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°
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 ............