From Pekin to Calais by Land

by Harry De Windt

The Kazanetse would have been a fairly comfortable boat anywhere. To us, fresh from the discomforts of the road, she seemed positively luxurious. The fleet to which she belonged is one of fourteen vessels, each ranging from one hundred and fifty to two hundred tons, and owned by two private individuals, Messrs. Kourbatoff and Ignatoff, who have the contract for carrying mails and prisoners. These vessels are built at Tiumen, and on the same model, the first-class accommodation forward, the roof of the saloon forming an upper deck, while abaft the funnel the decks are roofed over with iron for deck passengers, of whom, on the Kazanetse, there were some three hundred returning to various parts of the Obi district before the closing of that river for navigation. The merchandise is towed in lighters of two and three hundred tons, though drawing but two or three feet of water, for in parts even this huge stream becomes dangerously shallow in the summer months. The steamers burn wood, carried on the deck of the lighters, the consumption per diem being sometimes as much as eighty tons!

It was with a sense of relief that we woke next day to hear the paddle-wheels dashing through the water, and the little steamer shaking with the speed at which she was being driven through the grey misty morning. As usual, washing appliances were nil, but after a steaming glass of tea and two or three “Kalatchi”[^[16]] and preserves, we found no difficulty in dispensing with such minor details, and felt as we had not once felt since leaving Irkoutsk; thoroughly comfortable. A coal-barge would have been a relief after the incessant shaking and bumping of those fifteen hundred miles. I thought with a shudder how, had we been delayed a week later, we should in a few more days have been ploughing through the deep muddy roads and flooded plains to Tiumen, a distance of quite one thousand versts. Though that by river is nearly four thousand, we would have chosen it, had it been double or treble the distance, in preference to the leaky, bone-shaking tarantass, a vehicle the very name of which I shall ever recall with a shudder!

But though one felt thoroughly at rest, the unvarying monotony on board the Kazanetse was trying enough, and the winding stream, flat, muddy banks, and slow-going steamer grew intensely depressing after the first two days. The Obi river is neither grand nor picturesque. It is at all seasons a cheerless, dispiriting landscape that meets the eye from Tomsk to Soorgoot, but in late autumn its banks must present the appearance of a howling wilderness. There are few rivers in the world with as many tributaries, or of the same enormous length, as the Obi. The basin of the river contains more than a million and a quarter of square miles, an area nearly two thousand miles in length, and, at the widest part, twelve hundred in breadth. From near the Chinese border, where it has its source, to the Gulf of Obi in the Frozen Ocean, it has over seventy tributaries, not including the Tom and Irtish Rivers, the source of the latter being Lake Zaizan, near the Koochoom Mountains in Chinese Tartary. An idea may thus be gained of what a stupendous volume of water this is. A few days above Tomsk, it presents more the appearance of a succession of large lakes than a river——lakes fringed with low banks of stunted fir and beech-trees, varied by occasional stretches of sandy waste. Early autumn is, perhaps, the best time to see the Obi, for at this season the varied hues of decaying vegetation give a more or less varied look to the dull landscape of dirty green and drab that stretches away, without hut or habitation to mar its solitude, from its shores to those of the Arctic Ocean. The end of October, sees the Obi covered with ice, and no longer navigable. For a great part of the year, however, the water flows on under the ice, which, even as far south as Tiumen, is from three to four feet thick. Navigation is sometimes entirely suspended in twenty-four hours, so suddenly does winter come on. It must not, however, be imagined that the frozen rivers of Siberia present the smooth, unbroken surface of glassy ice which one sees depicted in English pictures, presumably by artists who have never been nearer Siberia than Moscow or Petersburg. The Obi, with its impetuous torrent, is, perhaps, the most uneven and rugged of any; but even on the Yenisei, which is less rapid, it is common enough in winter to see hillocks and miniature cliffs twenty to thirty feet in height, thrown up by the current upon its frozen surface. The effect, with a blue sky and brilliant sunshine, is, I was told, very beautiful; but on dull, days (which, happily for Siberians, are rare), the sight of a frozen, deserted river must be melancholy in the extreme.

We passed but two towns worthy of the name between Tomsk and Tiumen——Soorgoot and Tobolsk. The villages touched at were simply a collection of half a dozen log huts, the dwellings of the employés of the steamboat company, and depôts for the firewood used by their vessels. Of the nomadic tribes inhabiting the banks of the Obi, we saw but little, most of them having already struck their birch-bark tents, and migrated north to their winter-quarters and reindeer. Occasionally, however, we passed an Ostiak encampment, with its half-dozen grimy-looking, triangular tents, savage dogs, and fleet of canoes. The Ostiaks inhabit the vast tract of country lying between the Obi and the shores of the Frozen Ocean. Like the Yakoutz, their neighbours, the Ostiaks subsist entirely upon what they kill. Fish in summer, and game in winter. Like the Yakoutz also, scurvy and a still more loathsome disease, introduced by Russian traders, is slowly but surely stamping them out. They are a good-tempered, hospitable people, fond of trade, but averse to anything like hard work. In summer, when, between the months of June and August, night is unknown in these regions, their chief occupation is fishing, the produce of their nets being salted and sent on to Tobolsk for export to Tiumen, Ekaterinburg, Perm, and European Russia. The Ostiaks number about thirteen thousand in all, and are miserable creatures to look at, with a yellowish complexion, flat faces, and coarse, dark hair. They are, especially skilful in the use of the bow. In shooting squirrels, for instance, they use a blunt arrow, and are careful to hit the animal only on the head, so as not to injure the fur.

During summer, the Ostiaks live entirely upon fish, during the winter months their sole diet is reindeer milk. The costume is not an ungraceful one, and is made of reindeer skin trimmed with bright red or blue cloth and coloured beads, some of the richer ones being hung round with small silver coins, Russian twenty-kopek pieces, &c. It is never safe to approach their encampments alone. I did so once, and had cause to repent it, being attacked by half a dozen huge dogs, who would have made short work of me, had not an old Ostiak woman emerged from a tent upon hearing the disturbance, and beaten them off. The Ostiak breed of dog is not unlike the Mongolian. They are sharp-looking, sagacious creatures of a black and white colour, and are by nature the cleanest that exist, going daily of their own accord to the river and bathing throughout the summer months. In winter they roll themselves in the snow. I thought of buying and bringing one home, but that it would have been a nuisance and expense through Europe.

We anchored one evening off an Ostiak encampment and paid its inmates a visit. It was a curious, weird scene, the broad, sullen-looking river, the crimson sunset through the dark-green fir-trees, the two or three flimsy, tumble-down tents with columns of thin grey smoke rising into the still evening air, while a number of silent, skin-clad forms flitted noiselessly about, getting in the nets and canoes for the night, on the low sandy spit that ran for some yards into the river. Not a sound broke the stillness, for we were quite half a mile from the steamer, and save for the wash and ripple of the stream, the occasional bay of a dog, or cracking of sticks as one of the women gathered fuel for the night, all was silent as the grave. I have never seen a picture of more utter desolation. We intended to enter one of their dwellings, but beat a hasty retreat on coming within ten or fifteen yards of them. The stench was overpowering, and I am not exaggerating when I say that one may smell an Ostiak quite a quarter of a mile off with the wind in the right quarter! It is a smell peculiar to their race, so sickening and overpowering, that I cannot describe it. Russians ascribe it to their invincible repugnance to salt. None will touch it, although it has several times, and at great expense, been distributed amongst them by the Government; and this is no doubt the cause of the majority of the loathsome diseases from which they suffer. Some of the men were pleasant-looking fellows, and their women would have been pretty had they possessed any teeth, which, after the age of fourteen or fifteen, usually loosen and drop out from the same cause. Unlike their neighbours the Samoyédes, the Ostiaks are kind to their women. In no race in the world is woman so badly treated as among the former. To be enceinte, even legally, is considered degrading, and the unfortunate mothers are beaten and worried incessantly during the time of pregnancy, and until their child is born. During this period, too, they are tortured until they confess with whom they have been unfaithful, very often naming an utterly innocent person to escape further torment. When they have done so, there is no great result; the husband simply claiming a small sum of money (or its equivalent in fur or brandy) as damages! I was much struck with the likeness between the Ostiaks, as regards their appearance and habits, and the Dyaks of Central Borneo, although of course the latter are a much finer race, both as regards physique and intellect. The dug-out canoes used on the Obi are the same identically in shape and construction, while on the handles of the paddles I found much the same patterns of carving that I had come across among some of the inland tribes in Borneo. This is indeed a case of “extremes meeting.”

The shores of the Obi river teem with game and wild fowl. I must have seen quite a million duck during the journey from Tomsk to Tobolsk, while in the season wild geese, teal, widgeon, and snipe abound; and I was somewhat surprised to see quantities of sea-gull at this distance from the ocean. There is no lack, either, of bear and wolf in these regions, and smaller ground game, and for one who cared for sport, I can imagine no better hunting-ground. But he would be a bold man who would pitch his tent among this unsavoury race for two or three months. To say nothing of their filthy habits, the tents are seldom free from small-pox.

There were but six first-class passengers besides ourselves on the Kazanetse. M. Sourikoff, a painter of some renown in Russia, his pretty wife, and two little girls, Olga and Hélène, models in miniature of their mother, who were returning from Tomsk to Moscow, after a somewhat extended tour in Siberia, in search of peasant types for a new historical picture, since completed with great success by M. Sourikoff. It was pleasant, indeed, to make the acquaintance of these charming people, who were true Russians (not Siberians), and the long dull evenings passed quickly enough. Although M. Sourikoff spoke but a few words of French, madame was half a Parisienne, and returned every year, for a few weeks to the lovely city she had forsaken for the fogs and mists of Petersburg. We thus had many subjects in common, and this was undoubtedly the pleasantest part of our journey.

There is no fixed time for meals on board these boats. You order your food when and where you like, so passengers are but little thrown together, and as the two remaining ones never appeared to take nourishment at all, or join the Sourikoffs and ourselves at dinner or breakfast, we did not make their acquaintance. They were a queer couple too, one an old gentleman of semi-military appearance, who paced up and down deck all day, wet or dry, smothered up in furs, and seemed to subsist solely on suction. I never saw him eat, but he consumed at least twenty bottles of beer a day, to say nothing of nips of vodka and glasses of tea between whiles. His official cap and numerous decorations gave him the appearance of a general at least. We put him down as returning from an important Siberian military command, and were somewhat surprised to hear at Tiumen that he was a simple government inspector of mines in Siberia, and a civilian. Where he got the medals remains a mystery. Our other fellow-passenger was a lady who might have been any age from twenty to fifty, and whose movements and manner were so singular and weird that Madame Sourikoff christened her “The Sphinx.” She usually spent the whole day locked up in her cabin. It was only at night that she emerged, muffled up in furs, and thick veils, to pace the solitary deck till long after midnight. Only once did I catch a glimpse of her face, a pale and determined, though sad one, framed with jet black hair cut short and square over the temples. When alone one moonlight night, smoking a cigar on deck, I ventured to address the mysterious stranger in French, a language she understood perfectly. Her history was sad enough. She had left her home near Nijni Novgorod “under suspicion” two years ago, a girl of eighteen, to return an old woman. Most of her term of exile had been passed at Krasnoiarsk. It was only at Tomsk that she had learnt the death of her mother, and that her fiancé, who had vowed to wait for her return, had married another. “I have nothing to live for now, monsieur,” sobbed the poor woman, “for my step-father was the means of my being sent to that hell upon earth. Let me only ask you to keep my secret, and tell no one on board I have spoken to you. I do not wish for society————I cannot stand it.” Poor soul! I have often since wondered what became of her; whether she returned to a fairly contented, though broken life, or, as is more often the case, lived but to welcome the day when death should end her troubles, and let her forget that she had ever been sent to accursed Siberia.

The cuisine on board the Kazanetse was excellent, a pleasant change from the eternal menus of the past six weeks, “Yaitse,” “Chi,” and “Moloko.”[^[17]] The “Rabchick” formed part of our daily bill of fare. This is a bird peculiar to Russia and Siberia, something similar to a partridge, and excellent eating. When struggling with the bill of fare, I often thought of a poor Frenchman who left Moscow for Irkoutsk two years since——completely ignorant of the Russian language——and who was told by a friend whenever he felt hungry merely to mention the word “Teliatina,” and they would bring him anything worth eating. Things went well till he reached Tobolsk, when it suddenly dawned upon the poor wretch that all the animal food he had eaten since leaving the Holy City had been composed solely of veal! By the time our friend reached Tomsk he was fairly rabid. Veal is an excellent thing in its way, but “toujours veau,” like “toujours perdrix,” is apt to pall upon the palate after a few weeks! It was only at Tomsk that he came across a French-speaking Cossack officer who was able to change his bill of fare, and history relates that the victim was so overcome with emotion and gratitude that he fell upon his deliverer’s neck and wept for joy!