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Updated: June 6, 2025
I had come to Siberia with full confidence in the ultimate success of the Russian-American Telegraph line, but as I penetrated deeper and deeper into the country and saw its utter desolation I grew less and less sanguine. Since leaving Gizhiga we had travelled nearly three hundred versts, had found only four places where we could obtain poles, and had passed only three settlements.
He then related an instance of a Russian merchant whose wife was attacked by the "Anadyrski bol," and who actually made a winter journey from Gizhiga to Yamsk a distance of 300 versts to procure a silk dress for which she had asked and which could not be elsewhere obtained! Of course the women do not always ask for articles which they might be supposed to want in a state of health.
In cases of desperate emergency, when all other topics of conversation failed, we knew that we could return to Xerxes and the Flood; but these subjects had been dropped by the tacit consent of both parties soon after leaving Gizhiga, and were held in reserve as a "dernier ressort" for stormy nights in Korak yurts.
A man was instantly despatched on horseback to the neighbouring settlement of Kinkil, and before night he returned with a champagne-bottle under his arm, and the Major had milk that evening in his tea. From this time until we started for Gizhiga more than a month a man rode twenty miles every day to bring us a bottle of fresh milk.
Old Paderin, the chief of the Gizhiga Cossacks, with white frosty hair and beard, stood out in front of his little red log house as we passed, and waved us a last good-bye with his fur hood as we swept out upon the great level steppe behind the town.
On the contrary, the whole coast of the Okhotsk Sea, for nearly six hundred miles west of Gizhiga, was one wilderness of rugged, broken, almost impassable mountains, intersected by deep valleys and ravines, and heavily timbered with dense pine and larch forests.
Lesnoi was situated, as nearly as we could ascertain, in lat. 59° 20', long. 160° 25', about a hundred and fifty versts south of the Korak steppes, and nearly two hundred miles in an air line from the settlement of Gizhiga, which for the present was our objective point.
Some of us had come from the extremity of Kamchatka, some from the frontier of China, and some from Bering Strait, and we all met that night in Gizhiga, and congratulated ourselves and one another upon the successful exploration of the whole route of the proposed Russian-American telegraph line from Anadyr Bay to the Amur River.
Here we met fresh men, dogs, and sledges, sent out to meet us by the Major, and, abandoning our loaded sledges and tired dogs, we took seats upon the light narts of the Gizhiga Cossacks, and dashed away by the light of a brilliant aurora toward the settlement.
The Cossack soon cleared the yurt of natives, and the Major proceeded to question him about the character of the country north and west of Gizhiga, the distance from Kamenoi to the Russian outpost of Anadyrsk, the facilities for winter travel, and the time necessary for the journey.
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