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Alaric Hobbs reflected on his vain attempt to try the Tunguse, Chinook, Zuni, Apache, Sioux, and Esquimaux dialects on the handsome Prince Djiddin, whose Oriental magnificence was even now the despairing admiration of the two pretty housemaids. "My august master cannot speak to any one but the great scholar whom he came here to see.
On the 16th of November, after twenty-three days of continuous travel, we reached Yakutsk; and there, in the house of a wealthy Russian merchant who threw his doors open to us with warm-hearted hospitality, we washed from our bodies the smoke and grime of Tunguse tents and yurts; put on clean, fresh clothes; ate a well cooked and daintily served supper; drank five tumblers of fragrant overland tea; smoked two Manila cheroots; and finally went to bed, excited but happy, in beds that were provided with hair mattresses, fleecy Russian blankets, and linen sheets.
Between Okhotsk and Yakutsk, along the line of this post-route, there are seven or eight Tunguse encampments, which vary a little in location, from season to season, with the shifting areas of available pasturage, but which are kept as nearly as possible equidistant from one another in a direct line across the Stanavoi range.
In a monotonous routine of walking on snowshoes, riding on reindeer-sledges, camping in the open, or sleeping in smoky Tunguse tents, day after day and week after week passed, until at last we approached the valley of the Aldan one of the eastern tributaries of that great arctic river the Lena.
We made, on an average, about thirty miles a day; but our deer often came in at night completely exhausted, and the sharp ivory goads of our Tunguse drivers were red with frozen blood.
This simple corded or matted ware seems to be in connection with Tunguse people who lived in the north-east. The people of the Lung-shan culture lived on mounds produced by repeated building on the ruins of earlier settlements, as did the inhabitants of the "Tells" in the Near East. They were therefore a long-settled population of agriculturists.
If there be, in "all the white world," as the Russians say, anything more hopelessly dreary than one of the Tunguse mountain settlements in winter, I have never seen it.
At the first Tunguse encampment we took a rest of twenty-four hours, and then, exchanging our dogs for reindeer, we bade good-bye to our Okhotsk drivers and, under the guidance of half a dozen bronze-faced Tunguses in spotted reindeerskin coats, pushed westward, through snow-choked mountain ravines, toward the river Aldan.
We hoped to make the first post-station on the third day after our departure; but the soft freshly fallen snow so retarded our progress that it was nearly dark on the fourth day before we caught sight of the little group of Tunguse tents where we were to exchange our dogs for reindeer.
Schwartz, the oldest member of our party, was brought into a Tunguse encampment one night in a state of unconsciousness that would soon have ended in death, and even our hardy native drivers came in with badly frozen hands and faces.
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