“To pursue my route, or return to Tzarsko Selo would, indeed, be alike indecent and ridiculous; but, being so, and there being no remedy, I made therefore ‘forward’ the order of the day; having first, with the remnant of my apparel, rigged myself à l’Ecossaise, I resumed my route. I had still left me a blue jacket, a flannel waistcoat, and a spare one, which I tied round my waist in such a manner, that it reached down to the knees: my empty knapsack was restored to its old place, and trotted on with even a merry heart.”
Notwithstanding this untoward accident, Commander Cochrane’s ardour was by no means abated; for he still pursued his perilous journey; passed in safety the mighty barriers, called the Ural Chain, which divide Europe from Asia; and then proceeded onward to Malaya-Narymka, the last spot on the frontier of Russian Siberia. Here he forded a little stream which forms the actual line of demarcation on the Chinese and Russian dominions; and according to his narrative, seating himself on a stone on the left bank, “was soon lost in a reverie.” “It was about midnight,” says he, “the moon apparently full, was near her meridian, and seemed to encourage a pensive inclination. What can surpass that scene I know not. Some of the loftiest granite mountains spreading in various directions, enclosing some of the most luxurious valleys in the world; yet all deserted! – all this fair and fertile tract abandoned to wild beasts, merely to constitute a neutral territory!”
At Barnaouli, Commander Cochrane met with an enlightened statesman of the name of Speranski, lately sent from Russia with a view to correct abuses of administration in the distant provinces of Siberia. “Of his personal attentions to me,” says our traveller, “I shall ever feel proud and grateful. He had at first taken me for a Raskolnick[1], from my long beard, and longer golden locks; notwithstanding I wore at the same time a long swaddling grey nankeen coat, and a silken sash round my waist; but indeed so great a buck had I become of late, that I hardly knew myself.”
General Speranski, with the same discrimination which qualified him to correct public abuses, fixed on Commander Cochrane, as a suitable person, to join in the expedition of discovery, then fitting out on the Kolyma river, to determine
- ↑ A seceder from the Greek church.
