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Only occasionally do we see to the north a small patch of taiga, or the Siberian coniferous forest, silent and dark. A clump of birch-trees is a rare sight. The country is open, flat, monotonous, and dead-white as far as the horizon.
Sheeted with flowers, variegated by woodlands, it holds in its lap ranges of mountains, all running with fairly uniform trend from north to south, while in its heart lies the romantic and mysterious Baikal, the deepest of lakes. Through the spurs of the taiga, running irregularly through the lovely Steppes, passes the new railroad, which thus taps the chief resources of the land.
In two and a half days I shall be in Krasnoyarsk, and in seven or eight in Irkutsk. It's fifteen hundred versts to Irkutsk. I have made myself coffee and am just going to drink it. ... After Tomsk the Taiga begins. We shall see it. My greeting to all the Lintvaryovs and to our old Maryushka. I beg mother not to worry and not to put faith in bad dreams. Have the radishes succeeded?
The snow is not warmed by the earth, which has been frozen hard to the depth of several feet, and this thick crust of ice opposes determined resistance to the lifegiving rays, and only after long, patient labour does the sun succeed in awakening to new life the secret depths of the taiga and the queen of Yakut waters, 'Granny Lena', as the Yakut calls the great river.
That is the traveller's thought. He finds that they thicken and broaden, and deepen as they sweep in their majestic gloom across the Urals, and make up for thousands of miles the grand Siberian arboreal belt. In this taiga the Tsar possesses wealth beyond all computation; and the railway will put it actually at his disposal.
I have seen and experienced a great deal, and it has all been very new and interesting to me not as a literary man, but as a human being. The Yenissey, the Taiga, the stations, the drivers, the wild scenery, the wild life, the physical agonies caused by the discomforts of the journey, the enjoyment I got from rest all taken together is so delightful that I can't describe it.
Sleep then entirely deserted me, so I dressed and began smoking pipe after pipe of tobacco, as I thought: "How much easier to fight the Bolsheviki on the swamps of Seybi and to cross the snowy peaks of Ulan Taiga, where the bad demons kill all the travelers they can! There everything was simple and comprehensible, but here it is all a mad nightmare, a dark and foreboding storm!"
"I want to tell you an old story. I had a friend in Transbaikalia. He was a banished convict. His name was Gavronsky. Through many woods and over many mountains we traveled in search of gold and we had an agreement to divide all we got into even shares. But Gavronsky suddenly went out to the 'Taiga' on the Yenisei and disappeared.
A simple analysis of his story, "Makar's Dream," will show his psychological genius to greater advantage than could any critical essay. In the very heart of the dense woods of the "taiga," Makar, a poor little peasant, who has become half savage by association with the Yakutsk people, dreams of a better future.
The term taiga is used in a general way for all lands under timber, but east of the Altai it is applied more especially to the moist and spongy region overgrown with tangled roots and thickets, where the mari, or peat bogs, and marshes alternate with the padi, or narrow ravines. The miners call by this name the wooded mountains where they go in search of auriferous sands.
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