On the Amur the weather had been gorgeous, but when we entered the Shilka we were north of 53° again and well into the mountains, and the next morning I awoke to a grey day. It rained and it rained, not tropical rain, but soft, penetrating rain; the fir-clad hills on either side were veiled in a silvery mist. The river wound so that as we looked ahead we seemed to be sailing straight into the hills. The way looked blocked with hills, sometimes all mist-covered, sometimes with the green showing alluringly through the mist, and occasionally, when the mist lifted and the sun came out, in all the gullies would linger little grey cloudlets, as if caught before they could get away and waiting there screened by the hills till the mist should fall again. Occasionally there were lonely houses, still more occasionally little settlements of log huts with painted windows hermetically sealed, and once or twice a field of corn ripe for the harvest but drowned by the persistent rain. But the air was soft and delicious, divine; only in the cabins on board the crowded steamer was it pestilential. The mate told me how, six weeks before, on his last trip up, an Englishman had come selling reapers and binders, and he thought that now I had made my appearance the English were rather crowding the Amur.
Sometimes when we stopped the passengers went ashore and went berrying, returning with great branches laden with fruit, and I and Buchanan too walked a little way, keeping the steamer 'well in sight, and rejoicing in the flowers and the green and the rich, fresh smell of moist earth. I do not know that ever in my life do I remember enjoying rain so much. Of course in my youth in Australia I had always welcomed the life-giving rain, but thirteen years in England, where I yearned for the sunshine, had somehow dimmed those memories, and now once again the rain on the river brought me joy. The mist was a thing of beauty, and when a ray of sunshine found its way into a green, mist-veiled valley, illuminating its lovely loneliness, then indeed I knew that the earth was the Lord's and the fullness thereof.
Sometimes we passed rafts upon the river. They were logs bound together in great parallelograms and worked with twelve long sweeps fixed at each end. Twelve men at least went to each raft, and there were small houses built of grass and canvas and wood. They were taking the wood down to Nikolayeusk to be shipped to Shanghai and other parts of the world for furniture, for these great forests of birch and elm and fir and oak must be a mine of wealth to their owners. I do not know whether the wood is cut on any system, and whether the presence of these great rafts had anything to do with the many dead trees I saw in the forests, their white stems standing up ghostlike against the green hill-side.
I have no record of these lovely places. My camera was locked away now in my suit-case, for it was war, and Russia, rightly, would allow no photographs.
Seven days after we left Blagoveschensk we reached Stretensk and I came in contact for the first time with the World's War.
CHAPTER XIV—MOBILISING IN EASTERN SIBERIA
At Stretensk I awakened to the fact that I was actually in Siberia, nay, that I had travelled over about two thousand miles of Siberia, that dark and gloomy land across which—I believed in my youth—tramped long lines of prisoners in chains, sometimes amidst the snow and ice of a bitter winter, sometimes with the fierce sun beating down upon them, but always hopeless, always hungry, weary, heartbroken, a sacrifice to the desire for political liberty that was implanted in the hearts of an enslaved people.
It is an extraordinary thing that, though for many years I had believed Saghalien was a terrible island, a sort of inferno for political prisoners, something like Van Diemen's Land used to be in the old convict days one hundred and ten years ago, only that in the Asiatic island the conditions were still more cruel and it was hopeless to think of escaping, while I was actually in that beautiful island I was so taken up with its charm, it was so extremely unlike the place of which I had a picture in my mind's eye, that I hardly connected the two. All up the Amur river was a new land, a land crying out for pioneers, pastoralists and farmers, so that the thought that was uppermost in my mind was of the contrast between it and the old land of China, where I had spent so long a time; but at Stretensk I suddenly remembered this was Siberia, the very heart of Siberia, where men had suffered unutterable things, might still be so suffering for all I knew, and I stepped off the steamer and prepared to explore, with a feeling that at any moment I might come across the heavy logs that made up the walls of a prison, might see the armed sentries, clad to the eyes in furs, who tramped amidst the snow. But this was August and it was fiercely hot, so the snow and the sentries clad in furs were ruled out, and presently as Buchanan and I walked about the town even the lonely prison built of logs had to go too. There may have been a prison, probably there was, but it did not dominate the picture. Not here should I find the Siberia I had been familiar with from my youth up.