The coast is most desolate-looking. One may travel mile after mile without seeing a hut or meeting a single human being. Now and then, when I came to a lonely fisherman's hut, I was civilly treated; and, riding from morn till night, I reached Shari Mombets, where there are forty Ainu huts and about the same number of Japanese fishermen's shanties. It has a small anchorage for small junks only; but, unfortunately, it is not well protected, as the reef of rocks which runs in a north-east direction does not extend far out to sea. I was roughly treated here at first, for some Russian convicts, who had escaped from Sakhalin in an open boat, had been drifted by the current down this coast, and previously to my arrival had landed in the vicinity of this village. They were half starved, and could not speak a word of the language. They had no money and no clothes, and none of the natives seemed willing to help them in any way. Now that the long-wished-for freedom was obtained after years of servitude and chains, the four brave men, who had suffered agonies for days, and had almost miraculously escaped death in the treacherous currents of the Otkoshk Sea, were certainly not to be outwitted by a handful of hard-hearted Japanese or by a pack of hairy Ainu. They begged for food and could not obtain it, so they stole it, and ill-treated some of the natives who interfered. They then disappeared towards the south. When I put in an appearance, all alone and almost in rags, leading and dragging my tired pony, it is not astonishing that the first thing that struck them was that I must be another escaped Russian, "or bad man from Krafto,"[34] as the Ainu called me.
The reception I received was pretty stormy; but when I understood what the matter was which caused the rioting, I set their minds at rest, and, speaking in their own language, told them that the "bad men of Krafto" were my enemies as well as theirs, and that, should I find them, I would punish them. Not only that, but, to make them perfectly at ease, I gave them some little present of money, which turned them at once into friends. As to the Russian convicts, there was no possibility of my finding them, for they were travelling towards the south from this point, and I was moving towards the north, so I was perfectly safe in passing myself off as a kind of supreme judge.
Shari Mombets is a miserable place. In the house where I put up I was received by a young man, but the owner of the house did not show himself. The next morning, however, as I gave much more money than they expected, the landlord was brought to my room to thank me. The poor man suffered from elephantiasis—the wretched disease by which the head and all the limbs of the body assume gigantic proportions. His head was swollen to more than twice its normal size, and had lost its shape; his body was piteously deformed and inflated, his eyes nearly buried in flesh. The weight of his head was such that the cervical vertebræ were scarcely strong enough to support it erect; and when he bowed down in Japanese fashion to thank me and bid me good-bye, I had to run to his help, for he could not get up again. Poor man! And when we reflect that in more civilised countries many people think themselves very ill and suffering when they have a pimple on their nose, or a cold in their head!
SARUMA LAGOON.
AN EAGLE-DISPLAYED SABLE.