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I was informed by an old peasant, who came out of the fir-forest, and with whom I entered into conversation, that a large portion of the stones had been employed in the construction of the beacon-tower.
About the middle of May, therefore, we generally sent a couple of Cossacks to the harbour at the mouth of the river, with instructions to keep a sharp lookout from the log beacon-tower on the bluff, and fire three cannon-shots the moment they should see a whaler or other vessel cruising in the Gulf.
In the frieze on the right-hand façade you must paint things in keeping with the Moon, such as fishers of the night, mariners navigating with the compass, necromancers, witches, and the like; for grotesques, a beacon-tower in the distance, nets, weir-baskets with some fishes in them, crabs feeding by the light of the moon, and, if there be space enough, an elephant kneeling in adoration of her.
On the Piazza of the same Duomo he directed the building of the Temple of S. Lorenzo, in a beautiful manner of architecture, which won him much praise; and on the shore there was built under his direction the Beacon-tower.
Leaving the Cossack to take our baggage out of the lodka, we all climbed up to the beacon-tower, with the hope that, as it was still fairly light, we might be able to see with a glass the vessel that had made the smoke; but from the high black cliffs of Matuga Island on one side of the Gulf, to the steep slope of Cape Catherine on the other, there was nothing to break the horizon line except here and there a field of drifting ice.
The light in the beacon-tower is steady, and the same; but the beam it throws across the waters sometimes fades to a speck, and sometimes flames out clear and far across the heaving waves, according to the position of the glasses and shades around it.
Late in the afternoon, we pulled back, with heavy hearts, to the beacon-tower at the mouth of the river, and on the following day returned to Gizhiga, to await the arrival of a vessel from San Francisco with an official notification of the abandonment of the enterprise.
I had not heard it, but I understood instantly the significance of the inquiry. A cannon-shot meant that there was a ship in sight from the beacon-tower at the mouth of the river. We were accustomed, every spring, to get our earliest news from the civilised world through American whaling vessels, which resort at that season of the year to the Okhotsk Sea.
When the sun was still in the ascendant, the island would be green and fresh to the gaze, evoking no dismal impression; and as the rays glanced back from the two or three glazed windows, and from the roofed beacon-tower, the little estate wore a look of solid security and privacy in spite of its crumbling walls, which was almost as tantalising to her romantic curiosity.
Had our competitors beaten us, or was there still a fighting chance that we might beat them? We reached the mouth of the river late in the evening, and were met at the landing by one of the Cossacks from the beacon-tower. "What ship is it?" I inquired. "We don't know," he replied.
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