The Kurile mothers have a very cruel practice. When they have two infants at a birth, they kill one; and yet these people are gentle and humane. They respect old age, they are attached to their kindred, and form friendships.
CHAPTER XVI.
KIACHTA TO MAIMATCHIN.
The tarantass—Tea merchants—Their competition—The Sienzy—Aspect of Maimatchin—A dinner at the Chinese Governor’s—Preparations for crossing the Gobi desert.
We found quite a change in the state of the road after leaving Verchni-Oudinsk. The sledge, in the course of a few hours, being no longer supported with a smooth thick layer of snow, its skates occasionally came in contact with the earth below, and this increasing the friction, considerably retarded our progress. This at last produced so much jolting that, on arriving at the first stage, we were obliged to abandon our sledge and proceed in a tarantass. This vehicle, in which the Russians travel in summer, has no other spring than that afforded by four birch poles resting on the axles of four wheels. I do not know any kind of locomotion, excepting the Chinese mule palanquin, more uncomfortable than the tarantass, and yet, the jolting apart, I was delighted the first time I found myself mounted on this vehicle. The country was still for the most part covered with snow, but here and there I caught a glimpse of uncovered spots: the land that had been lost to sight since quitting St. Petersburg, the land of Siberia, in fact, which, although I had passed over fifteen hundred leagues of this country, strictly speaking, I had not yet seen. Here it was a rich soil apparently favourable to agriculture, but of so dark a colour that it must give a more gloomy aspect to the neighbourhood of the villages in summer, than the spotless snowy shroud in winter.
As we went on our way, we noticed a great difference in the people; they were more singular-looking and of a type more Oriental: the villagers, the yemschiks, and even the posting masters, were nearly all Buriats. We now often passed Chinese, in carriages or palanquins, clad in silks, red, blue, and in fact of every colour; still more frequently Mongols perched on camels, or mounted on frisky little horses, all of them capped alike with a yellow turban lined with fur, and wrapped in a full cloak, made of the skin of the white deer of the Gobi desert, folded across the chest. At last, on the 27th of March, at nine in the morning, I caught sight, from the top of a hill, of the village of Kiachta, at the end of which stood up two enormous yellow posts that marked the frontier of the Celestial Empire, and the entry into the town of Maimatchin.
I went straight to M. Pfaffius. “I had no idea,” he said, “you would have been so long in coming from Irkutsk.” I related to him my adventures of the Baikal. “The little caravan of tea-merchants which you were to join, left here yesterday morning. But you will lose nothing by it, for there will be another caravan leaving here in a week. You will then have plenty of time to make all your preparations to accompany it to Pekin, and we shall have the pleasure of your company here all the week.” I went to announce this news to Ivan Michäelovitch Nemptchinof, who was so highly delighted, and offered me, with so much courtesy, the hospitality of his father’s house, that I shall never forget the occasion.
Ivan Michäelovitch’s father,[25] with whom I lodged at Kiachta, is a cousin of the Nemptchinof I have already mentioned as one of the three proprietors of the richest gold mine of Trans-Baikalia. Not feeling disposed to risk his fortune in gold-hunting, so often precarious, he preferred devoting himself to the tea business, and has acquired in it an immense fortune.