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By way of the post route to Lake Baikal it is equally difficult, as the road is carefully watched and there are few habitations away from the post villages and stations. No one can travel by post without a padaroshnia, and this can only be procured at the chief towns and is not issued to an unknown applicant. I heard a story of a young Pole who attempted, some years ago, to escape from exile.
The scientific exploration of the interior began in the Eighteenth Century with Messerschmidt, followed by Gmelin, Müller, and Delisle de la Croyère, who determined many important physical points between the years 1733 and 1742. The region stretching beyond Lake Baikal was explored by Pallas and his associates in 1770-3.
Blinding snow mixed with the spray gave the inky blackness of the night a weird and sombre appearance. Our Cossack attendant, Marca, droned a folk-song about the wonders of the Baikal, which, when interpreted by my liaison officer, fitted the scene to a fraction. We put up the double windows, listed the doors and turned in for the night.
I took possession of the station and telegraphs, and then heard from the officials that Bolshevik agents had come to the town and had persuaded the workmen to leave work, to take arms and cut the line to prevent the Allies moving forward, and await the arrival of the Bolshevik force which had retired from Baikal.
But they had been seen, and some of these Russians, running to them, led the blind man and the girl to a little point at which was moored a raft. The raft was just going to start. These Russians were fugitives of different conditions, whom the same interest had united at Lake Baikal.
I missed the airliner, of course. I was still on the Staten Bridge when I heard the roar of the catapult and the Soviet rocket Baikal hummed over us like a tracer bullet with a long tail of flame. We got the contract anyway; the firm wired our man in Beirut and he flew up to Moscow, but it didn't help my reputation.
At Klyuevo the watchman undertook to convey our luggage to the station; he drove the cart while we walked along the very picturesque shore. Levitan was an ass not to come with me. The way was through woods: on the right, woods running uphill; on the left, woods running down to the Lake. Such ravines, such crags! The colouring of Lake Baikal is soft and warm. It was, by the way, very warm.
It is on the longest line drawn through the Old World from the Cape of Good Hope to Bering Strait; it is also on the line of the great deserts and inland seas stretching from Gibraltar to Lake Baikal in Siberia—a line of continuous depressions; it is equidistant from the Black and Caspian Seas and the Mesopotamian plain, which three depressions are now watered by three distinct river-systems emanating from Ararat’s immediate vicinity.
Approaching the Czar, who had thrown himself into an armchair, he asked, "Your majesty has of course given orders so that this rebellion may be suppressed as soon as possible?" "Yes," answered the Czar. "The last telegram which reached Nijni-Udinsk would set in motion the troops in the governments of Yenisei, Irkutsk, Yakutsk, as well as those in the provinces of the Amoor and Lake Baikal.
Should they not succumb to such fatigue? On what were they to live on the way? By what superhuman energy were they to pass the slopes of the Sayansk Mountains? Neither he nor Nadia could answer this! And yet, twelve days after, on the 2d of October, at six o'clock in the evening, a wide sheet of water lay at Michael Strogoff's feet. It was Lake Baikal.
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