Previous to his finally quitting the country, he made another excursion to the frontiers of China, principally, it would seem, for the purpose of studying the botany of those districts, when the flowers were clothed in all the beauty of summer. The road to Kiakta traverses a large sandy plain, and afterward a succession of rocky mountains, entirely destitute of wood. In this latter district our traveller observed a species of locust, by whose flight the natives could foretel with certainty whether the weather would be fair or otherwise. They mounted aloft on the wing previous to rainy weather, and the noise of their motions resembled that of castanets. After remaining some short time in the vicinity of Kiakta, he once more returned to Selinginsk, and began to make the necessary preparations for retracing their footsteps to Krasnoiarsk, where they again intended to pass the winter. Accordingly, on the 3d of July, Pallas and a part of his companions departed from Selinginsk, and proceeded towards the Baikal.
Upon reaching the eastern shore of the lake, they saw a thick cold mist, which appeared to fill the whole extent of its vast basin, and hung close upon the surface of the water. This fog exactly resembled those fogs which are sometimes collected in the hollows of the mountains, or on the shores of the sea. It was kept in continual motion, and tossed hither and thither, like the waves of the ocean, by the wind. This mist was accompanied by strong westerly winds, which prevented our traveller from proceeding on his way; and he amused himself during his detention in studying the fishes of the lake, together with the birds and animals which frequent its shores.
On the 10th of July, he embarked, and set sail with boisterous and contrary winds. The passage of the lake was long, but, arriving at length at Zimovia, Pallas proceeded with all possible expedition to Krasnoiarsk, by way of Irkutsk. He arrived on the 1st of August at the point of destination, where, to his great satisfaction, he found that a magnificent collection of the flowers which adorn the banks of the Yeniseï had been made during the spring and summer, by one of his pupils, whom he had left behind for that purpose. From Krasnoiarsk, our traveller made another long excursion, visited several Tartar hordes, various mines, mountains, and tombs, and returned about the middle of September, the approach of winter being already visible in those high latitudes. By December, the cold had reached an intensity which had never been felt even in Siberia. The air was still, and at the same time condensed, as it were; so that, although the sky was exceedingly clear, the sun appeared as if beheld through a cloud. In the morning of the 6th of December, Pallas found the mercury of his thermometer frozen, “a thing,” says he, “which had never before happened during the whole eight years in which I had made use of this instrument. I then conveyed it from the gallery where it was kept into an apartment moderately warmed with a stove. Here the column of mercury, which had been condensed in the tube, immediately sunk into the bulb, while that in the bulb resumed its activity in the course of half a minute. I repeated this experiment several times with the same result, so that sometimes there remained but a very few particles in the tube, sometimes not above one. In order to follow the progress of the experiment, I gently warmed the bulb with my fingers, after it had been exposed to the air, and watching the mounting of the mercury, distinctly observed that the condensed and frozen columns offered considerable resistance before they gave way. At the same time I exposed about a quarter of a pound of mercury to the air, in a saucer. This mercury had been previously well washed in vinegar, and cleansed from impurities. The saucer was placed in a gallery on the north side of my house. In an hour the edges of the surface were frozen, and a few minutes afterward, the whole superficies was condensed into a soft mass, exactly resembling pewter. As the interior, however, still continued fluid, a small portion of the surface presented numerous wrinkles branching out from each other, but the greater part was sufficiently smooth. The same thing took place with a still larger quantity which I placed in the open air. This mass of frozen mercury was as pliable as lead but if bent suddenly, would break more easily than pewter; and when flattened into sheets, appeared somewhat knotty. I tried to beat it out with the hammer, but being quite cold, the mercury fell from it in drops. The same thing took place when you touched this mass with the finger, the top of which was instantly benumbed with cold by the simple contact. I then placed it in a moderately warm room, and it melted like wax placed over the fire. The drops separated from the surface, which melted gradually. The intensity of the cold diminished towards the evening.”
In the month of January, 1773, Pallas began to make preparations for returning to Petersburg, and departing on the 22d, pushed on with the utmost rapidity to Tomsk. During this journey, he discovered the execrable principles upon which it was attempted to people Siberia. The refuse of the people, the lame, the sick, the infirm, and the old, had been collected together, and sent thither to die. Men had been torn, for this purpose, from their wives and families. Women, for some reason or another, had not been allowed to emigrate from the west in sufficient numbers, and vice and misery flourished in their absence. Man, deprived of the society of women, necessarily degenerates into a ferocious beast, contemning all laws, and every regulation of morality. “It is not good that man should be alone.” Whenever new colonies are established, women should be numerous. It is they who are the grand instruments of civilization.—The cavern, the desert hut, when inhabited by a woman, already contains the germs of humanity, of hospitality, of improvement; but without her is a den, a haunt of ungovernable passions,—a refuge from the storm, but not a home.
In crossing a bridge over the Dooroosh, in the country of the Votiaks, our traveller was placed in a more perilous condition than he had experienced during any former period of his travels. His horses had already reached the shore, when the bridge, which must have been a very frail structure, gave way under his carriage, and he must infallibly have been precipitated into the stream, had not the spirited horses dashed on at the moment, and dragged up the carriage from amid the falling ruins.
The country between the Jaik and the Volga was at that period a vast desert, which abounded with wild horses. Pallas, however, was of opinion that these animals had once been tame, but, during the emigrations and nomadic movements of the Kalmucs and Kirghees, had escaped into the wilderness, where they had multiplied exceedingly. To fly from the heat and the hornets, these horses wandered far into the north during the summer months, and there, besides a refuge from their persecutors, found better pasturage, and an abundance of water. The surface of this great Mesopotamia was sprinkled at intervals with ruins of Tartar edifices, which swarmed in an extraordinary manner with serpents.
On the 25th of June our traveller arrived at the Moravian colony of Sarepta, which in eight years had increased, by immigration, from five persons to two thousand five hundred; and was at this period in a highly flourishing state. He here entered into some curious researches respecting the ancient shores of the Caspian, whose waters, in his opinion, once covered the greater portion of the Kalmuc country, just as those of the Black Sea did all the low lands upon its banks, before the deluge of Deucalion, when they first burst the huge natural mound which separated them from the Mediterranean.
Pallas passed the autumn at Zarizyn, where he observed the Kalmucs moving westward in hordes towards the country lying between the Volga and the Don. From this place he made an excursion through the stepps which lie up the stream of the Volga; on his return from which he chiefly employed himself in botanical researches, until the spring of 1774. He then undertook another journey along the banks of the Aktooba, through a country infested with bands of vagabond Kirghees, and other wandering nations, and returned to his head-quarters on the 25th of May.
It was now six years since the expedition had set out from Petersburg, and all its members began to desire repose. Each person, therefore, hastened to return by the shortest road to the capital. Pallas was directed to repair to Moscow, and punctually obeyed his orders, without making the slightest deviation to the right-hand or to the left. He arrived at this ancient city on the 3d of July, 1774. “Here,” says he, “I found the orders of the court, by which I was commanded to hasten without the least delay to Petersburg; and, notwithstanding that I felt exceedingly desirous of making a short stay at Moscow, for the purpose of improving my knowledge, by conversing with the learned M. Müller, one of the most excellent men in Russia, as well as one of the most celebrated of its historians, it was necessary to yield and obey.” Such is the condition of those who travel by command. He arrived at Petersburg on the 30th of July, exhausted by fatigue, and with a head sprinkled with premature gray hairs; for he was then no more than thirty-three years old.
The companions of Pallas had suffered still more severely; scarcely one of them lived long enough to draw up an account of his travels; and it was therefore left to him to render this piece of justice to their memory. For himself, the splendid objects which he had beheld had made too profound an impression on his mind to allow of his being satisfied with the accounts of them which he had hastily traced in his journal. He therefore determined upon the publication of several separate works, which should contain the natural history of the most celebrated quadrupeds of Siberia; and these he actually laid before the public, together with descriptions of a great number of birds, reptiles, and fishes. In addition to all these, he even projected a natural history of all the animals and plants in the Russian empire; in which design, though it was never completed, he made a very considerable progress. The empress herself, worthless and profligate as she was, was possessed by the ambition of being regarded as the patron of the sciences, and in order to facilitate the execution of our traveller’s project, communicated to him the herbariums of several other botanists, who had studied the flora of the empire. To secure the completion of the undertaking, Catherine moreover engaged to furnish the expense of the engraving and printing of the work; but the end was not answerable to this magnificent beginning; projects of more vulgar ambition, or vile and despicable amours, too fully occupied the imperial mind to allow so unimportant a thing as the science of botany to command a thought, and Pallas was constrained to rely upon his own resources for making known his botanical discoveries to the world. The same fate attended his works on the natural history of the animals and insects of the empire.