CHAPTER X—ONE OF THE WORLD'S GREAT RIVERS
All the afternoon we went back on our tracks along the main line, the sea on one side and the green country, riotous, lush, luxuriant, on the other, till at last we reached the head of the gulf and took our last look at the Northern Sea; grey like a silver shield it spread before us, and right down to the very water's edge came the vivid green. And then we turned inland, and presently we left the main line and went north. Above was the grey sky, and the air was soft and cool and delicious. I had had too much stimulation and I welcomed, as I had done the rains after the summer in my youth, the soft freshness of the Siberian summer.
There were soldiers everywhere, tall, strapping, virile Russians; there were peasants in belted, blouses, with collars all of needlework; and there were Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and the natives of the country, men with a strong Mongolian cast of countenance. The country itself was strangely empty after teeming China, but these all travelled by train or were to be found on the railway stations and at the fishing stations that we passed, but apparently I was the only bloated aristocrat who travelled first class. In normal times this made travelling fairly easy in Russia, for it was very cheap and you could generally get a carriage to yourself.
Oh! but it was lovely; the greenness of the country was a rest to eyes wearied with the dust and dirt of China. And there were trees—not trees denuded of all but enough timber to make a bare livelihood possible, but trees growing luxuriantly in abundant leaf after their own free will, oaks and firs and white-stemmed, graceful birches bending daintily before the soft breeze. At the stations the natives, exactly like Chinamen, dirty and in rags, brought strawberries for sale; and there were always flowers—purple vetches and gorgeous red poppies, tall foxgloves and blue spikes of larkspur. The very antithesis of China it was, for this was waste land and undeveloped. The very engines were run with wood, and there were stacks of wood by the wayside waiting to be burnt. I was sorry—I could not but be sorry. I have seen my own people cut down the great forests of Western Victoria, and here were people doing the same, with exactly the same wanton extravagance, and in this country, with its seven months of bitter winter, in all probability the trees take three times as long to come to maturity. But it is virgin land, this glorious fertile country, and was practically uninhabited till the Russian Government planted here and there bands of Cossacks who, they say, made no endeavour to develop the land. The Koreans and the Japanese and the Chinese came creeping in, but the Russians made an effort to keep them out. But still the population is scanty. Always, though it was before the war, there were soldiers—soldiers singly, soldiers in pairs, soldiers in little bands; a horseman appeared on a lonely road, he was a soldier; a man came along driving a cart, he was a soldier; but the people we saw were few, for the rigours of this lovely land in the winter are terrible, and this was the dreaded land where Russia sent her exiles a long, long way from home.
Farther we went into the hills; a cuckoo called in the cool and dewy morning; there were lonely little cottages with wooden roofs and log walls; there were flowering creepers round the windows, and once I saw a woman's wistful face peeping out at the passing train, the new train that at last was bringing her nearer the old home and that yet seemed to emphasise the distance. We went along by a river, the Ussuri, that wound its way among the wooded green hills and by still pools of water that reflected in their depths the blue sky, soft with snow-white clouds. A glorious land this land of exile! At the next station we stopped at the people were seated at a table having a meal under the shade of the trees. Then there was a lonely cross of new wood; someone had been laid in his long last home in the wilderness and would never go back to Holy Russia again; and again I thought of the woman's wistful face that peered out of the flower-bordered window.
This is a new line. Formerly the way to Kharbarosvk was down the Amur river from the west, and that, I suppose, is why all this country of the Amur Province south and east of the river is so lonely.
As we neared Kharbarosvk came signs of settlement, the signs of settlement I had been accustomed to in Australia. There were tree stumps, more and more, and anything more desolate than a forest of newly cut tree stumps I don't know. It always spells to me ruthless destruction. I am sure it did here, for they cut down recklessly, sweeping all before them. It seemed to cry out, as all newly settled land that ever I have seen, and I have seen a good deal, the distaste of the people who here mean to make their homes. These are not our trees, they say; they are not beautiful like the trees of our own old home; let us cut them down, there are plenty; by and by when we have time, when we are settled, we will plant trees that really are worth growing. We shall not see them, of course, our children will benefit little; but they will be nice for our grandchildren, if we hold on so long. But no one believes they will stay so long; they hope to make money and go back. Meanwhile they want the timber, but they neglect to plant fresh trees.
They wanted the timber to build Kharbarosvk. This is a town of the outposts, a frontier town; there are no towns like it in the British Isles, where they value their land and build towns compactly, but I have seen its counterpart many a time in Australia, and I know there must be its like in America and Canada. It straggled all along the river bank, and its wide streets, streets paved, or rather floored, here and there with planks of wood, were sparsely planted with houses. In one respect Australian towns of the frontier are much wiser. When there is a train they do build their stations with some regard for the comfort and convenience of the inhabitants. In Russia wherever I have been the railway station is a long distance, sometimes half-an-hour's drive, from the town it serves. I suppose it is one of the evils of the last bad regime and that in the future, the future which is for the people, it will be remedied, but it is difficult to see what purpose it serves. I had to get a droshky to the hotel. We drove first along a country road, then through the wide grass-grown streets of the town, and I arrived at the principal hotel, kept by a German on Russian lines, for the restaurant was perfectly distinct from the living-rooms. I put it on record it was an excellent restaurant; I remember that cold soup—the day was hot—and that most fragrant coffee still.
From the windows of my bedroom I saw another of the world's great rivers. I looked away over a wide expanse of water sparkling in the sunshine: it was the junction of the Ussuri and the Amur, and it was like a great lake or the sea. It was very, very still, clear as glass, and the blue sky and white clouds were reflected in it, and there were green islands and low green banks. All was colour, but soft colour without outlines, like a Turner picture.
The Amur is hard frozen for about five months of the year and for about two more is neither good solid ice nor navigable water. It is made by the joining of the Shilka and the Aigun in about lat. 53° N. 121° E., and, counting in the Shilka, must be nearly three thousand miles in length, and close on two thousand miles have I now travelled. I don't know the Amur, of course, but at least I may claim to have been introduced to it, and that, I think, is more than the majority of Englishmen may do. And oh, it is a mighty river! At Kharbarosvk, over a thousand versts—about six hundred and forty miles—from the sea, it is at least a mile and a third wide, and towards the mouth, what with backwaters and swamps, it takes up sometimes about forty miles of country, while the main channel is often nearly three miles wide. It rises in the hills of Trans-Baikal—the Yablonoi Mountains we used to call them when I was at school. Really I think it is the watershed that runs up East Central Siberia and turns the waters to the shallow Sea of Okhotsk; and it cuts its way through wooded hills among rich land hardly as yet touched by agriculture, beautiful, lovely hills they are, steep and wooded. It climbs down into the flat country and then again, just before it reaches the sea, it is in the hills, colder hills this time, though the Amur falls into the sea on much the same parallel of latitude as that which sees it rise, only it seems to me that the farther you get east the colder and more extreme is the climate. For Nikolayeusk at the mouth is in the same latitude as London, but as a port it is closed for seven months of the year. True, the winter in Siberia is lovely, bright, clear cold, a hard, bright clearness, but the thermometer is often down below -40°