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It was hinted to me that much gold was smuggled across the frontier into China, and never saw the treasury of his Imperial Majesty, the Czar. The Cossacks of the Argoon keep a sharp watch for traffic of this kind. "They either," said my informant, "deliver a culprit over to justice or, what is the same thing, compel him to bribe them heavily to say nothing."
The Amoor is formed by the union of these rivers, just as the Ohio is formed by the Allegheny and Monongahela. Geographers generally admit that the parent stream of a river is the one whose source is farthest from the junction. The Argoon flows from the lake Koulon, which is filled by the river Kerolun, rising in the Kentei Khan mountains in Northern Mongolia.
A few minutes later I saw the defile of the Shilka. Between the streams the mountains narrowed and came to a point a mile above the meeting of the waters. It is on the Argoon side of the delta and contains but a few houses. I knew by the smoke that so gracefully curled in the cold atmosphere that the inhabitants were endeavoring to make themselves comfortable.
A Russian officer told me there were many wealthy Cossacks along the Argoon river on the boundary between Russia and China. They trade across the frontier, and own large droves of cattle, horses, and sheep. Some of their houses are spacious and fitted with considerable attempt at luxury. The Amoor settlements are at present too young to possess much wealth.
"Just around that point," said the first officer of the Korsackoff as he directed his finger toward a headland on the Chinese shore, "you will see the mouth of the Argoon on the left and the Shilka on the right; wait a moment, it is not quite time yet." When we rounded the promontory dawn had grown to daylight, and the mountains on the south bank of the Argoon came into view.
In that year two wooden boats, the Shilka and the Argoon, were constructed on the Shilka river, preparatory to the grand expedition of General Mouravieff. Their timber was cut in the forests of the Shilka, and their engines were constructed at Petrovsky-Zavod. The Argoon was the first to descend, leaving Shilikinsk on the 27th of May, 1854, and bringing the Governor General and his staff.
The Russians were thus firmly established, and the development of the country has progressed peacefully since that period. As the Argoon from its mouth to Lake Kerolun forms the boundary between the empires I lost sight of China when we entered the Shilka.
It was accompanied by fifty barges and a great many rafts loaded with military forces to occupy the Amoor, and with provisions for the Pacific fleet. The Shilka descended a few months later. She was running in 1866, but the Argoon, the pioneer, existed less than a decade. In 1866 there were twenty-two steamers on the Amoor, all but four belonging to the government.
As I shivered on the steamer's bridge, my breath congealing on my beard, and the hills beyond the Amoor and Argoon white with the early snow of winter, I could not see why the Celestials call their land the 'Central Flowery Kingdom. The Shilka has a current flowing four or five miles an hour. The average speed of the Korsackoff in ascending was about four miles.
Together the Argoon and Kerolun have a development of more than a thousand miles. There are many Cossacks settled along the Argoon as a frontier guard. The river is not navigable, owing to numerous rocks and rapids. Genghis Khan, who subdued China and began that wonderful career of Tartar conquest that extended to Middle Europe, was born on the banks of the Kerolun.
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