cigarettes ahead,
but he is cutting down the lead.
Perhaps one had better get up one’s self. It is an easy operation
here. “Getting up” consists in emerging from the rolled blankets and
stretching. “Dressing” means pulling on boots. One can wash over in
the corner, where the brass can lets out a trickling stream of cold
water when the needle-valve underneath is pushed up.
The samovar hums on the red cotton cloth of the table. Varlakoff moves
along to make room. From the little pot of infused tea your glass is
partly filled; then you place it under the spigot for hot water, and
the beverage is ready for sipping. No lemons are here, as in Russia. In
a few Chinese shops one can buy spherical citrons, but they are like
unripe oranges, and are a luxury as great as pineapples in old New York.
A wool-buyer from Kiahta reaches for the bowl of broken loaf-sugar,
and holds it for you to choose the piece whose size pleases best. The
housewife comes from the kitchen over by her oven-door, bringing some
crestfallen cake which she has made in your honor.
“_Kuchete! kuchete!_” she commands, arms akimbo, puffing contentedly on
her cigarette.
We revel in the luxuries of Varlakoff’s room; warmth such that we may
take off the cumbersome outer coats; chairs to sit upon, instead of
crouching cross-legged; hot samovar-made drinks, and a chance to wash
in water. The latter is a privilege which can be appreciated only after
a period of ablutions in lukewarm tea. We stretch out and bask and sip,
and whiff _papirosi_ in epicurean idleness.
As we luxuriate, one by one the neighbors of the Russian colony come
in, to hear the news of Kiahta from Alexsimevich. The expedition has
become part of the gossip-transportation system. Half the population of
Kiahta must have sent messages here,--half the Russian traders in Urga
have come to receive them. First, there is the general news dispensed
into the expectant ears of the group at Varlakoff’s. Alexsimevich is
for an hour the cynosure. Questions and answers flash back and forth,
going off sometimes explosively like fireworks. Then follow the special
events and the individual messages. At last these are all detailed.
Now come invitations from various men to visit their houses “Will the
_gaspadine_ come?”--“The _gaspadine_ must see the city.”--“_Da! da!_”
echoes the group.
Varlakoff goes out for his stick and overcoat. The wool-merchant gets
into his fleece-lined _shuba_. He achieves the feat by the usual
Siberian method. Putting the garment over his head, he pushes his arms
through the sleeves, and gradually struggles and writhes up into it
as one gets into a wet bathing-suit. Alexsimevich finishes his fourth
glass of tea, lights one of the _Hazan’s_ cigarettes, and worms his
way also into his deerskin greatcoat. Then out we go into the bright
sunlight and the snow-covered streets.
[Illustration: TEMPLE OF GIGIN, URGA]
The houses of the Russian quarter of Urga were only glimpsed in the
dusk of last night. We have daylight upon them now. Squat whitewashed
buildings they are, with neatly paned windows and big square
chimneys. Across the mounds and hillocks of a broad street is the
one-storied Russian Club, where one may drink vodka, play billiards
or cards, and while away the winter evenings. Further on is a row of
shops. The bearded owners stand behind their counters, dressed in
belted Mongol _shubas_ and Russian fur caps. The doors to all the
shops are open, that the Mongols, perplexed with knobs, may not take
their trade elsewhere. Enameled kettles are hanging in festoons down
the walls. The shelves are crowded with bolts of vivid-colored cotton
cloths to be sewed into _shubas_ by the Mongols who ride in to buy.
There are big cases of sweetmeats, Moscowski caramels, acceptable
offerings to the grotesque _dokchits_ on the family shrines. Russian
monopoly tobacco is there, in stamped paper packets for the delectation
of Muscovites and Buriats who have the taste and the means, and
villainous South-China tobacco and snuff for native purchasers. One can
get vodka almost as bad as that of Siberia, and far cheaper, for it is
compounded by a local distiller who rejoices in an excise-less market.
Foreign brandies and wines fill big walls of shelves.
“_Zdravstvouitie!_” one of the merchants calls, hailing our party.
“It is Vassili Michaeloff, old friend of mine,” says Alexsimevich. “Let
us go in.”
We enter and are led back into the private part of the house.
“_Chai!_” shouts the host to somebody behind the oven.
“_Haracho_,” comes the answer.
We all sit down. If any purchasers drift into the shop, they can
wait until we get through our visit, or they can go down the line.
For wherever the Eagles are planted, the Russian joyfully drops his
business to entertain a friend. At the call of “tea” the shovel goes
into the ditch, the ledger onto the shelf, the pen into the potato. If
“_chai_” interferes with business, cut out business. Nor does it matter
in the least that we have just had breakfast; by the rule of etiquette
we must be entertained. “Tea” consists first in a ceremoniously clinked
toast drowned in vodka. Then appears the samovar in charge of the woman
of the house, the glasses, and the sugar. Next follow the cigarettes.
The talk is animated, for its local history absorbs each little world.
The fact comes out that the cousin of Michaeloff has bought a new pair
of horses for a hundred roubles. The price, the quality of the animals
and of the man, all go into the crucible. Kiahta beer arrives as the
conversation turns to the death of one Ivan Vladimiraef, which it is
agreed was not unnatural, since he had reached the age of ninety-odd
years. Still the provisions come. The good wife brings in a heaping
plate of lard-impregnated Hamburger steaks, called “cotlet,” which
Alexsimevich attacks as if his last meal were half a day instead
of half an hour distant. Other bottles accumulate to help out the
dwindling flagon of vodka. We enter upon Château Yquem, Pomeranian, and
Caucasian claret. Then cakes are set out, and more tea, and finally a
quart bottle of champagne.
Alexsimevich stands to his guns like the 38th Siberians at Tien-tsin.
But it is hard for any one of less rigorous training in this sort of
thing to hold even the straggler’s pace at nine o’clock in the morning.
Mentally we hoist the flag upside down, and wink at Alexsimevich as
the outward and visible sign of the inward and spirituous distress. He
takes the rest of the champagne in a last gulp, and with a series of
thanks we gain the entrance to the shop, where two Mongols and a Buriat
are waiting patiently, looking vacantly around at the crockery.
We are shown ceremoniously to the door, shake hands, remark about the
weather, give our compliments to the wife, and depart. When at the
corner, we glance back. Vassili Michaeloff is still standing on the
threshold; his three customers too are looking out leisurely at the
people passing.
“We have thrown his business out of gear,” we remark to Alexsimevich.
He seems surprised.
“There is plenty of time. Why should they mind waiting? _Nietchevo._”
Another host is overjoyed to see us, for an engineering problem of
great perplexity is, he tells us in due course, harassing his mind. No
one in Urga can help him out, but perhaps we will.
“The Chinese governor, the _Zinzin_, wants to make an automobile line
from Kalgan,” the host announces. “I saw an iron bridge once, so I
agreed to build him one over the Lara River. Have you ever seen an iron
bridge? How shall I do it?”
You allow that you have seen an iron bridge,--that you have even gone
across one. You suggest that much depends on the river. “How wide is
it, for instance?”
“I have not picked out the place for the bridge yet,” answers the host;
“but the river is somewhere between sixty and three hundred feet wide.
Have some vodka?”
“And how deep is the water?” you ask.
“Well,”--after much thought,--“it is deep in the middle and shallow at
the edges. Have a cigarette! Have some tea! If we build this bridge,
the _Zinzin_ will give us a decoration. How much will the bridge cost?”
“That depends upon what sort of bridge you build, and how long it is,
and how much material you use!”
Alexsimevich comes in.
“You see, the more iron you use, the more the bridge costs,” he
observes.
“_Navierno! navierno!_ you speak sagely, Alexsimevich. That is what I
told the _Zinzin_.”
“It must have piers and abutments,” you venture.
“But the _Zinzin_ does not like piers, because the water was not made
to put such things into. Yet I said with you, one must always have
piers. Here is brandy. Take a few sardines!”
The problem certainly needs something special for its elucidation. You
ponder, and Alexsimevich and the host breathlessly watch the hatching
of your official pronunciamento.
At last you deliver yourself.
“Find out how wide and deep the river is. Then write to a
steel-manufacturing company, to quote prices. They will send a
blue-print of an automobile bridge of the specified length, together
with the weight of the steel. You can buy pieces to build it at so many
kopecks a pound, just like butter.”
“Ah, my friend, you do not know how great a service you have rendered!
What a providence is your coming! Pray, have some cognac! Will they
send me a picture with piers,--a picture that I can show the _Zinzin_?”
“Yes,--yes, indeed.”
“I go to-morrow to tell him of this.”
We are once more in the street and the banded escort is turning into
still another Russian’s house. Their idea of sightseeing is apparently
to take tea with every Russian in the place. A mild desire is
registered to come in contact with some of the other people. The idea
strikes them in the light of a strange new doctrine.
“You wish to see Mongols?” one asks. Though surprised, they acquiesce
amiably. “To-day they have holiday; you are favored. Go see the doings
and make me visit later,” says the disappointed third host.
Then the wool-merchant speaks.
“Near by is the great temple of Urga, which few have seen, for it is
one of the most holy places of the Lama faith. It is the temple of
Maidari, the Future God. If the _gaspadine_ wishes to see it, I, who
have bought wool from the uncle of the keeper of the gate, can gain
admittance.”
[Illustration: TEMPLE IN THE URGA LAMASERY]
For this we start. The Russian section, made up of shops with posters
and signs in Slavonic letters, and homes with centre chimneys and
little square panes of glass, is left behind. Through a long dark lane
we come out into the main thoroughfare of Mongol Urga. The town is
in festival for the New Moon. The streets are ablaze with color. Red
posters are on every door and wall. The brilliant picture is framed
by the snowy girding hills and the green trees of the Holy Mountain
to the south. The tomb-like altars on the plain are dazzlingly white
against the gray-plastered fronts of the houses behind. The gilded
gargoyles of the temples flash in the sun. Down the main street, a
hundred feet broad, go bevies of girls, their hair bedecked with the
gaudiest ornaments of silver and pearl, their silken robes striped
and banded in green alternating with yellow and blue and gold. Lamas
stride here and there dressed in bright orange robes and hats, their
silver knives hanging at their sides. Great shaggy-haired dromedaries
swing past. Horsemen, robed in vivid scarlet and blue and magenta,
dash at full gallop across the wide open _piazza_ in the centre
of the town. A donkey-cart is driven slowly along, crowded with
brightly-dressed girls. A squad of Chinese cavalry trot by in white
jackets, red-lettered. Two of the Cossack garrison swagger past. A
bearded Siberian trader strolls across, clothed in the dark Mongolian
cloak which most have adopted, going toward the Russian quarter we have
just left. A string of oxen plods by, drawing cartloads of wood.
Walking on, we come to a long line of kiosks which a continuous
procession of pilgrims in holiday attire is entering. In each booth
is a cask-shaped prayer-wheel, a magnified model of those which women
carry, twirling them in their hands as they walk.
Along this main square of Urga, and girding her city stockade, are
hundreds of these cylinders. All the day long, men and women are going
in and out from one kiosk to another, turning. Some say that formerly
one could enter a great Tibetan temple only after saying a prayer
so long that even a Grand Lama’s memory could not carry it. So, for
convenience, a cylinder with the written text was set up at the temple
gate. By degrees it became the custom, without reading it, to rotate
the petition for a blessing. Others say that the wheels are whirled in
literal obedience to Buddha’s precept to “turn over and over his words.”
Alternating with the wheels are stone shrines graven with Tibetan
characters, before which, on wooden couches, silken-dressed women are
abasing themselves in abject worship. A long line of pilgrims is doing
the circle of the city. They stand, then drop prostrate in the snow.
Rising, they move conscientiously forward to where their heads touched,
and again lie prone, making thus a penitential circuit of the stockade.
Most are in deadly earnest. Some, hired for a proxy service, steal
forward a few inches on each prostration.
Suddenly three distant guns boom out.
“_Scurry, scurry toda!_” says the wool-merchant. “Quick, this way. He
is coming.”
You hurry forward to where a trail leads across the square. Afar off,
in the direction of the Holy Mountain, is seen a band of galloping
cavalry. The Mongols on horseback around you are drawing rein. The
pilgrims are looking toward the approaching cavalcade. Brilliant red
and yellow are the robes that flutter as the body-guard ride. Now a
rumble of wheels is heard among the clattering hoofs. Preceded by
twenty horsemen, followed by twenty more, rolls down a Russian droshky,
with a yellow-robed lama driving. Propped among the multicolored
cushions sits a clean-shaven, silk-robed man, with puffy cheeks and
tired eyes. The European watch which he carries hangs in anomalous
awkwardness at the breast of his robe; his leg is propped on the front
seat, as if he were lame. Most turn their backs to him in Oriental
honoring; many prostrate themselves in the snow; every horseman in the
square has dismounted.
“He drives from his palace beside the Holy Mountain to the temple on
the hill beyond the city,” says the wool-merchant.
“But who is it?” we ask, as the last galloper rides by.
The Russian looks at us as an old Roman might, if in the Forum we had
not recognized Cæsar.
“That! That’s Gigin, the Living God! That’s Buddha come back to
earth,--Gigin!”
You stand a moment to take it all in. Then, despite your purpose of
respect, a smile works to the front.
At once the wool-merchant laughs gleefully. “Ask Varlakoff about the
Buddha,” he chuckles. “Varlakoff sold him his ponies for ten thousand
roubles. My friend showed him a picture of the ponies, little horses,
you know, and Gigin told him to get them. They had to send to an island
of Europe, Scotland. But Gigin was very pleased. He said Varlakoff was
the only man who had never lied to him.”
The expression of the wool-merchant was that worn according to
tradition by the Roman augurs.
“When there is not a holiday, the people have the market here in this
square,” the merchant continues. “I was here in the bazaar with a
friend last week, and we heard a commotion over by that prayer-wheel.
We went up, to find that two of the Buddha’s lamas were borrowing a
fine horse, worth three hundred roubles, which belonged to a Mongol
woman. It was all she had, she told us, and it was being taken to the
Living God’s stables. The woman was in great distress.
“‘It is mine. I will appeal to the Consul,’ said my friend.
“The Gigin’s men could not take a Russian’s horse, so they had to give
it up. The Mongol woman came and wept on him, she was so glad. She
brought a gift to my friend. Generally the Gigin returns such borrowed
booty when he has used it a while, but often not. Anything that is new,
the God will buy. These pilgrims, you see, bring him offerings. Kalmuks
come all the way from the Volga, Manchus make pilgrimages, Buriats
come down from north of Baikal, and tribesmen from Tibet. He has half
a million roubles a year from his priests, and he does not care for
anybody.”
Becoming more and more steeped in celestial gossip, we go past the
gray-plastered compounds piled high with wood and timber, a main export
of Urga. Tall masts with logs suspended from them are the signs. We
reach at last a big stockaded courtyard, the beginning of the monastery
quarters.
“Come, look in here!” says the guide.
You peer through the gateway at six of the biggest bronze
_burgoo_-kettles that ever existed outside an ogre’s kitchen. Each
kettle can hold a couple of cows.
“It is to feed the monks,” says your companion.
The Mongols are going up to the vessels, with buckets suspended to the
end of a milkmaid’s yoke. They dip up a load. The soup looks like gray
tapioca pudding. What it is made of remains one of the secrets of the
monastery, whose chef is stirring the mixture with an oar.
A big stockade, enclosing tents and peaked _soumé_, from which the
sound of chattering is heard, appears ahead. As we approach, a whole
hive of boys swarm out and scatter in all directions. Some are in red,
some in yellow, some wear ordinary Mongol caps, some wear high, yellow
sugar-loaf fools’-caps, which fall over on one side. These are the
novices in training for the lama hierarchy.
The first-born of each family must by immemorial custom become a
lama. In babyhood and boyhood one of these dedicated children is clad
in yellow robes and is especially tended. “_Ubashi_,” he is called.
When about ten years old the boy goes to school, at Urga. He becomes
a _bandi_, or student of the prayers and of the Tibetan language. He
runs about as those we have just seen, and at about twenty he becomes
a _gitzul_, or first-degree lama. Now he shaves head and beard, and
wears a brilliant yellow and red robe. Next he takes the more advanced
examination and catechism, and becomes a full priest, or _gilun_,
forbidden to marry, to kill, or to work. He may continue his curriculum
in one of the departments of the lamasery, studying divinity, medicine,
or astrology.
In the divinity course a lama will memorize Tibetan prayers, and pore
for years over the big holy books which lie within the chests of the
lamasery chapels. He will repeat the creed over his beads, in rapt
self-hypnotism, meditating in celestial holiness. He will pray down
rain for the grass, and will exorcise glanders from the ponies.
A priest taking the medical course will gain a knowledge of the
innumerable herbs that grow on the Tibetan mountains, many of which
are of great value as drugs, and are known only to these monastic
seekers. Massage, warm sulphur baths, and waters, are part of his
pharmacopœia. Mixed with genuine instruction in anatomy and medicine,
he will be taught the incantations that cast out _tchutgours_, or evil
spirits, the words of power to be written on rice-paper and rolled
into a pill for the patient to swallow. He will learn what devil is
responsible for the disease which has brought low the lusty herdsman,
and the right order of image to make for allaying the infernal anger.
He will be taught when the fever crisis is at hand, so that the
cymbal-clashers, the drum-beaters, and the prayer-wailers may assemble,
and by these holy noises and a transcendental counter-excitement, lift
the patient over the fever-point.
[Illustration: A PROSTRATING PILGRIMAGE]
If he elects astrology, he will be instructed in casting horoscopes of
unfailing value, in reading the stars, predicting their future stations
and the coming of eclipses. He will be prepared to declare the reasons
for visitations of murrain and to track the trail of straying camels.
Divers are the paths of knowledge, but all may lead to the honor
of Grand Lama, head of a monastery, or member of the college of
_shabniars_, who form the Council of the Living God. And when the great
reaper has called the high priest from his earthly glory, a whitened
tomb will be raised to his memory just outside some town along the
camel-trail, while his ashes will be moulded into briquettes and godly
images, to rest before the gods in the shrine of some _soumé_.
We have arrived at the gateway to the great temple. The wool-merchant
disappears inside to work his pull. A young lama comes out to the
door, smiles at the foreigner, and then goes in again, and you tremble
lest your advent is being announced to some other than the one man who
can supposedly be “fixed.” This is the most important temple of Urga,
forbidden to foreigners, and seen through good fortune by a few only of
the old residents. But every gate they bar to hate will open wide to
love--and a ten-rouble note. The merchant comes back.
“We can go in while the lamas pray,” he whispers.
The uncle appears, with an expectant look on his face, and motions us
in through the darkness to the anteroom of the temple sanctuary.
From the chamber curtained off at one side comes a low swelling chant.
“Service begins, you may see it from here,” the lama says, just above
his breath.
Your station is in darkness, but just the other side of the curtain
are the lamas, and their apartment is lighted by windows. Two rows of
benches extend the length of their chamber, leaving an aisle between
them, reaching from the door to the altar. A score of priests in yellow
robes, with red sashes slung tartan-fashion over a shoulder, are
sitting on these seats facing each other. They are ranged evidently
in the order of their ages. Two old _giluns_, fluent in the Tibetan
litany, sit next the altar. Then come younger lamas, the _gitzul_, not
yet full priests. Finally next to the door are _bandi_, ten or twelve
years old, intense in youthful delight that their part in the ceremony
is to pound as lustily as they can the big prayer-drums. The service
begins with the chanting of a ritual in form not unlike the Slavonic
litanies of Siberia. At appointed times it is necessary to call the
god’s attention to the fact that something is going on in his honor.
At once a most deafening clamor begins. The small boy with a drum is
drowned out by his big brother, further up the line, who officiates
upon a huge wooden cornet, and by his uncle with the conch-shell or
the cymbals. The droning of prayers is like the buzz of hiving bees.
There seem to be no responses, but all of them read together. Presently
comes a sudden clamor, almost like a fire-alarm; then the crash and the
droning suddenly cease.
“It is over!” says the guide.
The lamas file out by a further door, and we tiptoe in to inspect the
holy of holies at the heart of the great lama sanctuary. In the dimness
one sees first before him the table for offerings, on which are the two
main sacerdotal instruments,--a silver bell and a silver handle like a
carving-knife-rest,--and row after row of targets made of dough-paste,
of brass cups filled with oil to serve the tapers, of millet, rice,
currants. Behind this altar, towering far up into the hollow of the
dome, is the bronze colossus of the smiling Buddha, Maidari, the Future
God.
Fifty feet in height, the figure is, cross-legged, with open, painted
eyes. From Buddha’s hands hang long silken streamers. One of very fine
quality is embroidered with the ten thousand gods.
“This,” the priest whispers, “is a present from the Dalai Lama.”
A great festival takes place in summer in honor of this god, who will
rule a myriad years hence, when the race of giants descends to kill
mankind and to people the earth with their own kindred. The Gigin’s
elephant is brought out, and he himself takes the lesser dignity of a
carriage in deference to Maidari. Even the gods of the present must
honor the gods of the future.
The Gigin’s throne is to the left of the statue. It has triple silk
cushions. Around are twelve colossi of Buddha, some ten feet in height,
and entirely gilt save for the red lips and the eyes. The hands are
held in differing positions, folded, outstretched, pointing. Here and
there a silk scroll is hung.
The walls of the sanctuary are lined with shelves like a book-store,
and these are loaded with statuettes of the ten thousand gods.
We tiptoe back the way we came, and are soon in the street of the
monastery. The uncle has seen us safely away. We betake our route from
the Mongol toward the Russian section.
“You saw the throne cushion of Dalai Lama?” the wool-merchant asks.
“They have put it back now. Gigin kicked it out of the temple when
Dalai Lama left. The Angleski drove Dalai Lama from Lhasa, and he came
to Urga to visit Gigin, because here is the second great Buddhist holy
place. Now Dalai Lama is very monkish, very austere, and always prays
and fasts. But our Gigin”--here follows another expansive smile--“Gigin
rode out with his Council, the _shabniars_, and took some of Pokrin’s
best champagne in the cart, for they would not have it in Lhasa.
Dalai Lama was very stiff. Gigin asked him, ‘Have a drink!’ Dalai did
not understand, for drink is forbidden. Then he asked him again, and
Dalai Lama refused rebukingly. They came to Gigin’s palace at the
foot of the Holy Mountain, which is built like the Russian consulate.
After the prostrations, Gigin said to Dalai that he had come far and
few women were on the road and those mostly old and ugly. Dalai Lama
refused that too. Cigarettes and snuff, and canned tomatoes he offered,
but Dalai Lama refused them all. Then, in the Assembly of the Lamas,
Dalai rebuked Gigin, and made him sit below his servants in penalty,
for Dalai Lama is more of a god than Gigin. All the pilgrims came to
offer gifts to Dalai Lama, and Gigin did not get his. For months Dalai
Lama stayed here. Afterwards he went away to China. Gigin came to
this temple then and kicked Dalai Lama’s throne, throwing it down. He
celebrated in the summer palace when Dalai Lama left, for he was very
happy.”
* * * * *
Mongol Urga is left behind, and we reënter the Russian town. A hail
from one of the passers-by is not long delayed. “Will you have _chai_?”
he questions. He is an alert-looking Russian, smartly clad in a _shuba_
of green leather trimmed with sable.
“Must we eat any more dinners to-day?” we inquire.
“Only tea,” is the reply. It is not quite reassuring.
“That is Pokrin, the one that sells to the Gigin,” the wool-merchant
whispers. “Go with him: he can tell you some tales.”
Obviously one must not miss the acquaintanceship of this modern
Ganymede, cup-bearer of the many-bubbled French nectar and jugged
ambrosia; so on we march to his compound.
Pokrin was on his way to a business appointment; but no rendezvous will
interfere with prospective _chai_. He hangs his coat back on its peg,
bids his wife start up the samovar, and produces the vodka-bottle. Yes,
his family is very well, and he is very busy buying hides. We talk up
and down and roundabout numberless themes, and at last venture: “The
Gigin!”
“Ah, the Gigin was here to see me only a week ago.”
We bow our recognition of the host’s great importance, and he is
started; soon he buckles down into the story.
“The Buddha came up in his carriage with his lamas riding beside him,
and they tied their horses all around here in front. Then Gigin came
in, walking softly because of his gout, and he said, ‘Let us drink
together like friends, without quarreling.’
“I brought out the drinks, and we sat down,--Gigin and I with the lamas
around us. Gigin likes best the strong drinks,--not vodka, but cognac
and sweet champagne. Very many bottles we drank, Gigin and I. And at
last I fell asleep. But Gigin drank still. Then he too fell asleep. In
the morning the lamas carried him to his carriage, and back he drove to
the palace, with the people lying down in the street as he passed. All
the next day I had a very bad pain in my forehead, and it felt large.”
By non-Siberian standards Alexsimevich should be on the way to similar
symptoms in the near future. For the purveyor to the Divinity has
produced an assorted collection of his wares which are being sampled
with due diligence. Cold meats and wheat-bread appear on the table with
the samovar.
“We must eat, or he feels badly,” whispers Alexsimevich, as he makes
a sandwich, an inch and a half through, which is about the depth of
brandy in the Siberian highball.
Other neighbors drift in as the afternoon wears on. The talk turns to
that greatest of local events, the Metropolitan Handicap of Mongolia,
under the high patronage of the Living God. Things become decidedly
stimulating, and the recitals lively. Everybody is living over the
excitement, ejaculating and gesticulating. The child-quality in their
minds keeps so vivid their impressions, that the scenes are projected
almost as by a cinematograph.
From hundreds of miles around, the herdsmen have assembled. The
plain before the city is a riot of color, as the horsemen ride here
and there. In the centre of the field is the gay pavilion for the
yellow-robed bishops and cardinals from distant lamaseries, guests of
the great Gigin.
All through the morning, hundreds of riders and horses have been making
for the starting-point, twenty _li_ (about seven miles) distant. The
jockeys are the smallest boys available: young red-cheeked lamas,
perched bareback on the shaggy racing-ponies. The monks, who are
stewards of the course, have with much shouting finally, at the hour,
lined them up in a long row, facing Urga. One thousand ponies have been
reported as entering. It is a regiment of boys. A signal starts the
whole cavalcade together. The thousand small jockeys shout at once. A
thousand whips come down on flanks. Two thousand heels dig into the
ponies’ withers. Over the irregular plain tear the racers, dodging
around gullies, stumbling in marmot-holes, galloping helter-skelter
amid furious yells. At length they come within sight of Urga. Crowds,
mounted, have gone out to follow them in. The shouts redouble, the
people become frantic; the riders yell at one another, and the horses
are as wild as their masters.
_Shabniars_ and cardinals get to their feet as the cavalcade appears.
The Living God’s heavy eyes brighten up with interest. His chief
soul-mate waves a jewelled hand and chatters excitedly with a lama
of the guard. The foremost rider is close at hand now, the jockey,
wriggling like an eel and almost on the neck of his pony, yelling and
slashing. The field thunders behind. The leader nears the pavilion,
his pony is on the fierce final spurt,--a last cut of the whip, and in
triumph, amid the deafening roar of the populace, the winner passes the
line. Many other riders come in at his heels, but most straggle off
to either side of the course when they see that the finish is lost.
The victor is caught up by the priests and is brought before Gigin,
where he lies on his stomach in adoration. He receives a gift, and is
pensioned for life. The horse’s owner receives a good price for the
animal, which is added to the Gigin’s stable. The mule-cart of the
Buddha is then brought up and he is loaded in. The yellow bishops mount
their steeds, and back to his palace goes the Living God. Thus ends the
great Urga race.
There are other athletic tournaments during the season; most important
of these is the championship wrestling-bout, which every year decides
whether laymen or clergy are the better sportsmen. The Gigin’s pavilion
fronts a ring, with dressing-tents on either side. From one emerges a
layman. He advances by huge jumps and prostrates himself before the
deity. Next, palms on the ground, like a great frog, he leaps into
the ring. The chosen lama executes the same pass from the other side.
They meet, jumping like game-cocks, with quick breaks. At length the
clergyman gets a leg. In an instant he heaves up on it, and over goes
the black man,--out! The whole assembled populace raises a stupendous
howl. Bout succeeds bout, with differing champions and varying issues.
Partisanship is intense. The clergy usually win in these matches, and
have long held the championship.
One guest tells to-night of the photographer who bribed a lama, and got
the first photograph of Gigin. The tale runs that this man, a Russian,
secured admission among a crowd of pilgrims, and snapped the god,
unawares, among his entourage of priests. This photograph, enlarged
and colored, is the one now hawked to the Mongols, and which they set
up for worship among their other gods. The lama was beheaded, they
say. That was several years ago, however: since then Gigin has been
photographed at the races and elsewhere.
At last we break away from the group and return to our lodgings at
Varlakoff’s.
[Illustration: A GRAND LAMA]
We are informed next day that among the invitations so lightly and
uncomprehendingly accepted was one to take dinner with the mayor of
the Russian settlement. We are expected therefore toward evening. So,
late in the day, we gird on our greatcoat and move out heavily. Down
the street we fare forth to the house of the host. A fine well-fed
man is this mayor, with the cordial grip and the slow smile of
good-fellowship. He wears a very long beard. He has taken a fancy to
the embroidered green and pink Chinese ear-tabs as a substitute for the
big fur cap of his own people. The ear-tabs are about as appropriate
to his burgomaster build as baby-blue ribbon on the tail of a fighting
bull-pup. Otherwise, deerskin boots and hunting-coat, he is the real
Siberian. In the mayor’s large sitting-room, along the wall against
which the table stands, is a rank of bottles of divers heights and
fatness, like recruits out for their drill. The samovar of shining
brass leads the array. Four different-sized glasses stand at each
plate, and the intervening area is covered with platters of sausages,
cheese, bread, sprats of every conceivable variety, and a medley of
cold _zakuska_ dishes.
The mayor reaches for the vodka.
“Please, none!” we blurt out.
The mayor looks hurt. Then an idea takes form in his head, and he
shouts something to his Chinese boy, who promptly shuffles through the
door into the street.
Out of the window we catch a glimpse of him turning into the
establishment across the way, where Pokrin’s clerk sells the
wherewithal to make a Russian holiday. The Chinese boy emerges with a
bottle, and trots back across the street with the curious gait made
requisite by the unattached thick-soled slippers. He shuffles into the
dining-room and makes space for one more bottle. Whiskey! The mayor has
bethought himself of the English label, and has sent for it, on the
theory that not to drink, like not to sleep, is unbelievable.
Evidently one must again sidestep, so _chai_ is besought and got down.
Our virtue is rewarded, for the host smiles and is content.
“Poor Pokrin!” he says presently, reminded of the man by the beverage.
“He made over a hundred thousand roubles from selling things to the
Gigin. But now he can’t think of any more things to sell. You saw the
Gigin’s new droshky? But that isn’t like selling an elephant or an
electric-light plant. Pokrin is down to pelicans and fountain-pens.”
He shakes his head sympathetically, and reaches anew for the
vodka-bottle. He goes on reminiscing, half-cynically, half-regretfully,
of the past, while dinner to serve the appetite of a Cyclops keeps
coming on.
In the midst of the repast cries arise outside. A Mongol with a flow of
language is heard calling aloud for “_Bulun Darga!_” (fat policeman.)
“They are after me,” says the mayor resignedly.
The Mongol comes hurtling in, pushing past the Chinese boy.
“Fat policeman,” he cries; “Red Mustache and Long Nose and Blue Coat
are drunk, and are disturbing my _gir_. Come quickly, O Lord, fat
policeman.”
The mayor sighs. “I go”; then he turns to us. “Will you accompany me?”
“Gladly, if we don’t have to eat any more.”
The mayor considers this a back-handed compliment to the amplitude of
his hospitality and smiles.
“_V period_, it is not far.”
He puts on his huge greatcoat, draws on his ponderous boots, takes
a heavy stick, and in vividly embroidered Chinese ear-tabs stands
ready to follow the Mongol. We shoulder open the felted door. From the
low-ceilinged recess between this and the outer door he produces two
other big sticks, like pilgrim’s staves. These he hands to his visitors.
“For the dogs!” he explains.
The Mongol’s hut is soon reached. It is in frightful disorder, and
vodka-bottles are strewn around. The mayor looks up in a little book to
see if Krasni, young Agueff, and Pugachev are not, as he suspects, the
men who in native nomenclature are called Red Mustache, Blue Coat, and
Long Nose. He finds that he has rightly surmised.
“I know them,” says the mayor. “They will come around to me in the
morning. I will tell them to make the Mongol satisfaction. When they
come back and say he is satisfied, I tell them to be good and to do
this no more. _Nietchevo!_”
The irate man is jollied along, and is told that it will be fixed up
soon. Consoled and soothed by the protection of authority, he admits
it was not so bad after all, and he bids us, as we leave, a grinning
“_Sein oh!_”
“Now,” says the mayor, “will you not come and see Urga at night?”
He leads along an icy back street, black as a canyon, with the bulging
mud-plastered walls, twenty feet in height, so close that a cart can
barely pass between them. Not a light is seen save as a ray pierces
the shuttered planking of some compound door. Distant clanging of
cymbals and far-off echoes alone break the stillness. Out from the
gloom of the street we come into the open _piazza_, half a verst wide.
It is unshadowed, and less dark. Threading the heaped-up refuse we
stumble on. The black crows, with lancet-like blood-red beaks, which
search the heaps by day, are gone. The black cannibal dogs wake and
growl as we approach.
“They are afraid of a stick and don’t generally attack people. But,
if several do come at you, crouch down and stay perfectly quiet,” the
mayor counsels.
He then tells of the Cossack who last year, passing by a dog that did
not move aside, drew his sabre and struck the beast. As soon as the
other dogs smelled the fresh blood, they became mad, and half a dozen
came at him. He put his back against the wall and slashed among them.
Many he cut and wounded, but more came and more, in an instant. Soon he
was pulled down, for hundreds were upon him.
A big black-furred brute looks insolently at us as we pass.
“They do not bury the dead here, you know,” the mayor says. “The
corpses are taken to the mountain northward outside the town, and are
left. It is cold to-night. There will be death in the market-place
where the poor lie shelterless. And the dogs wait beside them.”
A little way off, where the prayer-wheel stands, is the twinkling
light of a shrine. The new moon and the few brilliant stars are
frigidly distant. They cast a pale white glow now on the dimly outlined
walls and huts. A beggar, lying unseen, calls suddenly as we pass his
heap of sodden hides. The six-foot Siberian hunter by our side cries
out as he stumbles over and beholds a something, partly eaten, guarded
by a great cannibal dog.
If the thought of the rights of man has drowned sympathy with all that
concerns the government of Russia, visit Urga at night, and the Cossack
of the Russian Guard, swaggering along among the Chinamen,--this
Cossack whom you have heard execrated as the “knout of the Czar,”--will
look to you like a Highlander at Lucknow. The chance to absorb an
unwholesome amount of tannin by way of a samovar, and to sleep on the
floor beside the oven in the whitewashed house of Michael Varlakoff,
will become a privilege more prized than any possessed by His Holiness,
the Living God.
The section of the Russian colony in which we have been lodging
consists of five hundred-odd traders. They have drifted down from
Siberia, and on the free ground of taxless Urga have established their
shops of gaudy European cloths, enameled cooking-utensils, candles,
and cutlery. These Russians, whose whitewashed many-paned houses fill
a quarter of the town, have not the large interests watched by the
English merchants, who dot the globe with their agencies. They are
small Trans-Baikal shopkeepers, transplanted bodily. They build their
houses in the Siberian way, and their wives toil personally at the
oven. They wear blouses and felt boots as the house-dress, and keep the
ikons in the corner. Prosperity is evidenced in the striking-clocks,
the lamps, nickeled samovars, and curtained double windows. But they
are still not many removes from the peasant.
There is, however, another section of Urga’s Russian colony, grouped
around the consulate, a large compound situated a verst east of the
Mongol town, which was built in 1863, and was fortified in 1900,
against the Boxers. Within this compound are the Orthodox Church, the
Russian doctor, the rooms of the twenty Cossacks of the Guard, and the
great empty barracks of the two _sotnias_ that were sent here in Boxer
times, and were, to the regret of their compatriots, later removed. The
barracks are still ready for any future visits, and the breastwork,
with its stake and fosse lined with barbed-wire, is equal to any force
which from a five-hundred-verst radius can assemble against it.
In this quarter, the Russian consul is autocrat. He is the official
notary, without whose stamp no contract is legal, the chief of police,
the guardian of orphans. Around him revolves the society of the few
dozen mondaines of Urga, whose personnel consists of the officials,
the garrison officers, and some half-dozen commercial agents, single
generally, or with distant families. They conduct their bachelor
quarters through Chinese servants, and their cuisines are helped out
by all the canned and bottled delicacies that can be ordered from the
frontier. The gold-mines, and the extensive wool-trade which produces
a commerce of twenty to thirty millions, demand that first-grade men
watch the interests of the great companies which handle the business.
So men of the best cosmopolitan Russian type come, at salaries
proportioned to their sacrifice. They gather in the consulate evenings,
or sit in the fenced-off boxes at the theatrical performances, which
periodically come down from Kiahta.
A few families who have made their sixteen-day camel-trip from Kalgan
and Peking have foregathered here with their household goods and gods.
Buttressed by the companionship of books, this other class lives
in splendidly-furnished rooms, with pictures purchased in Paris,
statuettes from Rome, and grand pianos drawn for days over the passes
by laboring oxen. One converses at the consulate in French, the mother
tongue of none, but the common tongue of all. The few favored guests,
who are invited of necessity over and over, play chess endlessly in the
evenings. The ladies read the latest French novels, or sing the songs
that distant friends have sent from the Riviera or St. Petersburg.
They drive in imported carriages and sleighs for the afternoon airing,
and bemoan Nice and Monte Carlo in winter over the pages of Zola’s
“Rome.” The men subscribe extensively to English, French, German, and
Russian periodicals. They invite such relatives as can be persuaded for
lengthy stays, and shower a guest with the hospitality of old claret,
caviar, and the varied courtesies which the rarity of visitors from the
world inspires. They take long adventurous horseback trips in the dull
season,--explore forgotten monasteries, study the Tibetan inscriptions,
print monographs on the folk-tales, and dream of promotion and
Petersburg.
The consulate has one uniquely circumstanced personality, whose career
is a romance of Eastern adventure. Born in the Baltic provinces, he
studied in the Oriental training-schools, and entered the Russian
diplomatic service at Peking. Here he applied himself indefatigably,
until he knew the Chinese language as did hardly another European. He
could write the ten thousand ideographs, and could speak flawlessly the
Mandarin and the popular dialects. He went to Mongolia and mastered its
languages also,--its spoken idioms and its written grapevine letters.
Then, with his diplomatic entrée, his knowledge of men and tongues,
and the initiative of an adventurer, he launched his grand coup in the
palace of Peking.
He carried away the sole right to the gold of two _eimucks_, a
territory as large as France. Not a Chinaman may pan the metal, not a
Slav may open a mine, save through this concessionnaire. A third of all
gold washed,--these are his terms to those who would lease from him;
just double what he pays the Peking Yamen for his privilege. Fortune
upon fortune he is reported to have made, and the Chinese gold-washers
and the Russian miners who lease from him have gathered their own
stakes, too, despite the Cæsar’s tribute which he exacpts of all that
they produce.
He has spent large sums in bringing down machinery, to do on a
great scale what the shallow veins of ore demanded should be done
on a limited scale. An abandoned gold-dredge lies far up the Iro
River, transported piecemeal at exorbitant expense over the hills.
Traction-engines are here, which could not cope with the Mongol
roads. They consumed forty days going one hundred and twenty miles
to the largest mine. Now they lie rusting in their sheds. Thousands
of ox-carts were engaged for hauling in the various purchases. River
steamers and great oil-drills scattered over northern Mongolia are
relics of his ambition.
His brick house, finely furnished, and his brick smelter stand hard-by
the consulate. The Russians tell of masons imported from Sweden to
build them. The life-history is a bizarre record of great things
attempted by a man whose overleaping ambition stopped nowhere, and
whose expenditures more than once brought him down. But his interesting
meteoric career continues, and twenty _pud_ of gold are said still to
come down yearly from the mines to the most picturesque character in
Russian Urga.
We drive down with one of the officials, to be present at another of
the events in Urga’s meagre happenings--the arrival of the mail.
The Russian post, one delivery a week, crosses Mongolia. The horses
bring in three mails from the Russian frontier. From Urga to Kalgan,
the camel-post guarded by Cossacks, traverses the great desert of Gobi.
Save the Imperial Chinese telegraph, it is the only regular method of
intercourse with the outside world. The two thousand-odd roubles a year
paid by Russia as a subsidy are a small expenditure for the opportunity
of accustoming the people to her service, and for controlling the
avenues of news and communication.
The post-office is at the consulate, and a new postmaster has just been
installed. Thereby hangs a tale which is poured into your ear before
your stay in Urga has been much protracted.
A telegram came from Irkutsk to seize and bring to Verhneudinsk as
propagandists the postmaster’s son and daughter--twenty-one and
eighteen. Twenty Cossacks surrounded the house at three in the morning.
The two were arrested, taken to the mayor’s house, and lodged there.
The next day they were started on the trail to Kiahta. Once over the
border, there would be no more hope. Quickly the leading men of the
colony assembled and telegraphed the Russian ambassador at Peking,
knowing that if the ambassador had official cognizance, he could not
safely authorize an arrest on Chinese soil by the Cossacks of the
Guard. The response was delayed, but there was pressure enough upon
the consul to get the prisoners held at the mining-camp beyond Iro
until the answer was received. At length the ambassador replied that
Chinese suzerainty must be respected. The two were free. But the
father had been advised to resign his post and accept a station which
was offered him at Kalgan, where there were only three Russians, all
warranted proof against propaganda.
Beyond the Russian consulate, six versts, is the Chinese town called,
as are many of these trading-posts, Maimachen, or place of trade. One
can get there by the solitary Cossack-driven droshky that the Russian
colony supports. But more appropriately we go on pony-back, borrowing
an army-saddle and a purple fleece-lined _shuba_, whose skirts reach
around the knees, and whose long sleeves fold over the hands, keeping a
rider reasonably warm in cold weather.
The houses of Mongol Urga are soon left behind, the stockaded lamasery
is passed on the left, and we are on a big open plain. A few minutes’
gallop takes us past the consulate. Beyond it stands a compound girded
by a stockade of saplings, within which are the low mud walls of
straggling houses, amid which the gilded eaves of a more pretentious
residence lift themselves above the rest.
A troop of pig-tailed horsemen trots past: the white tunics of the
riders are covered, back and breast, with red ideograph letters,
which stigmatize the bearers as of the lowest caste--soldiers of the
Celestial service. The man in front holds aloft a gilded pear-shaped
standard, and between the ranks lumbers a covered cart with closed
shutters. The cavalcade wheels to the right and turns in, dipping the
standard as they pass under the gargoyle-tipped beams of the gateway.
Servants come running out of the great house. From the cart is helped
down a Manchu of pallid face and short gray mustache. That wooden
house, girded by mud huts, is the seat of government for this greatest
_eimuck_ in Mongolia. The figure robed in cheap blue cotton is lord of
life and death, the _Zinzin_, Viceroy for the Emperor of China.
This Manchu Viceroy, and his _Tu-T’ung_, or lieutenant-governor, who
represents Chinese authority in the city of Kalgan, are responsible
for the collection of tribute, the administration of justice in the
cities, and the maintenance of order. Over the Chinese inhabitants in
the Maimachen the rule through the agency of the prefect of police
appointed by the Viceroy is direct and absolute.
Over the Mongols, Chinese rule is exercised in an irregular nebulous
fashion, with some force in the centres and almost none in the outlying
districts, where the old nomad organization of society, with princes,
barons, or _tai-tsi_, clergy, and ordinary black men, still persists. A
code of Chinese laws exists, but in general justice is dealt out by the
local princes, or _guns_, who receive also the cattle-tax in some
districts, and who go by turns for a year to Peking in symbol of homage.
[Illustration: CHINESE MANDARIN]
[Illustration: GIGIN, THE LIVING BUDDHA]
These Mongol _guns_, ruling over each of the _hushouns_, or counties,
which compose the _eimucks_, are under feudal obligations to the
Chinese Emperor. Their visible subjection to China consists of
ceremonial visits with tribute, for which the Emperor’s return gifts
are of far greater value. A total of one hundred and twenty thousand
_lens_ of silver ($90,000) goes yearly from the Emperor to the nomad
nobility. A khan of the first rank receives two thousand _lens_ ($1500)
and twenty-five pieces of silk; lesser gentry in proportion.
This primitive aristocracy lives in barbaric state, with splendid
carpets, silver-inlaid furniture, and jeweled accoutrements. The women
are sometimes very good-looking. They are laden with ornaments, furs
and silks, and have a spot of carmine on each cheek, which is the
prerogative of a princess. But the normal imagination does not go
beyond the gir as a dwelling. Finely fitted it may be, yet it remains
a one-room hut, with the open brazier in its centre. Their wealth is
in ancestral ornaments, and in the flocks and herds of their private
domains. Their one relic and memorial of a past sway lies in the
custom under which the Chinese rulers call by the old Mongol names the
_eimucks_, which were the ancestors’ kingdoms. That of which Urga is
capital still bears the name of Tu-she-tu.
The Mongol lords are responsible for the feudal army, and a caste
of bannermen exists, who are paid nominally two ounces of silver per
month and a supply of grain, with the corresponding duty of keeping
their bows and arrows in order. In the Tu-she-tu khanate of the eastern
Khalka tribes, there are twenty banners, each under an hereditary
_yassak_, or tributary prince. In 1900 some banners of the Barukhs
turned out to fight Russians, but they made no showing whatever, and
hurriedly returned after a skirmish with the Cossacks. Spears and
arrows are the only weapons the Mongol army can show.
While this feudal system applies in general to the whole _eimuck_, in
Urga the Gigin has a unique position. The city is a great monastery,
practically all of the permanent native population of fifteen thousand
being priests. The laymen who are there are mostly pilgrims, or
dependents upon the Church. Over these the Gigin is master, so that
Urga is known as “The Holy Living God’s Encampment.”
Over the Russians and the Buriat tribesmen, the Chinese have no
actual sway, and from them they collect no taxes. The Russian consul
is dictator to this little flock; and behind his stockade, where the
tricolor waves, rally the Orthodox in times of danger.
Across from the _Zinzin’s_ doorway is a spiked stockade. Inside, where
they have been thrust through a hole just big enough for a man’s
body, are the miserable criminals. In the big pit dug with their
naked hands, the wretches cower, shelterless, under the terrible cold
of winter. They live or die there, sometimes fed by the charity of
Mongols, sometimes forgotten, sometimes purchasing miserable fragments
of offal with the unstolen remnants of the prison allowance. Few
waste sympathy on the inmates. The low level of existence of those
outside makes the place perhaps less terrible than it would be to
people who had known other conditions. It is a grim Chinese jest, this
loathsome prison for those who have stolen bread in the market-place,
set opposite the palace of the grafting governor who has filched the
tribute of Tu-she-tu.
From the Chinese city now, there begins to come the distant throb of
drums and clash of cymbals. Three gorgeous Mongols gallop past in their
splendid free-reined horsemanship. A sentry stalks to the door of
the stockaded prison, and looks toward the gray walls and temples of
Maimachen. The procession of the New Moon is to pass to-day.
You leap onto your little Mongol riding-pony, and spurring him into
a gallop, hasten along the way to the Chinese city. He tears down
the broad road. The resplendent trotting horsemen take the pace as
a challenge, and yell joyfully for a race as their whips come down
on their own horses’ flanks. Mongol girls walking hand in hand along
the highway scatter and call out as the riders clatter by. It is
contagious. Soon a score of riders are shouting, shaking bridles, and
lashing ponies, and it is a cavalcade of racers that gallops up to the
gate of Maimachen.
How different is this Chinese settlement from Mongol Urga! It is a
magnified replica of the city at the frontiers. Instead of the straggly
avenues a hundred yards broad, with cañon-like alleys flanked by
high mud walls, all the streets are so narrow that two strides cross
them. They are lined with miniature booths. Through the bars of their
paper-paned windows one sees the little delicately-tinted pictures of
pagodas and of Chinese girls, in quaint sweeping outlines. Red and
black and gold, the New Year placards flame on every post and wall.
Lanterns are hung before the gateways; green saplings stand sentinel
by the doors; and in the unshuttered compounds innumerable lines of
gaudy banners are seen, strung from side to side across the courtyards.
From the houses come from time to time a thrumming and a picking of
strings in minor music, broken by an occasional clang of cymbals or a
drone of beaten drums. You pass a temple of marvelously carved wood,
wrought into curves and flowers and arabesques, with eaves turning out
into open-mouthed dragons. Everything is brilliant in paint and gilt--a
blazing kaleidoscope of color.
In a friendly courtyard the horses are tied, and you walk into the
teeming streets. All the Chinese of Maimachen and half the Mongols of
Urga have come out to-day. Here is a little shifty-eyed Chinese clerk,
in his low shoes, with white soles several inches thick, his white
stockings, tied at the ankle, showing below the baggy trousers.
Here is a young Mongol lama, who hails you gleefully with a Russian
word which he has learned from a Buriat, and points out where the
procession will emerge. A Mongol woman passes, gorgeously dressed in
flowered yellow silk, with red, sable-cuffed sleeves so long as nearly
to touch the ground, and her head cuirassed with the burden of silver
ornaments. She smiles at the burly Mongol camel-driver who so openly
admires her.
A Chinese merchant, with red-buttoned cap, attended by a servant, is
pushing through the crowd. His looks are surly; perhaps he is thinking
of the whereabouts of his own establishment in this carnival.
Though the rich and wifeless Chinese may acquire Mongol companions,
they cannot buy or give affection. For a poor Mongol, who has the
sincerity and humanness which the Chinaman withholds, one of these
Mongol concubines will either deceive her master, or, if he object too
vigorously, will strip herself of his presents and go to her lover’s
_gir_.
A big Celestial with a fuse comes hastily through the gateway from
which the procession is to emerge. The crash of his firecrackers
startles the Mongol ponies pushed close along the houses. Beneath
the multi-colored gateway, next pour out a score of horsemen with
pennanted spears. They ride two by two, in white coats with red letters
on their breasts. Then comes a crowd of footmen, who fill the street
in a torrent. The curious Mongols press to each side, and watch the
procession of their alien overlords. Two ranks are robed in vivid red,
and carry poles with big gold knobs. Blue-coated Chinamen, with cymbals
and shrilling fifes, follow; then come more horsemen; then the great
silken umbrella, and a gray-mustached dignitary on horseback,--the
chief of police; next, more fifers and wand-carriers, six abreast.
With fireworks and clashing music, the vivid ranks in red and blue,
and yellow and gold, and green and purple, and every other conceivable
combination of hues, make their way around the stockade and back again
through the gated city.
The crowd seems to be trending now toward a brilliantly colored archway
spanning the main street. With the Mongol holiday-makers we follow
along into a cloistered courtyard flanked by peaked temple-like houses.
A crowd of Chinese is pressing around some one clad in blue, who has
just stepped out between the beater of a tom-tom and an artist with a
big pair of cymbals. A preliminary flourish introduces the performer--a
pasty-faced young Chinaman. He starts a rhythmic chant whose cadence
is within a note or two of one of the old crooning Negro melodies of
our South. Over and over again he chants it. A poet this is. He has
conned his verses, and now comes out to sing them. He ends with a
special swirl in what is evidently a very comic climax. The drum and
cymbals crash out once more, and another chanter comes--this one
old and feeble, with a curiously penetrating voice. He drones a long
hexameter-footed epic, in which the harsh Chinese _gh_ and _wh_ sounds
are not so coarsely enunciated as in the poem of the first reciter.
“That is one of the old legend-singers,” you are told. It is such a
ballad as Homer sang, or the Welsh bards chanted. It is the poetry
and the history of the long past, the immemorial past, far before the
infancy of other nations; for China keeps alive her antiquity, and in
her old age never forgets.
[Illustration: CHINESE ARCHWAY, URGA MAIMACHEN]
This week there can be no buying or selling. The Moon must be honored,
but visits are in order. Your friend brings you to meet a leading
Chinese merchant. At the house, a grille of thick wooden bars runs
down to the street level from the eaves just above one’s head. Looking
through them, one can see over the little square window the most
delicately-traced pictures on a white background. The panes are of
paper, all save one, which is of glass, so that the owner may see if,
coming down the street, any one turns and climbs the three steps into
the ordinarily wide-open door of his house.
The home of our host, which is likewise his office, is finely fitted up
and faultlessly clean. His light-blue silk robes are immaculate. Two
servants wait at table, bringing in the best of China tea and French
“petit-beurre” biscuits for our delectation. Everything is appetizing
and orderly.
As we are sitting over the cups with the Chinese merchant, the boy
comes to announce visitors, and two blue-robed fellow countrymen enter.
One has a strip of light-blue silk laid over his two arms, which he
stretches out. The host extends his own arms and receives it, then
gives it back to the newcomer, who goes down on one knee and again
presents it. The merchant takes it a second time and bows, this time
retaining it. The two guests bend and leave the room. “New Year’s
presents,” the merchant explains. Again the boy comes in and announces
a guest. A Mongol messenger enters, goes down on one knee, and presents
a red slip, black-lettered. “Visiting-card,” the host explains. Then,
with a smile, “White, like yours, not polite.” He accepts this too.
“_Ch’ou Ta-tzu!_” (the dirty Tatar!) he says as the latter leaves.
The calls continue, and our visit. The host is charming, cultured,
educated; he speaks English well, and lacks in no attention. But
you wonder if, when you leave, he is not going to murmur about you,
“Yong-kwei-tsz!” (foreign devil!)
Throughout all intercourse with these Chinese, one has always the
uneasy consciousness that one is doubtless, as with the card,
unwittingly offending. There are three hundred rules of ceremony,
three thousand formulæ of behavior, regulated by a classic tradition.
The ritual is so drilled into the Chinese as to become instinctive.
Celestial breeding would dictate that the little formalism which
precedes a rubber, “May I play to hearts, if you please?” be stretched
to cover every action of life. The left, not the right, is the place
of honor, and to enter a room facing wrongly is a slight. An irregular
method of folding a red New-Year’s card, and the failure in writing
to raise one character above the level of the rest, are breaches of
etiquette.
For our race there is always felt, behind the soul-mask of Chinese
eyes, a contempt. The kindness of our host to-day is unfailing. Yet we
are not at ease or sure of the ground. Errors, condoned to keep face,
are often inwardly resented. If you put your hat on the Mongol’s altar,
everybody in the hut will yell out for you to take it off. When you
remove it, they will nod understandingly as the interpreter explains
that the ignorant foreigner transgressed inadvertently. Forthwith all
is forgotten in an enthusiastic discussion of the last case of botts
among the horses. But with these Chinese one can never tell if, by
taking a chop-stick between the wrong fingers, one has not intimated
that the host’s grandfather was a cross-eyed coolie soldier. No one
will challenge or set a man right, but the breach will be silently
resented, though the tea continues to be smilingly offered.
The old-time Chinese dealers at Urga grew enormously wealthy in the
tea-trade to Kiahta. These have mostly gone back to China. But there
are still a number of the better-class merchants whose wares are sold
to the traders and by them to the Mongols. The house of Liu-Shang-Yuan
claims two hundred years of establishment. The Urga people are still
prosperous, for great sums in religious tribute come from all Mongolia
to this Lourdes of Lamaism. There are also many Chinamen who make large
profits from wool.
Of a total trade in Urga estimated at twenty-five million roubles per
year, nine tenths is in the hands of Celestials. The remainder is
Russian, for the Mongols are entirely without a merchant class. Of the
exports, wool is the main item. Some two hundred thousand _puds_ are
sent from Urga annually, four fifths of which go to the United States.
While cotton cloth, cutlery, kitchen-utensils, and other European
goods come down from Russia, the bulk of the imports are brought from
China by caravan, through Kalgan. Silks come from Shanghai, and tea
from Hankow, passing via Peking. There is trade, too, with Ulasati in
western Mongolia. It is the centre of a fur and hide country which is
isolated from outlets toward Russia by the high mountains, and must
send caravans to Kiahta. Its communication with China is either by Urga
and Kalgan, or by the caravan-route further south.
When the holiday-time is over we see more of the Chinese traders.
Sitting in the shops, with one of these, and glancing out over the
little counter of the sales-room, we converse as the customers come and
go.
The Russian in his shop shows all he has of wares, the red and magenta
cloths, the enameled kettles, the cutlery and sweetmeats. But the
Chinaman wraps his goods in hieroglyphic-covered papers, and all that
can be seen are rows of long-stemmed brass-bowled pipes, and an array
of silver and bronze teapots on shelves at one side. Very rare things,
too, our Chinese host can produce. Shanghai silks of finest texture,
ten roubles the _arsheen_; jade mouthpieces for the pipes at a hundred
_taels_; Hankow tea culled from the tenderest shoots. Everything is
labeled and systematized in the Chinaman’s place, and he goes at once
to the packet which he wishes to show.
A dozen Chinese, with bright blue silk jackets over their black
surtouts, invade now the home of the merchant. The red knot on their
black skull-caps and the length of their queues and finger-nails show
them to be men of some importance. They take off the bright-colored
ear-tabs as they enter. They are down to buy wool. To-day they visit,
next week they will trade. Then all but one will sit in the outer shop,
while the spokesman alone will go into the inner room and confer with
the merchant. From time to time the spokesman will go back to the party
and consult, till in the end the bargain is made. They will all hold
to the agreement, too, whichever way the market goes. For in this the
Chinese are inflexibly honest. A local Chinaman dispatched a mounted
messenger the six versts to Urga, to return to us twenty kopecks which
he had overcharged by a slip of his abacus-adder.
Yet the Scotch engineers saw shells in the arsenals loaded with clay
when the native troops went against the Japanese. The English miners in
the Province of Shan-tung have had their profits cut to nothing by the
official “squeezes,” and Chinese have bought in the depreciated stocks.
The ethic code of the squeeze seems to be very nice. It is a point of
honor, almost always scrupulously observed, that the first-fruits of
official graft go to repaying the one who advanced the money to buy the
office. A Chinaman, who could not be trusted to administer honestly
a trust fund of a hundred _taels_, will repay this obligation to his
backer. Thus must he keep face.
From the tax-appraiser who numbers the sheep to the civil governor
who receives the lumps of silver tribute for transmission to Peking,
every official gets his squeeze. They say in the _eimuck_ of Ulasati,
where sables are part of the tribute, that the officials take out the
best furs and put back poor skins to keep the number the same; and in
Urga, that the enormously rich administration takes a Tammany third
of the tribute. There has never been a viceroy yet, it is reported,
who has left Mongolia poor. Yet each official plays straight with his
backer, his “belly-band.” Very curious is this race, and there live few
Westerners who can at all understand it.
We ride back in the evening from the Chinese city (for none may stay
for the night), buried in recurring reveries. How brightly glitters
the face, and how barren is the heart in Maimachen! Never the thousand
ties of kinship and affection, never the thrill of citizenship, never
the love of a home. How little generosity, too, or sympathy for the
people of the land! The Mongols are but “tame barbarians,” as of old
were stigmatized the tributary Formosans. Now and then one finds a
Chinaman out among the nomad Mongols. Perhaps he may be a watcher at
a distant temple, perhaps a telegraph-operator on the two lines that
go, one to Kalgan and Peking, one to Kiahta and Russia. Always he is
something solitary--different. There is an almost sinister splendor in
this aloofness--this self-sufficiency of walled cities and compounds
where none but Chinese may dwell. What a rebuff of nationhood in the
gates that shut out at night all save the alien outlanders! What
contempt in the law that no woman of China may come among these Mongol
people, as if the very air were contamination! How the natives are
silently despised, whose bodies in death go to the dogs, while the
Chinaman’s, in a casket, is sent back over the long leagues to his home!
The homeless, wifeless, Chinese city, with the quarter of Mongol women
without the walls,--it is in many ways typical of all Chinese rule in
Mongolia. For, as the Celestial trader defaults in the duty of marrying
the Mongol mother of his children, so China defaults in many of the
duties that are inherent in suzerainty. One resents the heavy Chinese
yoke on the necks of these simple frank-hearted Mongolians. They are
a race of great good-humored children, and they are exploited while
disdained.
We are thinking of this unfairness as we ride back along the road
to Urga. Behind is the distant Chinese city, the Manchu Viceroy’s
straggling palace, the picketed prison-stockade. Before is the drooping
tricolor banner of the Czar, and the white and green of the Greek
Church, with its far-seen golden crucifix. A crowd of brilliantly-clad
Mongols, lamas and laymen and girls and youths, are strolling back from
Maimachen. They are laughing and chattering, and in uncouth playfulness
are pushing one another about across the road.
Half a dozen of the _Zinzin’s_ Chinese foot-guard are likewise coming
from Urga, stolid-faced, superior. As they reach the tumultuous band it
sinks into silence, and the men crowd to the side of the road that the
Chinese may pass.
[Illustration: THE GREAT WALL]
They tramp by without a glance. Then out from the Russian barrack-gate
swings a little Cossack in his great black sheepskin hat, gray
tunic, clattering curved sabre, boots and spurs. He is one of the
Zabaikalskaia Buriats, whom Russians call Bratskie, the brotherly
people. He speaks a tongue so similar to the Mongol that all these
people can understand him. They look up to him as a rich relative,
fortunate in overflowing measure. For on the pilgrimages of Buddhist
Buriats to Urga, their wives have told the wondering Mongol women
of the sewing-machines which they have at home to stitch linings, and
have allowed the visitors to peep into their mirrors. The Mongol men
have admired the Buriats’ breech-loading rifle, worth six horses at
current quotations. They have enviously heard tell that in Russia one
pays no cow-_alba_, but the young men get a uniform and free food when
they ride out to give their Cossack service to the Czar. They have
listened to Buriat boasts of the warm houses of Siberia, and stacks of
hay, and stored-up harvests. So Mongols smile when the Buriats come to
their _girs_. They say, “Rich smooth Buriats! Great lords! Give candle,
give sugar, give tobacco, give vodka.”
Has not a little Zabaikalskaia Buriat reason to swagger when he starts
from the Russian barrack-gate to see his lady in Urga? And should a
Cossack of the Czar step aside for a Chinaman in the shadow of the
Eagles? Head erect, with a look to right and then to left, hand on
sabre, he swings straight down the centre of the road, and right
through the Chinese soldiers. Without dispute they open a way. He
chucks a not unwilling girl under the chin as he passes the Mongols,
and he is good-naturedly hailed by the rest: “Hello, Cossack! Why so
fast? She has gone away with a lama.” And he goes a bit faster toward
Urga.
These Cossacks, terrible in war, friends and equals with the conquered
in peace, are those who have held the Russian vanguard in this march
to China,--the march which began when the two _hatamans_ of Moscow,
commanded by Ivan the Terrible, started in 1507 on their long tramp
eastward. The Cossacks it was whom Yermak led to the conquest of
Sibir. Through them, in storm and stress, despite oppression and
convict-gangs, with faults and failings, omissions and commissions, the
advance of Russia has been the way of civilization where none could
otherwise have come.
“It will mean much when a Russian railway follows our trail from
Kiahta,” says Alexsimevich; and André adds: “They will all be glad when
the Cossacks come to Kalgan.”
VII
RUSSIA IN EVOLUTION
New times have come to Russia with the events that have halted her
armies. The Slav, looking and reaching outward, has been hurled
violently back upon himself, and he turns to look inward. The stream
of Slavic civilization still flows eastward. But now held back at
the frontiers, its tide is rising behind the impounding barriers
and is lifting on its wave the level of national life. Its scour
is undermining here and there, its laden currents are depositing
and filling in the interstices of the social fabric. The struggle
is intensified to achieve representative government, to secure
administrative reform, to relieve the distress of the peasantry. The
people are in evolutionary throes and are sweeping forward in the arts
of peace, in the science of government, and in the myriad lines of
internal development.
The movements of empire-advance have been noted because they have been
conspicuously visualized. But the economic and social growth have been
only slightly regarded by our western world, intent upon great events,
crises, conflicts lost and won. The seizure of a hamlet in Manchuria
has obscured the founding of twenty cities in Siberia.
The continent-cleaving Siberian Railway has now revealed, in the
Russian occupation of northern Asia, not an exploiting colonial
enterprise, but a race-movement akin to the European invasion of our
Aryan ancestors. The upward struggle of a people striving to find
itself is embodied in imperial rescripts and armed revolts, in dumas
and dynamite, where rival titans grapple for the throw. There is now
therefore in the world a more earnest watching of this metamorphosing
Russian people. What are the types of civilization, the beliefs, the
manners of thought, the institutions that are to hold mastery over the
largest area on the globe occupied by a single nation?
To comprehend a people and the course of its evolution one must pierce
below the surface of ephemeral and contemporary incident, and probe
the primitive racial elements. Russia is to-day iceberg-like. The
crumbling, upper ice, honeycombed by eating waves, is exposed; but
submerged and unseen is the massive blue block beneath. Because rotten
surface-structures are obvious, many fail to appreciate what lies in
the depths. There comes understanding for much when one sounds the
ancient sources in race-history.
From the earliest times Russia lay across the path of incessant
invasion from Asia. In 1224 the Mongols swept down upon the old
Scythian plains. There were no mountain fastnesses in which the sparse
population could defend itself. The followers of Genghis Khan, through
the years that followed, destroyed town after town,--Bolgari, Suzdal,
Yaroslavl, Tver,--devastated Volkynia, and Galicia, until all Russia,
save Novgorod, was brought under Tatar rule. Their devastations cut
off the population of whole provinces, and changed old Russian cities,
such as Kiev, to hybrid towns of Asiatics. At Sarai on the Volga, for
two centuries Tatar sovereigns ruled; and here from being pagan they
became adherents of Islam. Russia’s foreign master was confirmed in a
religion as antagonistic as was his race. To these aliens Russia gave
humiliating homage and paid tribute, and from their khans her czar
received permit to rule. Thus in her infancy she had a foreign race,
not as servile members of the humble labor class, but in the wild,
fierce scourge of conquerors.
Throughout this period many Russian princes married into noble Mongol
families, and Mongol officers formed alliances with the Russian
boyars. The Muscovite aristocracy had already grown into strong
Oriental proclivities from contact with its southern neighbor, the
Byzantine, and these became confirmed under the Tatar. One czar, at
least, Boris Godunov, was of Mongol birth. Incessant war harassed
the people. Alexander Nevski, of Novgorod, beat back the Swedes;
but, abasing himself, he went to the Tatar khan with the tribute of
a country too feeble still to resist him. By and by Russia began to
rally and to strengthen her centres, Novgorod, Kiev, and Vladimir.
Moscow arose--that small destiny-city where Simon the Proud, even
in vassalage, dared to dream of unity and nationality, and took the
title of “Prince of all the Russias.” His grandson made the first
great stand against the Mongols and won in the field of Tula, which,
with the fights of Alexander Nevski, gives to chroniclers and bards
their early Russian ballads, or _bilinî_. Moscow, punished cruelly,
was razed almost to the ground. But the Bear was aroused and goaded
into desperation. Russia reeled to her feet, and for nearly a hundred
years she fought, she lost, she fell; but she rose again and fought
on, until at last the power of the Tatar terror was broken and the
tyrant was driven over her border. Still, for a hundred years more, she
was forcing back his inroads, and rescuing the winding trains of her
children, toiling over the southern steppes to be sold as slaves at
Kaffa. This was Russia in the last quarter of the sixteenth century.
That Europe was spared this, she owes to the Russian. Through those
crucial centuries when the Slav, weak, torn, anguished, beset with
foes around and foes within, was standing grimly at the perilous
portal of civilization, Europe, within the temple, safe by his grace,
was privileged to work up into light, to cement her nationalities, to
effect the liberation of her masses, and to develop her intellect into
the magnificent promise of a printing-press, a people’s Bible, and a
Shakespeare.
But to the brave warden of that portal there was not the sweetness and
the light. For him were the seams and the scars, the mutinous passions
of the strife. Long after the clouds of the Dark Ages had cleared from
the face of western Europe, they hung over Russia. The Slav was back
in his Dark Ages yet, heir only to a barbaric experience. Here he
must start, where Europe had started nearly a thousand years before,
where America, in the favor of Providence, was never to be called
upon to start. For him were the memories of subjection and the blood
of contention; but also, in relief, to him were the stolid patience
and endurance which were to serve him so well. He groped along in the
shadow until the coming of the great Peter.
But now arose a man. He, too, had dreamed the dream of empire,--vast,
masterful. He set about making his dream real. He found Russia a small
inland state, torn by faction, barbarian, and Oriental. Though himself
the descendant of a long line of Byzantine kings, half monk, half
emperor, he saw with the insight of genius, and he knew that that way
did not lie greatness. Therefore fully and fiercely he broke with the
past and set himself to the future.
Between him and that future stood the Strelitz. The walls of
the Kremlin, and the Red Square told the doom of their barring
conservatism. He warred with the Turk, he fought the Cossack, he
routed the Swedes, again and again, taking whole provinces on his
Baltic outlet and securing the coveted Neva. He embroiled himself with
Persia, and through Baku opened a way to the Caspian. Then, with a high
hand, he swept out the customs that made for Orientalism. He broke the
seclusion of women, the prostrations, banished the caftan, the beard,
and the flowing robes. He lifted his people bodily and violently out of
their past, and set them down face-front to a new order. The Russia he
had received a province, he left an empire. The Russia he had received
Asiatic, he left European, and already a force in Europe. And when
arose one of his own blood--a reversal--who would undo the herculean
labor of this master-builder, who would give back to Sweden those
priceless, wave-washed Baltic provinces, and, restoring the capital to
Moscow, return to an Oriental estate, the patriot was stronger than
the father, and at the price of his son’s life he bought the progress
of Russia. Here in this man, who died in 1725, we can truly say that
Modern Russia begins.
Through this skeleton history can be traced the structure of the modern
state, as in the struggle for survival may be found the root and early
warrant of her governmental system. Every element, physical and ethnic,
was, and still is, a handicap. Russia is not protected by the ramparts
of the sea; she is surrounded on all sides by nations with whom her
history has been that of perennial conflict. In place of a compacted,
well-peopled country, she has an empire extended gradually from frozen
Nova Zembla to Afghanistan, from the Danube mouth to Behring’s arctic
sea. She is a land of many distinct peoples, as foreign to each other
as Lithuanians and wild Kirghis; as alien in religion as Catholic and
Mohammedan. She is divided into one knows not how many tribes, numbers
of them completely barbarous. Her eastern and south-eastern frontiers
call for defense across vast and vacant stretches. Her northern and
western borders are occupied by Finns and Poles, unforgetful forever of
their own days of sovereignty, naturally and rightly jealous for the
memories and the prerogatives that are its legacy.
With the eastern problem living from the first on her immediate border,
with her many tribes wayward, Russia early strove to fuse her empire
into national unity. In old Poland had been seen the fearful price
which feebleness and disunion pay to fate. How much greater was the
menace to polyglot Russia, were her master-grip to relax! That she
should hold a strong hand over the elements that ever threatened her
disruption was the first national necessity. This supreme obligation
to herself in her entirety compelled a firm, commanding, centralized
authority. The mould that was to shape such metal had need of rigidity
and unyielding strength. To meet these race-desires, not as a
purposeless tyranny but as the fruit of a long evolving system, arose
the autocracy.
The system reached its climax in the most absolute administration of
modern times at the period of the American Revolution; the “Government
Statute of 1775” meshed all things and all men into the institutions
of despotism; Russia groaned under the iron rule of a Nicholas, yet
rejoiced in the belief that strength was there, and sure defense from
domestic disunion and foreign aggression; then, in the Crimea, came a
revelation of the inefficiency of the bureaucratic juggernaut. Despite
the stubborn valor of the defenders of Sevastopol, despite the gallant
efforts of the aged autocrat, the glory of Russia went down in the
blaze of her city and her fleet.
The old régime had failed. Even the Czar, before he died, could read
the lesson but could not act. How pathetic the words of the failing
monarch: “My successor may do what he will, I cannot change.”
With the accession of Alexander to the throne in 1855, on the sudden
death of Nicholas, came the first effective steps toward modern
institutions. The young czar, a self-declared friend of progress,
raised regally the standard of reform. All Russia rose to the hopes of
his idealism. Corruption in office, which had before been rampant, was
crushed out by the sheer force of public opinion. Pamphlets circulated
freely, uncensored. Meetings were everywhere held to discuss the varied
plans of a vivified government. With a whole nation become to a degree
transcendental, the Czar began his reign and his reforms.
First of all for righting, as it was first in evil, came serfdom.
Summoning commissions of his ablest advisers, seeking counsel of the
proprietors and their coöperation in an act of self-abnegation, the
Czar proceeded to the execution of his great task. For three years
every side and every phase of the problem was studied. Then at length
with a fundamental law which forecovered every detail of the situation,
Alexander II put his signature, February 19, 1861, to the great Ukase
of Liberation.
In Russia’s past there is much to answer for before the judgment-bar,
in omission and in commission. Yet, giving but justice to ruler and
people, it must be allowed that the measure which freed the serfs
ranks, with Magna Charta and the American Constitution, among the
mightiest agencies of advance that mankind has ever known. A dependent
population of nearly forty-six million souls was given liberty. The
great act was accomplished peacefully, and the measures were executed
without any trouble worthy of the name, in a spirit equitable to
the old owners as well as to the serfs. Not alone were the latter
released from bondage, they were provided, one and all, with land and
livelihood. They were given, in everything that concerned their local
administration, entire freedom from interference by their old masters
or by the members of the Administration. The righteous deed that the
American Republic achieved nearly three years later liberated but one
ninth the number of the Russian bondmen. It did so at the cost of the
deadliest fratricidal war of modern times, and the impoverishment
of one quarter of its people. All the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau
through the Reconstruction period could not insure to a tithe of the
Negroes the opportunity for a livelihood,--this that Russia provided
inalienably for each of her liberated. To this day the American Negro
in many places is under special civic disabilities more galling than
those imposed anywhere in the Russian Empire.
The protection of the former serfs was skillfully arranged by grouping
them in self-governing village communes, to which land enough was given
on a long-term repayment basis. In each, by an assembly composed of all
the heads of households, periodic allotments of the common territory
were made to the individuals. Compact economic units, whose property
could not be sold, were built up against alienation of the land or
poverty-induced peonage. The rendering of justice in local disputes was
delegated to the peasant courts,--the only tribunals in Russia, save
the National Senate, from which there is no appeal.
The Mir, complete within itself, was responsible to the Imperial
Government for good order and the taxes, and was secure from
molestation provided these duties were fulfilled. Its inhabitants,
united and independent, were able to resist any encroachment by
their former masters or by neighboring landlords.
[Illustration: THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW]
It is not unworthy of note that up to the present time the liberties
in economic matters thus granted have rarely been infringed by the
authorities, nor have the village assemblies been exploited as a play
in politics or to attain personal ends. While agriculturally and
industrially the communal land provisions have become insufficient,
cramping, perhaps baneful, and no longer necessary now that society
is in equilibrium, nevertheless the germ of free institutions
fecundated in the Mir, when dissociated from its communal features, is
admirable still, and is capable of becoming the foundation for real
self-government.
Plans for provincial assemblies as a further extension of local home
rule had been under consideration since 1859. On January 1, 1864, an
Imperial Ukase was promulgated instituting Semstvos in thirty-three
governments. To this assembly, proprietor and peasant, rich and poor,
elected their representatives. Each Semstvo was to appoint its own
executive to carry out the laws it decreed.
The jurisdiction of this assembly, though confined to local and
non-political matters, was wide. Rates, streets, convocations, posts,
sanitary measures, famine-relief, fire-insurance, schools, agricultural
improvement, all land, house, and factory taxes (those upon imperial
as well as those upon private domains), were given into the Semstvo
control. It was granted partial powers over various other minor
matters. It exercised practically all the economic and social functions
of local governmental activity save what fell to the Mirs. It was
welcomed as an epoch-making institution. The liberal press of the
period hailed it as a living guidon of the upward way, as the blessed
daylight of a constitutional government.
So indeed it might have become. In the new Emperor’s mind there
germinated a whole peaceful revolution. He had plans for new
courts of justice, reorganization of the army, reform of the civil
administration, and popular representative government, with an elected
national chamber.
But in the midst of his reforms broke out the Polish insurrection.
The Czar had granted to the Poles elective councils in each district
of government and in the chief cities; he had appointed a Pole his
Minister of Public Instruction, and had made many concessions to their
old language. Iron and blood crushed out the insurrection, but it had
brought to the great Czar Liberator the conviction that liberty spelled
disunion for Russia, and this belief was never to be dispelled.
Upon the Semstvo assemblies, no longer uplifted by the old generous
enthusiasm of the sovereign, pressed little by little the dead weight
of executive officialdom. One by one their functions were lopped away.
More and more the selection of delegates was transferred to the
administrative officials. The marshals of noblesse became chairmen,
the governors vetoing overlords. Before the death of Alexander II, his
once-cherished creations had lapsed from independent state legislatures
into anomalous, semi-advisory councils, discussing roads, land-taxes,
agriculture, and schools, and controlled by the land-owning nobles and
the governors. Semstvo and Mir and Assemblies of the Noblesse became
ornamental trimmings to the colossal edifice of the bureaucracy.
The assembling of all the functions of government into the hands of
the executive became again the guiding principle of this system. “The
Council of State,” whose office was that of discussing the budget and
law-making proposals, was the simulacrum of a parliament. The Senate,
which gave decision on special points appealed from the lower courts,
and whose promulgation of all enactments was the hall-mark of their
legality, was a form of supreme court. But both hung from above rather
than rested on a substructure. They were substantially cut off from
popular influences, their function was secondary action following
origin in the executive bureaus. The Imperial Autocrat, deriving his
right from Divinity alone, exercised, in addition to his executive
functions and his duties as supreme commander of the armed forces of
the State, those powers which by a segregation of functions would have
fallen to the legislative bodies and the judiciary. In this, the ten
ministries were his main agencies.
Under this system, legislation was inaugurated through the presentation
of a project to the Czar by one of his ministers, or by outside
petition, or perhaps by the imperial wish.
The proposed enactment, if the Czar ordered it to be further examined,
was referred usually to an Imperial Commission of Study. Debates
followed in the Advisory Council of State, and the completed bill, as
framed by this body, was signed by the Emperor and became a ukase, to
be formally promulgated by the Senate and enrolled as part of the law
of the land. Interpretations of law were made by the Ministers, which
none might gainsay. Thus was the legislative function absolute.
In the provinces the three functions of government were equally
centralized. A governor (almost invariably a general or an admiral)
through his subordinate executive officers duplicated in microcosm
the system of the capital. The dependent Semstvo was his Council of
State, the dependent judges composed his Senate, the dependent Semski
Natschalniki, his executive ministers. Into his bureaus came the
details of provincial government save such matters as the villagers
settled in their own Mirs. The troops of the district were at his call,
the gendarmerie under his orders carried out the judicial arrests and
the drumhead condemnations that sent so many thousands along the road
to Siberia.
In the placing of these proconsuls and their sustaining soldiery was
applied the Roman rule, “Divide et impera.” The head officials of the
provinces were from distant parts,--the Governor of Warsaw from Tiflis,
the Governor of Odessa from Samara, the Governor of the Amur from
the Baltic. The Orthodox Cossacks of the Don were in force among the
troubled Poles and Jews of the western governments; the drafts from
the peasantry of Little Russia garrisoned Tiflis and Turkestan, and
Siberian regiments watched the Austrian frontier. Even the popes sent
to petty village congregations were generally of far-off origin.
Though power was thus alienated from the people, the bureaucracy, by
other agencies rooted deep in human nature, had twined itself around
the daily life of society.
Every ambitious man in his profession, as he succeeded, was marked for
promotion. Not only to office-holders and soldiers, but to everybody,
throughout the whole social fabric, were “chins” or graded ranks given.
Here for example is a selection from one of the lists of the Czar’s
Christmas announcements:--
Appointed members of the Council of State: Privy Councilor Kabylinski,
and Von Kaufman, Senator, Minister of Public Instruction, President of
the Supreme Court.
Decorated with the St. Stanislaus Order, First Class: Major-General
Hippolyt Grigerasch, Director of the Department of Physics and
Electro-technology at the Nicholas Engineer Academy and School.
Decorated with the St. Vladimir Order of the Third Class:
Major-General Michael Hahnenfeldt, on the staff of his Imperial
Highness the Supreme Commander of Guards in the St. Petersburg
Military District.
Valentin Magorski, Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, Chief of the
Veterinary Staff.
Alexander Pomeranzev, Professor of Architecture.
Dimitri Sassiyadke, Governor of Radom.
Michael Mardarjev, Censor of Foreign Papers and Journals.
Advanced to the ranking Chin of actual State Councilor, hereditary
“honorable citizen” Constantine Popov, founder and director of the Tea
Emporiums.
Raised into hereditary “honorable citizenship” of the 3d gild, the
Archangel merchant Emil Brautigam.
Given personal “honorable citizenship,” Vladimir Ritimoun, Proprietor
of the Wollner Typographical Establishment; Karl Volter, Captain of
the steamer _Emperor Nicholas II_, of the Riga Navigation Co.
When a professor from his books was called up before the highest
provincial dignitary to have pinned on his lapel for honorable service
to the Empire the Order of St. Stanislaus, it was hard for him not to
have a warm sentiment for those who had so signally recognized his
talents. When on the document which recorded the promotion of a royal
prince to a colonelcy was enrolled the name of a tradesman; when a
neighboring doctor was raised his step in civil rank, each felt the
touchstone. All who had served well in their respective positions
might hope to be on the honor list, and this was the most effective
tribute to the weakness, the worth, and the ambition of human nature.
In Russia, as in France under Napoleon’s iron yoke, there was a welcome
to every sort of ability, and its elevation to posts of the highest
trust. The aristocracy sought for was one of power, not that of a small
birth-caste. A fundamental democracy ran through society. Save for a
few of the Guards regiments, the army was officered by poor men. The
Cossacks’ officers were chosen from among their own people and were
state-trained. In the knapsack of every soldier was Skobelov’s baton;
in the desk of every chinovnik, Witte’s portfolio.
So stood the bureaucratic edifice, complete in itself. Here and there
a popular embellishment was added, perhaps to strengthen, often to
conceal; but in grim reality it formed no part of the structure. Thus
the Russian Empire finished out the nineteenth century. With the
twentieth the system had come to trial for its stewardship.
In the great reckoning are elements both of good and of evil. The
liberation of the serfs and all that went with the emancipation stand
as a credit. It is a further vast credit that Russia has made, held
together, and civilized an empire of over eight and a half million
square miles, with a population of over one hundred and forty million
souls; that to the internal development of her splendid resources
the Government has vigorously set its hand, seeking for her rivers
unhampered navigation, for her canals larger passage, for her deserts
great irrigation works. Already the Siberian Railway links the Baltic
and Pacific; already on the southeast the tracks creep to the threshold
of Kashmir, where some four hundred miles separate the Russian lines
from those of British India. This gap once crossed, Calcutta becomes
but eleven days distant from London. It is still another credit
that, despite Slavic limitations and financial loss, in the face
of Western invention and competitive leveling, the country of the
cheapest telegraph and the cheapest railway rate was until recently
not America but Russia. It is a credit that the public land has been
put so efficiently and generously at the disposal of the people, that
any emigrant expressing a genuine purpose of settling will be given,
wherever he may select it in Siberia, a liberal homestead, and he will
be conveyed to it over the Trans-Siberian Railway for a sum less than
the cost. He is not only allotted his homestead, but he is supplied
with seed, grain, tools, and advances for his first years of marketing.
It is again a credit that the governmental attitude to the industrial
classes has not been one of oppression. True, work-hours are
unrighteously long and certain strikes have been put down arbitrarily.
Still the Russian labor laws and arrangements for the settlement of
labor difficulties are in many features conspicuously statesmanlike and
just. Some years since, a body of Belgian miners, fifty or more, with
their families, were transferred from the collieries of the Meuse to
the Donetz Basin. Recently these miners, at a meeting of the directors’
board, presented a memorial to this purport: “How happy are we who are
no more in Belgium, but who live and work in Russia! No longer must we
support the socialistic committee. On the day of pay we put our hands
in our pockets and have it for our wives and children.”
The other side of the ledger is, however, not without weighty items.
While no system of government can legislate prosperity, the public
welfare is rightfully the first test, as it should be the first
consideration, of an administration. Despite her immense territories,
her vast mineral deposits, her fertile soils, her navigable rivers, her
abundant timber, all the natural sources of national wealth, Russia
is very poor. The peasants have more than doubled in number since the
allotment of communal fields that followed the emancipation, and they
are in general want. Vast stretches, whole provinces, are subject to
periodic famine. Millions of the people are constantly on the brink of
starvation. Manufacturing is, as a rule, desultory, undeveloped, and,
in general, unprofitable.
The per-capita wealth of Russia is estimated at but two hundred and
seventy-five dollars, as compared to Germany’s seven hundred dollars,
France’s eleven hundred and twenty dollars, and England’s twelve
hundred and thirty-five dollars. The savings-bank deposits reported
for all Russia average but $2.75 per man, while in France they average
$20.82, in England $15.00, and in Austria $15.68.
The degree of administrative responsibility for this condition is
of course not to be definitely laid down. Much manifestly is due to
natural conditions, national character, and historic handicaps; and
some of the resultants would be the same under any administrative
policy. Russia in her great area has had a sparse population. She
has not, like her sister nations, and preëminently America, been
able to lay the rest of the world under teeming contribution to her
citizenship. She has had only her natural increase, and no such
record as that of the United States has been possible. The Slav is
not commercial, but agricultural. He has remained poor, and has had
relatively very small resources to devote to what have proved our two
greatest developing forces--internal improvement and education.
It is, however, a matter directly involved in government that, with
this low standard of national living, there is the correlated fact of
extremely high national expenditure. An immense budget of two billion
roubles, ordinary expenditure, is annually met, which the war-loans
raised to a total, for some years, of over three billions.
[Illustration: DRAGOON CONSTABLE RUSSIAN TYPES]
It is the general belief that a large part of the public funds is
frittered away in needless waste, with multitudes of idling clerks
and sinecure officials. Granting the benefit of doubt, assuming
that the Administration’s corruption and inefficiency are exaggerated,
and supposing that the public money is in the main honestly and
productively spent, it is still a very serious question if any public
service rendered by the agents of Government can correspond to or
justify the immense burden of taxation heaped upon a people whose
economic distress is so terrible.
The weight of the tax-levy crushing the peasants, whose improvident
habits aggravate their want, is, for most, unescapable unless they
follow the emigrant’s road to Siberia. The rate-gatherer can take
anything the mujik has, save his last coat, his last horse, his
seed-grain for next year. He is, with fateful frequency, forced to hire
himself out to whoever will use his services, and this during the brief
summer season which is so supremely essential if he is to attend to his
own crops and fields. One landowner relates that he has seen paid an
average of five roubles ($2.50) a month for farm-laborers, including
men, women, and children, during June, July, and August.
Under the old system the method of rate-levy on the “souls” in a family
weighed inequitably. Census revision was delayed in one instance,
personally related, by over twenty-three years. A family taxed,
twenty-three years before, on a father, four brothers, and two adult
sons,--seven souls,--was still assessed for seven males, whether the
family had increased to twenty, or been reduced to one. Each member of
the household was responsible for the total.
It is related that whole families in Samara, reduced by the fearful
cholera epidemic of some years back from scores of men to a dozen or
ten, had to leave their home-country for Siberia to escape the load of
their dead brothers.
Discussing the economic loss of the years of military service, one of
the country nobles related an incident. He told of ordering the dead
leaves and branches cleared out of his lake. Ordinarily, he said, he
did not go near the work or let the peasants come near his château, for
there was a good deal of class-hostility where he lives. But he was
interested in the lake because the branches were killing some specially
cherished fish, so he went down through the woods and was surprised
to see nobody working. All the men were crowded round a peasant whom
he had cited as an example of those who, though unlettered, had great
capacity. This man had served seven years in the navy and could neither
read nor write, a commentary upon what the service training was. He was
declaiming on politics, and the squire stepped behind a tree, for the
peasant spoke musically and well. The man was telling about his naval
service: “Seven years on the boats I have been, brothers, and every
three months I got ninety kopecks to buy a string for the crucifix and
to cut my hair. I had no money for tobacco, none to send home to my
wife in all this time, and I came home without a kopeck. Seven years
of my life I have given to the Czar. What has he given me? What has he
given you?” The landowner stepped from behind the tree and faced the
group of startled peasants. “You have heard, your honor? Well it is
true, it is true!”
The measure which under existing land-conditions would most directly
raise the standard of life is the improvement of the mediæval
agricultural system, and this depends upon the intelligence of the
people at large. Scientific farming needs technical knowledge, yet of
the great sums collected, a very small portion goes to education. The
Nation spends for it but forty-three million roubles, the Semstvos but
twenty million roubles, or together one eighth of the military budget.
A tedious, inefficient course in Slavonic, with the prayer-books as
text, a smattering of modern Russian, sometimes mathematics as far
as multiplication and division,--this is the state education of the
privileged few of the peasants’ children. Whatever small amount of real
knowledge is gained is quickly submerged in the ocean of ignorance at
home. The percentage of illiteracy is very great. The record gives
Switzerland five, Germany seven, Great Britain ten, France fifteen,
Russia eighty-four.
It is argued that for the bulk of the population, under existing
material conditions, schools are of small use. The lack, in the
general poverty, of the very primary materials,--paper, pencils,
books; of proper shoes and clothes; the unsuitableness of the houses
of the peasants as places for the children to prepare their lessons
in, with no spot to put their books or to do their tasks and with no
available light--all these things strike at the very root of education.
The population must be raised economically to the point where the
elementals of existence are assured, before the incidental costs of
schools can be met by the peasantry. However, there has been coming
to Russia during the last generation, in a great wave, the kind of
education that made the American West--the education of expansion, of
the founding of towns, the planting of new industries, the building of
new railroads, the opening of better navigation-routes, the enlistment
of foreign capital; all the intelligence and enlightenment that attends
a real industrial, commercial, and material quickening.
Beyond these social and economic factors a large count is set against
the bureaucratic system for the conduct of administration. The
suppression of personal liberty, of freedom of speech, the abuse of
power by arbitrary officials, remorseless repression, ruthlessly
carried out, racial oppression, frightful cruelty in the prisons and
exile stations;--it is a terrible indictment that has been drawn. The
close of the Japanese War opened a new “Smutnoe Vremya,” or time of
trouble. Industrial wars, riots in Baku, uprisings in the Caucasus,
seizure of cities by Social Democrats,--so went the disturbances
throughout Russia, the white terror above grappling with the red terror
beneath.
The situation which the forces of order were required to meet was
extraordinary. The balance-wheel of the human mind, and all sense of
proportion among classes of the people, seemed at times to be lost.
Barbaric as the administration condemnations undoubtedly were, the
individuals were not infrequently innocent only by curious standards.
In a broad view one must confess that on both sides were rights and
wrongs. The system, far more than individuals, was at fault. But
while a system so linked to violence and oppression could not longer
be suffered, the way out could not come through yielding to men in
insurrection.
Salvation lay along the path that the Emperor opened. His rescript of
October 17, 1905, proclaimed a National Duma.
The pregnant clauses in the summons to a national legislature were
these:--
We direct the Government to carry out our inflexible will in the
following manner:--
1. To grant the population the immutable foundation of civic liberty
based on real inviolability of the person and freedom of conscience,
speech, union, and association.
2. To call to participation in the Duma those classes of the
population now completely deprived of electoral rights.
3. To establish it as an immutable rule that no law can come into
force without the approval of the State Duma.
The ebullition of sentiment that followed these decrees was
extraordinary. All the bitterness and discontent that had weltered
through the years of distress were metamorphosed into a glowing hope.
Ambition and aspiration became a fervor. The delirium went electrically
through all classes during the few following weeks of uncensored press
and unfettered meetings. The educated were fed with every sort of essay
upon what would be the result of the new order, and exhortation to keep
spread the young wings for national ascension. Among the unlettered
peasants, pictures circulated showing glorified cartoons of the risen
Russia. One of the most widely distributed of these celebrated the
Imperial Svoboda Manifesto. The genius of the Slav stood forth: one
hand rested on a tablet marked “Zakon” (Law), the other unfurled a
banner inscribed in blazing red letters, “Svoboda” (Liberty), below
which followed freedom of speech, of forming associations, of holding
meetings, of religion, the inviolability of the home, and amnesty for
political prisoners. Peasants and workmen were grouped around, and
above them stood an heroic figure representing the Duma which was to
halo all national activity with law. The rising sun, illumining the
Tauride Palace, cast its glow and glamour over the prophecy.
The ukase had gone forth to give the widest representation at the
polls. The command was followed out in a system by which every class
had its own deputies in the nominating colleges that elected the Duma
members. Among the peasantry each _volost_ had two deputies; every
thousand industrials had one, the nobility, the salaried clerks,
the bourgeois in the cities, the Cossack stanitzas, the boards of
trade, the universities, the Holy Synod, the aboriginal Buriat
tribesmen,--each had special representation. Uninterfered with for the
most part by officialdom, all Russia crowded to the polls, every man
believing that his ideal was now, at last, on the eve of realization.
The peasants who called for land, the workmen who wished for higher
wages, the Intellectuals with their slogan of universal education, the
submerged races with dreams of reborn nationalities, the ambitious with
visions of power, the venal with hopes of plunder, each and all thought
their hopes were to spring at once into the actual and the visual.
In such a fever-time the men to whom official service meant the slow
toilsome improvement of conditions by self-sacrificing devotion to the
routine of administration, who could offer as pre-nomination pledges
only earnest study and conscientious action on the legal matters
presented, were passed by in the hot aspiring canvass for delegates.
Those who believed all things and promised all things, whose fervency
of expectation fed the universal hope, whose preaching held that, the
way once cleared, Russia could at a bound reach the plane to which
other countries had so long and toilsomely struggled, those of fiery
faith which would consume every obstacle--these were the men whom the
people ratified and whom the nation sent to St. Petersburg for the
first Duma.
It was a band of hot heads and eager hearts that assembled, echoing
their constituents’ desires, crying for all things and at once. They
were saturated with the history of the French Revolution, they felt
confident that their coming meant the end of the old régime, and belief
in their own power was the pledge of the future. Their first official
act threw down the gauntlet to autocracy. In the reply to the Crown,
passed during their first day’s session, the final paragraphs read:--
The most numerous part of the population, the hard-working peasants,
impatiently await the satisfaction of their acute want of land; and
the first Russian State Duma would be recreant in its duty were it
to fail to establish a law to meet this primary want by resorting to
the use of lands belonging to the State, the Crown, the Royal family,
all monastic and state lands, also private landed property, on the
principles of eminent domain.
The spiritual union of Russia’s different nationalities is possible
only by meeting the needs of each one of them, and by preserving
and developing their national characteristics. The Duma will try to
satisfy these wants.
Sirs, the Duma expects of you full political amnesty, as the first
pledge of mutual understanding and mutual agreement between the Czar
and his people.
It was apparent that if these clauses did not contemplate the
confiscation of private property, which was openly advocated by the
peasant deputies, and the substitution of a “spiritual union” of
Russia’s subsidiary peoples for the real hegemony, there was fair
_prima-facie_ evidence for thinking that they did. While a general
amnesty would render less than justice to a large number of citizens,
it would cover as well the bomb-shell anarchists, whose imprisonment
was as necessary to the protection of society as that of any other
dangerous criminals. The tenor of these demands, the speeches of the
deputies, and the avowed desires of their majority, brought matters
to a crisis. Not alone the autocracy, but national unity, and the
jurisdiction of the courts, were called openly and violently into
question. When such a challenge is offered a government, it must answer
or abdicate.
Unostentatiously, the Imperial Administration poured troops into St.
Petersburg from Kronstadt and the northern garrisons. The governors at
Moscow, Odessa, Warsaw, and the big industrial centres were notified
to concentrate their loyal regiments. The whole country was mapped
out like a checker-board. It was now only a question of when the
authorities would act.
On the night of July 8, the troops in St. Petersburg were called to
arms. They marched with machine-like precision to appointed stations
throughout the city. With the dawn every strategic point was held by
the soldiery, and a battalion ringed about the deserted Duma hall. In
the silence was read the imperial rescript. The first Duma had ceased
to exist.
The dissolution of this national parliament had come as a stroke of
lightning. The venerable representative Petrunkevitch told how he was
awakened at five in the morning with the news that the city was under
martial law and that soldiers with fixed bayonets were at the Duma
doors. Hurried consultations were held with groups of colleagues,
and finally the word was passed to meet at Viborg in Finland. At the
little inn there, the pressing crowd of one hundred and sixty-nine
fugitive deputies signed their manifesto. It called for the cessation
of tax-payments, the refusal of conscription, and reclaimed the freedom
of Russia. But the insurrection, the uprising in their support! Not a
regiment came to assist them, not a city rallied to their call, not a
Mir responded. For a few weeks the signers were free. Then the police
took them, one by one.
Dully unprotesting, the public received the news of the dissolution
of the Duma and the arrest of the deputies. The majority of Russians
did not want disunion, did not want the overthrow of vested rights.
Each wanted some specialty of his own. Yet here was the resultant of
each constituency’s crystallized desires. The people had accepted the
leadership of those who had held out great hopes, impotently. The
Government had crushed the men whose power meant social and economic,
as well as administrative, revolution. In the blow it had perforce
shattered the dreams as well.
[Illustration: THE TVERSKAIA GATE LOUBIANSKAIA PLACE STREET SCENES IN
MOSCOW]
Humiliated by the contemptuous condemnation of their chosen
representatives, bitterly disillusioned, the people at large stolidly
acquiesced in the extinction.
The voting for the second Duma, which followed some months later,
was almost perfunctory. Those who had chronically wished to agitate,
and those put forward by the Administration in an effort to pack the
membership, composed the bulk of the deputies. Moderates, hopeful of
progress with order, stayed at home, disgusted with both sides. The
result was a second violent, wrangling Duma, offending like the first,
and in its turn ignominiously snuffed out.
The year 1907 saw universal disappointment, cynicism, and skepticism.
In the literature, the lassitude of the nation was shown, and morbid
despair reflected the thwarted hopes, the agonies, the confusion of the
people. The bitterness in the _Lazarus_ of Andreyev, the decadence in
the _Sanin_ of Artzybashev, mirrored the people’s mood, and the shadow
of a dark destiny brooded over all. To fill the cup, the reaction,
coldly triumphant, was able to bring the members of the first national
parliament before the bar for high treason in signing the Viborg
Manifesto.
In the stifling Hall of Justice in St. Petersburg, like a resurrection
of the first Duma, sat the hundred and sixty-nine signers, grouped
as of old by party affiliations. Each man was called upon to justify
his actions. Many had signed the Viborg document in the belief that
the people would rise in bloody rebellion, and they issued what was,
to their fevered view, advice of moderation. One deputy after another
stood erect to answer for his deeds. If the men had been carried
from liberty into license, at least they had been fired by intense
belief in themselves and in their mission. Impressive were the solemn
declarations of those who expected nothing less than long imprisonment
for speaking out, now, a defiance to the ruling power. It was currently
rumored that should the former President of the Duma, Dolgoroukov,
justify his action, his penalty was to be three years’ imprisonment;
the others would serve one; while liberty was reported to be the bribe
for any who would confess a fault. Yet almost to a man these old
deputies rose to declare that they still stood by all that they had
done.
“I did not care, and do not care if our action was unconstitutional. We
found that we must rely,” said Nabokov, “on the highest law, the will
of the people.”
Kakoshtin, of the Cadet Party, and a professor in Moscow University,
declared: “Whatever fate awaits us, it will be nothing compared to
the sufferings of our predecessors who have fallen in the fight for
liberty.”
Three members of the “Group of Toil” declared that the first Duma would
be an encouragement to the people to overthrow the present system.
Mourontzev, and Prince Dolgoroukov were there, leading members of the
first Duma. Petrunkevitch ended his speech: “If you open for us the
doors of the prison, we will quietly enter with the knowledge that we
have fulfilled a duty to the Fatherland.”
Burning words these, but they waked not an echo. The Administration
was in complete control of the situation. Repression was the order
of the day, repression as widespread and efficient as in the days of
Nicholas I; the autocracy, buttressed by an army which, however lacking
in discipline and supposedly honeycombed by disaffection, nevertheless
rallied still to the command and service of the master.
At this time there was issued the call for a third Duma. As Prime
Minister sat cold Stolypin, whose reputation as a governor-general was
the reverse of liberal. He had risen by virtue of rigid efficiency. His
best friends did not know his beliefs. He had dissolved both the first
and second assemblies, and had done his best to pack the third. “I want
a Duma that will work, not talk,” he declared.
The murmurers said that the Russian Parliament had become a farce; that
the administrative officers were following to the best of their ability
instructions from St. Petersburg to deliver a roster of safe men; that
those who had agitated unwisely were being removed from the likelihood
of candidature; that the Senate, with its membership of retired
officials, had so construed each provision of the election law that
the unquiet classes were as far as possible disfranchised; that every
influence was being used to make the third a “dummy Duma,” hopelessly
manipulated into the reactionary camp.
Throughout this time of shattered ideals and discouragement, a very
small band of real believers still held high the torch of faith. Most
prominent among them was Alexander Goutchkov, he who among the Moscow
Constitutional Democrats (the “Cadets” of the earlier times) had in a
critical Polish debate of the party spoken and voted alone for a united
Russia.
When at length the third Duma had assembled, the so-called Octobrists
or Moderates, who had a small plurality, prepared a reply to the Speech
from the Throne. Very respectful it was, with no demand for general
amnesty or suggestions of confiscation or national devolution. It read
in part:--
We wish to devote all our ability, knowledge, and experience to
strengthening the form of government which was given new life by the
Imperial will; to pacify the Fatherland, to assure respect for the
laws, to be a buttress for the greatness and power of indivisible
Russia.
Unexceptionable, this, to the higher powers, save that in the preamble
in the original draft, the Czar’s historic title of “Autocrat” had not
been given him. A debate followed, and brought about the declarations
which defined the parties of the third Duma. Bishop Mitrophane,
of the Right, or reactionary party, rose. He said in the name of
his group that the Address to the Throne must contain the phrase
“Autocrat of all the Russias.” Lawyer Plevako seconded, threatening
to secede if the proper title were not incorporated. Paul Milyoukov
spoke hotly for the opposing Cadets, asking whether the country was
or was not under a constitution. He declared the new election law to
be contrary to the original ukase and an act of force. Others of the
Left, among them orator Maklakov of the Cadets, declaimed against
the election law by which this Duma was constituted. They were not
politic, these spokesmen, but harsh and dogmatic, yielding none
of the courtier-respect that makes up for so much absence of real
yielding. For the Octobrists, Alexander Goutchkov led the debate. His
speech revealed that they operated, not with the bludgeon, but with
the Damascus blade. They were of flexible obstinacy and opportunism,
stirring up no sleeping dogs, bending to rise again. Goutchkov slipped
adroitly into his speech the disputed word constitution, thus: “We do
not believe that the Czar’s power has been diminished. The Emperor
has become free, for the Constitution has delivered him from court
camarillas and the hierarchy of chinovniks.” Thanks largely to his
tact, the Octo brists won. The Address, without “Autocrat,” was passed
by a vote of two to one. But it passed at the cost of self-separation
by the right wing of the reactionaries, who withdrew.
The answer of the Administration came sharply from Prime Minister
Stolypin:--
The manifesto of imperial power has borne witness at all times to the
people that the autocratic power, created by history and the free will
of the monarch, constitutes the most precious benefit of the political
state of Russia; for it is this power and this free will that are
alone capable, as the tutelary source of existing constitutions, of
saving Russia in times of trouble, of guaranteeing the state from the
dangers that threaten it, and of bringing back the country to the way
of order and historic truth.
He called upon the Chamber to incorporate the recognition of the
“Autocracy.”
A hundred members protested. Many of the Cadets walked out. To the
Octobrists, barely a quorum, fell the humiliating duty of recalling
their own address and of inserting, despite the scorn, the fateful
word. So shaken was the group itself by the conflict that of its one
hundred and sixty members but ninety-five united in the caucus that
elected officers and committee members. Alexander Goutchkov was chosen
chairman, Baron Meyendorf, Priest Bjeloussov, and Radsjauko, officers.
Among the heads of committees were Prince Wollanski, and Peasant
Kusovkov. In spite of the stigma of reaction popularly imposed upon
them, these were not unrepresentative men.
The distracted Duma got slowly under way, and the Prime Minister
brought before them his proposed policy of administration.
M. Stolypin’s address to the Duma, November 16, 1907, stated that:--
1. The destructive movements of the party of the extreme Left have
resulted in brigandage and anarchy. Order will be the first duty of
the Government.
2. Agrarian relief is the first necessity, and this by a system of
small proprietors.
3. Local self-government and administrative reforms will be formulated
and presented to the Duma.
Business got centred on these practical subjects. Discussions as to
whether or not there was an autocracy gave place to famine-relief
measures and railway-rate studies. The absenting delegates of the Left
and Right, who had retreated to their tents in the wrangle over the
Czar’s titles, and had left the forlorn little band of constructive
Octobrists to carry on the work of legislation, now returned. The
proceedings began to take parliamentary form.
The Budget came on, the Ministers of the Government presenting their
projects for discussion. In the heat of debate, the Minister of
Finance, M. Kakovtsev, exclaimed, “Thank God, we have no parliament
yet!” The fact that an Imperial Minister was presenting his budget to
an elected assembly showed the reality, but the war on names rose
up afresh. The Duma officially declared the Minister’s expression
unfortunate. He threatened to resign unless the house apologized.
The Left again exploded in outcries, called out that the Duma was a
farce, threw in their votes as more fuel for the flame of discord, and
deserted the hall when they were in the minority. Still the little band
of moderates chose the self-abnegating, unspectacular part, and gave
the apology that avoided a crisis.
But now came up a matter wherein the dispute was not over a name or a
title, but a reality. The Government, upheld by the Czar, the Court,
and much public sympathy, proposed a programme for a new navy. It
called for the immediate allocation of one hundred and eleven million
roubles, and the expenditure in ten years, of over a billion roubles.
In the state of the country this entailed a fearful burden, perhaps the
loss of the gold standard. The outwardly supine members, in rows like
grenadiers, voted against the project. By 194 to 78 it was lost.
The Minister of Finance shortly afterwards undertook to issue railway
bonds without the Duma’s consent. With a rebuke, for which this time no
apology was asked or given, his estimate was cut down by one rouble,
and voted. The Amur Railway was authorized, though three hundred
million roubles are its prospective toll. The sole remaining Pacific
port of Russia, Vladivostok, is thereby linked with the Irkutsk and
Trans-Baikal districts of Siberia, and so doubly insured against an
eastern enemy.
After a lengthy session the third Duma adjourned, but not by violence.
It could show as results two hundred bills passed, a budget thoroughly
scrutinized and ratified, and much faithful work in committee. More
important still, the Parliament, by forbearance and patience, had
made itself a part of the machinery of government, and had shown that
a national legislature did not mean expropriation, and a partitioned
Russia.
At the end, fiery Maklakov of the Cadets, he who early in the session
had cried out that all was a farce, admitted that “the third Duma has
lost none of its rights, it is systematically extending them.” All
honor to those whose self-suppression and patience won.
The thin edge of the wedge had been driven in under absolutism by
the third Duma, but little could one foresee that a half-dozen quiet
blows would, during the fourth Duma’s session, bring autocracy to the
greatest crisis it has encountered since it decreed a legislature. The
heart of the situation lies in a naval bill submitting to the Duma
matters which the Constitution reserves to the control of the Emperor.
Strangely, too, the Czar is himself the abettor, if not the originator,
of the supplanting.
In May, 1906, the Czar decided to create the “Naval General Staff.”
One hundred thousand roubles a year were needed, and the money must
be sought of the Duma. The first two assemblies being so violent, the
measure lay in abeyance, to the great injury of the service. Since
the regeneration of the navy was one of the measures made painfully
necessary by the Japanese War, M. Stolypin had a bill drafted, in three
clauses: one ratifying the creation of the “Naval General Staff,” a
second furnishing an annual sum for its operation, a third supplying a
fund for contingencies. No feature of the creation, save the financial
aspect, came at all within the legal jurisdiction of the Duma. Yet the
Premier had the organization itself brought before the Assembly.
The deputies criticised the institution, modified it, sliced the
estimates. Assuming the judicial functions of a court of last
appeal, they voted the money and passed the bill, which M. Stolypin
then submitted to the upper chamber. In view of the overstepping of
domain, the bill was, after a lucid exposition of the law by the
ex-Controller-General, thrown out.
The matter was next submitted to the Czar himself, who authorized
its reintroduction in the Duma. A second time the measure was passed
and sent to the Council. M. Durnovo, ex-Minister, ablest of the
Conservatives, and candidate for the Premiership, made a notable
speech. He proved clearly the trespass upon the rights reserved to the
Crown, showed that such precedents would build up an artificial claim
which could not later be combated, while the allowance of participation
in one instance gave a warrant for demanding interference in any and
every proposal. The bill was a blow at the very heart of monarchical
government, and a degree of democracy not allowed even in republican
France. But, defiantly, M. Stolypin held his ground. The anomaly was
presented of Conservatives decrying the Premier for undermining the
dynasty, with the Emperor himself supporting the culprit. Thus has the
former government minority been converted into a majority,--the measure
passed by the small margin of twelve.
The reactionaries have bitter feud with this Premier. He has, it is
allowed, so enlarged the functions of the deputies by handing over
to them, one after another, the vital prerogatives of the autocracy,
that no later action can ever disestablish the Duma. The Empire is
now governed through a unified cabinet; the important prerogative of
appointing the governors-general has been exercised by the Premier,
rather than by the Czar, since June 16, 1906. Russia has marched far on
its upward way.
Great, however, is the task ahead. Of all that the Duma can achieve
the country has supreme need. The agrarian question calls aloud for
solution, and the peasants’ future depends on land-relief. The Emperor
has given instructions for the sale of most of the Crown domains and
those of the Imperial Family. The nobles are being encouraged to sell
to the tenants, on notes guaranteed by the Imperial land bank. Firm
and able hands must guide this improvement, promoting the division
of estates left to run wild, but avoiding the pitfalls of threatened
property-rights.
Individual enterprise must be awakened, which will in the end bring
about more scientific rotation and intensive farming. The old system
leaves fallow thirty-three per cent of the arable land--an area equal
to the whole ploughed acreage of the United States. In western Europe
but seven per cent is fallow, and the value of the harvest per acre
in Russia is less than a third that of Germany. The policy adopted in
the Agrarian Law of November 9, 1906, for the gradual breaking-up of
the communistic Mirs, and the division of the common lands, at the
villagers’ option, into freehold plots, is a wise one. In 1907, the
year following the law’s promulgation, 2617 peasants, in the government
of Ekaterinoslav had become individual proprietors. Under the Land Act
of 1909 one million farms had been taken up for private ownership in
the first six months of the law’s operation.
Emigration to the vast untilled fields of Siberia should be carried on
with all the efficiency of which the Government is capable. That this
is in progress, the figure of four hundred and ninety-one thousand
emigrants for the first seven months of 1908 attests. Fifty-nine
thousand homeseekers were sent by villages which wished to emigrate
thither _en masse_. But care and providence must follow the movement,
and insure that the settlers are equipped with the means for safe and
permanent establishment.
The race-question calls also for a righteous solution. The future must
bring the repeal of the old bureaucratic laws of Jewish exclusion, and
end the vicious circle of oppression and terrorism against this much
wronged people. The chaotic finances of the Empire must be regulated
by years of patient work, such as that of the last Duma, through whose
agency there is now, for the first time in twenty-two years, a budget
surplus.
The Duma members, to whom these all-important tasks fall, must plough
the fields in all their armor. The autocracy is not their greatest
enemy. The history of parliamentary government demonstrates again and
again that in an ordered community authority gradually reverts to the
national representative assembly. Little by little power slips away
from the throne. In England, in 1686, the reign of James II could show
Jeffreys’ Bloody Assizes; yet five years later the Parliament was in
full and permanent control of the government.
The preservation of the country from the nether chaos is, however, a
mightier problem. Before the ship of state rides safe in the harbor
of true representative government there must come a critical period
when the administrative powers are not firmly clasped by the hand of
either autocracy or duma. This hiatus-time, when iron repression ceases
and sober self-rule begins, is yet to come. Those who must tide the
nation over it are such as those pathetically few Octobrists, unpopular
because of their bending, craven-seeming policy, and because of the
unfree elections that gave them place. Will such a group, when the
crucial hour strikes, be allowed peaceably to pilot the vessel? Or will
red-handed revolution wrench from their grip the tiller, bereft of the
guidance of autocracy? Is it to be evolution or revolution?
One cannot deny that a free election to-day would throw out the toiling
Octobrists and put in a membership like that of the first Duma. These
constructive, unvisionary men are not loved, nor is their progress
likely to make them so. They exist as the ruling factor only by
virtue of election manipulations and legal interpretations. With this
essentially temporary support taken away, the group would be powerless,
for every indication shows that the people would not support them or
their policies.
[Illustration: PEDDLER POLICEMAN RUSSIAN TYPES]
Even Moscow, their former stronghold, fell away in the 1909 elections.
There is throughout the country an undercurrent of fierce demand
for an immediate millennium, with Liberty as the guiding grace and
some particular party as its escort. A song that has become almost
an anthem, “Spurn with us that ancient tyrant,” chanted softly by
the school-boys to the tune of the _Marseillaise_,--this tells the
tale of what is in the air, and in the blood of the people. The most
poorly-suppressed desire is insatiate to hack away with one blow
the abuses that have, through the centuries, rooted themselves deep
in Russian society. The experience of the various revolutionary and
terrorist movements proves that their votaries are capable of daring
any death for their creeds, and of swimming to their imaged goal in
a sea of blood. Let the conservative Octobrist group once succeed
in concentrating power in the Duma, and then let a free election
substitute for them such men as were in the first Duma, and the Russian
Revolution has become a fact.
It is a commonplace to compare the situation with that of France in
1790. There is, however, one fundamental difference. France possessed
a numerous and economically powerful bourgeoisie, from whom political
rights had been withheld. This class included many strong men moved
to a unity of political desire. They were able in the first place to
work up into a place of dominance. After the interval of supplanting
terrorism, they retook by their own efforts the power which, save for
the periods of despotic militarism, they have since maintained. In
Russia the conservative middle-class is numerically very weak, and
its representatives are unable to seize and hold control themselves.
They possess it now only precariously, by the external propping of
weakening absolutism. Will Russia’s Octobrists, after performing the
function of filching power from the autocracy, meet, at the hands of a
new Robespierre, the fate of the high-idealed Gironde?
One cannot yet answer. But whatever the harvest, the work of the third
and fourth Dumas, carried out in harmony with the Imperial Ministers,
has shown that the last dread arbitrament of social war need not
come. Revolution is the final recourse, to be undertaken only if a
political and social situation is so desperate that all other means
must fail. Such is not the case in Russia. There are administrative
abuses there. But governmental restrictions press rather less than one
might imagine upon the plain workaday people; and compared to those
of other nations, they are not exceptional save in degree. It is the
educated and so-called upper classes who complain. Taxes elsewhere than
in Russia are burdensome and sure as death. Emigration to Siberia will
give any peasant the legal privilege of escaping taxation, which in
America is the prerogative of her absentee plutocracy alone. The exile
system, dwindling for years past, has now been in effect abolished by
the refusal of the Duma to make an appropriation for its continuance.
The press-censorship is only the open operation of influences tacitly
accepted elsewhere--such as in the United States left the Tweed Ring
so long uncriticised. The much-condemned passport is actually of no
more inconvenience than showing a railway ticket, and it does not come
within “forty _sagenes_” of the custom-house inquisition which faces
every American citizen on his return home.
It is not an error to say that in many matters of individual liberty
the Slav enjoys more than the American. In the treatment of subject
nations, reliable and neutral witnesses declare that Russia does not
approach the rigor of the Prussian bureaucracy in Alsace. Many of
the Empire’s restrictions are those which obtained throughout Europe
fifty years ago--abuses common to a certain stage of civilization,
and of public opinion. These melt away in newer customs, for time
is curing much. Once the chariot of progress is started, many evils
right themselves in the natural and inevitable upward pressure, and
many slough off unnoted. It is not so many years back that in America
a black man could be deported to malarial lowlands more deadly than
Siberia’s steppes; not so long ago that the English Parliament passed
an act requiring all railway-trains to be preceded by a man carrying
a red flag. Like the seignorial rights of Germany’s feudal states,
anachronisms become outgrown, and fall away.
In Russia, unfortunately, the onslaught against iniquitous human laws
is overcarried into a blind charge against Nature’s laws, which no
revolution can repeal. The protest against dire artificial abuses is
mixed with a rebellion against the curse of Adam. It is the fearful
fact of life that the destiny of the majority is anxiety, dependence
for daily bread on other men, grinding incessant toil remunerated by
a bare livelihood, a barring-back from the fullest personal capacity
and possibilities through poverty, parentage, environment, and lack of
opportunity. The forces of Nature and primal competition put so many
limitations upon every one’s action that it is hard to say which are
due to the tyranny of men, which are the handicaps born of the nature
of things. The cry for deliverance is rising equally in the workhouses
of Scotland, in France, where thirty-five per cent of the land is
owned by great proprietors, in the slums of New York City, and in the
rice-fields of Japan. A government under the present system can but do
its best to develop men’s capacities, and to give them a fair deal. All
that the best of modern societies has succeeded yet in securing to the
mass of mankind is the chance to get their sons the education which
will enable them to vanquish some of the limitations, security for the
person, and protection from robbery of the cruder sort.
Capacity and opportunity can come but by slow degrees. When one sees
the numbers and the types in the villages, men of latent capacities
undoubtedly, but swamped by the spirit of _nietchevo_ and with all
their enterprise sapped in the stagnant communism of the Mir, he
realizes the futility of a sudden change and the hopelessness of
germinating by political pellet the leaven of progress in the hundred
and forty millions.
Rulers may be changed by revolution. But the real quickening of the
people to their great future must come and is coming by the slow, sure
way of evolution.
VIII
THE STORY OF THE HORDES
Among people so peaceful and subdued as are the latter-day Mongols,
it is hard to realize that the race has had a past which in tradition
at least goes back to the infancy of history. According to legend,
the Chinese, the first reputed offspring of the Mongols, preceded by
three hundred years Egypt’s earliest dynasty. They antedate Abraham’s
assigned epoch by twenty-six generations. They claim to have continued
before Marathon a longer time than has elapsed from the foundation of
Rome to our own era. Yet they yield not even to the Romans preëminence
of arms, for they won and ruled an empire in extent and population the
greatest that has ever existed. Mongols have led the world’s mightiest
armies; their hosts have carried the ox-hide banners over every great
European state but Spain and England, and into every Asian country
except Japan.
That the march of Mongols down the long way of history has been so
little appreciated is the sword’s obeisance to the pen. Save for the
mendacious memoirs of Tamerlane, and a few Ouighour inscriptions in
Central Asia, chronicles there are virtually none. So story has found a
peg for the clipped tails of Alcibiades’ dogs, but scarcely a word for
the deeds of those who won the world from the Yellow Sea to the Baltic,
from the Persian Gulf to the Arctic. Only where the annals of the race
have been written in the blood of the peoples they conquered are the
events to be traced; only by assembling the alien and hostile evidences
of the encircling nations can one shape the outline of Mongolia’s
mighty past. History takes from the Confucian Book of Records the story
of the earliest emigration to the east; from Herodotus the descent upon
Mesopotamia and the struggle with Persia on the west. It gleans from
the Chinese archives the doings of the Hiung-nu--the Huns; from the
documents of the Byzantine Empire the descent on Europe of the same
Mongolian “Scourge of God.” It culls from Arab historiographs the facts
of the southern conquests of Genghis Khan; from Russian monasteries the
tale of the northward march of his lieutenant Batui.
The outlines of Mongolia’s career are patched and gathered from her
frontier lands, yet silhouetted against the far recesses of time they
grow steadily clearer and more colossal.
In the year given by most as 2852 B.C., a tribe, whose earliest
folk-lore and traditions point to an origin in the cradle of the Hordes
near Urga, was pushing seaward down the valley of the Yellow River.
Like the children of Israel, they were in constant conflict with the
“barbarian” aborigines. This tribe became in due time the Chinese
nation.
Through fifteen hundred years the descendants of the invaders wrought
out a dimly comprehended civilization on the banks of the Hoang-ho.
Behind the imposing national legend, hallowed by the mist of centuries
and focused by images of their five Hero Kings, one may see the fact
of strong, brave rulers striving for their people’s advance. A real
statesman was the original of the demigod Shinnung, “holy husbandman,”
the introducer of agriculture, in whose honor every spring a furrow is
ploughed in the soil of his temple courtyard by the Emperor of China.
A father in the flesh was that “Nest-builder” who watched the birds
construct their homes, and on that model taught his people to make
the wattled and plastered huts one sees to-day. The mystic queller of
disastrous inundations, Ta-yu, founder of the house of Hia, was the
first hydraulic engineer, the dykes of whose successors embank the
treacherous Yellow River. He it was who hung at his door a bell which
any of his subjects might ring, to obtain immediate attention, and who
would leave his rice to answer a call to secure justice. Kie likewise
wears human lineaments, he who made a mountain of meat and a tank of
wine, and then, to please a frail companion, had his courtiers eat and
drink of them on all fours like cows. There is an historic background
to the rising against the tyrant under Shang, who later offered himself
as a human sacrifice for rain in time of famine, and a kindred note in
the story of Chou-siu, sold to misfortunes by a woman whom he loved
and immolating himself in his royal robes when the rebellious vassals
were closing in around him.
As the years pass, the histories become clearer and more direct,
and the legendary aspect of exploits falls away. The Commentaries
of Confucius deal with events as tangible and exact as Luther’s
Reformation: they give the records of kings, and their daily doings two
thousand years before our era.
In 1122 B.C., with Wu-wang of the dynasty of Chu, the Chinese nation
emerged as a civilized state. It was organized on a feudal system,
not dissimilar to that built up by Japan’s powerful Daimios. Under
this single dynasty the Celestial Kingdom began a period of 873 years
of development, marked by the writings of the great sages. Lao-tse,
founder of the Taoist religion, with its watchword of “Tao” (reason),
but its quick degeneracy to forms and idol-worship, was the first of
the Chinese philosophers in point of time. He was at the zenith of
his repute around 530 B.C. He had a young disciple struggling through
poverty to an education, “Master Kung,” known to us under the Latinized
nomenclature of Jesuit missionaries as Confucius.
The youth eagerly conned and meditated upon Lao-tse’s abstract
speculations; but, unsatisfied, he began the studies and compilations
from the ancients which to this day constitute the foundations of
Chinese literature, etiquette, religion, ceremonial, and policy of
government.
Confucius was at once the world’s greatest college professor and its
most influential editor. His school instructed three thousand pupils
in ethics and etiquette. His writings have influenced more minds than
those of any other human individual, and his supremacy is the triumph
of uninspired work. His moral tone is lofty,--as witness his “Do not
unto another what you would not have done to yourself,”--but his life
brought no great new message.
“I am a commentator, not an originator,” he said of himself.
Mang-tse, “Master Mang,” whom we know as Mencius, followed “Master
Kung” by one hundred years, applying, as a practical reformer, to the
society of the day, the maxims of his enlightened philosophy, rebuking
princes and giving to the Chinese world the last of its classics.
In the glories of the Chu Dynasty, China, the earliest offshoot of the
Mongol race, reached its literary and philosophic climax.
In Turan, now called Turkestan, and in Mesopotamia, a western division
of the Mongols appears about 640 B.C. It is making an incursion into
the declining Empire of Assyria, over which Nebuchadnezzar is soon to
rule. Nothing of detail remains, only the record of the devastating
inroad over the mountain; but it locates at this date the southwestern
frontier of Mongol dominion.
Scythia, north of the Black Sea, reveals them next. The sketch
is drawn by the master-pen of the Greek father of history in his
description of the expedition of Darius, 506 B.C. “Having neither
cities nor forts, they carry their dwellings with them wherever they
go,” Herodotus writes, describing the nomad foes of the Great King. He
relates that they are “accustomed, moreover, one and all of them, to
shoot from horseback and to live not by husbandry, but on their cattle.”
This was the enemy against whom Darius planned a campaign, whose
object was to free from the menace of the Scythians north of the line
of advance his prospective expedition for the conquest of Greece.
From the bridge of boats over the Hellespont, beside which Miltiades
watched, the great Persian marched to the Don River, the nomads always
retreating. Darius finally challenged the Scythian king to stand and
fight, or to accept him as suzerain. To this message Idonthyrsus
replied: “This is my way, Persian. I never fear men or fly from them,
nor do I now fly from thee. I only follow my common mode of life in
peaceful years. We Scythians have neither towns nor cultivated lands,
which might induce us, through fear of being taken or ravaged, to be in
any hurry to fight with you. In return for thy calling thyself my lord,
I say to thee, ‘Go weep!’”
All the Asian steppes were open to the ever-retreating nomads: Darius
was obliged to halt. Hereupon, the Scythian prince, understanding how
matters stood, dispatched a herald to the Persian camp with presents
for the king. They were “a bird, a mouse, a frog, and five arrows.”
Darius was at liberty to deduce whatever explanation he chose. He
retreated, the Scythians hounding his army on. He found his bridge over
the Bosphorus safe, and returned to Persia to prepare the Athenian
expedition that ended at Marathon. The Scythians remained: they were
left leading their flocks as of old over the unconquerable steppes.
By these echoes of clashings with other nations, the first-known
streams of Mongol outflow are dimly followed to the Caucasus Mountains
and the Black Sea on the south and west, bounding Scythia; to the
Hoang-ho Valley, in which were living the metamorphosed Chinese.
But the rolling hills south of Lake Baikal, the source of the
race-stream, still poured out fresh hordes, which periodically
overflowed in roving nomad bands, harrying the plainsmen. While the
feudal states of China struggled and fought among themselves, now
coalescing under the “Wu-pa,” the five dictators, now uniting under a
Prince Hwan of Shan-tung into a temporary Chinese Shogunate, there came
down upon the fertile lands and populous cities wild horsemen, sparing
none, burning, looting, riding away. “The Hiung-nu descended on us,”
appears again and again in the history.
At length, about 246 B.C., arose the short but glorious dynasty of
Ts’in, under China’s king, Shi-hwang-ti. He was a man of action. He
compacted a centralized monarchy from the many princedoms, drove back
the nomad Hiung-nu beyond the Yellow River, built the Great Wall, and
by his glorious exploits blazoned into Europe’s vocabulary, the word
China--Ts’in.
In Sz-ma Ts’ien’s history, a striking incident, revealing the Great
Emperor’s limitations, is graphically told.
“Li-se, the councillor, said, ‘Of old, the Empire was divided and
troubled. There was nobody who could unite it. Therefore did many
lords reign at a time. For this, the readers of books speak of old
times to cry down these. They encourage the people to forge calumnies.
Your subject proposes that all the official histories be burned.
The books not proscribed shall be those of medicine, of divination,
of agriculture. If any want to study laws, let them take the
office-holders as masters.’”
The decree was “approved.” The old books of annals, the Confucian
Commentaries, the Odes and the Rituals, to the suppressed execration of
the learned, fed the flames. The literati who protested were warmed,
themselves, over the same fires.
But despite Shi-hwang-ti’s signal defeat of the five coalescing tribes,
and the eighty-two thousand severed heads; despite the victories in 214
B.C., the Hiung-nu Empire grew in power, until it extended from Corea
to Tibet.
The Chinese “Han” Dynasty, even under the peasant-founder, Lin-pang,
who had proven himself a thorough soldier, was constantly harried. The
loss of the old literature continued to be mourned, which argues some
plane of general appreciation. The Minister urged the recall of the
Ts’in philosophers and the reproduction of the burned books.
“Why have books?” said the Emperor. “I won the Empire on horseback.”
“Can you keep it on horseback?” the Minister asked.
The literati were eventually recalled. Their support was secured for
the throne, and the Hiung-nu were kept back by art as well as by arms.
At the Emperor’s death, his widow, the Dowager Empress Lu, of Borgian
repute, was still harder pressed by the nomads. Meteh, the khan of the
invading hordes outside the Wall, ventured to send to her a proposal of
marriage and tariff-treaty couched in Rabelaisian poetry. “I wish to
change what I have for what I have not.” He followed the verses with
gifts of camels and carts and steppe ponies. In return his messengers
insisted on a tribute of wadded and silk clothes, precious metals and
embroidery, grain and yeast, as well as the intoxicating _samshu_.
These royal presents and tribute were really a trading of goods, a
barter, and citizens of lower rank, in the fairs beside the Wall, were
carrying on an equivalent.
More and more oppressive became the demands of the Mongols. A band of
beautiful maidens, a very toll of the Minotaur, was exacted yearly.
In one of the ancient Chinese poems a princess laments the fate that
condemns her to a barbarian husband, a desolate land where raw flesh is
to be her food, sour milk her drink, and the felt hut her palace.
In 200 B.C., Sin, King of Han, marched against the Hiung-nu, only to
retreat after heavy losses, with a third of his soldiers fingerless
from the cold. Again, in 177 B.C., the Hiung-nu broke a treaty and
raided across the Wall. A speech of the Emperor, in 162 B.C., is
quoted in the Chinese chronicles: “These later times for several years
the Hiung-nu have come in a crowd to exercise their ravages on our
frontiers.”
In 141 B.C., Nu-ti, the fifth of the House of Han, assembled a great
army of one hundred and forty thousand Chinese, and marched against
the Confederacy. This army, like that of Darius, penetrated far up
into the nomad’s territory. Scarcely a quarter of them returned. But
the invasion was not fruitless: the Hiung-nu gave allegiance to China.
Later, in 138 B.C., largely to turn the left flank of the Horde, the
Chinese advanced into Corea. In 119 B.C. another march to the district
north of Tibet turned the nomads’ right flank. At length, in 100 A.D.,
a more northerly Tatar clan, the Sien-pi, came down on the broken
remnants of the Hiung-nu. After thirteen hundred years of power this
tribe was destroyed. Of the scattered nomads some remained to unite
with their victorious conquerors; some went south to Turkestan; a third
group trekked north, and went over the great steppe. Subsequent to 100
A.D., they are found on the east bank of the Volga, where during two
centuries they temporarily disappear from history.
The great Empire of China now existed unmolested by the Hordes, and
after a few hard fights ruled Asia as far as the borders of Persia.
Its outposts almost met those of the Empire of Rome. Both realms were,
about this date, in peace and prosperity. There is even a record of
trade between them, the Chinese annals telling of an expedition of
King An-tun, or Antoninus, in 166 A.D., to Burmah, from which his
factors reached the Middle Kingdom; and of glass, drugs, metals, and
game obtained overland by way of Parthia from Ta-ts’in, the Great
Empire. Pliny writes of silk, iron, furs, and skins, caravan-brought
from China. So moved the two empires until 376 A.D., when Valens the
Irresolute reigned in Byzantium. To him came messengers bringing word
of great alarm from the Danube. The whole nation of Goths were on the
bank, begging a refuge in Roman territory.
“Wild enemies, from where we know not, are upon us!” they cried.
The Goths, who were to subvert the declining empire, were escaping from
before the western division of the old Hiung-nu. Valens had the Goths
ferried over the Danube, and the Huns established themselves in the
vacated places of what is now Austria.
[Illustration: THE MIRACLE OF ATTILA’S REPULSE (From a painting by
Raphael in Vatican)]
Amid those hordes arose a leader destined to leave a memory in the
sagas of the Scandinavian bards, in the Niebelungenlied of the Teutons,
and a lurid trail in the annals of the Cæsars. He called himself a
descendant of the great Nimrod, “nurtured in Engaddi, by the grace of
God, King of the Huns, the Goths, the Danes, the Medes; the Dread of
the World,”--Attila.
A profound politician, he alternately cajoled and threatened the
peoples whose conquest he undertook; a true barbarian, no food
save flesh and milk passed his lips. He and his men worshiped the
mysteriously discovered scimitar of Mars, and from Persia to Gaul, from
Finland to the walls of Constantinople, his armies ranged. Ambassadors
went from his Court to China. The great battle of Chalons, in which,
aided by the Goths, the dwindling forces of Rome’s Western Empire
won their last victory, alone preserved Europe from his yoke. His
descendants, mixing with succeeding conquerors, have remained until
this day in the land that is called, after their dreaded name, Hungary.
Back to the history of Sz-ma Ts’ien one must return for the next
harvest of Mongolia’s dragon-teeth. The Tung-hu, whose descendants are
now the skin-clad Tunguses that live far to the north, even up to the
Arctic Ocean, came down between 309 and 439 A.D. upon Manchuria. This
occupation separated China from Corea, which, thus isolated, preserved
for centuries the old Han dialect. The Tung-hu conquerors established
a great kingdom extending from the Japan Sea to Turkestan. From 380 to
580 they ruled the northern kingdom of China proper. The leading place
among those who composed their empire was held by the tribe of Juju, or
Geougen, whose descendants are now the Finns. Subject to the Juju was a
Mongol clan descended from the old southern Hiung-nu, who lived hard-by
Mount Altai. They were blacksmiths and armorers for the Tung-hu army,
and were called Turks. Their crescent power gradually supplanted that
of their masters.
In 480 this people appeared on the border of China. By 560 the Turkish
Empire had become supreme in Central Asia. They pressed upon the nation
of Avars on the Altai borderland of the steppe, until twenty thousand
of these, refusing to submit, moved westward. Justinian received
the envoys of the fugitives in 558. They offered to serve him, and
threatened, if unaccepted, to attack his Eastern Empire. Anxious only
to keep them away from his own domains, and indifferent as to which
should survive, he sent them to attack his German enemies. The Avars,
conquering a place in Europe, established a powerful nation between the
Danube and the Elbe, biding their time till with the other barbarians
they could descend to the spoil of Rome.
After their rebellious vassals came the Turkish envoys, with richer
presents to the Eastern Emperor Justin II, and more alarming menaces.
The military alliance of the Turks was accepted and that of the Avars
renounced. Kemarchus carried the ratification of Rome’s treaty to Mount
Altai in Central Asia. For many years there was friendship between
Mongol and Byzantine, mutual alliance and trade.
In 618 the great T’ang Dynasty arose in China, whose fame is suggested
in the fact that the only Cantonese word for a Chinese nationality
is “Man of T’ang.” The energetic Li-shi-min subdued the Manchurian
Tunguses, and in 630 a great battle broke the Turkish power. China once
again was supreme from Corea to the borderland of Persia. During the
T’ang Dynasty, Kashmir in India, and Anam were captured by the Chinese.
There followed now a period of centuries when the breeding-place of the
Mongol’s wolf-born hordes ran barren. In unchronicled obscurity the
skin-clad herdsmen lived out their generation. To the feeble Ouighour
confederacy fell the sceptre of the steppes. The old territory of the
Hiung-nu khans and the Turkish Supreme King was split into little
chief-governed principalities. Manchus and Tung-hus, rallying again,
alternately ruled and harried China. Avars and Huns occupied their
distant conquests. But in the vast stretch between, the tribes were
in a bewitched sleep. The people and the qualities that made the old
armies were there; the breed of shaggy ponies which they rode was
there; iron reddened the hill-slopes, waiting to be hammered into
spears in the Altai forges; China and Europe were as ripe for the
spoiling. All that the Mongols needed was a leader.
In a quaint chronicle of the Middle Ages we read of how he came. When
the French took Antioch from the Turks, one Can Can ruled over the
northern region out of which the Turks had originally come. To the
old kindred in this hour of need they sent for aid. Can Can was of
the Cathayans, a people dwelling among the mountains. In one of the
valley stretches lived the Tayman tribe, who were Nestorians. After
Can Can’s death a shepherd, who had risen to power among the Taymans,
made himself ruler as King John. King John had a brother named Vut.
Beyond his pastures some ten or fifteen days’ journey was Mongol; the
latter described as a poor and beggarly nation, without governor or law
save their soothsayings so detestable to the minds of the Nestorians.
Adjoining the Mongols were other poor people called Tatars. When King
John died without an heir, Vut became greatly enriched. This aroused
naturally the cupidity of his needy neighbors. Among the Mongols was
a blacksmith named Cyngis. Ingratiating himself with the Tatars, he
pointed out that the lack of a governor left both peoples subject to
the oppression of the surrounding tribes. He got himself raised to the
double chieftainship, secretly collected an army, and broke suddenly
upon Vut. Cyngis sent the Tatars ahead now to open his way, and the
people everywhere cried in dismay, “Lo, the Tatars come! the Tatars
come!”
While the Turks sought aid of their kinsmen for the defense, the French
King sent to King John’s reputedly Christian kingdom for help to his
crusade. But Cyngis “Temugin,” the Man, had come. As Genghis Khan he
was to open up the vastest empire the world has ever seen.
In 1200 the young Temugin, in a great battle near Urga, defeated Wang
Khan, whom modern research, vindicating the basis of truth in the old
Friar William de Rubruquis tales, has shown to have been a Tatar prince
of the Nestorian Christian faith, King of the Kitai or Cathayans, in
all probability the ruler known to the princes of Europe, through his
letters to the Roman Pope, as the Christian potentate of the Orient,
Prester John.
Wang Khan’s skull, encased in silver, graced the conqueror’s tent as a
first trophy. In 1206, summoning all the Mongol chiefs, Temugin took
the title of Genghis Khan, “The Greatest King.”
His armies were turned next to the reduction of his own people, the
nomad tribes of the Central Asian plains. As one after another was
defeated, its warriors were incorporated into his growing army. When
all these myriad shepherds and soldiers were gathered in, he directed
his march towards China.
The Great Wall was as paper to his host. Ninety cities were taken by
storm, never one surrendering. For while to the kindred races which he
had conquered, and which furnished further recruits for his armies,
Genghis was most merciful and humane, to a foreign foe he was indeed
the Wrath of God. Once he was bought off from the invasion; but again
he returned to the prey. A way into Peking was opened by means of a
mine dug under the walls to the centre of the city; through it a picked
body of Mongols entered, marched to the gates, and opened them. The
savage host rushed in to sack and slay. For sixty days Peking burned,
and five desolated provinces of North China were added to the Mongol
Empire.
Mohammed, Sultan of Carizme, who reigned from India to the Persian
Gulf, was the next objective for the Mongols. In the field, by valor
and numbers, the Khan’s troops defeated all the Sultan’s armies. The
walled towns were besieged and taken, largely through the skill of
Chinese engineers. The whole great Persian district was harried after
the custom of the Mongols through four years; for hundreds of miles
the country was so ruined that to this day the old populousness and
prosperity have never been recovered.
The army of one of the Khan’s generals marched north into Turkestan,
and subduing many Turkish peoples, entered beyond the Caucasus the
territory of the Polovtisni, themselves Mongols of an earlier invasion.
The conquest of Russia had begun. A Muscovite chronicle of those days
illustrates the utter consternation and surprise of the inhabitants at
this formidable and sudden incursion: “In those times there came upon
us, for our sins, unknown nations. No one could tell their origin,
whence they came, or what religion they professed. God alone knew
who they were.” The people generally believed that the time had come
foretold in Revelation when Satan should be let loose with the hosts of
“Gog and Magog to gather them together in battle; the number of whom is
as the sand of the sea.” Indeed, in the old map of Tatary, by Hondius,
the territories of these two fabled worthies are carefully outlined in
what is now Manchuria.
Despite the Tatarean theory of the Mongols’ army, the Russian chivalry
gathered to the aid of the Polovtisni, and collected an army by the
lower Dnieper. Defiantly they killed the ambassadors whom the Mongols
sent. The wrathful nomads advanced into the Crimea near the Sea of
Azov. The two hosts met in the fatal battle of Kalka. It was the Crécy
of Russian chivalry. Hardly a tenth of the army escaped. Ten thousand
of the men of Kiev fell; of the princes, six, of the boyars, seventy,
died on the field of battle. Matislaf the Bold alone made front, and he
was treacherously betrayed and slain.
The way into southern Russia was now open; yet, after their victory in
1224, the Mongols disappeared as suddenly as they had come. The hordes
had been diverted to complete the conquest of China. For thirteen
years they were swallowed up by the steppe. The son of Genghis,
“Oktai,” had succeeded the dead conqueror, and had appointed Batui
General of the West.
Again there was heralded an invasion, this time by one of the outlying
tribes of Khirgiz on the eastern border. The blow was aimed at the very
heart of Russia. The old Slav ballads, or “_bilinî_,” tell how Oleg the
Handsome fell at Riszan. The Tatars entered and burned Moscow in 1237.
Onward into the north rolled their conquest, town after town falling.
At the Cross of Ignatius, fifty miles from Novgorod, the torrent
turned, and, sparing for the time being the ancient republic, swept to
the south.
Against the cradle of the Russian race, the white-walled many-towered
city of Kiev, Mangu, the grandson of Genghis, now marched. By
multitudes the Tatars carried the walls. Fighting to the end, the last
defenders went down in a ring around the tomb of the great Yaroslav.
Russia was prostrate at the feet of the nomads. Her princes became
vassals, some to journey as far as the Amur to pay their homage to
the Great Khan. Without the Tatar Emperor’s letters-patent, no prince
could assume his inheritance. When the envoy presented the documents,
the nobles had to prostrate themselves and accept them kneeling. Each
Russian city gave its tribute, even the still uninvaded Novgorod.
Every peasant in Muscovy paid his poll-tax. Indeed, the supremacy of
the czars of Moscow, when the Tatar yoke was at length thrown off,
was largely due to the wealth which the Romanov family had managed to
acquire and to hold during their term as tax-farmers of the Great Khan.
Russian troops, supplied as part of the tribute, engaged in the Tatar
wars, getting in one instance of record their share of the booty--after
the sack of Daghestan. They were drafted on account of their great
size and valor into a body-guard for the Mongol Emperor in Peking,
corresponding to the Swiss Guard of Louis XVI.
While the conquest of Russia was being consolidated into a permanent
Mongol dominion destined to endure for nearly two hundred and fifty
years, Batui led his army on into Poland and Bohemia. He took Buda-Pest
and devastated the country far and wide. The most alarming accounts
preceded him, which are still to be read in the monkish annals of the
time. “Anno Domini, 1240, the detestable people of Satan, to wit, an
infinite number of Tatars, broke forth like grasshoppers covering
the face of the earth, spoiling the eastern confines with fire and
sword, ruining cities, cutting up woods, rooting up vineyards, killing
the people both of city and country. They are rather monsters than
men; clothed with ox-hides, armed with iron plates, in stature thick
and short, well-set, strong in body, in war invincible, in labor
indefatigable, drinking the blood of their beasts for dainties.”
The Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, who undertook to gather the
powers of Europe to meet the danger, wrote to Henry III of England:--
“A barbarous nation hath lately come called Tatars. We know not of what
place or originall. A public destruction hath therefore followed the
common desolation of Kingdomes and spoil of the fertile land which that
wicked people hath passed through, not sparing sex, age or dignity,
and hoping to extinguish the rest of mankind. The general destruction
of the world and specially of Christendom calls for speedy help and
succour.
“The men are of short stature but square and well-set, rough and
courageous, have broad faces, frowning lookes, horrible cries agreeing
to their hearts. They are incomparable archers.
“Heartily we adjure your majestie in behalfe of the common necessitie,
that with instant care and prudent deliberation, you diligently prepare
speedy aide of strong knights and other armed Men-at-arms.”
Throughout Europe the dread was universal. In 1248 Pope Innocent IV
sent to the Tatars an embassy with money, begging them to cease their
ravages. Failing, he summoned Christendom. Louis IX of France prepared
a crusade. The fishermen of England could not sell their herrings
because their usual customers, the Swedes, had remained at home to
defend Scandinavia. Fortunately, the tide of western Mongol invasion
had spent itself. After wasting the Danube district, the death of
the Great Khan recalled Batui in 1245.
[Illustration: ON THE ROAD TO THE MING TOMBS]
Syrian archives reveal the Mongols’ next appearance. In 1243 Hatthon,
King of Armenia, sought Mangu Khan at Cambaluc (Peking), praying him to
fight the Saracens and recover Jerusalem. Mangu sent his general, who
speedily took Antioch, spoiled Aleppo, and sacked the city of Bagdad.
When the latter was stormed, Haloon, the Mongol general, ordered that
the Caliph be brought alive into his presence. There had been found in
the city a quite surprising booty in treasure and riches. Haloon asked
why the Caliph had not used his wealth to levy mercenaries and defend
his country. The Caliph replied that he had deemed his own people
sufficient to withstand the Mongols. Then the Khan announced that the
precious things which had been so cherished would be alone left to the
miserable man, who was shut into a chamber with his pearls and gold
for sustenance and perished in torments. There was no Caliph of Bagdad
after him.
Thus, almost simultaneously, there were conquered by the Mongols,
northern China, Syria, Russia, Hungary, and Poland. The stream of human
blood that it cost is immeasurable.
Of the first conqueror, Genghis Khan, an Arab poem says:--
On every course he spurred his steed
He raised the blood-dyed dust.
The lives of four and a half million people are reckoned as his toll on
humanity. He had proposed to raze every city and destroy every farm of
the five northern Chinese provinces, to make pasture for his nomads,
and was only dissuaded by a minister, who ventured death in opposing
him. It was he who ordered the million souls of Herat to slaughter.
Batui, subduer of Russia, called “Sein Khan” (the Good King), is
said after the Moscow massacre to have received 270,000 right ears.
Following his fight with the Teutonic knights, near the Baltic, nine
sacks of right ears were laid at his feet. “Vanquished, they ask no
favor, and vanquishing, they show no compassion.” “The Mongols came,
destroyed, burnt, slaughtered, plundered, and departed,” summarizes
an Arab; and the unimaginative chronicles of the Chinese tell without
comment of city after city taken, and their inhabitants put to the
sword.
Utter ineradicable barbarity would, on the face of things, seem to have
been the inmost nature of this people. Yet only a few years later, when
Mangu Khan was ruling at Caracorum, the Court had become civilized.
Forty-one years after Genghis Khan’s death, when the great Venetian
traveler Marco Polo arrived at Kublai’s Court, the palaces and the
organized statecraft at Peking had become a model of efficiency. The
Mongols, not as a race, but in the sphere of their leaders, had become
a real nation, not unworthy of its success.
It is interesting to reconstruct the Tatar capital and note its
development in half a century. The Minorite monk, sent to beg aid from
the supposedly Christian Mangu Khan for the delivery of Jerusalem,
wrote a detailed description of the city, Caracorum. It had a circuit
of three miles and in dearth of stone was rampiered strongly with
earth. It had two main streets: one of the Saracens, where the fairs
were held and where many merchants assembled, attracted by the traffic
with the Court, and with the continuous procession of visitors and
messengers; the second chief street was occupied by Chinese, who were
artificers. The town had four gates. In the eastern section grain was
sold, in the western sheep and goats, in the southern oxen and wagons,
in the northern horses. Beyond were large palaces, the residences of
the secretaries. The Khan himself had a great court beside the city
rampart, enclosed not by an earth but a brick wall. Inside was a
large palace, and a number of long buildings, in which were kept his
treasures and stores of supplies.
Twice a year the Khan held high festival, with drinking-bouts
whereat Master William, a captive taken in Hungary, served as chief
butler, officiating at the tree which he had devised to pour forth
intoxication. The ambassador of the Caliph of Bagdad came in state,
carried upon a litter between two mules. Before the Khan, rich and poor
in multitudes moved in procession, dancing, singing, clapping their
hands. The guests brought gifts to the monarch. Those of the ambassador
of the Turkish Soldan were especially rich, but for quaintness the
Soldan of India scored. He sent eight leopards, and ten hare-hounds
taught to sit upon the horses’ buttocks as do cheetahs. Manifestly it
was no raw encampment of barbarians, this Caracorum of Mangu Khan.
If the Mongol’s Court could, in 1253, show this degree of “pomp and
pageantry,” how much was it exceeded by that of Kublai the Magnificent,
visited and told of by Marco Polo.
Kublai had established a second seat at Shang-tu, and had built not
merely a court, but a city. His palace was of marble, its rooms
aglitter with gold. Art had come, and the ceilings were painted
with figures of men and beasts and birds. Trees of all varieties,
and flowers, were executed with such exquisite skill as filled the
traveler, familiar with the best products of Italy, with amaze
and delight. Sixteen miles of park, enclosed by a wall, embosomed
the palace. Rivers, brooks, and luxuriant meadows diversified the
landscape, and white stags, fallow deer, gazelles, roebuck, rare
squirrels, and every variety of attractive creature, lent gayety and
charm.
The Khan rode weekly with his falcons. Sometimes a leopard sat a-croup
behind him, and was loosened at the game that struck his fancy.
The tale runs on of the Khan’s silk-corded pavilion in the grove, gilt
all over, and having lacquered, dragon-pedimented columns; of cave-born
rivers running deep below the ground; of treasured gems and gold.
No wonder that Coleridge’s imagination was warmed to his dream poem.
In Xanadu did Kublai Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree,
Where Alph the sacred river ran,
Through caverns measureless to man,
Down to a sunless sea.
London’s tortuous streets were to wait two hundred years for their
first pavement, when Cambaluc’s were so straight and wide that one
could see right along them from end to end, and from one gate to the
other. In the Khan’s parks, the roads, being all paved and raised two
cubits above the surface, never became muddy, nor did the rain lodge on
them, but flowed off into the meadows.
In addition to civilization’s wealth and magnificence, the Mongols
had developed a well-organized government. The Khan’s twelve barons
exercised his delegated authority, as does a modern cabinet in behalf
of the national executive. Cambaluc was policed by a thousand guards.
The city wards were laid out, for taxation and government, in squares
like a chess-board, and all these plots were assigned to different
heads of families. The military roads were constantly kept up by a
large force. The Emperor had ordered that all the highways should be
planted with great trees a few yards apart. Even the roads through the
unpeopled regions were thus planted, and it was the greatest possible
solace to travelers.
The post, too, was as thoroughly organized as Napoleon’s. The
messengers of the Emperor, bound in whatsoever direction from Cambaluc,
found, every twenty-five miles of the way, a relay-station. Where the
route lay through uninhabited deserts, the relay-posts were made houses
of sojourn. At all stations express messengers were in readiness, as
links in the system for speeding dispatches to provincial governors or
generals: they were equipped with the fastest horses, which stood fresh
and saddled, ready for an instant mount. The men wore girdles hung with
bells; when within hearing of a station came the sound of jingling and
the clatter of hoofs, the next man similarly provided would leap to
his horse, take the delivered letter, and be off at full speed. The
post covered a full two hundred miles by day, and an equal distance
by night. Marco Polo states that, in the season, fruit gathered one
morning at the capital, in the evening of the next day reached the
Great Khan in Shang-tu--a distance of ten days’ journey.
Organized charity was instituted by the Mongol Khan for Cambaluc.
A number of the poorest families became his pensioners, receiving
regularly wheat and corn sufficient for the year. The nomad levied
as tribute a tenth of all wool, silk, hemp, and cloth stuffs, and
had therefrom clothing made for the indigent of his capital. He had a
banking system, paper money, a wonderful military discipline, advanced
astronomy; and he opened the Grand Canal to the commerce of the ages.
When one recalls the epoch at which all this existed, and realizes that
at that time wolves and robbers disputed mastery of the streets of
Paris; that the Saracens were lords of half of Spain; that Wycliffe had
not yet published his Bible, and that French was the language of the
English law courts,--the advance attained is hardly short of marvelous.
In nothing whatsoever is the Mongol civilization more remarkable and
contrasting than in its religious toleration--the last acquisition of a
civilized state.
While the Christian King of France was engaged in earning the title of
“Saint Louis” by extirpating a people of whose creed he disapproved,
his envoy, the friar, came to a country which had attained complete
religious liberty and toleration. There were “twelve kinds of
idolatries of divers nations.” Two churches of Mahomet preached the law
of the Koran, and one church of the Christians proclaimed the gospel of
the Christ.
He found his own creed treated with especial courtesy, the Great Khan
subscribing two thousand marks to rebuild a chapel on the behest of
an Armenian monk. He relates that the privilege was accorded to the
Church of trying any of their number accused of theft; that the
Khan’s secretary and his favorite wife were Christians; that a chapel
was allowed them within the court enclosure; and that the Nestorians
inhabited fifteen cities of Cathay and had a bishopric there.
Marco Polo found the same indulgent tolerance of his religion. In
Calaci, the principal city of Tangus, the inhabitants were “idolaters,”
but there were three churches of Nestorian Christians. In the province
of Tenduch, formerly the seat of Presbyter John, King George was a
Christian and a priest, and most of the people were Christians. They
paid tribute to the Great Khan.
Indeed, if the Mongolian attitude toward armed nations combating in
Christ’s name has been implacable hostility, toward those of the faith
who worshiped peacefully in their midst it has been uniformly tolerant,
even favoring. The Nestorians, who brought their creed from Khorassan
in the fourth century, had by 500 A.D. bishoprics in Merv, Herat, and
Samarcand. The Perait Turkomans as a tribe accepted Christianity, and
were unpunished. That the Faith was liberally treated in 781, under
the Chinese, is self-acknowledged, on the ancient Nestorian stone of
Si-an-fu. Headed by a cross, there is graven in Syrian and Chinese the
Imperial decree of 638, ordering a church to be built: it gives an
abstract of Christian doctrine, and an account of the “introduction
and propagation of the noble law of Ta-t’sin in the Middle Kingdom.”
In Si-an-fu at this time there were four thousand foreign families,
cut off from return by a northern inroad of fanatical Tibetans into
Turkestan.
Another monument of 830, found near the site of the old Ouighour
capital on the Orkhon, and carved in Chinese, Turkish, and Ouighour
characters, mentions the Western religion. A strange sect of Hebrews
of unknown origin found as well an unpersecuted home at K’ai-feng-fu,
where the Mosaic rites could be performed. To this day a remnant
survives.
The same tolerance for alien faiths marked Tatar rule in Russia. The
Khan of Sarai authorized a Greek church and a bishopric in his capital,
exempting the monks from his poll-tax. Khan Usbek in 1313 confirmed the
privileges of the Church, and punished with death sacrilege against it.
Kublai Khan took part regularly in the Easter services, and allowed the
Roman missionaries to establish a school in Shang-tu.
Indeed, reviewing the whole sweep of Asia’s religious history, one can
hardly escape the deduction that if the greatest race of the greatest
continent is idolatrous, it is not the fault of the Mongolians.
The Nestorian missionaries had an unsurpassed opportunity in the
fourth century when their faith was new and burning, and the world
was at peace. But stigmatized as heretics after a doctrinal dispute
which had been settled by the logic of a street fight, in which
Cyril’s Egyptian bravos defeated the Syrian henchmen of the Patriarch
of Constantinople, their mother church was driven out of the Roman
Empire into Persia, where, cut off from the support of the main trunk
of fellow Christians, their organization withered away as a lopped
branch. The chief congregations in Iran and Turan were overwhelmed by
the Mohammedans, until at length there were left only the dwindling
congregations in Mongolia, and such communities as those on the Malabar
coast in India.
To-day one hears of interesting discoveries. Now it is of the old
buried Christian strata among Turkomans of Samarcand, of doctrines
preserved through the fury of Islam fanaticism by families that have
secretly transmitted Christian worship through the centuries. Next it
is of Nestorian monks in Asia Minor, startled at being able to read the
characters of Ouighour inscriptions, relics of the writings which their
predecessors carried to Mongolia. But for all practical purposes the
Nestorian labors, once so promising, are as if they had never been.
Another supreme opportunity for Christianity came when Kublai Khan, in
1268, sent west by the Polo brothers for Roman missionaries to teach
his people.
“The Great Khan, ... calling to him the two brethren, desired them
for his love to go to the Pope of the Romans, to pray him to send an
hundred wise men and learned in the Christian religion unto him, who
might show his wise men that the faith of the Christians was to be
preferred before all other sects, and was the only way of salvation.
“After this the Prince caused letters to the Pope to be written and
gave them to the two brothers. Now the contents of the letters were
as follows: He begged that the Pope would send as many as an hundred
persons of our Christian faith; intelligent men acquainted with the
seven arts, well qualified to prove by force of argument to idolaters
and other kind of folk, that the law of Christ was best; and if they
would prove this, he and all under him would be Christians.”
In the advance of Christianity the steps ahead have been made not
so much by the conversion of the people as by the winning of their
rulers,--Constantine, giving to Rome’s legions the standard of the
Cross; Clovis; Ethelbert; Vladimir, who drove the whole population of
Kiev naked into consecrated water of the Dnieper; Charlemagne, moving
against the Saxons with his corps of priests. Where these spoke for
a hundred thousand souls, Kublai spoke for a hundred million. He was
able to deliver; it was the Pope who did not rise to the occasion.
In all Christendom Gregory could find but two priests to go with the
Khan’s messengers, and these turned back in the midst of the journey,
alarmed by the prospect of its hardships. The Khan, who wished some
religion, sent to Tibet, and received the Buddhist missionaries whom
he requested. So China, Mongolia, Tibet, and eastern Turkestan are
Buddhist to this day.
Yet once again the Christian opportunity came. The way which had
been opened into China by Matteo Ricci had been followed by Jesuit
missionaries, until at the beginning of the seventeenth century there
were two churches in Peking, some three hundred thousand converts in
the Empire, and the favor of the Emperor Hang was with the Western
faith.
When Christianity was spreading with cumulative rapidity, the
Dominicans and Franciscans came in and denounced the Jesuit workers for
tolerating the ancestor-cult of the Chinese, and for permitting God
to be called “Shang-ti.” In vain the Emperor Hang, appealed to by the
Jesuits, declared that by “Shang-ti” the Chinese meant “Ruler of the
Universe,” and that the Confucian rites were family ceremonies and not
idolatry. The rival friars persuaded the Pope to proclaim “Tien-chu”
the proper Chinese word for God, and to condemn all ancestral
ceremonies. Thereupon, the Chinese Emperor, rebuffed and disgusted
with all the wrangling fraternities, condemned the Christian religion
and killed the friars, save those whom he wanted for the Imperial
Observatory.
One cannot but recall an early commentary made by Mangu Khan upon the
jarring Christian sects whose rival dogmas have prevented, and do to
this day, the common progress.
“We Mongolians believe that there is but one God, through whom we live
and die, and we have an upright heart towards Him. That as God hath
given unto the hand fingers, so He hath given many ways to men. God
hath given the Scriptures to you, and ye Christians keep them not. But
He hath given us soothsayers, and we do that which they bid us, and we
live in peace.”
For some years after Kublai Khan’s death, the Mongol Empire held its
preëminence by inertia rather than by strength. Each of the khans had
his kingdom. Presently the nations that had been subdued began to rise
against the numerically small garrisons of Mongolia. In China, the
young Bonze, Chu-Yuan-Chang, finally organized a band of Boxers, and
succeeded in driving out the last degenerate Mongol khan from Peking.
He united the old eighteen provinces and established the Ming Dynasty,
the tombs and palaces of whose kings are still the most celebrated
structures of China.
In Russia, Dimitri of the Don gathered one hundred and fifty thousand
men and defeated the Mongols at Kulikovo.
If the old supreme monarch of the north had lost his sway, in the south
the Mongol race was being lifted to its second period of empire under
Tamerlane, the Iron Khan. His was the history of the first Mongol
conqueror repeated. The ant that Timur watched during his exile,
which fell back and returned sixty-nine times before it carried its
grain of wheat to the top of the wall, was the symbol of his early
career. Constant obscure tribal conflicts, unsuccessful at first, led
finally to a gathering of the nomads into a terrible invading army.
The Golden Horde was hurled against Dimitri, defeated him, and marched
upon Moscow. It was sacked with the horrors of Genghis’ days, and all
Russia was ravaged to the Don and the Sea of Azov. One of Tamerlane’s
armies traversed the Pamir into India, and, by the capture of Delhi,
opened the way for the Mogul Dynasty of his sons, which was to endure
until the Indian Mutiny. His Indian army, returning, swept a swath of
desolation through Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Georgia, and Armenia.
Every city that was taken was sacked, and the event commemorated by a
pyramid of skulls embedded in mortar. One hundred and twenty pyramids
marked Tamerlane’s path through India alone. The Delhi pyramid was made
from the skulls of one hundred thousand slain “with the sword of holy
war.”
Bajazet, Sultan of the Ottoman Turks,--themselves sprung from a nomad
Mongol tribe,--was threatened by Tamerlane on the west. In a great
battle Bajazet was defeated.
Alhacen, Tamerlane’s Arabian secretary, relates that the conquered king
was examined by his master.
“Wherefore dost thou use so great cruelty towards men? Dost thou not
pardon sex or age?”
Bajazet might logically have responded with a “tu quoque,” but his
position did not warrant it.
“I am appointed by God to punish tyrants,” continued Tamerlane. He had
an iron cage made; and locked within it like a linnet, the unfortunate
sultan was carried from place to place, because, in the Tatar’s naïvely
quoted words, “It is necessary that he be made an exemplary punishment
to all the cruel of the world, of the just wrath of God against them.”
The invasion of China was under way, in 1405, when Tamerlane died,
leaving a renewed Mongol Empire, which stretched from the Hoang-ho to
the Don, and from Siberia to India.
Here again the descendants of the savage conquerors rose to the
requirements of their sovereignty and obeyed the peaceful and humane
maxims that each of the two great and warlike and pitiless tyrants had
bequeathed to his successors. They ruled with a fair degree of wisdom
and a large measure of success. A descendant of Tamerlane was to build
at Agra, in 1630, the most splendid monument the world has ever seen,
the Taj-Mahal.
In the century after Tamerlane’s death the Hordes split up once
more, Ivan the Great of Moscow, having consolidated many neighboring
princedoms, with the nominal consent of his Tatar overlord, at length
seized the opportunity to refuse the payment of tribute. The Mongol
Khan had no longer the power to compel it at the sword’s point, and
without a battle the Tatar supremacy was covertly relinquished. In
1480 the long servitude of Russia to the alien invader was ended. From
this time the Mongol nomads appear hardly at all in history. They
withdrew gradually to their Asian steppes, leaving in Turkey, in the
Crimea, and in India, the kingdoms of their offshoot tribes. Russia and
China still felt the raids of the horsemen, for the khans of the Golden
Horde were yet not to be despised.
Fernan Hendez Pinto, the shipwrecked Portuguese of the generation
after Vasco da Gama, was in China in 1542 when Tatars came down and
besieged it. He saw “an emperor called Caran whose seigniorie confineth
within the mountains of Gen Halidan, a nation which the naturals call
Moscoby, of whom we saw some in this citie [of Tuymican], ruddie, of
big stature, with shoes and furred clothes, having some Latin words,
but seeming rather, for aught we observed, idolaters than Christians.
“To the ambassador of that Prince Caran, better entertainment was
given than to all the rest. He brought with him one hundred and twenty
men of his guard, with arrows and gilded quivers, all clothed in
chamois-skins, murrie and green. After whom followed twelve men of high
giantlike stature, leading great greyhounds, in chains and collars of
silver.”
When Yermak cleared the way to Sibir, and opened the path that was to
lead to the Pacific, the Mongols were pushed south. Russians still had
Tatars all along their frontier, but these were pressed steadily back
as the Slavic race advanced eastward. The Tatar domains were restricted
soon to the steppe country and Mongolia.
After Yermak’s time the Mongol power sank. It fell further when the
Manchus established their dynasty in Peking in 1644. So low had its
estate become that even the old fighting instinct was gone,--all
the passionate desire for independence that has been the Mongols’
birthright since the dawn of history. How had it vanished? Christianity
had not come. Buddhism had come, and it was the tolling of the knell
for freedom.
The sum of national energy and the heat of the new dispensation were
diverted into theocracy. The meaning of life, its value and its duty,
these basic ideas which determine the ultimate activities of every
race, were revolutionized by the new faith. To the Pagan the world
was good despite its evils; struggle against environment measured the
worth of manhood and freedom was the supreme blessing. To the Buddhist,
life was an evil in which the soul had become enmeshed. The path to
release lay not in overcoming the environment, but in retreating from
it within the citadel of the soul. Resignation, self-surrender, the
yielding of this world to secure the other world beyond,--such were the
forces which transformed the Mongols from the foremost warriors into
the priest-ridden, subject, unaspiring people of to-day. The supreme
problem in the autonomy of China, and in the subjugation of India,
is involved in the point of view of Buddhism and its outgrowth in
character.
In 1650 a son of the leader, Tu-she-tu Khan, was made chief of the
Mongol _kutukhtus_, or cardinals, with the title of Cheptsun Damba.
This monsignor began the Urga hierarchy of Gigins, or god-priests,
which has continued until the present time, when the eighth Gigin
reigns at the Holy City. As the powerful Tu-she-tu clan lost its
vitality, Chinese influence made itself felt. This was directed in
general toward the encouragement of the priesthood, whose celibacy and
other-worldliness dovetailed with Chinese control.
The Mongol khans, becoming through the years more and more unwarlike,
had grown tired of internecine feuds. They were at last won over by
China to a nominal allegiance and the payment of a formal tribute,
reciprocating which, imperial gifts of tenfold value served as artful
bribes. Modestly, diplomatically, came King Stork, leaving to the local
Daimios, seemingly undisturbed, their feudal sway. With the coming of
the first Manchu governor began the present era of Mongolia.
[Illustration: THE GLORY IS DEPARTED]
As time went on, the Chinese, more astute and cunning, took little
by little from the careless hands of the nomad princes the reins of
real political power. The native chiefs were wheedled into giving up
many ancient rights over the vassals, as well as their general taxing
powers. The celibate priests, who were draining the manhood of their
idle but powerful hierarchy, were subsidized and directed by the
interlopers. They preached to their confiding countrymen obedience and
submission. In the Mongol Gigin of Urga, the Chinese raised up a native
power superior to all the old feudal lords, whose armies melted away
beneath the ecclesiastical dominion. When the Gigin became in turn
too great a menace, they caused it to be decreed that each succeeding
incarnated Buddha must come from Tibet, and that his main powers must
be delegated to a “Council of Lamas.”
In the train of the Manchus came the Chinese traders, polite, supple,
calling themselves friends of the Mongols, offering their alluring
wares on undefined credit terms which tangled the unsuspicious natives
in inextricable usury. Peking-brought gewgaws were paid for a hundred
times over in the food and clothing which the natives kept giving to
the compounding voracity of the debt.
Chinese coolies pressed up the river-valleys, begging land here,
intruding themselves there; more followed, and ever more, until the
best of the pastures were filched away, and the nomads, in order to
exist, were forced to trek to the more distant and barren slopes.
Deforesting transformed into deserts whole provinces. The once famed
virtue of the Tatar women is forgotten, and every Chinaman has his
“friend” whom he leaves behind when he returns to his native land. The
big prosperous Mongol families, that early travelers noted, are no
more. Two or three children are the most that one sees to a _yurta_,
and the population, owing to lama celibacy and the decreased means of
subsistence, is declining from year to year.
This is the people and this the land which sent horde after horde
through centuries to conquer the world; where in half a dozen
generations a little band of blacksmiths like the Turks could breed a
nation that would dominate Asia. With narrowing means of subsistence,
and aliens draining their small surplus capital, the Mongol race lies
prostrate beneath the Yellow Empire. The grim Malthusian tenet that the
world cannot give food for all its children falls short here of the
grim actuality. The silent invasion of the Chinese has been as ruthless
as was the march of Genghis Khan. The economic garroting of a race is
what the world has seen in Mongolia.
No longer are there men to lead or men to fight. Obediently and
submissively the once fierce, ranging warriors have yielded to the
artfully-imposed yoke. The army of unmatched cavalry has become a
memory, and a nation of fighters has become a race of timid herders,
with little heart or brain. The sons of the old soldiers have learned
to shave their heads and croon Tibetan prayers, and the fires of a
people’s ambition are quenched in the creed that makes abstention
from effort a cardinal virtue, and annihilation life’s supreme
objective. What there was of virtue and of valor lies buried in distant
graves. Ringed with the bones of slaughtered captives, rusted swords
at their sides, they sleep well, those old forgotten warriors. In
poverty and hardship, priest-ridden and debt-ridden, decimated and
degenerated, their descendants eke out their sterile days. But there
lingers yet among them a half-forgotten memory of the heroic past.
The wandering chanter still sings in the twilight the old “Song of
Tamerlane”--Tamerlane who will come again, they say, and lead the
hordes once more to victory.
When the divine Timur dwelt in our tents,
The Mongol Nation was redoubtable and warlike.
Its least movements made the earth bend;
Its mens’ look froze with fear
The ten thousand people upon whom the sun shines.
O Divine Timur, will thy great soul soon return?
Return, return; we await thee, O Timur!
IX
CHINA
Destiny has bequeathed to his once subject-race the heritage of Genghis
Khan, but whether its Manchu possessor can or cannot hold even his
own birthright is to-day an enigma. The last few years have seen the
gathering of the eagles, disputing the mastery of eastern Asia, where
China stands against the world. Slav, Saxon, and Frank press in, upon
the supine empire. Has this yellow race the manhood and the capacity to
rally against them and retrieve its national integrity?
The cession of Formosa after the war of 1895 began the partition.
China’s defenselessness was then visualized. The revelation of her
easy defeat set every predatory nation on the alert. Watchful for an
occasion, which two murdered missionaries supplied, Germany, by clumsy
but successful unscrupulousness, seized Kiao-chow and two hundred miles
of hinterland. Three weeks after the bludgeoned ratification of Admiral
Diedrich’s grab, Russia procured the signature of the intimidated
Emperor to the lease of Port Arthur. France demanded and secured the
cession of Kwang-chow-wan, on the mainland opposite the island of
Hainan. England acquired the lease of Wei-hai-wei, and continental
territory opposite Hong-kong. Italy came to claim as its portion Sanmen
Bay; but this at least China found courage to refuse.
Then followed a period when, backed each by its government, invading
cohorts of promoters scooped in franchises and special privileges of
every description. The latter part of 1899 saw foreigners pushing in
from Manchuria on the north, where Russia with her so-termed railway
guards held the strategic route, and from Yun-nan on the south, where
France was constructing a similar road of conquest. It showed four
European nations so established along the coast that only by courtesy
of a foreign government could a Chinese vessel cast anchor in some of
the principal ports of China. It saw a Belgian-French railway driving
from Peking into the heart of the Empire at Hankow; an American line
started north from Canton to the same objective; an English line
controlling the territory between the main northern trade-centres,
Niu-chwang and Tien-tsin; a French society in possession of a great
south-country copper concession; Russians with the exclusive right to
all the gold in two _eimucks_ of Mongolia; and an English syndicate
deeded the best of the Chinese coal-fields.
The partition was thus far accomplished. The continental nations
seemed to be ready for all that they could get. The strength of Great
Britain’s traditional position, based upon maintaining the integrity
of China, was shaken by her lease of Wei-hai-wei, although this lease
was to run only so long as Russia should hold Port Arthur. England
was on the point of recognizing openly “spheres of influence,” as is
shown by the inferential claim to special British rights in the Yangtse
region set forth in the official transactions of Sir Claude McDonald,
and brought out under parliamentary interpellation, when a Secretary
of State for Foreign Affairs in the Balfour Ministry spoke of “British
rights” to the provinces adjoining the Yangtse River and Ho-nan and
Che-kiang.
There was apparently good warrant for the general belief that in
expectation of an impending partition a provisional understanding had
been reached by the different chancelleries, regarding the share of
each nation, England being allotted the mighty domain from the Yellow
Sea to Burma and Afghanistan, including all Tibet, as well as six
hundred and fifty thousand square miles in China proper. In general,
from Shan-tung inland the valley of the Hoang-ho was destined for
Germany; the district north of her Anamese possessions for France; all
Mongolia and Manchuria for Russia; Corea and the province of Fokien on
the mainland opposite Formosa, for Japan. Peking and the surrounding
district, whose disposition was embarrassed by jealousy if not by
scruples, was alone left for the Chinese.
At this critical juncture, when the day of dismemberment seemed indeed
to have arrived, the United States came forward in behalf of the
“open-door” doctrine, as a means of preserving the nationality and the
integrity of China. In a circular letter to the Powers, our Secretary
of State, Mr. John Hay, asked that adhesion be given in writing to
three main propositions, appertaining to each country “within its
respective sphere, of whatever influence.” These points were that no
treaty port rights or other vested interests should be interfered with;
that the Chinese tariff should be maintained; that no discriminating
railway charges or harbor-dues should be imposed.
America’s might, thrown into the wavering balance, turned the scale.
Great Britain gave ready adhesion. Though the responses of some of
the other Powers were evasive, none was at this time willing to bear
the onus of an adverse stand: each nation nominally accepted, and the
movement toward partition was checked.
To most people Chinese matters seemed settled. The preservation of a
nation had been combined with the guaranteeing of a great free market;
the orgy of grabbing had ceased. Russia, assenting to the open door,
had promised to evacuate Manchuria. The special concessions, though
secured by stand-and-deliver methods, it was felt would bring economic
improvements and would furnish to the Chinese a demonstration of the
beneficent results of Western civilization.
It was recognized that there would be frictions: misunderstandings
are inevitable when old ways are faced with new. The extra-territorial
rights of foreigners and their converts, absolutely necessary to
protect their liberties if not their lives, could not but create
occasional unharmonious situations, in which the consuls would have to
intervene. The severity of the judicial punishment meted out at times
to rioting cities for harm done to the protégés of the Powers was to be
deplored, each nation grieving at the atrocities the others had seen
fit to perpetrate.
But periodic local and temporary disturbances had been going on from
time immemorial. Did not the Chinese realize, we reasoned, that their
old corrupt government had been given another undeserved chance to try
and march with the rest of the race; that this world is not the place
for graft-ridden relics from the fifth century B.C.? The least we felt
was that, thanks to the bearer of the “Flowery Banner,” the Chinese had
been given a last opportunity. A self-denying Occident had guaranteed
the nation’s existence and had presumably earned its everlasting
gratitude. “Let China get up and do something--let it redeem itself.”
[Illustration: THE BRIDGE AND TABLETS IN PEI-HAI]
A very small circle of Chinese shared this Western view, and realized
at their true value the mights if not the rights. There existed among
the literati at Peking and in the coast cities the rudiments of a
foreign liberal party. Recognizing that Western methods must come, they
had been in favor of accepting foreign improvements even at the cost
of railway concessions and the violated dwellings of wind and water
spirits. When this party won over the young Emperor, there began the
period of foreign concessions. Reforms, too, covering every subject,
from queue-cutting to postage-stamps, were inaugurated.
The summer of 1898 saw the important edict which ordered the abolition
of the Wen-chang essays and the penmanship posts, with the Emperor’s
personal comment that the examinations should test “a knowledge of
ancient and modern history, and information in regard to the present
state of affairs, with special reference to the governments and
institutions of the countries of the five great continents, and their
arts and sciences.” A Bureau of Mines was established, a patent-office,
schools, a scheme of army reform.
The climaxing decree was the one abolishing sinecures. For the
Emperor’s unreconstructed entourage this last was too much. Foreign
aggression had embittered to the point of unreason mandarin and coolie
alike. The _coup d’état_ planned by the Dowager Empress, and executed
by the reactionaries, virtually dethroned the Emperor, exiled his
advisers, and ended the foreign-encouragement reform.
Indeed it was not within human nature for it to endure. From the point
of view of the party of the second part the aspect of the whole foreign
relationship, even after the Hay Note, looked very ugly indeed. The
fact of guaranteed integrity was obscured by the _laissez-faire_ of
the already consummated grabs. The idea that gripped them was the
humiliation of foreign occupation and foreign aggression. It was as
if the Russians and the English had just seized rival reservations
on Long Island and the Jersey coast, commanding New York City; as if
the English had wrenched away Charleston; the Germans, Philadelphia;
the French, New Orleans; and Cossacks were garrisoned in strategic
points throughout New England. It was as if the New York, New Haven and
Hartford Railway were manned and guarded by Slavs, the New York Central
by Belgians, the Pennsylvania by Prussians; as if the Pittsburgh mines
were handed over _en bloc_ to an English corporation, and the Russians
had exclusive mining rights to the gold of Alaska’s Yukon region. It
was as if America’s protective-tariff and contract-labor laws were
repealed at foreign dictation, and a flood of foreign machine-made
goods and undesired immigrants were poured into the unwilling country.
It was as if yellow-robed Buddhist lamas were everywhere haranguing the
Yankee farmers, telling them of the fraudulent nature of the Christian
creed, and urging upon them an approved canine method for disposing of
deceased ancestors, to replace their superstitious funeral services.
It was as if astrologers, calling themselves engineers, were to dig
up New York cemeteries in order to erect prayer-wheels; as if the
apostates whom these yellow priests had drawn into their joss-houses
were enabled to dodge part of the taxes, which consequently fell with
added oppression on the rest of the people; and as if, when they
did something which others would in the normal course of events get
punished for, a lama came before the magistrate and got them off. As
if the President and the Senate were given a weekly wigging by the
diplomatic corps, and were periodically forced to deed away sections of
the forest reserve and tracts of particularly desirable territory.
With such an aspect as this, which represents what in an undefined,
bewildered way the Chinese saw and felt, it is no wonder that they
considered the Confucian dictum obsolete: “Do not unto others, what
you would not that they should do unto you”; and joined the patriotic
harmonious Fists,--the Boxers.
Chinese sentiment was ungauged in the West because we had never
put ourselves in their places. Unforeseen save by a few unheeded
Cassandras, and unprepared for, there broke out the planless,
leaderless Boxer Rebellion, grim fruitage of the national resentment.
A few hastily gathered legation guards were alone available for
defense. Spreading from the Shan-tung Province, where the severity of
the Germans had goaded the usually peaceable people to madness, the
I-Ho-Chuan besieged the legations at Peking. It was the infuriated and
ill-directed rush of a patriotism real if futile,--a turning against
the spoilers.
The movement was crushed in a torrent of blood, and with a devastation
that for long will leave its mark upon the northern provinces. The
closing year of the nineteenth century saw the Taku forts stormed,
Tien-tsin, the Liverpool of the North, taken over and administered by
a foreign board, Manchuria and Mongolia swarming with Cossacks, the
Dowager Empress in flight, and her capital looted by foreign armies.
The coming of alien soldiery to the Forbidden Palace left its impress
in the fiercer though more carefully smothered hatred of mandarins and
people. It was still a blind resentment. They were injured, stung in
all their pride and self-sufficiency, but dumb, bewildered, not knowing
what to do, which way to turn. The liberals with their solution were
gone; with them had passed the hopes of a progressive policy.
The people, perplexed, looked to their reëstablished reactionary rulers
for guidance. But these officials, mostly of advanced age, and steeped
in the ideas and ideals of the Confucian classics, were anxious mainly
to close the ears and eyes of the masses to the unpleasant realities;
to feather their own nests and finish off their lives in tranquility.
The Chinese Minister to the United States, Wu Ting Fang, gives a
graphic picture of these Celestial Bourbons:--
“It must be remembered that most of the high officials in Peking are
born and bred Chinese of the old school. All the princes and nearly all
the ministers of state have spent most of their days within the four
walls of the capital. They have never visited even other parts of the
empire, not to say foreign lands; nor can they speak any other language
besides their own. They have absolutely no knowledge or experience of
foreign ways except those who are ministers of the Tsung-li Yamen, and
the experience of these men has been confined exclusively to their
official intercourse with the foreign representatives at Peking.”
Buttressing their hereditary _intransigeance_, these mandarins had,
after the Hay Circular, possessed a measure of confidence that their
yielding of open-door trade privileges to the greed of the foreigners
had enlisted a combined support which would preserve China’s remaining
national powers.
But so powerless to fulfill their purposes had these paper pledges
become, so far was the open-door doctrine from settling the situation,
that in China’s own territory, where by solemn promises of both parties
no special privileges could accrue, the year 1904 saw two Powers in the
throes of the greatest war of modern times.
If the realization of the combatants’ purpose has signified much to
the nations of the West,--perhaps rather to the United States, for
the others nursed no illusions,--to China it has meant far more. It
has brought for the first time a real and general appreciation of the
necessity for modernized, efficient self-defense.
Fifteen years of aggression have been needed to drive home this
knowledge. While the defeats of 1895 came as a blow to a few
keen-minded Chinese, to most they were a matter of entire indifference.
China was not conquered, they reasoned: only two provinces took
part while the viceroys of the rest looked idly on. “That Shan-tung
man’s war” was the general attitude; “Li Hung Chang’s boats beaten.”
When it was over, merely Formosa, the little-valued island of “tame
barbarians,” had been lost. The traditional policy of playing off the
jealous powers one against the other had apparently succeeded; it had
cleared the Japanese from Corea and Port Arthur. China as a nation was
hardly touched, and multitudes of people never knew there had been a
war.
The seizures of 1897-1899, coming close upon each other, exasperated,
but taught no lesson. The mass of Chinese, and even those in high
official circles, believed that a little effort would drive the foreign
devils into the sea. The march of the Allies to Peking stunned them. It
was their first facing of the fact.
[Illustration: HSUEN-WU GATE, PEKING]
The Russo-Japanese War, and the partition of the province that had
cradled their Emperor’s dynasty, dissipated their fool’s paradise. It
was seen then, clearly, by all, that China’s only hope of maintaining
her integrity lay in her defensive power. With the object, not of
securing the blessings of civilization (which the overwhelming majority
of Chinamen desire no more than we do the Holy Inquisition), but of
beating away the spoilsmen, the Peking rulers turned at length to the
survey of their actual military condition. As this concerns intimately
the Chinese internal situation, a summary of it may be pertinent.
The Hwai-lien regulars, to the number of twenty-five thousand, are
well-drilled, and well-armed with Chinese-made Mausers. They are
stationed in the northern provinces, including the Taku and Peht’ang
forts, the Tien-tsin station, and the neighborhood of Peking. These
make up the only national force of modern troops at the disposal of
the Chinese Government, but the private armies of various viceroys
bring up the total somewhat as follows: The camps of foreign-drilled
troops, formerly Yuan Shi Kai’s, probably the best in China, number
roundly twenty thousand. From the Shen-ki Ying, or artillery force,
from the camps of the Manchu Banners, which the Government is making an
effort to whip into some kind of shape, from the Imperial body-guard,
and other scattered and less important troops, ten thousand effectives
might be culled. In the south the Viceroy of Nanking has, all told,
some twenty thousand more men holding the Wusung forts, who may be
classed as efficient and well-armed; some of these are German- and
Japanese- drilled. This total of seventy-five thousand represents
China’s numerical military strength in effective modern troops.
The old hereditary organization of twenty-four Banners, adds some two
hundred thousand Manchus, Mongols, and Chinese,--of the privileged
soldier caste, which through two hundred and fifty years has drawn
an annual subsidy of eight million taels from the Peking treasury.
Billeted as the nominal wardens of the provincial cities and garrisoned
around Peking, these Tatars have become as a rule so degenerated by
immemorial idleness as to be useless save for picturesque parades. The
one positive element is that they are men under pay, subject to order,
and available for initial experiments.
The Green Banner, or militia, under the command of a general for
each province, is theoretically composed of a large number of native
Chinese. The army is made up mainly of officers. The higher officials
of the Green Banner acquire the pay, commissary, and weapon-allotments
of their nominal armies, and pad the rolls with the names of coolies
who come out for the annual review in return for the small portion of
their nominal wage which must be spent to keep face.
To expect these men to get out and fight is obviously more than they
bargained for. The Green Banner can deliver about the same relative
number of actual soldiers per unit of population that a Mississippi
backwoods county polls for the Republican party. The most that can be
said for the Green Banner is that it has a list of men’s names from
which a certain number of real recruits might be obtained.
The military organization of even the best regular troops is feeble.
Constant word reaches the press of soldiers revolting for lack of
pay. In one such instance nine hundred men near the Manchuria border
mutinied and were put down with difficulty, tying up the caravans for
some time. Aside from questions of discipline, and considering number
only, it is doubtful if, in the whole empire of four hundred million
people, one hundred thousand decently armed and drilled troops could be
gathered, in an extremity, for defensive purposes.
Drilled and armed men in whatever numbers are, however, but one
element of a country’s defensive power. Organization, transportation,
commissary, and supply are factors of hardly less importance. The
troops that get there are the ones which count, and even a Chinese army
marches on its belly. Russia’s defective transport, to mention but one
case, undoubtedly decided both the Crimean and the Japanese wars. The
question of territorial defense is one of several dimensions, first of
which is how soon could a given force, with its necessary commissary
and ammunition-supply, be disposed along the various lines of possible
attack.
Making the round of the Chinese Empire, it is apparent that Tibet and
Mongolia, for all the resistance that could be made, might be taken by
England and Russia respectively whenever they were minded to cross the
border. The Chinese could throw out barring columns no further westward
than Sze-chuan, no further northward than the Great Wall.
On the frontier of Corea, the Yalu River formerly defined the first
line of defense. But this frontier has been moved westward by the
Japanese, so that it would be a political impossibility to put men
there even were it practically possible. The present line would of
necessity be between Shan-hai-kwan and Yung-ping. Perhaps withdrawals
from the northern provinces, the viceroys permitting, might admit
massing here fifty thousand troops. But this, as well as any other
possible line, is entirely unfortified, giving hardly more advantages
to the repelling than to the attacking forces. There would be no second
line of defense, nothing to fall back upon but the old Tatar Wall of
Peking. Beyond this fifty thousand any quota brought from the south
would consume a very considerable time, probably a month, even allowing
that their semi-independent viceroys did not discreetly hold off
altogether.
Further east, at Shan-tung, Germany’s railway pierces to the heart
of the Confucian province; while from the Chinese military centre in
Chi-li there is no corresponding railroad, Chinese-manned, giving them
access, were it necessary to repel aggression. The Anamese railways
afford the French means of bringing up troops, where China could
assemble an army only after weeks of marching. The Burmese frontier of
Britain’s dominion is similarly vantaged.
The German _Land-Wehr_, while the first armies go to the front, may
be called out and mobilized, until the whole manhood of the nation
is in arms. Such a body is nonexistent in the Celestial Empire. Like
her own lichee nut, once the frail shell of her resistance is broken,
the meat is ready for the eating. Considered solely from the military
standpoint, aside from reform as such, China is as supine as a huge
helpless jelly-fish, with disconnected nerve-ganglia, and not even the
rudiments of a backbone.
For the first requirements of national defense, what is necessary? For
the north there should be a thoroughly drilled and equipped regular
army of at least one hundred and fifty thousand men, with capacity for
rapid concentration in the neighborhood of Peking. For the south a
standing army of at least fifty thousand men. An intermediate army of
fifty thousand more should be available near Hankow, capable of being
thrown either way. The Peking-Hankow railway line must have strategic
branches to Canton, Shanghai, Yun-nan, and Shan-tung. These must be
controlled not by foreigners but by Chinese. There must exist a reserve
of, say, five hundred thousand men, at least partially drilled, from
which to draw reinforcements. There must be arsenals able to make all
the weapons and ammunition for these forces, since foreign nations
will continue to command the sea. The sums needed to realize such a
programme must be available, and China must possess the organization
and fiscal system for the conduct of a war. From this summary it may
be seen that adequate defense requires a measure of increase in her
efficiency that is revolutionary. The demand which such measures would
make upon any nation is stupendous. How much more would it exact of
China, where for its accomplishment every single factor must overthrow
the ideas, the principles, the very morals evolved through centuries in
the most conservative race of the globe!
At the outset, for the personnel of such a regular army, two
hundred and fifty thousand adults must be transformed from stolid,
superstitious field-tillers and coolies, never of combative spirit,
into courageous, disciplined fighting men. Can this be done? Some,
eminently qualified to judge, answer that it can; but Chinese history
has not for several thousand years furnished many glorious annals.
Where a stark fight is recorded, as at Albazin, or against the Mongol
khans in the sixteenth century, the warriors have been Manchus rather
than Chinese. Whenever an aggressive nation, be it Hiung-nu or Khitan,
Mongol or Manchu, British or Japanese, has gone against the genuine
Chinaman, the latter has invariably submitted. It is only when his
subjugators, absorbed into the swarming mass of conquered, have
degenerated, that the native has been able to rise and drive out
his enfeebled oppressor. The Chinese have conquered by time and their
birth-rate.
[Illustration: PEKING Where the Allies’ main assault was made]
On the other hand, the Chinaman has qualities which, translated into
military virtues, should theoretically give him a great initial
advantage over any other race. He is comparatively without nerves;
he can hold a gun without a tremor for what to a Westerner is an
inconceivably long time; he has good eyes and a strong sight; he can be
victualed on a few handfuls of rice; he is entirely indifferent as to
where or how he lodges; he is sober and reliable; he is a big-bodied
man, stronger even, perhaps, than the Japanese; he is docile, obedient,
and susceptible to discipline. Indeed, in all that concerns his
physical qualities and certain moral superiorities, one could not
ask for better raw material. When well led he has at times done very
creditably. A generation of such leadership as Yuan Shi Kai’s would do
not a little toward bringing out what there is latent in this people.
If in the army organization the gap between what is and what should
be is so great, how much wider is it in the government organization
needed to finance reform. The revenues of China are some $100,000,000.
About $36,000,000 are allotted to military purposes. When from this
has been deducted the eighteen million-odd which go to the generals
of the Red and Green Banners, there is left, theoretically, about
$18,000,000 for the real army. Actually there is efficiently applied
probably not over $10,000,000. The regular army of Japan--two hundred
and twenty-five thousand--takes $40,000,000 effectively expended. China
must begin from the very bottom, whereas Japan is simply carrying
along. A judicious total expenditure of at least $50,000,000 is needed
for China’s army. With the additional railway and arsenal programme,
and other concomitant work, the demands over and above present outlays
would reach around $110,000,000. Add this to the present budget, less
the well-spent ten millions, and there is to be reckoned a total budget
of at least $200,000,000.
Could China raise such a defense-fund on top of her present
hundred-million-dollar budget? Could she cut down on present expenses
to help it out? The latter might be considered. Theoretically the
wasted army money of the present budget might be saved and applied.
Practically the vested interests in the graft are so important as to
make it of infinite difficulty. The mere beginning of sinecure-cutting
cost the Emperor the actuality of his throne and nearly his head.
The list shows other items of expenditure which cannot be materially
economized. The large and growing sum which goes to repay interest,
foreign loans, and indemnities, cannot be touched, nor can the
$16,000,000 sent to the provinces for their local expenditures.
The $8,000,000 for the Peking salaries and palace expenses is
a fixture. The modest and well-administered $3,000,000 of the
customs expenditures, covering about all the public works that China
undertakes,--the lighthouse and coast-patrol allowances, the mails, the
interpreters’ school,--this cannot be pared. The needed money must come
if at all by increase of the receipts. One is driven irresistibly back
to the Government’s taxing capacity.
The physical possibility of such taxation undoubtedly exists. The per
capita revenue which the Government receives from its four hundred
million subjects is but twenty-five cents. The American per capita
revenue is eight dollars, the Japanese five dollars, the Russian twelve
dollars, the Indian--perhaps in conditions the closest parallel to the
Chinese--one dollar and a quarter. An extra twenty-five cents would
raise the Chinese Government well above all financial difficulties, and
still leave the rate far below that of the other great nations of the
world.
Looking at the actual mechanism for revenue collection, one is met by
difficulties which have rooted themselves deeply into the system. One
cannot squeeze any larger proportion of the needed sum than the present
$25,000,000 from the Imperial Maritime Customs. Tariff-rates are
fixed by treaty, and the collections, under English direction, are as
efficient as they can become. The likin duties on freight during inland
transit are such a plague to commerce that, far from being increased,
they should be swept away altogether as one of the earliest of reform
measures. This $14,000,000 is produced at so heavy a price of fettered
and thwarted commerce that added tariff would but aggravate the
strangulation without materially increasing income. The opium revenue
of $5,000,000 is likewise an item which, for the best interests of
China, should disappear from a reformed budget, and the “foreign dirt”
from the Celestial domain. In any event opium cannot be made much more
productive.
After these eliminations there are left items which bring in
$56,000,000. The sources consist principally of the land-tax, the
grain-tribute, native customs, and the salt gabelle. The returns from
these factors would require to be nearly trebled, if they were relied
upon to make up the bulk of the needed total.
The method of collection is a further check to greater income. The
existing machinery of fiscal administration operates, roughly,
as follows: When the funds begin to run short for the usual
expense-accounts, the various executive boards apply to the Board
of Revenue. The latter makes a glorified guess at the sum which,
considering harvests, rebellions, and other elements, each province
might be able to pay. It is thereupon put to the provincial officials,
consisting usually of a viceroy, a governor, a treasurer, and a
judge, to supply something approximating this sum. The provincial
syndicate, through the medium of various intermediate officials,
such as the _tao-tai_ and the _fu_-prefect, whose powers are nebulous
and overlapping, call upon the eighty-odd county magistrates for an
estimated share. The magistrates, _shien-kwan_, called colloquially
“father and mother officials,” whose varied functions include rendering
justice, keeping the jail, leading the religious processions, and
collecting the taxes, send out each his hundred henchmen to get the
actual money or grain. Of this hierarchy of officials not one has
a salary which would keep his establishment going for a month. Of
necessity the laborer must draw his own hire first from the harvest.
Under such a satrap system, by the grace of human nature, each official
takes what the traffic will bear, letting pass to the man higher up
enough to conciliate his claim and to keep face with Peking. If the
penalties which follow deficient generosity to a superior define
the maximum contribution, the minimum is fixed by the famine or the
rebellion point. With this method in vogue, it is not unreasonable to
assume that the amounts gathered in the first instance are about as
great as can be wrung from the people. An increase of the Government’s
receipts would have to come through shaking down the office-holders for
a larger share of their pickings. Such a revenue as a real reform would
demand must despoil of vested rights in his livelihood every mandarin,
viceroy, _tao-tai_, _fu_-prefect, magistrate, and petty publican in
the empire. It might be practicable to commute the likin, or inland
octroi dues, for fixed sums by agreement with the _hongs_, or merchant
associations. This was done in Li Hung Chang’s province, Kwang-tung,
where $2,750,000 was paid in order to get rid of likin dues which
netted only $670,000. Enough might be raised by this means to pay the
officials at just rates. Then honest collections might reasonably be
demanded, and a beginning be made of fiscal reform. But it is apparent
from these outlines how long a way China has to travel before her
capacity for self-defense is a reality.
The facts are now being comprehended by all classes. From the coast
cities, a growing number of young Chinese have been sent to study
abroad, mainly in Japan--as many as fifteen thousand in 1907.
Returning, these so-called “students” have become the leaders in
the boycotts against the United States and Japan. They have engaged
actively in propaganda of a patriotic nature, and, more constructively,
have translated into their mother tongue hundreds of books on history,
economics, and law, including the whole Japanese code, Herbert Spencer,
Huxley, Voltaire, Montesquieu, the “Contrat Social” of Rousseau, the
works of Henry George and Karl Marx, and many others of the same
general nature.
These movements show a widespread public opinion friendly to Chinese
regeneration. Various administrative measures have been inaugurated
which are yet more promising.
The old method of dividing the Peking Bureau into provincial
departments, and letting each of these care for every sort of business
from its special province, has been altered. Instead of a bureau having
general charge over the salt-tax, the customs, and the appointments
of each province, there have been organized ten departments, dealing
each with its specialty throughout the entire realm. The five
recently-created bureaus--Agriculture, Works and Commerce, Police
and Constabulary, Post-Office and Education--tell by their names the
centralizing purpose of the new régime. Formerly five hundred clerks
attended a department, with office-hours from eleven A.M. to two
P.M. including lunch, smoking-time, and due intervals for examining
peddlers’ wares. Now a much reduced force is employed, with actual
working-hours generally from nine A.M. to four P.M. The foot-binding of
children has been prohibited; pressure has been put upon the officials
who smoke opium to abandon it, under penalty of dismissal from the
service; classical essays as a civil-service examination subject are
being given up, and the education of the Chinese youths abroad is being
encouraged. A large number of Japanese officers have been engaged to
train the khaki-clad and well-armed Chinese regulars, who have shown
excellent aptitude. The Government has bought back practically all
foreign railroad concessions, and all the valuable mining concessions
except the Kai-ping coal-fields.
Even representative government is well under way. The Dowager Empress’s
edict of August 27, 1908, by which a nine-year period was set for
the devolution of legislative powers to provincial assemblies and
a national senate has been justified by remarkable success. The
local legislatures, elected under carefully restricted suffrage
qualifications, have grappled earnestly with the economic problems
of the districts. The senate, of thirty-two members, selected by the
Prince Regent from an elected body, has not yet had time to show
results, but the calibre of the men in it is encouraging.
China is making a real effort to get abreast of the times. But never
was a nation brought more directly before the judgment-bar on the plain
test of character. Upon the capacity of the race for private sacrifice
and public honesty rests primarily her salvation. Whether China can
or cannot rise to the task depends upon her own manhood, and no one
can be prophet of the issue; for all estimate of Chinese character is
perplexed by that curious Eastern subtlety of contradictions which
baffle understanding.
The inability of the Chinese to keep fingers out of the public till
is proverbial; yet the very high standard of business integrity is
universally conceded.
[Illustration: SUMMER PALACE OF THE EMPEROR]
The quality of Chinese honesty is attributed by some to the local
idea of good form, and the obvious mercantile maxim that future
credit depends upon present performance. Bourse operators may be
scrupulously exact as to obligations which the mere lifting of a
finger imposes, while engaged in campaigns diverting to their private
speculations the funds of a chain of banks, or looting the values from
the minority owners of a street-railway.
Chinese business integrity is said to be due to the fact that her
merchants are of the upper class; cowardice in war, to the fact that
her soldiers are of the lowest caste. In Japan the condition is exactly
reversed: hence the prowess of her Samurai, and the peccability of her
clerks--such that Japanese bankers employ Chinamen to handle their
money.
Since the Japanese have built up an effective public administration, it
is fair to give the Chinese the benefit of faith, and to assume that in
time they too will rally to the task, and make a modern state.
With this should come the Trans-Mongolia Railway: opening to the
plainsmen of Central Asia a prospect of civilization and advance.
Equally or more important, looking at things broadly, it would give to
the world the best of the great Asian trade-routes. Examine a globe
and see what, in the shortening of distance, this land-route to Peking
signifies. Note the enormous circumnavigations that must be made in
going around by India and Suez, and measure then the direct overland
route by the Urga Post-Road and the Trans-Siberian Railway.
The bulky freight from the Asian Coast to western Europe will still
pay tribute to the sea. To compete with vessel-transportation, which
carries a ton from Shanghai to London for seven dollars, the railroads
over the 7283 miles from Vladivostok to Paris would have to make a
rail-rate of one tenth of a cent per ton-mile; this is impossible when
one remembers the average American rate of eight tenths of a cent. But
North China, all North Asia, and Europe west of Moscow, are within the
railway radius of an Urga-Peking line.
From interior China may be drawn the goods for half a continent. The
tea-freight which Russia receives over the long sea-trip to Odessa, or
by the trans-shipped Vladivostok route, can be loaded then at Kalgan on
the car that goes to Moscow. By it the silks of the Tien-tsin merchants
may be rolled through into the freight-yards of St. Petersburg, and
the timberless cities of interior China may build with the wood of
the Yakutski Oblast forests. By it the dwellers in the valley of the
Hoang-ho, “China’s Sorrow,” may be nourished in their need with the
wheat of the Angara Valley; the Manchu mandarins may be clad in the
furs from the Yenesei; the ploughshares tempered in Petrovski Zavod
break the ancient soil of the Chi-li Province; the silver of the Altai
Mountains make the bangles that deck the anklets of the purdah women.
For America the road will open a commercial highway into the very heart
of a new and expanding empire. American rails may carry American
cars,--those ever moving shuttles which weave the woof of trade.
American woolens and felts may protect the Siberians against their
Arctic cold, American machinery mine and refine their gold. New England
cottons, utilizing the Panama Canal, may clothe the myriad coolies
of interior China. Here is the mail-route of ten days from Paris to
Peking, against the thirty-five days needed by the fastest ships. Here
is the quickest passenger-route from London to Yokohama. All these
potentialities lie as the fallow heritage of the Urga Road, if beyond
Kalgan it is given its avenues to China and the sea. It is civilization
that must profit when the equilibrium of the East is restored, and over
the old Urga Road China is relinked to the West by the trains of the
great Asian Railway.
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A
[Illustration: ASIA]
Transcriber's Notes:
Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
Perceived typographical errors have been changed.
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