by James Hilton
Early in September the Lena, miles wide, began to freeze over, and soon the whole visible world became transfixed in the cold, darkening glare of winter. The two guards who had left Irkutsk in charge of A.J. and who had spent the summer amusing themselves as well as the amenities of Yakutsk permitted, now indicated that the time for the resumption of the journey had arrived. From now onwards it became a much more personal and solitary affair—almost, in fact, a polar expedition, but without the spur of hope and ambition to mitigate hardship. The three men, heavily furred, set out by reindeer sledge into the long greyness of the sub-Arctic winter. Two of them carried arms, yet the third man, defenceless, was given the place of honour on all occasions—at night-time in the wayside huts, usually uninhabited, and during the day whenever a halt was made for rest and food. The temperature sank lower and lower and the sky darkened with every mile; they crossed a range of bleak mountains and descended into a land of frozen whiteness unbroken anywhere save by stunted willows. For food, there were birds which the guards shot or snared, and unlimited fish could be obtained by breaking through the thick ice in the streams. The fish froze stiff on being taken out of the water; they had to be cut into slices and eaten raw between hunks of bread. A.J.’s palate had by this time grown much less fastidious, and he found such food not at all unpleasant when he was hungry enough. The cold air and the harsh activity of the daily travel bred also in him a sense of physical fitness which, at any other time, he would have relished; as it was, however, he felt nothing but a grim and ever-deepening insensitiveness to all outward impressions. He imagined vaguely the vast distance he had already travelled, but it did not terrify him; it was merely a memory of emptiness and boredom, and though he knew that the end of the journey would mean the end of even the last vestige of changefulness, he yet longed for it, because, for the moment, it seemed a change in itself.
One evening, thirteen weeks after leaving Yakutsk, the three men were crossing a plain of snow under the light of the full moon. At the last settlement, ten days previously, they had exchanged their reindeer transport for dogs, and since then had been traversing this same white and empty plain. There seemed, indeed, no obvious reason why the plain and the journey might not go on for ever. The temperature was fifty below zero. A.J. had noticed that for some hours the guards had been muttering to each other, which was unusual, for in such cold air it was painful to speak. Suddenly, out of the silver gloom, appeared the hazy shapes of a few snow-covered roofs; the guards gave a cry; the dogs barked; a few answering cries came from the dimness ahead. They had reached Russkoe Yansk.
It was smaller and more desolate than he had imagined. There were only four Russians in exile there, none of them educated men; the rest of the population consisted of a score or more natives of very low intelligence. The native men, under the direction of the guards, began to dig an entry through the snow into an unoccupied timber hut that was to belong to the new exile; there were several of these deserted huts, for the settlement had formerly been larger. The natives looked on in amazement when A.J. began to unpack the bundle that he had not been allowed to touch since leaving Petersburg; they had never before seen such things as books, writing-paper, or a kerosene-lamp. The Russians looked on also with a curiosity scarcely less childlike; they had seen no strange face for years, and their eagerness bordered on almost maniacal excitement. A.J. addressed them with a few cordial words and they were all around him in a moment, shaking his hands and picking up one after another of his belongings; they had evidently been half afraid of him at first. One of them said: “This shows that the Government has not forgotten us—they know we are still here, or they would not have sent you.”
A fire was made, and the two Cossack guards stayed the night in the hut. The next morning they hitched up their dog teams, shook hands cordially enough, and began the long return journey. A.J. watched them till the distance swallowed up their sleigh and the hoarse barking of the animals. Then he set to work to make his habitation more comfortable.
Russkoe Yansk was close to but not actually on the Arctic Ocean; the nearest settlements, not much larger, were four hundred and four hundred and fifty miles to west and east respectively. There was no communication of any regular kind with the civilised world; sometimes a fur-trapper would take a message and pass it on to someone else who might be going to Yakutsk, but even in most favourable circumstances an answer could scarcely arrive in less than twenty months. The nearest railway and telegraph stations were over three thousand miles away.
The year was composed of day and night; the day lasted from June to September only. In winter the temperature sometimes fell to seventy below zero, and there were week-long blizzards in which no living human being could stir a yard out of his hut. During the short summer the climate became mild and moist; the river thawed and overflowed, causing vast swamps and floodings that cut off the settlement from the world outside even more effectively than did the winter cold and darkness.
A.J. had brought a fair supply of tea and tobacco, and with small gifts of these he could secure the manual services of as many natives as he wanted, apart from the four Russians, who would have lived their whole lives as personal slaves in his hut if he had wished it. He did not feel particularly sad, but he did begin to feel a strange Robinson-Crusoe kind of majesty that was rather like an ache gnawing at him all the time. He was the only person in Russkoe Yansk who could read, write, work a simple sum, or understand a rough map. The most intelligent of the Russians had no more than the mind of a peasant, with all its abysmal ignorance and with only a touch of its shrewdness. The others were less than half-witted, perhaps as a result of their long exile. They remembered the names of the villages from which they had been banished, but they had no proper idea where those villages were, how long their banishment had lasted, or what it had been for. Yet compared with the native Yakuts, even such men were intelligent higher beings. The Yakuts, with their women and families, reached to depths of ugliness, filth, and stupidity that A.J. had hardly believed possible for beings classifiable as mankind. Their total vocabulary did not comprise more than a hundred or so sounds, hardly to be called words. In addition to physical unpleasantness (many were afflicted with a loathsome combination of syphilis and leprosy), they were abominable thieves and liars; indeed, their only approach to virtue was a species of dog- like attachment to anyone who had established himself as their master. With a little of the most elementary organisation they could have murdered all the exiles and plundered the huts, but they lacked both the initiative and the virility. Life to them was but an unending struggle of short summers and long winters, of snow and ice, blizzard and thaw, of fishing in the icy pools and trapping small animals for flesh and fur, of lust, disease, and occasional gluttony. They had never seen a tree, and knew timber only as material providentially floated down to them on the spring-time floods. Even when he had picked up their rudimentary language, A.J. could not interest them by any talk of the outer they were incapable of imagination, and the only thing that stirred them to limited excitement was the kerosene-lamp, which, after some experimenting, he made to burn with certain kinds of fish-oil.
Now especially he had cause to be grateful to Savanrog, the enterprising and sympathetic prison-guard at the Gontcharnaya. For the luggage, packed according to the latter’s instructions, included all kinds of things that A.J. would never have thought of for himself, but which now were found to be especially useful. With them, and with the miscellaneous articles he had purchased in Irkutsk, he was not badly equipped. He had his twelve books, chosen apparently at random from his shelves in Petersburg; the only one he would have thought of selecting himself was a translation of Don Quixote, but the others soon grew to be odd but no less faithful companions. One was a school text-book in algebra, another an out-of-date year- book; another was Dickens’s Great Expectations—of course in Russian. Mr. Pumblechook and Joe Gargery became the friends of all his waking and sleeping dreams, and before them alone he could relax and smile.
&n
bsp; Besides his few books his luggage contained several other things never seen in Russkoe Yansk before. He had a watch and a clinical thermometer, a few bottles and jars of simple medicines, and a pair of scissors; he had also (he was sure) the only boot-trees north of the Arctic Circle. The police in Petersburg, with typical inconsequence, had packed them inside a pair of field- boots.
Oddly, perhaps, the time did not seem to pass very slowly. There was always so much to be done—the mere toil of getting food, of repairing and improving the hut, of keeping himself well clothed to withstand the almost inconceivable cold. He did a little amateur doctoring whenever he found anything he fancied he could cure amidst that nightmare of disease and degradation. He made notes, without enthusiasm, yet somehow because he felt he must, about the customs and language of the natives. He even tried to teach the least stupid of the Russians to learn the Russian alphabet. And whenever, during the long winter, or while day after day of blizzard kept him a prisoner in the hut, he felt pangs of loneliness or disappointment piercing to his soul, he would slip into a coma of insensibility and wait. The waiting was not often for long. When, after the grey night of winter, the sunlight showed again over the frozen earth, at first so very timidly, he welcomed it with a smile that no one saw. Sometimes at midsummer he sailed clown the swollen river in a small boat; once, with a couple of natives, he reached the open Arctic and made a rough sketch-map of fifty miles of coast-line. He hardly knew why he did such things—certainly not from any idea of ultimate escape. There was nothing at all to prevent his making such an attempt, except the knowledge of its utter hopelessness. His stern jailers were the swamps in summer and the icy wastes in winter; and even if by some miracle, he could pass them by, there was no place of safety to be reached. It would have been more hopeful to make for the North Pole than for the semi-civilised places in Siberia.
His first winter at Russkoe Yansk was that of 1909-10.
* * *
PART III
In the late spring of 1917 a small party of Cossacks set out from Yakutsk by reindeer and dog sledge. They were seven in number and travelled swiftly, visiting each one in turn of the remoter settlements. Russkoe Yansk was almost the last.
They reached it in the twilight of a May noontide, and at the sound of their arrival the entire native population—some dozen Yakut families—turned out of their huts to meet them, surrounding the clog- teams and chattering excitedly.
At length a tall figure, clad in heavy furs, approached the throng; and even in that dim northern light there was no mistaking leadership of such a kind. One of the soldiers made a slight obeisance and said, in Russian: “Your honour, we are from Yakutsk.”
A quiet, rather slow voice answered: “You are most welcome, then. You are the first to visit us for three years. Come into my hut. My name is Ouranov.”
He led them a little distance over the frozen snow to a hut rather larger than the rest. They were surprised when they entered, for it was so much better furnished than any other they had seen. The walls were hung with clean skins, and the stove did not smoke badly, and there were even such things as tables, chairs, a shelf of hooks, a lamp, and a raised bed. Ouranov motioned the men to make themselves comfortable. There was something in his quiet, impersonal demeanour that made them feel shy, shy even of conveying the news that they had brought with them. They stood round, unwilling to sit in those astonishing chairs; most of them in the end squatted on the timber floor.
Ouranov was busying himself with the samovar. Meanwhile the soldiers could only stare at one another, while the still shouting and chattering Yakuts waited outside the hut in a tempest of curiosity. At last the spokesman of the party began: “Brother, we are the bearers of good news. Don’t be too startled when you hear it, though it certainly is enough to send any man such as yourself out of his wits for joy. At Kolymsk that did actually happen to one poor fellow, so you will understand, brother, why we are taking such a long time to tell you.”
Then Ouranov turned from the samovar and smiled. It was a curious smile, for though it lit up his face it seemed to light up even more the grimness that was there. “Whatever news it is,” he said, “you may be sure I shall not be affected in that way.”
“Then, brother, it is this. You are a free man. All exiles everywhere are now released and may return to their homes, by order of the new revolutionary government. Think of it—there has been a revolution in Petrograd—the Emperor has been deposed.” And as if a hidden spring had suddenly been touched, the soldiers all began to talk, to explain, to shout out the good news, with all its details, to this man who knew nothing. They had told the same story at each one of the settlements, and every time of telling had made it more marvellous to them. Their eyes blazed with joy and pity, and pride at having the privilege of conveying the first blessings of revolution to those who stood most in need of them. But if only Ouranov had been a little more excited, they would have been happier. He handed them tea so quietly, and after they had all finished talking he merely said: “Yes, it is good news. I will pack my things.”
The soldiers again ’stared at one another, a little awed, perhaps even a little chilled; they had enjoyed such orgies of hysteria at the other settlements, but this man seemed different—as if the Arctic had entered his soul.
He said, rather perceiving their disappointment: “It is very kind of you to have come so far to tell me. As I said before, there has been no news for three years. There were four other exiles here then, but that same winter three died of typhus, and another was drowned the following summer.”
“So for over a year you have been altogether alone?” said one of the soldiers.
“Oh, no. There have been the Yakuts.” And once more that grim smile.
They fell to talking again of the revolution and its manifold blessings, and after a little time they noticed that Ouranov seemed hardly to be listening; he was already taking his books from the shelf and making them into a neat pile.
Two days later eight men set out for the south. There was need to hurry, as the warmer season was approaching and the streams would soon melt and overflow.
As they covered mile after mile it was as if the earth warmed and blossomed to meet them; each day was longer and brighter than the one before; the stunted willows became taller, and at last there were trees with green buds on them; the sun shone higher in the sky, melting the snows and releasing every stream into bursting, bubbling life, till the ice in the rivers gave a thunderous shiver from bank to bank; and the soldiers threw off their fur jackets and shouted for joy and sang songs all the day long. At Verkhoiansk there was a junction with other parties of released exiles, and later on, when they had crossed the mountains, more exiles met them from Ust Viluisk, Kolymsk, and places that even the map ignores.
Yakutsk, which was reached at the end of July, was already full of soldiers and exiles, as well as knee-deep in thick black mud and riddled with pestilence. Every day the exiles waited on the banks of the Lena for the boat that was to take them further south, and every hour fresh groups arrived from the north and north-east. Food and money were scarce; sick men and women staggered into the settlement with stories of others who had died during the journey; a few were mad and walked about moaning and laughing; every night the soldiers drank themselves into quarrelsomeness and careered about firing shots into the air and falling off the timbered paths into the thick mud; every morning dead bodies were pushed quietly into the Lena and sent northwards on their icy journey. Yet beyond all the misery and famine and pestilence, Yakutsk was a city of hope.
Ouranov had little money, but he did not go hungry. The seven soldiers of his escort had taken a curious fancy to him. They called him their captain, and saw to it that he always had food and shelter. There was much in him that they did not understand, but also something that attracted them peculiarly. During the first part of the southward expedition he had naturally taken command, for he knew the land far better than they, and was in less danger of losing the track. After that it had
seemed natural that he should go on telling them when and where to halt, where to stay for the nights, and so on. They let him do that, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the fact that they thought him a little mad. They had a nickname for him which meant ’The man who has forgotten how to talk.’ It was an obvious exaggeration, since he did talk whenever there was need for it; yet even on such occasions it was as if he were thinking out the words, and as if each word cost him effort. They told one another that this was because he had been exiled by himself and had been left alone so long. By the time of reaching Yakutsk the legend had grown; Ouranov, they were saying, had been such a dangerous revolutionary that, by the ex- Emperor’s personal order, he had been sent to the remotest and most terrible spot in all Siberia. And after a week of gossip in Yakutsk it was easy to say and believe that he had been ten years utterly alone in Russkoe Yansk, and that he had not spoken a word during the whole of that time. So now, when the soldiers saw him reading a book or making pencil notes on paper, they said he must be learning language over again.
At last came the long-awaited steamer, an old paddle-boat, built in Glasgow in the ’seventies, towing behind it a couple of odorous and verminous convict-barges. Fifteen hundred persons crammed themselves into the boat and another thousand into the barges. There was nowhere to sleep except on the bare boards of the deck or in the foul and pestilential holds; men and women sickened, died, and were dropped overboard during that month of weary chug-chugging upstream through a forlorn land.