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Spite of his eccentricities, he was a good dog and secured the admiration of those he did not attempt to bite. We passed the Yablonoi mountains by a road far from difficult. Had I not been informed of the fact I could have hardly suspected we were in a mountain range. The Yablonoi chain forms the dividing ridge between the head streams of the Amoor and the rivers that flow to the Arctic Ocean.
The line gradually ascends to the crest of the Yablonoi Mountains, reaching a height of 3,412 feet above the sea level. This is the greatest altitude of the Siberian Railway. In this province of Transbaikalia lies the interesting city of Chita, the far-off home of the most famous and estimable Socialist exiles sent from Russia.
They determined to wait until spring before crossing the mountains. Unluckily while with the Tunguze they were seen by a Russian merchant, who informed the authorities. Early in the spring they were captured and returned to their place of imprisonment. The region around the Yablonoi mountains is so desolate that escape in that direction is almost impossible.
As far as I could observe it is not a place of perpetual frost and snow, its summers being warm though brief. In winter it has cold winds blowing occasionally from the Yablonoi mountains down the valley of the Nertcha. The region is very well adapted to agriculture, and the valley as I saw it had an attractive appearance. The product of the Nerchinsk mines has been silver, gold, and lead.
I found the chief inconvenience was, that the moisture in my breath congealed on my beard and the fur clothing near it. Two or three times beard and fur were frozen together, and it was not always easy to separate them. From the Yablonoi mountains to Verkne Udinsk there are very few houses between the villages that form the posting stations.
Many who escaped this way lost their lives, but others reached the seacoast where they were picked up by whalers or other transient ships. In 1844 three men started for the Ohotsk sea, traveling by way of the Yablonoi mountains. They had managed to obtain a rifle, and subsisted upon game they killed, and upon berries, roots, and the bark of trees.
These birds winter in the south of China, Siam, and India, while they pass the summer north of the range of the Yablonoi mountains. The birds of the Amoor belong generally to the species found in the same latitudes of Europe and America, but there are some birds of passage that are natives of Southern Asia, Japan, the Philippine Islands, and even South Africa and Australia.
There is still a third route, across the Atlantic to the United States or Canada, by rail to San Francisco or Vancouver, and then by steamer to Shanghai via Japan. This journey can also be accomplished in a month. On the last day of the year we pass through the Yablonoi Mountains and enter the region called Transbaikalia, because it lies on the farther, that is, the eastern, side of Lake Baikal.
Thus we travel on by degrees through Siberia, this immense country bounded on the south by the Altai, Sayan, the Yablonoi and Stanovoi Mountains, and on the north by the Arctic Ocean. Huge areas of northern Siberia are occupied by tundras moss-grown, marshy steppes, with little animal life, frozen hard as stone in winter and thawed during the short summer into dangerous swamps.
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