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The sound of these chains as the men walked about was one of the most disagreeable I ever heard, and I was glad to observe that the Russians did not appear to admire it. The prisoners at Chetah were laboring on the streets, preparing logs for house-building, or erecting fences. Most of the working parties were under guard, but the overseers did not appear to push them severely.
He could never easily accommodate himself to wide extremes of heat and cold, and I believe this is the experience of nearly all persons not born and reared under a northern sky. The road from Nerchinsk to Chetah is through an undulating country, the hills in many places being high enough to merit the name of mountains.
About one-sixth of them were at Chetah and in its vicinity. The prisoners were of two classes political and criminal and their punishment varied according to their offence. Some were sentenced to labor in chains, and others to labor without chains. Some could not go out without a guard, while others had more freedom. Some were sentenced to work in prison and others were imprisoned without labor.
The reason was not explained to me, but probably the general configuration of the country is much like that near Chetah. Krasnoyarsk lies on the Yenesei which has a northerly course into the Arctic Ocean. The mountains bounding the valley are not lofty, but sufficiently high to wring the moisture from the snow clouds.
During my stay at Chetah a party was organized to hunt gazelles. There were ten or fifteen officers and about twenty Cossacks, as at Blagoveshchensk. Up to the day of the excursion the weather was delightful, but it suddenly changed to a cloudy sky, a high wind, and a freezing temperature. The scene of action was a range of hills five or six miles from town.
Around Chetah and in most of the Trans-Baikal province there is not snow enough for good sleighing, and the winter roads generally follow the frozen rivers. Horses, cattle, and sheep subsist on the dead and dry grass from October to April, but they do not fare sumptuously every day.
It was repeated at the club-rooms and on two or three other occasions during my stay in Chetah, and though learned so hastily it was performed as well as by any ordinary band in our army. The principal rooms in General Ditmar's house had a profusion of green plants in pots and tubs of different sizes. One apartment in particular seemed more like a greenhouse than a room where people dwelt.
Chetah stands on the left bank of the Ingodah, nearly three hundred miles above Stratensk, and is the capital of the Trans-Baikal province. For many years it was a small town with a few hundred inhabitants, but the opening of the Amoor in 1854 changed its character.
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