Memoirs of a revolutionist

by kniaz Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

In short, we crossed the frontier unmolested. We were eleven Cossacks, one Tungus, and myself, all on horseback. We had with us about forty horses for sale and two carts, one of which, two-wheeled, belonged to me, and contained the cloth, the velveteen, the gold braid, and so on, which I had taken in my capacity of merchant. I attended to it and to my horses entirely myself, while we chose one of the Cossacks to be the ‘elder’ of our caravan. He had to manage all the diplomatic talk with the Chinese authorities. All Cossacks spoke Mongolian, and the Tungus understood Manchurian. The Cossacks of the caravan knew, of course, who I was—one of them knew me at Irkútsk—but they never betrayed that knowledge, understanding that the success of the expedition depended upon it. I wore a long blue cotton dress, like the others, and the Chinese paid no attention to me, so that I could make, unnoticed by them, the compass survey of the route. The first day only, when all sorts of Chinese soldiers hung about us in the hope of getting a glass of whisky, I had often to cast only a furtive glance at my compass and to inscribe the bearings and the distances in my pocket, without taking my paper out. We had with us no arms whatever. Only our Tungus, who was going to marry, had taken his matchlock gun and used it to hunt for fallow deer, bringing us meat for supper, and making a provision of furs with which to pay for his future wife.

When there was no more whisky to be obtained from us the Chinese soldiers left us alone. So we went straight eastwards, finding our way as best we could across hill and dale, and after a four or five days’ march we really fell in with the Chinese track which had to take us across the Khingán to Merghén.

To our astonishment we discovered that the crossing of the great ridge, which looked so black and terrible on the maps, was most easy. We overtook on the road an old Chinese functionary, miserably wretched, who travelled in the same direction in a two-wheeled cart. For the last two days the road was going up hill, and the country bore testimony to its high altitude. The ground became marshy, and the road was muddy; the grass was very poor, and the trees grew thin, undeveloped, often crippled and covered with lichens. Mountains devoid of forests rose right and left, and we thought already of the difficulties we should experience in crossing the ridge, when we saw the old Chinese functionary alighting from his cart before an obó—that is, before a heap made of stones and branches of trees to which bundles of horsehair and small rags had been attached. He drew several hairs out of the mane of his horse, and attached them to the branches.

‘What is that?’ we asked.

‘The obó—the waters before us flow now to the Amúr.’

‘Is that all of the Khingán?’

‘Yes! No mountains more to cross as far as the Amúr: only hills!’

Quite a commotion spread in our caravan. ‘The rivers flow to the Amúr, the Amúr!’ shouted the Cossacks to each other. All their lives they had heard the old Cossacks talking about the great river where the vine grows wild, where the prairies extend for hundreds of miles and could give wealth to millions of men; then, after the Amúr was annexed to Russia, they heard of the long journey to it, the difficulties of the first settlers, and the prosperity of their relatives settled on the upper Amúr; and now we had found the short way to it! We had before us a steep slope upon which the road went downwards in zig-zags leading to a small river, which pierced its way through a chopped sea of mountains, and led to the Amúr. No more obstacles lay between us and the great river. A traveller will imagine my delight at this unexpected geographical discovery. As to the Cossacks, they hastened to dismount and to attach in their turn bundles of hair taken from their horses to the branches thrown on the obó. The Siberians altogether have a sort of awe for the gods of the heathen. They don’t think much of them, but these gods, they say, are wicked creatures, bent on mischief, and it is never good to be on bad terms with them. It is far better to bribe them with small tokens of respect.

‘Look, here is a strange tree: it must be an oak,’ they exclaimed, as we went down the steep slope. The oak does not grow, indeed, in Siberia. None is found until the eastern slope of the high plateau has been reached. ‘Look, nut trees!’ they exclaimed next. ‘And what tree is that?’ they said, seeing a lime tree, or some other tree which does not grow in Russia either, but which I knew as part of the Manchurian flora. The northerners, who for centuries had dreamed of warmer lands, and now saw them, were in delight. Lying on the ground covered with rich grass, they caressed it with their eyes—they would have kissed it. Now they burned with the desire to reach the Amúr as soon as possible. When, a fortnight later, we stopped at our last camp fire within twenty miles from the river, they grew impatient like children. They began to saddle their horses shortly after midnight, and hurried me to start long before daybreak; and when at last we caught from an eminence a sight of the mighty stream, the eyes of these unimpressionable Siberians, generally devoid of poetical feeling, gleamed with poetical ardour as they looked upon the blue waters of the majestic Amúr. It was evident that, sooner or later—with or without the support, or even against the wish, of the Russian Government—both banks of this river, a desert now but rich in possibilities, as well as the immense unpopulated stretches of North Manchuria, would be invaded by Russian settlers, just as the shores of the Mississippi were colonized by the Canadian voyageurs.

In the meantime the old half-blind Chinese functionary with whom we had crossed the Khingán, having donned his blue coat and official hat with a glass button on its top, declared to us next morning that he would not let us go further. Our ‘elder’ had received him and his clerk in our tent, and the old man, repeating what the clerk whispered to him, raised all sorts of objections to our further progress. He wanted us to camp on the spot while he would send our pass to Pekin to get orders, which we absolutely refused to do. Then he sought to quarrel with our passport.