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A meeting with this band meant death. After three days we crossed the northern ridge of the Sayan chain, passed the border river Algiak and, after this day, were abroad in the territory of Urianhai.
From somewhere on the snowy slopes of the Tian Shan and from the hot sands of Western Zungaria to the timbered ridges of the Sayan and to the Great Wall of China it stretches over a huge portion of Central Asia.
In a distant village we bought three horses, two for riding and one for packing, engaged a guide, purchased dried bread, meat, salt and butter and, after resting twenty-four hours, began our trip up the Amyl toward the Sayan Mountains on the border of Urianhai. There we hoped not to meet Bolsheviki, either sly or silly.
The Caucasus, the Elburz, the Kopetdagh, and Paropamisus, the intricate and imperfectly known network of mountains west of the Pamir, the Thian-Shan and Ala-tau mountain regions, and farther north-east the Altai, the still unnamed complex of Minusinsk mountains, the intricate mountain-chains of Sayan, with those of the Olekma, Vitim, and Aldan, all of which are ranged en échelon, the former from north-west to south-east, and the others from south-west to north-east all these belong to one immense Alpine belt bordering that of the plateaus.
We presented to them a bright scheme for the future development of their district, when we would build the roads and bridges which would allow them to export the wood from Urianhai, iron and gold from the Sayan Mountains, cattle and furs from Mongolia. What a triumph of creative work for the Soviet Government!
Thus we travel on by degrees through Siberia, this immense country bounded on the south by the Altai, Sayan, the Yablonoi and Stanovoi Mountains, and on the north by the Arctic Ocean. Huge areas of northern Siberia are occupied by tundras moss-grown, marshy steppes, with little animal life, frozen hard as stone in winter and thawed during the short summer into dangerous swamps.
It was from Al Agran or Algran that we obtained a stone with a spout to it, with rather a long Sabæan inscription on it, a dedication to the god Sayan, known to have been worshipped in the Hadhramout. We were given coffee in a very dirty room, which we were all the time longing to tear down that we might dig under it.
In fact, as their advance from the basins of the Volkhoff and Dnieper to the foot of the Altai and Sayan mountains, that is, along nearly a quarter of the earth's circumference, the Russian colonizers could always find the same physical conditions, the same forest and prairies as they had left at home, the same facilities for agriculture, only modified somewhat by minor topographical features.
After several days we looked down from the high bank of the Yenisei upon the first steamer, the "Oriol," from Krasnoyarsk to Minnusinsk, laden with Red soldiers. Soon we came to the mouth of the river Tuba, which we were to follow straight east to the Sayan mountains, where Urianhai begins.
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