CHAPTER XIII.

IN THE SYANSK MOUNTAINS.

For some distance our way led over a few short hills to the banks of the Armeul, our progress being characterized from the very start by frequent upsets. I can only describe the roadway, if roadway it can be called, as one of the most villainous I had ever seen. The method of making it was indeed primitive, for instead of selecting a circuitous route, in order to avoid bad places, it went dead ahead, and in doing so, yawning gaps occurred, down which our sledges fell, almost on top of the horses, and with jerks and creakings which threatened to dismember every vehicle. The horses slithered down the slopes, struggled and squirmed up the other side, and could only be kept going at times by much whipping and fierce shouting.

Nearing the Armeul, we came out on the crest of a small hill which bordered the river, and here an amusing, although somewhat serious, incident befell our party. The runners of previous passing sledges had cut a deep groove in the snow, and so long as we kept in this groove all was well. Arrived on the slope, Gaskell’s horse, infuriated at the frequent whippings he had received, plunged heavily sideways, the runners of the sledge got out of the groove, and in a second the whole lot--sledge, horse, and driver--went rolling down the snow in one confused heap towards the river. As chance would have it, the edge of the river was bare of ice, where the border had been broken away by water-carriers. Into this the horse fell with a tremendous splash, dragging with him the sledge, and sunk in about eight feet of water. For a time it was impossible for us to do anything to assist our companion, who, fortunately, had been thrown clear of the sledge, and was stuck fast up to his armpits in the soft snow. When we did reach him, it was gratifying to find that no bones were broken, and we quickly hauled him back on to the roadway. With the sledge and horse, however, matters were more difficult, for the former had got fixed under the ice, and the horse, with the instinct of self-preservation, just showed his nose above water. There was much lugging and hauling, shouting and halloaing, on the part of our men to get the poor animal out, and ultimately a success was made of the effort. But the sledge was smashed quite beyond repair, and perforce we had to abandon it. Room had to be made for Gaskell, therefore, and this was accomplished by half emptying one of the baggage-sledges, panniering the baggage on the spare horse’s back.

Right once more, we continued our journey, all of us considerably more careful now, and ultimately we got down on to the ice, and felt safer. The little river Armeul was not more than a furlong wide, and wound tortuously through gaps in the hillsides. In summer it was simply a torrent, and going up-stream was simply going up-hill, for we were to follow its course right up into the mountains. We went along at a jog-trot, varied by spells of walking, and so the day passed. Night came on, and with the blinking stars we endeavoured to get a little sleep; but this we speedily realized was quite out of the question, for the fearful bumps and jolts which were occasioned by the deep holes in the road made it a difficult matter to hang on, let alone to repose. In that faint starlight it was a weird proceeding to be travelling over this uneven surface; to dimly see your horse suddenly disappear before your eyes, and then to feel yourself sink down as if you were going into the bowels of the earth, only to be brought up with a crash at the bottom of the hole, sufficient to shake every bone in your body. Then, the next second, up would go the horse on the other side of the hole, struggling, kicking, and straining, with snow flying from its hoofs in all directions, and with you, hanging on to the reins with the tenacity born of the love of self-preservation, nearly falling out of the back of the sledge. Well into the night we rounded a huge cliff, which, towering up, blotted out the firmament, and left only a small circle of the dark blue sky, and sighted, away ahead, a light winking solemnly. Simultaneously we all raised a shout, for it was the light of the hut of the first stage, and even the horses, after their eighty versts’ toilsome pull, seemed to recognize it. Pace was put on, and in a few minutes our caravan drew up at the side of the river, before the hut.

Now we were roughing it with a vengeance. The hut was a small affair, built of logs and mud, its roof of twigs and hay, and with no vestige of comfort within. It was simply a shelter, but we were glad of that. After the horses had been unhitched and hobbled, one of our men started a roaring fire with some fuel which we had brought with us, and which was made outside in the open. An iron tripod was erected, kettles and saucepans hung over, and we prepared for our meal. The custodian of the hut, a decrepit old man, smothered in the filthiest sheepskins that ever I clapped my eyes on, busied himself on our behalf. It was easy to see the pleasure which animated this poor old fellow, who for days, and sometimes a week at a stretch, never saw a human face, and who had no more chance of getting food than was given him by the miners going to or coming from the mines, or by the fish he could catch through a hole made in the ice.

Cold as it was, the fire outside the hut was warm enough for anything. Some of our men, intent on not doing things by halves, had disappeared in the forest with their hatchets, and presently we heard the clump, clump, of the steel against the tree-trunks, and soon we had whole trees blazing and crackling on the river-bank, while the light cast up by this huge bonfire spread red and white across the frozen river to light up with its lambent glare the façade of the cliffs on the opposite bank. It was a wild-looking crowd we made, seated around on the hay bags, with feet almost in the crackling embers, furs still on, and eating almost ravenously the soup which had been prepared in the huge saucepan. How delicious it was, although it was eaten out of rough wooden bowls, with no cutlery save our hunting-knives, and with our fingers as forks! What matter if we licked our fingers, if we gnawed the bones, or were even guilty of wiping our mouths on our sleeves! Pocket-handkerchiefs had been given the go-by some time before, and this part of Siberia was no place for ceremony. We ate, and we drank heartily, meanwhile that the fire blazed, and roared, and lit up in fantastic light and shadow the motley crowd around it.

The hut would not hold more than four, but, unfortunately for our peace, it was alive with vermin. We brought in plenty of straw and hay from the sledges and spread it on the earth floor, and then, wrapping ourselves in our shoubas, sought sleep. For our employés there were the sledges, and in these they slept.

It was still dark when Schultz awoke us and intimated that it would be better to get on. A glance at our watches showed that it was 6 a.m., and though we would fain have had more sleep, the necessity of the case knew no delay. The second stage threatened to be even more difficult than the first, for we were informed in several places the ice of the river was broken owing to the water passing away underneath, and there would be much trouble in order to get through to the next hut, eighty versts away. I must confess that when I staggered out of the hut in the bitter cold air, I felt anything but happy or cheerful. The romance of the thing was all right, and the experience one to be always remembered. Its actuality, however, was the sort of thing to make a man cross or even despondent. Outside, the fire had dwindled down to a few glowing embers and wreaths of smoke; the stars had gone out, and a faint mist was in the atmosphere. I stood there for a moment, and as I did so heard two or three long-drawn howls. Dogs, I thought. I asked Schultz, who was by my side, what it was.

“_Vulka_,” he said, and at the time I did not know that he meant wolves.

We shambled off in the darkness, Schultz leading the way with a lantern, and soon the hut, distinguished alone from the darkness by the tiny fire in front of it, grew fainter and fainter to our vision as we progressed, and soon a bend in the river obliterated it entirely, and we plunged on into the darkness. Day came imperceptibly--the grey creeping over the hill-tops ahead of us and gradually suffusing the horizon. Then a few glints of gold on the very tops of the mountains, the reflection of which shed roseate hues upon smaller and more insignificant hilltops. This glowing light, heralding the arrival of the sun, caused the mountain crests to assume most grotesque shapes. One stood out like a gigantic frog, another was like a man’s face, a third was like an alligator, and so on. With the rising sun the mist cleared off, and we were able to traverse the ice at a better pace. But soon the road became next door to impassable. Here and there the river ice had broken in, and the water, freezing again, left but a thin coating, which was quite insufficient to bear the weight of our caravan. This necessitated the dragging, one by one, of the sledges over the hummocky ice, or up on the pathway which was here and there formed on the river-bank, where the cliffs did not run sheer. At midday we encamped on a small plateau by the side of the river, built our fire, made more soup and more tea. It was cheerful, at any rate, to note the good humour which characterized all our men. No matter how difficult was the passage of the ice, they all went at it like bricks, and when one way failed they tried another. Schultz, a gigantic fellow of six feet four, or thereabouts, was ever to the fore, hauling and tugging, or with his huge pick breaking away the impeding ice ahead.

To record the details of our journey forward would be but reiteration. Thoroughly exhausted, we arrived at our second stage late in the afternoon, and put in eight hours’ good solid sleep. On the third day we arrived at the headwaters of the Armeul, where the river was only a few feet wide, and where the springs feeding it burst from the rock, but now hung masses of huge icicles. There was a pathway through the forest to the eastward, and over this we had to go to our destination. This pathway had been formed by the miners cutting their way through with the hatchet. The trees were so close together that, although it was day when we entered, once inside the wood, things were almost as black as night. Now and again, as we progressed, we caught sight of animals flitting about the underwood of the forest, but with all the nonsense about wolves knocked out of us by travel, we gave them no heed, save for an occasional rifle-shot which Scawell sent after them.

On the afternoon of the fourth day we arrived at the top of the first range of mountains, and below us lay a deep valley through which the tiny stream known as the River Isinsoul wound its course, and upon whose banks was the property which formed our destination. Right ahead of us, towering up almost perpendicularly, rose the final range of the Syansk Mountains, the barrier between Russia and China, and now not more than five miles away.

Our descent into the valley was rapid and exciting. The road was every bit as bad as it had been on the river, and was, moreover, precipitous. Horses stumbled, fell, and rolled over into the snow. Once I was shot out of the sledge, and my feet, catching in the reins, I was dragged along a considerable distance before my horse could be stopped. Scarcely a minute after my accident, Asprey was thrown violently out, and his head, striking a projecting tree-trunk, he was knocked nearly insensible. A little later one of the baggage-sledges overturned, and we had the glorious spectacle of our goods and chattels flying in all directions down the hill.

[Illustration: GOLD-MINING APPARATUS ON THE UPPER YENESEI.]

Passing through the fringe of the forest we came out upon the slopes of the valley, and now could clearly see, on the banks of the river below us, traces of the work of man in the shape of huts and long aqueducts, but all covered in snow and silent as the grave. At length we were fairly down in the bed of the valley and making our way along the course of the Isinsoul, hoping to reach our destination before darkness fairly set in. What a shout we gave when, just as the sun was sinking over the mountains to our back, Schultz announced that we had reached the edge of the property! Huge mounds of earth, the tailings of the washeries, but covered in deep snow, lay scattered all around. A few dismantled huts, some heaps of logs here and there, the traces of an abandoned washery, all looking desolate and forlorn underneath their snowy covering. Three versts more and we came in sight of some huts away up on the hillside, which we learned were to form our head-quarters for the next two or three weeks. A man came out of one of the huts and waved his hand. Schultz responded with a whoop that would have done credit to a North-American Indian, and the horses, scenting rest, sprung bravely forward. On we rattled and creaked, jerked and bumped, until with a simultaneous sigh of most intense satisfaction we drew up before the sluice-house of the mine. Our destination at last, after five and a half weeks’ almost continual travelling from England!