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Updated: June 13, 2025
He said he did not know certainly that it was; but it was not Russian, nor Korak, nor any other native language with which he was familiar, and it sounded very much like Yakut. I inquired what was done in case the sick person demanded some article which it was impossible to obtain.
A woman who wanted a new bonnet, and who could not obtain it by the ordinary method of teasing, found it very convenient as a dernier ressort to fall into a trance state and demand a bonnet as a physiological necessity. If the husband still remained obdurate, a few well-executed convulsions and a song or two in the so-called Yakut language were generally sufficient to bring him to terms.
I made his acquaintance accidentally; the chance which led to it was caused by the peculiar conditions of the Yakut spring. My readers will probably only have a very imperfect knowledge of the Yakut spring.
It is a proverbial saying in Siberia, that if you take a Yakut, strip him naked, and set him down in the middle of a great desolate steppe, and then return to that spot at the expiration of a year, you will find him living in a large, comfortable house, surrounded by barns and haystacks, owning herds of horses and cattle, and enjoying himself like a patriarch.
He had also purchased three hundred Yakut horses and pack-saddles, and an immense quantity of material and provisions of various kinds for the equipment and subsistence of horses and workmen.
Indeed, there he was, behind the bushes beyond a bridge spanning the marsh or dried-up arm of the Lena a man in the ordinary clothes of deported criminals; he agitated his arms violently, and continually repeated his call 'Kallarra'! This was addressed to a Yakut who became visible on the outskirts of the brushwood, but it was in vain, for the wary Yakut had no intention of drawing nearer.
At first I neither understood the call nor whence it came, but on frequent repetition it dawned upon me that it proceeded from the bushes at a little distance in front of me, and that it was meant to be the Yakut call 'Come here, come here, brother! I even divined, as I came nearer, what manner of man it was that was calling.
When the 'Ysech', the feast of spring, is over, the animated mood of the population does not abate in the least. The 'strengthening kumis', the ambrosia of the Yakut gods, does not run dry in the wooden vessels, for luxuriant grass covers the ground, and cows and mares give abundant milk. The sight of the lovely plain and the joyful human beings delighting in the summer had revived me also.
As long as he could insist upon the superiority of Californian storms, there was certainly hope. Early in the afternoon we reached the Yamsk River and, after wandering about for an hour or two in the timber, came upon one of Lieutenant Arnold's Yakut working-parties and were conducted to their camp, only a few miles from the settlement.
The persons attacked by it, who were generally women, became unconscious of all surrounding things, acquired suddenly an ability to speak languages which they had never heard, particularly the Yakut language, and were gifted temporarily with a sort of second sight or clairvoyance which enabled them to describe accurately objects that they could not see and never had seen.
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