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Updated: June 18, 2025
A sharp turn in the road revealed a group of yurts like many that we had passed, but two khaki tents a little at one side showed the European, and in a few minutes I found myself among the new friends that so speedily become old friends in the corners of the world.
But the shaman urged his mount into a walking pace toward the Apache until they stood only a few feet from each other the warrior of the steppes and the Horde facing the warrior of the desert and the People. "You have taken a woman from our yurts," Menlik said, but his eyes were more on the alien gun than on the man who held it. "Brave are you to come again into our land.
Only when pay-day comes the debts, grown like a rolling snowball, must be met, and so horses and cattle, the few pitiful heirlooms, are swallowed up, and the Mongol finds himself afoot and out of doors, another enemy of Chinese rule. Whenever we halted near yurts, the women turned out to see me, invading my tent, handling my things. They seemed to hold silk in high esteem.
And I now found out what was the matter. The people had objected the night before to our camping near the yurts, for it was their hayfield, theirs by the custom which forbids encroaching on the land near a settlement, but the Russians had persisted, and now, in their helpless anger, they were an aged lama and an old woman, they refused to sell us wood.
When we rode off, our hands were heaped with cheese and slabs of mutton which were discarded as soon as we had dropped behind a slope. Mongol hospitality is whole-souled and generously given, but one must be very hungry to enjoy their food. A day and a half of traveling was uneventful, for herds of sheep and horses indicated the presence of yurts among the hills.
The disturbed, torn-up condition of the snow usually apprises the traveller of his approach to the yurts of the Koraks, as the reindeer belonging to the band range all over the country within a radius of several miles, and paw up the snow in search of the moss which constitutes their food.
Petersburg, or gambling or drinking or dancing or feasting the long winter nights through, with, perhaps, a duel in the morning to settle midnight debts. Just across a deep ravine from the fort was another kind of settlement ten or a dozen yurts, thatch-roofed, circular houses half underground like cellars, grouped about a square hall or barracks in the centre.
Another day we were traversing from dawn till sundown an evil-looking land strewn with boulders and ribs of rock, bleak, desolate, forbidding. Nowhere were there signs of life, nothing growing, nothing moving. For days together we saw no yurts, and more than one day passed without our meeting any one.
Through the grey mist we could see dimly, on a high bluff opposite, the strange outlines of the X-shaped yurts of the Kamenoi Koraks.
In ten minutes we were seated on bearskins before a warm fire in a cozy Russian house, drinking cup after cup of fragrant tea, and talking over our night's adventures. The village of Penzhina is a little collection of log houses, flat-topped yurts, and four-legged balagáns, situated on the north bank of the river which bears its name, about half-way between the Okhotsk Sea and Anadyrsk.
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