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He had ascertained the possibility of hiring a thousand Yakut labourers in the settlements along the Lena River, at the rate of sixty dollars a year for each man, and of purchasing there as many Siberian horses as we should require at very reasonable prices. He had located a route for the line from Gizhiga to Okhotsk, and had superintended generally the whole work of exploration.
He was surprisingly sedate for his delicate organism and thin, mobile little frame, but this was not the calm sedateness of the strong, shaggy Yakut dogs, against whom he obviously harboured a certain hatred and bitterness, because these big, powerful creatures would not recognize the rights of the weak.
Living a life of gay and careless vagabondage in this snowy world, they took part in one of the most characteristic episodes of the general religious upheaval. At Guigiguinsk, a straggling village on the borders of the Arctic Ocean, lived a Yakut tribe already converted to Christianity.
Cold milk and kumis can be had in all these yurtas. It is true both have the nasty smell which the stranger in this part of the world calls 'Yakut odour'; but during the long winter when milk other than from Yakut yurtas was hard to procure, I had got used to this specific smell, so that now it only produced a mild nausea.
Between the Yakut settlements on the Aldan and the town of Yakutsk, there was a good post-road really a road; so, harnessing shaggy white Yakut ponies to our Okhotsk dog-sledges, we drove swiftly westward, to the unfamiliar music of Russian sleigh-bells, changing horses at every post-station and riding from fifteen to eighteen hours out of the twenty-four.
Leet so soon recovered his strength and spirits that three days afterwards he started for Okhotsk, where the Major wished him to take charge of a gang of Yakut labourers. The last words that I remember to have ever heard him speak were those which he shouted to me in the storm and darkness of that gloomy night on the Málkachán steppe: "What would our mothers say if they could see us now?"
It covered almost every article carried in the general European trade as a necessity, and many of the luxuries sugar and sealing wax, tobacco, both Virginia and Kirghis, silk and broadcloth, calico and Flemish linen, ravens duck and frieze, arshins of blankets and poods of yarn; vedras of rum, cognac and gin; butter from the Yakut, from California and from Kodiak; salt beef from Ross Colony, from England and from Kodiak; beaver hats and cotton socks.
One of the many yurtas had taken my fancy, for it was charmingly situated close to the woods in a corner of the raised banks of a long stretch of lake. It belonged to an aged Yakut, well deserving of the honourable designation 'ohonior', given to all the Yakut elders. The old man was living there with his equally aged wife and a young fellow, a distant relation of his.
Various Arab geographers also assist us in this identification. Yakut, for example, tells us how the Prince of Zufar had the monopoly of the frankincense trade, and punished with death any infringement of it. Ibn Batuta says that 'half a day's journey east of Mensura is Alakhaf, the abode of the Addites, probably referring to the site of the oracle and the last stronghold of the ancient cult.
'And whether you will believe me or won't' he crossed himself again the man wept like a child when I told him I would take him to the nearest Yakut yurta, at a distance of thirty versts from the town of Zaszyversk, and I swear to you for the third time it was with joy that he wept... although he was not much better off in that yurta....
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