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Updated: June 13, 2025
Now, as in former times, the Yakut believes in "the soul of things," and seeks for it everywhere. Every tree has a soul, every plant, every object; even his hammer, his house, his knife, and his window. But beyond these there is Ai-toen, the supreme, abstract soul of all things, the incarnation of being, which is neither good nor bad, but just is and that suffices.
He had succeeded, with the sanction and cooperation of the governor of that province, in hiring for a period of three years a force of eight hundred Yakut labourers, at a fixed rate of sixty rubles, or about forty dollars a year for each man.
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.
"What are those?" I inquired of my Tunguse driver. "Yakut," was the brief reply. They were columns of smoke, sixty or seventy feet in height, over the chimneys of Yakut farmhouses; and they stood so vertically in the cold, motionless air of the arctic night that they were lighted up, to their very summits, by the hearth-fires underneath.
The Yakut is by far the most capable of the Siberian tribes; he values the gifts of the life-giving sun and enjoys them to the full. When he escapes from his narrow, stinking winter-yurta he fills his hitherto inhospitable country with life and movement; his energy is doubled, his vitality pulsates with greater strength and intensity.
Evan was a Yakut whom my friend brought from the Lena country. He was intelligent and active, and assisted greatly to soften the asperities of the route. With my few words of Russian, and his quick comprehension, we understood each other very well. During the first few hours from Verkne Udinsk the sky was obscured and the air warm.
This was my first summer in Yakutsk, and I responded to it with my whole being. Daily I went for walks to look at the beauty of the surrounding world, daily I took my sun bath. My walks usually led me to one of the Yakut yurtas; they are at long distances from each other, lonely and scattered over the whole country. You find them in whatever direction you may choose.
We dashed away at a gallop through the snow-drifted streets, past earth-banked yurts whose windows of ice were irradiated with a warm glow by the open fires within; past columns of luminous smoke rising from the wide chimneys of Yakut houses; past a red stuccoed church upon whose green, balloon-shaped domes golden stars glittered in the frosty moonlight; past a lonely graveyard on the outskirts of the city; and finally down a gentle decline to the snow-covered river, which had a width of nearly four miles and which stretched away to the westward like a frozen lake surrounded by dark wooded hills.
Yakut tells us how the ancient ships on their way to and from India tarried there during the monsoons, and he further tells us that it was twenty parasangs east of the capital. The 'Periplus' speaks of it as Moscha, Ptolemy as Abyssapolis, and the Arabs as Merbat; but as there is no harbourage actually at Merbat, it clearly could not be there.
Yakut, writing seven hundred years ago, speaks of the Arabs as ruling here; the author of the 'Periplus' more than one thousand years ago tells us the same thing; and now we have a representative of the same country and the same race governing the island still.
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