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Altai in the north yielded the precious metals; the range of mountains which branches westward from the Himalaya on the south yielded them rubies and lapis lazuli. We are informed by the travellers whom I have been citing that they dressed in winter in costly furs; in summer in silk, and even in cloth of gold. One of the Franciscans speaks of the gifts received by the Khan from foreign powers.
The Greek prince entertained with hospitable regard the ambassadors of a remote and powerful monarch: the sight of silk-worms and looms disappointed the hopes of the Sogdoites; the emperor renounced, or seemed to renounce, the fugitive Avars, but he accepted the alliance of the Turks; and the ratification of the treaty was carried by a Roman minister to the foot of Mount Altai.
The panic among the Chinese was heightened by the receipt of a letter containing the news that the Mongols and Altai Tartars under the leadership of the Tartar officer Kaigorodoff pursued the Chinese who were making off with their booty from the sack of Kobdo and overtook and annihilated them on the borders of Sinkiang.
Much of the country over which these caravans travel is a succession of Asiatic steppes, with occasional salt lakes and scanty supplies of fresh water. After passing the Altai mountains and outlying chains the routes are quite monotonous. Fearful bourans are frequent, and in certain parts of the route they take the form of sand storms.
I heard air interesting story of an adventure in which one of the Kirghese, who was living among the Russians at the time of my visit to Barnaool, played an important part. He was a fine looking fellow, whose tribe lived between the Altai Mountains and Lake Ural, spending the winters in the low lands and the summers in the valleys of the foot-hills.
In fact, as their advance from the basins of the Volkhoff and Dnieper to the foot of the Altai and Sayan mountains, that is, along nearly a quarter of the earth's circumference, the Russian colonizers could always find the same physical conditions, the same forest and prairies as they had left at home, the same facilities for agriculture, only modified somewhat by minor topographical features.
In India, there is the White-cheeked weasel, Hodgson's and Horsefield's weasels; and in Nepaul, the Nepaul weasel, and the Cathia. Further north in Asia, there is, in Siberia, the Vomela, the Chorok, and the Altai weasel of the Altai Mountains; and no doubt need exist that animals of the weasel tribe are to be found everywhere.
There were models of machines used in gold-washing, quartz mills fifty years old, and almost identical with those of the present day; models of furnaces and zavods in various parts of Siberia, and full delineations of the principal silver mines of the Altai. There was a curious steam engine, said to have been made at Barnaool in 1764, and used for blowing the furnaces.
It seemed that Kanine was a Bolshevik, the agent of the Irkutsk Soviet, and stationed here for purposes of observation. However, now he was rendered harmless, because the road between him and Irkutsk was interrupted. Still from Biisk in the Altai country had just come a very important commissar. "Gorokoff?" I asked.
At length the annexation of Finland by Russia, in 1809, awakened national feeling, and stimulated research into the songs and customs which were the heirlooms of the people. It was the policy of Russia to encourage, rather than to check, this return on a distant past; and from the north of Norway to the slopes of the Altai, ardent explorers sought out the fragments of unwritten early poetry.
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