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"I believe in God and in our Saviour Jesus Christ," replied the Cossack, as he crossed himself devoutly. "That's all right, and so you ought," rejoined the Major; "but that has nothing whatever to do with the 'Anadyrski bol. Do you really believe that these women talk in the Yakut language, which they have never heard, and describe things which they have never seen?"

As soon as Kowalski gave this order, it was a sure sign that he would not open his mouth except for conversation about his dog, of which he never tired. Although this dog was quite ordinary, he was in several ways distinguished from his Yakut brothers. For one thing he had no name and was simply addressed as 'Doggy', though he was his master's pet and was attached to the house and enclosure.

The student was not only a great collector of everything useful for our daily life, he was also deeply versed in the knowledge of the Yakut in general. While we were cooking and roasting we told one another the most interesting things, and thus stimulated each other to such a degree that the dinner, originally planned on simple lines, began to assume Lucullian dimensions.

The country back of Okhotsk, for a distance of six hundred miles, is an unbroken wilderness of mountains and evergreen forests, sparsely inhabited by Wandering Tunguses, with here and there a few hardy Yakut squirrel hunters.

The journey takes from fifteen months to two years, and they frequently stop en route in order to work in the gold mines, to make money to pay for their studies. These are the future regenerators of the Yakut country.

For the Yakuts consider that there is nothing more sacred than human speech, nothing more admirable than an eloquent discourse. When a Yakut speaks, no one interrupts him. They believe that in the spoken word justice and happiness are to be found, and in their intense sociability they dread isolation, desiring always to be within reach of the sound of human voices.

We had repeatedly met people who knew the life in the nearer Yakut settlements; now and then we had seen temporary or permanent inhabitants of the so-called Yakut 'towns' of Vjerchojansk, Vihijsk, and Kalymsk. But the nearer auls and towns were populous centres of human life in comparison to those far-off deserted and desolate places; they gave one no conception of what the latter might be like.

When the day is hot and a Yakut has a long way to go, he takes a stone which he has chanced to find in an animal or fish, winds a horse-hair several times round it, and ties it to a stick. He then waves the stick about, uttering a spell. Soon a cool breeze begins to blow.

No Yakut, no Russian, be he a native or a settler, could have mispronounced this Yakut word so badly; it should have been 'Kelere! Only my countrymen, the Masurs, could do such violence to the beautiful, sonorous Yakut language. During my long sojourn in Yakutsk I have never met a Masurian peasant who pronounced this word otherwise than 'Kallarra'.

I regret that I was not enough interested in comparative philology while in Siberia to compile a vocabulary and grammar of the Yakut language.