by G. A. Henty
“Oh that was it!” Alexis said. “I wondered how you got mixed up in the affair, and still more why they let you out after your having been caught in what they considered a serious business. Well, here we are, victims both, and it is a curious chance that has thrown us together again.”
“Well, what is our life here?” Godfrey asked.
Alexis shrugged his shoulders. “As a life it is detestable, though were it for a short time only there would be nothing to grumble about. We are fairly fed; we have each a patch of ground, where we can grow vegetables. The twelve men in these huts can visit and talk to each other. When that is said all is said. Oh, by the way, we are also permitted to make anything we like! that is, we can buy the materials if we have money, and the work can be sold in the town. There is one man has made himself a turning-lathe, and he makes all sorts of pretty little things. There is another man who was an officer in the navy; he carves little models of ships out of wood and bone. Another man paints. I have not decided yet what I shall do. I had two or three hundred roubles when I was sent off here, and as I only spent four or five on the road, I have plenty to last me for some time for tea and tobacco.”
“But how do you get them?”
“The warders smuggle them in. It is an understood thing, and there is no real objection to it, though they are very strict about bringing in spirits. Still we can get vodka if we have a mind to; it is only a question of bribery.”
“How long are you here for, Alexis?”
“Fifteen years.”
“I am supposed to be in for life,” Godfrey said.
“Fifteen years is as bad as life,” the young doctor said. “What is the use of your life after having been shut up here for fifteen years?”
“Well, I don’t mean to stay, that is one thing,” Godfrey said. “There can’t be any difficulty in escaping from here.”
“Not the least in the world,” Alexis said quietly. “But where do you propose to go?”
“I have not settled yet. It seems to me that any one with pluck and energy ought to be able to make his way out of this country somehow; besides, from what I hear great numbers do get away, and take to the woods.”
“Yes, but they have to give themselves up again.”
“That may be; but I hear also that if they give themselves up a long way from the prison they escape from, and refuse to give any account whatever of themselves, they are simply sent to prison again as vagabonds. In that case they are treated as ordinary convicts. Now from what I hear, an ordinary convict is infinitely better off than a political one. Of course you have to associate with a bad lot; still that is better than almost solitary confinement. The work they have to do is not hard, and if they are well conducted they are let out after a time, whereas there is no hope for a political prisoner. At any rate, even if I knew that if I was retaken I should be hung at once, I should try it.”
“But the distance to the frontier is enormous, and even when you get there you would be arrested at the first place you come to if you have no papers; besides, how could you get through the winter?”
“I should get through the winter somehow,” Godfrey said stoutly. “There are hundreds and thousands of people in scattered villages who live through the winter. Why shouldn’t I? I would make friends with the natives in the north, and live in their huts, and hunt with them. But I am not thinking of that. The distance is, as you say, enormous, and the cold terrible. My idea is to escape by the south.”
“It is a desert, Godfrey.”
“Oh they call it a desert to frighten people from trying to escape that way. But I know there is a caravan route by which the teas come from China; besides, there are tribesmen who wander about there and pick up a living somehow. I don’t say that I am going to succeed; I only say I am going to try. I may lose my life or I may be sent back again. Very well, then, I will try again some other way. We are not far from the Chinese frontier here, are we?”
“No; the frontier is at Kiakhta, not more than three or four hundred miles away.”
“What are the people like?”
“They are called Buriats, and are a sort of Mongol tribe, living generally in tents and wandering with their flocks and herds through the country like the patriarchs of old.”
“If they have large flocks and herds,” Godfrey said, “the reward the Russians offer for escaped convicts can’t tempt them much. Most likely they are hospitable; almost all these wandering tribes are. If one had luck one might get befriended and stick for a time to one of these tribes in their wanderings south, and then get hold of some other people, and so get passed on. There can’t be anything impossible in it, Alexis. We know that travellers have made their way through Africa alone. Mungo Park did, and lots of other people have done so, and some of the negro tribes are, according to all accounts, a deal more savage than the Asiatic tribes. Once among them it doesn’t much matter which way one goes, whether it is east to China or west to Persia.”
Alexis sat and looked with some wonder at his companion. “By the saints, Godfrey Bullen, I begin to understand now how it is that your people, living in a bit of an island which could be pinched out of Russia and never missed, are colonizing half the world; how they go in ships to explore the polar seas, have penetrated Africa in all directions as travellers, go among the wildest people as missionaries. We are brought up to have everything done for us: to think as we are told to think, to have officials keep their eyes over us at every turn, to be punished if we dare to think independently, till we have come to be a nation of grown-up children. You are only a boy, if you will forgive my calling you so, and yet you talk about facing the most horrible dangers as coolly as if you were proposing going for a promenade on the Nevski. We won’t talk any more about it now, for you have made me feel quite restless. There, you have been here two hours, and I have forgotten all my duties as host, and have not even offered you a cup of tea; it is shameful.” And Alexis brought out a samovar and soon had water boiling and tea made.
After they had drunk it they went out of the hut, and Godfrey was introduced to the other exiles. Two of them who lived together were quite old men; they had been professors at the University of Kieff, and were exiled for having in their lectures taught what were considered pernicious doctrines. There were three military and two naval officers, a noble, another doctor, and two sons of merchants. All received himcordially, and Godfrey saw that in any other place the society would be a pleasant one; but there was an air of settled melancholy in the majority of the faces, while the sentry fifty yards away, and the high prison wall behind, seemed ever in their minds.
By common consent, as it seemed, no allusion was ever made to politics. They had all strong opinions, and had sacrificed everything for them, but of what use to discuss matters the course of which they were powerless to influence in the smallest degree. Free, there was probably not one of them but would again have striven in one way or another to bring about reforms, either by instructing the ignorant, rousing the intelligent, or frightening the powerful. But here, with no hope of returning, the whole thing was best forgotten. The past was dead to them, and they were without a future. The news that Godfrey brought of the blow that had been struck against the Czar roused them for a few days. The war then was still being carried on. Others were wielding the weapons they had forged, but of what had happened afterwards Godfrey was ignorant. Four men had been arrested or killed; but whether they had played an important part in the matter he knew not, nor whether others had shared their fate. All he could say was, that so far as he heard, numerous arrests had taken place.
But the excitement caused by the news very speedily died away, and they again became listless and indifferent. All worked for a little time in their gardens, but beyond that only those who had made some sort of occupation for themselves had anything to interest themselves actively in. Sometimes they played chess, draughts, or cards, but they did so, as Godfrey observed, in a half-hearted manner, with the exception, indeed, of one of the professors, who w
as by far the strongest chess-player of the party, and who passed all his time in inventing problems which, when complete, he carefully noted down in a book, with their solutions.
“When I am dead,” he said one day to Godfrey, who was watching him, “they will send this book to a nephew of mine; you see I have written his name and address outside. He is a great chess-player, and will send it to England or France to be published; and it is pleasant for me to think that my work, even here in prison, may serve as an amusement to people out in the world.”
Except in the dulness and monotony of the life there was little to complain of, and Godfrey was surprised to find how far it differed from his own preconceived notions of the life of a political prisoner in Siberia. It was only when, by an effort, he looked ahead for years and tried to fancy the possibility of being so cut off from the world for life, that he could appreciate the terrible nature of the punishment. Better a thousand times to be one of the murderers in the prison behind the wall. They had work to occupy their time, and constantly changing associates, with the knowledge that by good conduct they would sooner or later be released and be allowed to live outside the prison.
When at eight o’clock in the evening the prisoners were locked up in their huts, he endeavoured to learn everything that Alexis Stumpoff knew of Siberia.
He found that his knowledge was much more extensive than he had expected. “As I came out nominally, Godfrey, as a free man, I brought with me every book I could buy on the country, and I almost got them by heart. It seemed to me that I was likely to be kept here for years, if not for life. I might be sent from one government prison to another, from Tobolsk to the eastern sea; therefore every place possessed an interest for me. Besides this, although I was not actually a political prisoner myself I was virtually so, and my sympathies were wholly with the prisoners, and I thought that I might possibly be able to advise and counsel men who came under my charge: to describe to them the places where they might have relations or friends shut up, and to dissuade those who, like yourself, meditated escape, for my studies had not gone far before I became convinced that this was well-nigh hopeless. I learned how strict were the regulations on the frontier, how impossible, even if this were reached, to journey on without being arrested at the very first village that a fugitive entered, and that so strict were they that although numbers of the convict establishments were within comparatively short distances of the frontier, escapes were no more frequent from them than from those three thousand miles to the east. When I say escapes I mean escapes from Siberia. Escapes from the prisons are of constant occurrence, since most of the work is done outside the walls. There are thousands, I might almost say tens of thousands, get away every spring, but they all have to come back again in winter. The authorities trouble themselves little about them, for they know that they must give themselves up in a few months.”
“Yes, my guard told me about that. He said they were not punished much when they came in.”
“Sometimes they are flogged; but the Russian peasant is accustomed to flogging and thinks but little of it. More often they are not flogged. They have, perhaps, a heavier chain, for the convicts all wear chains—we have an advantage over them there—and they are put on poorer diet for a time. They lose the remission of sentence they would obtain by good behaviour, that is all, even when they are recognized, but as a rule they take care not to give themselves up at the prison they left, but at one many hundred miles from it. In the course of the summer their hair has grown again. They assert stoutly that they are free labourers who have lost their papers, and who cannot earn their living through the winter. The authorities know, of course, that they are escaped convicts, but they have no means of identifying them. They cannot send them the rounds of a hundred convict establishments; so instead of a man being entered as Alexis Stumpoff, murderer, for instance, he is put down by the name he gives, and the word vagabond is added. The next year they may break out again; but in time the hardships they suffer in the woods become distasteful and they settle down to their prison life, and then, after perhaps six, perhaps ten years of good conduct they are released and allowed to settle where they will. So you see, Godfrey Bullen, how hopeless is the chance of escape.”
“Not at all,” Godfrey said. “These men are most of them peasants—men without education and without enterprise, incapable of forming any plan, and wholly without resources in themselves. I feel as certain of escaping as I am of being here at present. I don’t say that I shall succeed the first time, but, as you say yourself, there is no difficulty in getting away, and if I fail in one direction I will try in another.”
CHAPTER VI
AN ESCAPE
The evenings were spent principally in conversations about Siberia, Godfrey being eager to learn everything that he could about its geography and peoples.
Alexis told him all he knew as to the mountains and rivers, the various native tribes, the districts where the villages were comparatively numerous, and the mighty forests that, stretching away to the Arctic Sea, could hardly be said to be explored. Books and paper were forbidden to the political prisoners, and so strict were the regulations that the warders would not under any considerations bring them in. But Godfrey wrote all the particulars that he judged might in any way be useful with a burnt piece of stick upon the table as Alexis gave them, and then learned them by heart, washing them off after he had done so.
But few of the details Alexis could give him would be of any use in the attempt he first intended to make. The southern frontier was so temptingly close that it seemed absurd to turn from that and to attempt a tremendous journey north, involving the certainty of having to struggle through an Arctic winter, and to face the difficulties of the passage west, either by land or sea. Beyond the fact that from Irkutsk he would have to make for the southern point of Lake Baikal, some sixty miles away, and then strike about south-east for another two hundred through a country inhabited almost entirely by Buriats, the doctor could tell him little.
“Kiakhta,” he said, “or rather, as far as the Russians are concerned, Troitzkosavsk, which is a sort of suburb of Kiakhta, is the frontier town. Kiakhta is a sort of neutral town inhabited only by merchants, and by a treaty between Russia and China no officer or stranger is allowed to sleep there. Across the frontier, a few miles away, is the Chinese, or I suppose I should say the Mongol, town of Maimatchin. Beyond the fact that the people about there are Mongols rather than Chinese, and that such religion as they have is that of Thibet rather than China, for their priests are called lamas, I know nothing except that the caravan route from Kiakhta to Pekin is somewhere about a thousand miles, and that the camels do it in about thirty-five days.”
“Then they make about thirty miles a day,” Godfrey said. “I suppose there must be wells at their halting-places.”
“Ah! that is another matter, Godfrey. You see a camel can go three days without water easily enough, and of course they would carry skins of water for the travellers.”
“Oh, that is no odds,” Godfrey said. “One could walk the ninety miles easily enough in three days, and there would be no difficulty in carrying water enough for that time. Besides, one would of course join a caravan if one could. Luckily enough I had two hundred roubles in notes when I was captured, and they restored them as well as my watch and other things when I started. I suppose the Mongols are just as fond of money as other people. The Chinese are, certainly, and I might get some Chinese tea-merchant to let me go in his train for a consideration.”
The Russian laughed. “’Pon my word, Godfrey, I begin to think you will do it.”
“There can’t be anything impossible in doing it,” Godfrey said. “Why, did not Burton disguise himself and go with a caravan to Mecca and visit the holy places, and that was twenty times as difficult and dangerous. Going along the caravan route of course the difficulty is the language and the Buriats. If one could talk Mongol, or whatever the fellows call their language, it would be easy sailing; but I own that it is a difficult thi
ng to get along and explain what you want with people who cannot understand a word you say. I suppose the Buriats speak Russian.”
“I should say that a great many of them do, Godfrey. I know there are missionaries and schools among them, and some of them live in settled villages, though they are so wedded to their own wandering life that they build their houses on the exact model of their tents, with a hole in the roof to let the smoke out. Still, as they deal with the towns and come in to sell their cattle and sheep and herds and so on, no doubt the greater part of them, at any rate on this side of the frontier, speak a certain amount of Russian. The difficulty will be to persuade them not to give you up.”
“But I can pay them more not to give me up than they can get for doing so,” Godfrey said.
“They would kill you for what you have, Godfrey. They are permitted to kill runaways, in fact encouraged to do so, and the reward is the same whether they are brought in dead or alive.”
“I should think, Alexis, it is easier to bring in a live man than a dead one.”
“I don’t know,” the Russian laughed. “I don’t think a Buriat would find it very easy to take you any distance alive, but there would be no trouble in chucking you into a cart and bringing you here after the preliminary operation of knocking you on the head.”
Godfrey smiled. “You forget there would be some preliminary trouble in knocking me on the head, Alexis; but seriously, I don’t think any natives who have been in contact at all with civilization are disposed to take life without some strong motive. Of course robbery would be a motive, but I should certainly have nothing about me that a Tartar or a Buriat—I suppose they are all something of the same thing—would covet. You were telling me yourself that many of these people have very large flocks and herds. Is it likely such people as these would cut a stranger’s throat on the chance of finding a few roubles in his pocket?”
“Well, one would think not, Godfrey; but of course they are not all rich.”