‘What for? What has he done?’ I asked.
‘Nothing particular; nothing! But, mon cher, you know, State considerations! Such a clever man, awfully clever! And such an influence he has upon the youth. You understand that a Government cannot tolerate that: that’s impossible! intolérable, mon cher, dans un État bien ordonné!’
Count Ignátieff made no such questions; he knew the Amúr very well, and he knew St. Petersburg too. Amidst all sorts of jokes, and witty remarks about Siberia which he made with an astounding vivacity, he dropped to me: ‘It is a very lucky thing that you were there on the spot, and saw the wrecks. And “they” were clever to send you with the report! Well done! At first, nobody wanted to believe about the barges. Some new swindling, it was thought. But now people say that you were well known as a page, and you have only been a few months in Siberia; so you would not shelter the people there if it were swindling. They trust in you.’
The Minister of War, Dmítri Milútin, was the only man in the high administration of St. Petersburg who took the matter seriously. He asked me many questions: all to the point. He mastered the subject at once, and all our conversation was in short sentences, without hurry, but without any waste of words. ‘The coast settlements to be supplied from the sea, you mean? The remainder only from Chitá? Quite right. But if a storm happens next year, will there be the same destruction once more?’ ‘No, if there are two small tugs to convoy the barges.’ ‘Will it do?’ ‘Yes, with one tug the loss would not have been half so heavy.’ ‘Very probably. Write to me, please; state all you have said, quite plainly; no formalities.’
V
I did not stay long at St. Petersburg, and returned to Irkútsk the same winter. My brother was going to join me there in a few months; he was accepted as an officer of the Irkútsk Cossacks.
Travelling across Siberia in the winter is supposed to be a terrible experience; but, all things considered, it is on the whole more comfortable than at any other season of the year. The snow-covered roads are excellent, and, although the cold is fearful, one can stand it well enough. Lying full length in the sledge—as everyone does in Siberia—wrapped in fur blankets, fur inside and fur outside, one does not suffer much from the cold, even when the temperature is forty or sixty Fahrenheit degrees below zero. Travelling in courier fashion—that is, rapidly changing horses at each station and stopping only once a day for one hour to take a meal—I reached Irkútsk nineteen days after I had left St. Petersburg. Two hundred miles a day is the normal speed in such cases, and I remember having covered the last 660 miles before Irkútsk in seventy hours. The frost was not severe then, the roads were in an excellent condition, the drivers were kept in good spirits by a free allowance of silver coins, and the team of three small and light horses seemed to enjoy running swiftly across hill and vale, and across rivers frozen as hard as steel, amidst forests glistening in their silver attire in the rays of the sun.
I was now nominated attaché to the Governor-General of East Siberia for Cossack affairs, and had to reside at Irkútsk; but there was nothing particular to do. To let everything go on, according to the established routine, with no more reference to changes, such was the watchword that came now from St. Petersburg. I therefore gladly accepted the proposal to undertake geographical exploration in Manchuria.
If one casts a glance on a map of Asia one sees that the Russian frontier, which runs in Siberia, broadly speaking, along the fiftieth degree of latitude, suddenly bends in Transbaikália to the north. It follows for three hundred miles the Argúñ river; then, on reaching the Amúr, it turns south-eastwards—the town of Blagovéschensk, which was the capital of the Amúr land, being situated again in about the same latitude of fifty degrees. Between the south-eastern corner of Transbaikália (New Tsurukháitu) and Blagovéschensk on the Amúr, the distance west to east is only five hundred miles; but along the Argúñ and the Amúr it is over a thousand miles, and moreover communication along the Argúñ, which is not navigable, is extremely difficult. In its lower parts there is nothing but a most wild mountain track.
Transbaikália is very rich in cattle, and the Cossacks who occupy its south-eastern corner, and are wealthy cattle-breeders, wanted to establish a direct communication with the middle Amúr, which would be a good market for their cattle. They used to trade with the Mongols, and they had heard from them that it would not be difficult to reach the Amúr, travelling eastwards across the Great Khingán. Going straight towards the east, they were told, one would fall in with an old Chinese route which crosses the Khingán and leads to the Manchurian town of Merghén (on the Nónni river, a tributary to the Sungarí), whence an excellent road leads to the middle Amúr.