town of Zashíversk was a place of considerable local importance; but, for some reason, it lost its preëminence as a fur-trading center, fell gradually into decay, and finally ceased to exist. Its location was still marked with two concentric circles on all the maps,[1] its name continued to appear annually in the records of the governor-general's office, and I have no doubt that a coterie of chinóvniks in Irkútsk were dividing and pocketing every year the money appropriated for repairs to its public buildings; but, as a matter of fact, it had not contained a building nor an inhabitant for more than half a century, and forest trees were growing on the mound that marked the site of its ostróg.[2] Poor Schiller, after having been carried three or four thousand miles up and down the rivers Léna and Indigírka in a vain search for a non-existent arctic town, was finally brought back to Yakútsk; and a report was made to the governor-general that Zashíversk, apparently, had ceased to exist. The governor-general thereupon ordered that the prisoner be taken to Srédni Kolímsk, another "town" of forty-five houses, situated on the river Kolymá north of the arctic circle, 3700 miles from Irkútsk and 7500 miles from the capital of the empire. When, after more than a year of étape life, the unfortunate druggist from Pultáva reached the last outpost of Russian power in northeastern Asia and was set at liberty, he made his way to the little log church, entered the belfry, and proceeded to jangle the church bells in a sort of wild, erratic chime. When the
- ↑ It is shown as a district town on an official map of the Russian general staff published as late as 1883.
- ↑ The site of Zashíversk is about 3200 miles by the usually traveled route from Irkútsk and about 7000 miles from St. Petersburg. Exiles have been sent there more than once. A political named Pik very nearly starved to death there in the reign of Catherine II., from which I infer that the town was virtually extinct before the beginning of the present century. Seventy-five or eighty years later, however, Governor-general Fredericks is said to have sent there a drunken and incorrigible exile named Tsigankof, who had been banished to Siberia for impertinence to a gendarme officer in a St. Petersburg restaurant. [See newspaper Volzhski Vestnik, Kazán, September 23, 1885, and newspaper Vostochnoe Obozrénie, St. Petersburg, April 24, 1886, p. 9.]
