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Updated: June 25, 2025
And so the mountains and the Yenissey are the first things original and new that I have met in Siberia. The mountains and the Yenissey have given me sensations which have made up to me a hundredfold for all the trials and troubles of the journey, and which have made me call Levitan a fool for being so stupid as not to come with me. The Taiga stretches unbroken from Krasnoyarsk to Irkutsk.
The meeting maintained the usual standard of interest, and the chief of the works, whose face bore traces of the tortures inflicted upon him under Bolshevik rule, was delighted with the new hope we had brought to himself and his workmen. Our next meeting was at Taiga, and it was quite a great event.
Birchwoods, small lakes, brushwood and verdant fields alternate and make the whole country look like a large park, framed by the silver ribbon of the Lena. The surrounding gloom of the taiga emphasizes the natural beauty of the valley. This smiling plain in the midst of the wide expanse reminds one of an oasis in the desert.
When, on reaching Irkutsk, I washed at the baths, the soapsuds off my head were not white but of an ashen brown colour, as though I were washing a horse. When I get home I will tell you about the Yenissey and the Taiga very interesting and curious, for it is something quite new to a European; everything else is ordinary and monotonous.
The trees are not bigger than in Sokolniki, but not one driver knows how far it goes. There is no end to be seen to it. It stretches for hundreds of versts. No one knows who or what is in the Taiga, and it only happens in winter that people come through the Taiga from the far north with reindeer for bread.
This mischievous fallacy is difficult to dispel. In a few years the Siberian railway will have completely dissipated it. Much more valuable is the far wider zone called the taiga, the most wonderful belt of forest on the surface of the earth.
Ivan went off the second day, leaving for me a bag of dry bread and a little sugar. I never saw him again. Then I was alone. Around me only the wood of eternally green cedars covered with snow, the bare bushes, the frozen river and, as far as I could see out through the branches and the trunks of the trees, only the great ocean of cedars and snow. Siberian taiga!
After fifty odd miles of this I came to the country called Sifkova, where I found the cabin of a peasant named Tropoff, located closest to the forest that came to be my natural environment. With him I lived for a time. Now in these unimaginable surroundings of safety and peace, summing up the total of my experience in the Siberian taiga, I make the following deductions.
Everything, even Nature herself and the angry demons of Darkhat Ola, had helped us: but we were not gay, because again before us lay the dread uncertainty that threatened us with new and possibly destructive dangers. Ulan Taiga with Darkhat Ola lay behind us. We went forward very rapidly because the Mongol plains began here, free from the impediments of mountains.
The fur of the squirrels also varies with the surrounding foliage, those of the pine forests being ruddy, those of the cedar, taiga, and firs inclining to brown, and all varying in intensity of colour with that of the vegetation. Other species besides the peltry-bearing animals have diminished in numbers since the arrival of the Russian hunters.
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