At the stancias we met the travelling merchants from the Far East and from China with their long train of goods hauled in sleds or packed on the backs of horses. Five pood, we found, was the regulation load, and all packages were put up in drums bound with raw hide and so strapped that they could easily be transported by the pack-horse, which carried half a load on either side of a saddle-tree prepared for the purpose.
But those stancias were filthy, overcrowded, evil-smelling places, wherein one laid in one’s sleeping-bags upon a bench amid a crowd of unwashed, vodka-drinking humanity in damp, noxious sheep-skins.
Fortunately the moon was at that moment nearly full, and often at night I went forth alone to smoke, sometimes with the snowy plain stretched on every hand about me, and at others with gigantic peaks lifting their hoary heads far into the blue night vault of heaven; silent, frigid, white. Ah! what grandeur! I rejoiced that it was night, when I could smoke and ponder. So cold and still was it that those snowy summits, bathed in the silver radiance of the Siberian moon, filled me with awe such as I had never before experienced.
Yes, those were wonderful nights which will live for ever in my memory—nights when my thoughts wandered far away to the gay promenade at Hove, wondering how fared the little madcap, and whether her peril were real or only imaginary.
Ever obsessed by the knowledge that Markoff was aware of my journey, and would endeavour to prevent its successful issue, I existed in constant anxiety and dread lest some prearranged disaster might befall Madame de Rosen ere I could reach her.
Siberia is, alas! the country where, as the exiles say: “God is nigh, and the Tzar is far away.”
Thus, after three weeks more of hard travelling, I passed through the big, straggling, snow-covered town of Krasnoyarsk, and arrived at the wretchedly dirty stancia of Tulunovsk, where the road to Yakutsk—distant nearly two thousand miles—branches to the north from the Great Post Road, up the desolate valley of the Lena.
We arrived in Tulunovsk in the afternoon, and, having sent a telegram to Her Highness from Krasnoyarsk, eight days before, I was delighted to receive a charming little message assuring me that she was quite well and wishing me a continuance of good fortune on my journey.
Since I had left Tomsk no traveller had overtaken me. At Tulunovsk we found a party of politicals, about sixty men and women, in the roughly-constructed prison rest-house, being permitted a few days’ respite upon their long and weary march.
Already they had been six months on the road, and were in a terrible condition, almost in rags, and most of them so weak that death would no doubt have been welcome.