‘What sort of a passport is that?’ he said, looking with disdain into our pass, which was written in a few lines on a plain sheet of foolscap paper, in Russian and Mongolian, and had a simple sealing-wax seal. ‘You may have written it yourselves and sealed it with a copper,’ he remarked, ‘Look at my pass: this is worth something,’ and he unrolled before us a sheet of paper, two feet long, covered with Chinese characters.
I sat quietly aside during this conference, packing something in my box, when a sheet of the ‘Moscow Gazette’ fell under my hand. The Gazette, being the property of the Moscow University, had an eagle printed on its title-heading. ‘Show him this,’ I said to our elder. He unfolded the large sheet of print and pointed out the eagle. ‘That pass was to show to you,’ our elder said, ‘but this is what we have for ourselves.’
‘Why, is it all written about you?’ the old man asked with terror.
‘All about us,’ our elder replied, without even a twinkle in his eyes.
The old man—a true functionary—looked quite dumbfounded at seeing such a profusion of writing. He examined every one of us, nodding with his head. But the clerk was still whispering something to his chief, who finally declared that he would not let us continue the journey.
‘Enough of talking,’ I said to the elder; ‘give the order to saddle the horses.’ The Cossacks were of the same opinion, and in no time our caravan started, bidding good-bye to the old functionary and promising him to report that short of resorting to violence—which he was not able to do—he had done all in his power to prevent us from entering Manchuria, and that it was our fault if we went nevertheless.
A few days later we were at Merghén, where we traded a little, and soon reached the Chinese town of Aigún, on the right bank of the Amúr, and the Russian town of Blagovéschensk, on the left bank. We had discovered the direct route and many interesting things besides: the border-ridge character of the Great Khinghán, the ease with which it can be crossed, the tertiary volcanoes of the Uyún Kholdontsí region, which had so long been a puzzle in geographical literature, and so on. I cannot say that I was a sharp tradesman, for at Merghén I persisted (in broken Chinese) in asking thirty-five roubles for a watch when the Chinese buyer had already offered me forty-five; but the Cossacks traded all right. They sold very well all their horses, and when my horses, my goods, and the rest were sold by the Cossacks it appeared that the expedition had cost the government the modest sum of twenty-two roubles—a little over two pounds.
VI
All this summer I travelled on the Amúr. I went as far as its mouth, or rather its estuary—Nikoláevsk—to join the Governor-General, whom I accompanied in a steamer up the Usurí; and after that, in the autumn, I made a still more interesting journey up the Sungarí, to the very heart of Manchuria, as far as Ghirín (or Kirín, according to the southern pronunciation).
Many rivers in Asia are formed by the junction of two equally important streams, so that it is difficult for the geographer to say which of the two is the main one and which is a tributary. The Ingodá and the Onón join to make the Shílka; the Shílka and the Argúñ join to make the Amúr; and the Amúr joins the Sungarí to form that mighty stream which flows north-eastwards and enters the Pacific in the inhospitable latitudes of the Tartar Strait.