Fahrenheit, and when that happens life is difficult for both man and beast. No wonder it is an empty river. The wonder to me is that there should be so much life as there is. For in those five months that it is open fine large steamers run from Nikolayeusk by Ivharbarosvk to Blagovesehensk, and smaller ones, but still rather fine, to Stretensk, where river navigation, for steamers of any size at any rate, ceases. There are the two months, April-May, September-October, when the river cannot be used at all, and there are the winter months when it may be, and is to a certain extent, used as a road, but with the thermometer down far below zero no one is particularly keen on travelling. It has its disadvantages. So most of the travelling is done in the summer months and in 1914 the steamers were crowded. Now, I suppose, they are fighting there. It is a country well worth fighting for.
It was a curious contrast, the lonely empty river and the packed steamer. It was an event when we passed another; two made a crowd; and very, very seldom did we pass more than two in a day. But it was delightful moving along, the great crowded steamer but a puny thing on the wide river, the waters still and clear, reflecting the blue sky and the soft white clouds and the low banks far, far away. When there were hills they were generally closer, as if the river had had more trouble in cutting a passage and therefore had not had time to spread itself as it did in the plain country. The hills were densely wooded, mostly with dark firs, with an occasional deciduous tree showing up brightly among the dark foliage, and about Blagovesehensk there is a beautiful oak known as the velvet oak, the wood of which is much sought for making furniture. However dense the forest, every here and there would be a wide swath of green bare of trees—a fire brake; for these forests in the summer burn fiercely, and coming back I saw the valleys thick with the curling blue wood smoke, smelt the aromatic smell of the burning fir woods, and at night saw the hills outlined in flames. It was a gorgeous sight, but it is desperately destructive for the country, especially a country where the wood grows so slowly. But at first there were no fires, and what struck me was the vastness and the loneliness of the mighty river. I had the same feeling on the Congo in the tropics, a great and lonely river with empty banks, but that was for a distance under two hundred miles. Here in the north the great lonely river went wandering on for ten times as far, and still the feeling when one stood apart from the steamer was of loneliness and grandeur. Man was such a small thing here. At night a little wind sighed over the waters or swept down between the hills; round the bows the water rose white; there was a waste of tossing water all round, under a lowering sky, and the far-away banks were lost in the gloom. A light would appear, perhaps two lights shining out of the darkness, but they only emphasised the loneliness. A wonderful river!
The navigation of the river is a profession in itself. There is a school for the navigators at Blagoveschensk where they are properly trained. All along we came across the red beacons that mark the way, while beside them in the daytime we could see the cabins of the lonely men who tended them.
Truly a voyage down the Amur in summer is not to be easily forgotten, and yet, sitting here writing about it in my garden in Kent, I sometimes wonder did I dream it all, the vastness and the loneliness and the grandeur that is so very different from the orchard land wherein is set my home. You do not see orchards on the Amur, the climate is too rigorous, and I doubt if they grow much beyond berries, a blue berry in large quantities, raspberries, and coming back we bought cucumbers.
Oh, but it was lovely on that river. Dearly should I like to share its delights with a companion who could discuss it with me, but somehow it seems to be my lot to travel alone.
Not, of course, that I was really alone. Though the steamers were few, perhaps because they were few, they were crowded. There were two companies on the river, the Sormovo or quick-sailing company, and the Amur Company; and I hereby put it on record that the Amur Company is much the best. The John Cockerill, named after some long-dead English engineer who was once on the Amur, is one of the best and most comfortable.
At Kharbarosvk, finding the steamer did not leave till the evening of the next day, I had naturally gone to a hotel. It seemed the obvious thing to do. But I was wrong. The great Russian steamship companies, with a laudable desire to keep passengers and make them comfortable, always allow a would-be traveller to spend at least two days on board in the ports, paying, of course, for his food. And I, who had only come about thirty-six hours too soon, had actually put up at a hotel, with the John Cockerill lying at the wharf. The Russo-Asiatic Bank, as represented by a woman clerk, the only one there who could speak English, was shocked at my extravagance and said so. These women clerks were a little surprise for me, for in 1914 I was not accustomed to seeing women in banks, but here in Eastern Siberia—in Vladivostok, Kharbarosvk, and all the towns of the Amur—they were as usual as the men.
The John Cockerill surprised me as much as I surprised the bank clerk. To begin with, I didn't realise it was the John Cockerill, for I could not read the Russian letters, and at first I did not recognise the name as pronounced by the Russians. She was a very gorgeous, comfortable ship, with a dining saloon and a lounge gorgeous in green velvet. And yet she was not a post steamer, but spent most of her time drawing barges laden with cargo, and stopped to discharge and take in at all manner of lonely little ports on the great river. She was a big steamer, divided into four classes, and was packed with passengers: Russians in the first, second and third class, with an occasional German or Japanese, and in the fourth an extraordinary medley of poorer Russians, Chinese and Gilyaks and Golds, the aboriginals of the country, men with a Mongolian east of countenance, long coarse blaek hair, very often beards, and dirty—the ordinary poor Chinaman is clean and tidy beside them.
But the first class was luxurious. We had electric light and hot and cold water. The cabins were not to hold more than two, and you brought your own bedding. I dare say it could have been hired on the steamer, but the difficulty of language always stood in my way, and once away from the seaboard in North-Eastern Asia the only other European language beside Russian that is likely to be understood is German, and I have no German. I was lucky enough on the John Cockerill to find the wife of a Russian colonel who spoke a little English. She, with her husband, was taking a summer holiday by journeying up to Nikolayeusk, and she very kindly took Buchanan and me under her wing and interpreted for us. It was very nice for me, and the only thing I had to complain of on that steamer was the way in which the night watch promenading the deek shut my window and slammed to the shutters. They did it every night, with a care for my welfare I could have done without. In a river steamer the cabins are all in the centre with the deck round, and the watch evidently could not understand how any woman could really desire to sleep under an open window. I used to get up early in the morning and walk round the decks, and I found that first and second class invariably shut their windows tight, though the nights were always just pleasantly cool, and consequently those passages between the cabins smelt like a menagerie, and an ill-kept menagerie at that. They say Russians age early and invariably they are of a pallid complexion. I do not wonder, now that I have seen their dread of fresh air. Again and again I was told: “Draughts are not good!” Draughts! I'd rather sleep in a hurricane than in the hermetically sealed boxes in which those passengers stowed themselves on board the river steamers. On the John Cockerill the windows of the dining saloon and the lounge did open, but on the steamer on which I went up the river, the Kanovina, one of the “Sormovo” Company, and the mail steamer, there was only one saloon in the first class. We had our meals and we lived there. It was a fine large room placed for'ard in the ship's bows, with beautiful large windows of glass through which we could see excellently the scenery; but those windows were fast; they would not open; they were not made to open. The atmosphere was always thick when I went in for breakfast in the morning, and I used to make desperate efforts to get the little windows that ran round the top opened. I could not do it myself, as you had to get on the roof of the saloon, the deck where the look-out stood, and anyhow they were only little things, a foot high by two feet broad. But such an innovation was evidently regarded as dangerous. Besides the fact that draughts were bad, I have been assured that perhaps it was going to rain—the rain couldn't come in both sides—and at night I was assured they couldn't be opened because the lights would be confusing to other steamers!
Nobody seemed to mind an atmosphere you could have cut with a knife. I am sure if the walls had been taken away it would have stood there in a solid block—a dark-coloured, high-smelling block, I should think. I gave up trying to do good to a community against its will and used to carry my meals outside and have them on the little tables that were dotted about the deck.